 |
January 10 - 17,
2000: Archive
Monday -
January 17th
|
Guru3D has posted a review
of Guillemot's 3D Prophet GeForce 256 SDR card. Head over and see
what they thought of it.
|
|
Exxtreme3D has posted a review
of Leadtek's Winfast GeForce 256 SDR card. A great
alternative to other cards on the market, and it has a TV-Out option as
well.
|
|
CDRInfo has posted a review
of Pioneer's DR-104S 10X ATAPI Slot-loaded DVD-ROM drive. This is
my personal favorite, head over and check it out.
|
|
TargetPC has posted a review
of IWill's Slocket II Socket-370 to Slot-1 converter card. This
card is used to allow Celeron and Coppermine FC-PGA (Pentium III) CPU's
to run on i440BX and other Slot-1 boards which support these CPU's.
|
|
Sharky Extreme has posted
the first
part of their CES 2000 wrap up. In this part, they've taken a
look at almost every product Sony and Panasonic were displaying at the
show ( its a huge article). The devices they talk about are very
cool, but way too expensive.
|
|
iXBT Hardware has posted their review
of Promise's FastTrak66 IDE RAID controller card. This is the
first IDE ATA-66 controller card that can support a RAID
|
|
DocHardware has posted a shootout
between Global WIN's FEP32 and their larger FDP32. What am I
talking about? It's huge! These are some of the best (and
cheapest) Socket-370 coolers you can get.
|
|
Since Aureal is taking forever to release these new drivers, I decided
to post the newest beta drivers which I came across while browsing over at 3DSL.
It seems a site called A3D
Fan Site has gotten hold of the latest 2048 Beta 18 drivers.
These drivers support EAX, A3D 3.0 and I3D2. Keep in mind that
they are beta and unofficial, so use at your own risk:
Update: I just installed the drivers on my MX300 and
they seem to work quite nicely. You have to run the Vor30App file
in the directory you extract the drivers to, to get the Vortex Control
Panel applet.
|
|
Hardware Central has posted
a review
of Intel's i840 chipset. This chipset is the next one up from the
i820, will only use RDRAM and will typically be found in
Server/Workstation machines.
|
|
The Tech Report is reporting
that H. Oda has created a software program which will let you change the
cache speed setting on Athlon CPU's. They have even posted some
benchmarks to show the overall performance difference! Head over
and check out the full
article.
|
|
3DSoundSurge has posted a review
of X-10's DVD/MP3 Anywhere kit. This looks like a very interesting
device and could seriously add some extra umph to your home theatre
system if you have a DVD-ROM drive in your computer.
|
|
Dan's Data has posted a shootout
between two very high end digital cameras, the Olympus C-2500L and
Sony's DSC-F505. Head over and see which one they liked better.
|
|
CPUReview has posted the second
part of their Sys Cold-Fusion 1000 Review. In this portion,
they take a look at how well the system runs through the synthetic
benchmarks.
|
|
The Tech Zone has posted a review
of Monsoon's MH-500 3-piece flat panel speaker set. They seemed to
like the sound quality very much, but were disappointed with the sub
woofer.
|
|
CNewz sent word of a site that
contains a huge
table of benchmarks for just about the entire line ASUS video
cards. A good way too see the performance jump from one generation
to the next.
|
|
BXBoards has posted their review
of Videologic's very nice looking 5 piece Sirocco Crossfire speaker
set. It's nice when you're speakers look nice, because in you're
mind it makes them sound even better than they already are (most of the
time).
|
|
Our hosting site, Fresh3D is back
in business and they've posted a new article today entitled, "The
Millennium Buyers Guide." This thing has a few devices
that are very interesting and I haven't seen before, like the impressive
TerraTec m3po player.
|
Saturday -
January 15th
|
Gamers Depot has posted a review
of MSI's new i440BX based motherboard, the BX Master. This board
has 5 PCI slots, 4 DIMM slots and an Ultra DMA/66 controller which no
other board uses (that I've seen).
|
|
Active Hardware has posted a review
of DFI's PW65-E Socket-370 board which is based on the i810
chipset. It's got a built-in video chip, AC'97 audio and 5 PCI
slots. So if you're on a budget, you may want to consider a board
like this.
|
|
Anand Tech has posted a review
of Gigabyte's GA-660 Plus 32MB TNT2 Pro based card. This card has
a turbo setting of 170/180 core/memory speed!
|
|
PC Paradox has posted a review
of Microsoft's Sidewinder Freestyle Pro gamepad. This pad has been
on the market for quite some time, but it's still a bit expensive and
you may want to find out if its good or not before buying one.
|
|
GamePC has posted a roundup
of five very nice 19" CRT monitors. The Viewsonic PF790 seems
like the best deal, but those Sony and Mitsubishi monitors look awesome!
|
Friday -
January 14th
|
iXBT Hardware has sent word that
they've posted a review
of ASUS' P3C2000 Slot-1 i820 based motherboard. They've compared
it to other i820 boards as well as an i440BX and VIA Apollo Pro 133A
boards. Unfortunately, it looks as if this board doesn't fit ASUS'
reputation.
|
|
CPUReview has posted a review
of ActionTec's Camera Connect Pro. This is a parallel port flash
card reader that works with the flash cards of many Digital Cameras and
makes transfer to your PC a much less time consuming task.
|
|
3DHardware has posted their review
of ELSA's ERAZOR X GeForce 256 32MB SDRAM card. You know what I'm
thinking? If you find a good price, you really can't go wrong with
any GeForce, I can't wait to get one.
|
|
Hardware Central has
posted a review
of Marmitek's Gigiavideo 30. This product is similar to the X-10
DVD Anywhere product, which allows you to transmit a video signal to
your TV to watch DVD's.
|
|
3dgn has posted a review
of Abit's BF6 motherboard. This is the less popular brother to the
BE6-II. It doesn't have the ATA-66 controller, but does have 6 PCI
slots and the same large selection of FSB speeds.
|
|
This is a bit late, but their site wasn't working when I went to check
it out yesterday, but its still a good article. GamePC
has posted a comparison
between Abit's BE6-II and Soyo's SY-6BA+IV, arguably the two best BX
boards in existence.
|
|
NVIDIA has officially released their latest 3.68 drivers for almost
their entire line of chips including the TNT, TNT2, TNT2 M64, Vanta,
GeForce 256, GeForce DDR, and Quadro. Grab them below:
|
|
Anand Tech has posted a review
of AOpen's MX64 Slot-1 microATX motherboard which is based on VIA's
Apollo Pro 133A chipset. The board is small and has only 3 PCI
slots and 3 DIMM slots, so its not for the power user.
|
|
Creative Labs has released a new beta
driver for their 3D Blaster GeForce and GeForce Pro cards. Grab it
below:
This beta build optimizes the system settings to improve
compatibility between AMD 750 System Core Chipset [mainboards
with Athlon processors] and 3DBlaster GeForce/GeForce Pro.
|
Thursday -
January 13th
|
3DWars has posted a comparison
between ELSA's Erazor X SDR GeForce 256 card and ASUS's V6600 SDR Deluxe
GeForce 256 card. The ASUS is obviously more feature packed, but
does the price difference justify those features? Head over and
decide for yourself.
|
|
Beyond3D has posted a review
of Diamond's Viper II Savage2000 card. Looks like a decent card,
especially if the price is low, but it's not even close to the GeForce.
|
|
Hardware Central has posted
an article
which takes a look at the overclocking potential that FC-PGA Pentium III
Coppermine processors have. They are calling them the next Celeron
300A's because the results look really good. How does 500 to 667 sound?
|
|
BXBoards has posted a review
of NinjaMicro's FreeSpeed Pro. This dip-switch based card plugs
directly into the golden fingers of Athlon CPU's and allows you to
change the multiplier, voltage and cache settings.
|
|
Sharky Extreme has posted
this week's updated
CPU price list which has the cheapest prices they've found on the
net. Very nice price drops on many CPU's and there are some new
additions to the list like the Celeron 533, Athlon 800, etc. This
list confirms CPUReview's findings, that the Athlon is cheaper than all
P3's at the same speed rating and quite a bit cheaper too!
|
|
Matrox has contracted Precision
Insight to develop complete Linux display drivers for the G400 (and G200
later). Here are the details from the press
release:
Montreal, Canada—Matrox Graphics
Inc. has contracted Precision Insight Inc. to develop the Matrox G400
XFree86 4.0 Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) driver.
Precision Insight develops drivers for 2D and 3D
graphics hardware within the industry-standard XFree86 X server.
Building on the fast, stable 2D driver and the current GLX driver
already written by the Linux community, Precision Insight will
integrate support for 3D performance and features using the
company-authored DRI
architecture. In addition to 3D acceleration, the driver from
Precision Insight will also enable the
Matrox G400’s DualHead Display multi-monitor feature, as supported
by XFree86 4.0.
Although largely optimized for the Matrox G400, this
driver will support 2D and 3D features common to both the Matrox G200
and G400 chips.
As part of the contract agreement, Precision Insight
will soon be posting the driver’s source code to their Web site for
further work by open source developers. The company will use their
open source repository to ensure consistency between their work and
the coding done by other open source developers. In addition,
Precision Insight will support and maintain the entire driver,
including code not developed directly by the company.
The DRI-based driver will be released in two versions,
slated for summer 2000.
|
|
While I was over at 3DSoundSurge,
I also noticed that they've posted a few new early
impressions of Altec Lansings ADA880 5-piece speaker system, Altec
Lansings ACS56 5-piece speaker system and the DMX/MX400 ESS Canyon3D
based sound cards.
|
|
3DSoundSurge has posted a very
detailed review
of Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! X-Gamer and MP3+ sound cards.
Identical cards, with different software packages, head over and check
out the exact differences.
|
|
CPUReview has updated their Athlon/Pentium
III price comparison with the latest processor and motherboard
prices. According to this article, the Athlon + motherboard is
cheaper than a P3 + motherboard at every speed grade.
|
|
Thresh's Firing Squad has
written up the second
part of their article on 3dfx at Macworld. The article talks
about the details of the Voodoo4/5 for the Mac and the various technical
issues such as pixel formats, API's, 2D/3D quality.
|
Wednesday -
January 12th
|
BJ who runs that site
with the newest NVIDIA reference drivers, has sent word that he has
somehow gotten hold of the new 3.69 NVIDIA Windows 9X and 2000 reference drivers
for the TNT/TNT2/TNT M64/Vanta and GeForce based cards. They are
unofficial, so use at your own risk:
|
|
iXBT Hardware has just sent word
that they've posted an early preview
of NVIDIA's NV11 and NV15 chips!! Check out this bit:
The key innovation in NV15 and NV11 is the fact that each pixel
rendering pipeline can now boast not a single texturing block as we
saw in GeForce256, but two of them. This provides the so called
"free" multitexturing, when two textures are superposed over
one pixel and the general peak fillrate doesn't drop.
|
|
Planet Hardware has posted a
review
of Promise's Ultra66 PCI Controller card. This is based on their
own chip I believe, so its not another HPT366 based card. The nice
thing about this card is that it is supported by Linux.
|
|
Thresh's Firing Squad has
posted the second
part of their coverage of this years Consumer Electronics Show in
Las Vegas. Head over to see some very cool devices!
|
|
Active Hardware has posted a review
of IWill's SIDEpro66 ATA (UltraDMA/66) PCI controller card. This
is another card that uses the HPT366 controller chip (also found on the
Abit BE6, BP6, BE6-II, Hot Rod and Soyo's SY-6BA+IV.
|
|
A third party who is donating the drivers to Creative Labs has released
a new Linux snapshot for
the Sound Blaster Live! (EMU10K1 chip). Grab it below:
|
|
BXBoards has posted their review
of AOpen's AX6BC Pro II Millennium Editions Slot-1 motherboard which is
based on the legendary BX chipset. This board will probably be
very hard to find, but it's still interesting to read anyway.
|
|
Hardware Central has posted
a review
of IWill's Slocket II Socket-370 to Slot-1 converter card. This
new revision works with the Coppermine FC-PGA chips and has some other enhancements
as well.
|
|
Hardware-One has posted a review
of Act Labs Force RS Steering wheel/pedal system and their RS Shifter as
well. With this package and a big monitor and sound system, you're
pretty much in a real car and you can do whatever the hell you want with
it, without worrying about the cops! :)
|
|
SystemLogic has posted a review
of AOpen's 9420 4X Write, 4X ReWrite and 20X Read ATAPI CD-ReWriteable
drive. By the way, you can also check out their first video review
broadcast where they reviewed the Benwin BW2000 speakers. Click on
one of the following: slow
connection or fast
connection.
|
|
Here are a couple new utilities which you may find useful. CPUIdle
Pro is the only program which insert the idle HLT process in Windows NT
and 2000 to cool down your CPU and even optimizes your CPU
features. Yes, these operating systems already do this
automatically, but according to the author they don't always work
properly. CPUIdle 6.0 is for Win9X and does the same thing. The
second utility, Hardware
Monitor Pro is a hardware monitoring utility:
|
|
The Tech Zone has posted a review
of Quantum's Fireball KX 7200 RPM ATA-66 hard drive. This is the
next model up from the KA Plus, but doesn't seem to have any significant
changes. It still has an average access time of 8.5ms and 512KB of
cache.
|
|
First of all, I'd like to apologize for the lack of updates today.
I'm forced to leave early in the morning to get to school because the
damn Teachers Assistants at the University of Toronto are on strike and
are causing huge traffics jams and its really frustrating. If any
of you TA's happen to read this site, I despise your actions and hope
you don't get anything from the university because of your selfishness!
Anyway, back to site news :) I've been busy fixing and changing
stuff around here and there which takes a lot of time. If you see
anything that is wrong, please email me at mike@hardwarepros.com.
|
Tuesday -
January 11th
|
Thresh's Firing Squad has
posted a review
of AMD's recently announced Athlon 800MHz CPU. The chip may be
hard to find for quite some time, but hey, who the hell wants to spend
the money anyway?
|
|
Sharky Extreme has posted a review
of SYS Tech's Cold Fusion 1000 (1GHz) Athlon system. This is very
similar to Kryotech's system with a few differences.
|
|
Matrox has released new
beta drivers for the Millennium G400 card only. They now
require DirectX7 and fix a few bugs, grab it below:
|
|
While I was over at Anand's I
also noticed that they've posted the second
part of their guide/article to overclocking the FC-PGA Pentium III
Coppermine processor. Quite a bit of interesting info and
overclocked benchmarks.
|
|
Anand Tech has posted a review
of Tyan's S1854 Trinity 400 Slot-1 and Socket-370 (yes it has both)
motherboard which is based on VIA's newly released VIA Apollo Pro 133A
chipset.
|
|
CGO has posted their review
of ATI's Rage Fury MAXX board. As you may already know, this card
has a couple of Rage 128 Pro chips running at 125MHz each with 32MB of
memory each.
|
|
Extreme Hardware has posted an interview/Q&A
they conducted with Peter Wicher, Director of Product Marketing of
3dfx. Most of the information is directed towards the Voodoo4 and
5 cards which won't be released for some time.
|
|
Hardware Central has posted
a review
of Plextor's PlexWriter 8/4/32 CD-ReWriteable drive. According to
the review, this is the first 8X drive to use the ATAPI interface (IDE
instead of SCSI).
|
|
The Tech Zone (also with their
snazzy new layout) has posted a review
of TennMax's Detonator Cooling device. They wrote about their
experiences ripping of the G400's heatsink and putting this fan on while
monitoring temperatures before and after.
|
|
Adrian's Rojak Pot
has posted an article
which takes a look at the effects of Video RAM caching. This
option can be set in your computer's BIOS setup, but people often debate
whether its speeds things up or slows them down. Well this should
clear things up a bit, over 20 tests with 7 different benchmarking
programs were conducted in this 13 page article.
|
|
We've uploaded much of the stuff that is ready, which is pretty much
everything other than old reviews and the old news archive, which will
remain in their present state for quite a while because it will take
ages to convert them over, so I'll do it a little at a time.
Anyway, we hope that you like it, please email us and let us know what
you think and/or vote on the new poll below. Also, take a look at
the PC Game Pros site by clicking on the icon (above right), it's still
under construction though.
|
|
Over the past year or so, we've taken the time and developed three
completely new layouts for our site and weren't completely happy with
any of them. Last month, we designed our fourth layout and it
finally satisfied us both, and was relatively easy to implement (ie.
convert pages, post news, etc). We've been working extremely hard
on the dirty work for the past three weeks and I think we're finally
ready to launch it later today. At that time you will also get a
glimpse of our new sister site which we also designed, the PC Game Pros
which will be run by a good friend of mine. Hopefully you'll like
what we've done with the site and we can't wait to hear your
feedback. So come back later today and check it out!
|
Monday -
January 10th
|
ASUS has released a new beta
driver for your downloading pleasure. This driver works with
their TNT2 and GeForce cards excluding the V6800 (DDR), grab it below:
|
|
Anand Tech has posted their review
of the only NVIDIA Quadro based card I've heard about this far, ELSA's
Gloria II Quadro SDR. Head over and check out their incredibly
thorough review.
|
|
3DSoundSurge has posted a review
of Hoontech's SoundTrack Digital-XG sound card. For those of you
who have never heard of this company or sound card, here is a bit from
the review:
Hoontech is a small Korean company that in the past
only sold professional/high-end music cards (e.g. ST 128 DDMA & ST
Digital Audio) that you would find in music shops. However,
Hoontech has recently started to offer very inexpensive cards with
digital connections that are targeted at the broader home user
& consumer market. Most people who know the name probably
know it due to the exposure received by their inexpensive digital
daughter cards for the Live and Live!Value. In this review will take a
look at Hoontech's SoundTrack YMF 744 Digital-XG which as you may
guess uses Yamaha’s YMF744 chip. The version of the board we tested
comes with a bracket board with coaxial, optical and AES/EBU digital
in/out but it’s also available without the bracket board. For 3D
sound and reverb it uses the Sensaura engine which supports DS3D,
I3DL2, EAX 1.0 and 2.0. With the latest drivers the card also supports
an impressive 32 3d streams! That all sounds great on paper but how
does it perform? For all the details you can check out our review.
|
|
CPUReview has posted a review
of the Sys Cold-Fusion 1000MHz system. This is similar to
Kryotech's SuperG but from a different company.
|
|
Sharky Extreme has posted a review
of Intel's recently released Celeron 533MHz PPGA (Socket-370) CPU.
The main thing we want to know is if it can overclock at all, check it
out:
While it is not a great overclocking processor, the Celeron 533
still reaches 600MHz with complete stability. With a better method of
active cooling this 533 should be ale to reach 622MHz with complete
stability and an 81MHz front side bus may even be a possibility (8 *
81MHz = 648MHz).
|
|
Overclockin.com has posted a review
of D-Link's DHN-910 10Mbps phoneline networking kit. This
eliminates the need to run long wires in your house and still gives you
pretty decent speed.
|
|
Real World Technologies has
written up another very informative and detailed article
on the disk subsystem in computers and have started with hard drives.
|
|
SystemLogic has posted a review
of D-Link's DSB-C300 USB Color Video Camera. Resolution is
supposedly very good and it even comes with a Mic all for $80.
|
|
Here are a few new Razer BoomSlang 2000 DPI mouse reviews for you to
enjoy (or use as a buying guide):
|
|
iXBT Hardware has posted a review
of Aztech's PCI 368DSP sound card. This card is based on the
relatively unknown Thurderbird 128 chip, but has some pretty decent
features.
|
|
Ga'ash Soffer over at Voodoo
Extreme has posted a review
of Plextor's Plexwrtiter 8/4/32A (8X Write, 4X ReWrite, 32X Read) CD-RW
drive. As I suspected, he liked the drive very much, giving it an
overall rating of 94%
|
|
3DHardware has posted a review
of AvB's Sonix S-2000 3-piece flat panel speaker set. They weren't
too impressed by the way these speakers sounded.
|
|
Game Forces has posted an article
which tells you how you can tweak your machine for better 3D performance
(and better all-around system performance as well). Head over for
some good tips.
|
Hardware
Pros Home Page
|
