July 17 - 23, 1999
Archive

• Maxi Gamer Xentor16/32 Driver (Win9X - version 2.08 - 997 KB)
• Maxi Gamer Xentor16/32 Driver (WinNT - version 2.08 - 667 KB)
• Xentor16/32 Overclocking Utility (Win9X - 619 KB)
  
  
  

NV10 Details: 
Transformation & Lighting acceleration with DirectX 7.0 and OpenGL
estimated 15-25 million triangles/second
"350 MHz RAMDAC"
"about twice the fill rate of current generation 3D chips"
"HDTV support"
"motion compensation for full 1080i/480p HDTV displays" 
x-y video scaling acceleration
"colorspace conversion"
AGP 4X
32 meg and 64 meg versions

Right now, all over the net are reviews about the new Everglide mousepads, and how they can help you rack up frags (or Shags as we at Digital-clips call Shogo kills... I shagged you 50 times!) due to its precision surface, allowing for quick, responsive and accurate movement of the mouse.  However, all that wrist moving may cause an injury that even the most feared Quaker may fear.  That's right, RSI, or repetitive stress injury.  Lets see if the case logic offering GL4 is up to the task or providing suitable ergonomics and traction at the same time.

• Beyond3D's Montego II Quadzilla Review
• 3D Audio Immersion's Montego II Quadzilla Review
  
  
  

When walking through CompUSA earlier this week I saw the new ACS54 speakers from Altec Lansing sitting on the floor and calling out for me. The reason they were calling for me was the fact that they actually included 4 speakers and a subwoofer, something that Altec Lansing has left to the competition before. In the past their only options were 2 speakers and a subwoofer, but that is all about to change. Having seen that 4 speaker sound cards have started to truly take off, Altec decided to go after the sales that Cambridge Soundworks and others were keeping to themselves. The end result is the new ACS54 speakers with all of the power of the ACS48 with extra speakers, a new subwoofer and more. Best of all the price of the speaker is quite low, with a price of only $99.99 retail that is sure to keep you from going bankrupt.

I own a BE6 that suffers this problem, and I was unlucky enough to get another buggy board when I exchanged my first one with my vendor.  But since I can't wait the 2 weeks Abit says it will take to RMA my board, I discovered an EASY work around to the problem, requiring no hardware or software modifications.

It's simple -- say you have a buggy BE6 and want to increase the core voltage from 2.0 to 2.2.  The trick is, take it one step at a time. If you set the voltage from 2.0 to 2.2, the buggy board will pop it back to 2.0. But if you only change the voltage one step up, to 2.05, it will work. Save & exit, then enter soft menu as soon as it reboots (no need to wait for the OS to boot or anything).  Then, take the voltage one more step --
2.1.  Save & exit, enter soft menu again, and set the voltage to 2.2.  Save & exit, then let the system boot.  Open up Motherboard Monitor (or Winbond HW Doctor) to discover your system is now running at 2.2v, and will stay that way until you change it back.

With this process, I can successfully take my PIII 500 (GlobalWin VGS08 enhanced :) ) to 600 Mhz, stably.

Hope this can be of some use to the other BE6 users out there.  Thanks for your time.

The technical rep. from ABIT USA returned my call this afternoon and after some discussion he was able to give me all the details on the BE6 motherboard voltage problems as he understood them.

With regards to the initial matter of the BIOS not saving the setting for the CPU voltage. This problem should only occur on a small numbers of initially released motherboards (~200). ABIT will be accepting these boards back for modification or exchange in order to correct this problem immediately. As I indicated in an earlier news update on the page, it is possible for you to correct the problem yourself by removing the resistor located at R59, however this is not high on my recommendation list as it is a surface mount component and if you don't have the proper tools to do the job right, you could do more harm than good to your new motherboard. ABIT recommends that you simply return the board for a newer revision. ABIT also remminded me that any tampering with the resistor would viod the owner's warrenty.

With regards to the second matter of the -5V DC and -3.3V DC on the BE6. We realized a few days ago that software utilities such as Motherboard Monitor were unable to read these voltages correctly and hence could not display them. Well here is the explanation. The current Winbond chip on the BE6 (W83783S) has no spare inputs to physically read these voltages, hence software tools will not be able to recognize them. ABIT will be discussing this matter at a meeting held at the company tomorrow and it may be determined at that stage whether or not the Winbond chip will be changed on the BE6 to accommodate these voltage readings in future revisions of the board. For now you will have to make do without them.

I want to also commend the technical rep. who responded to all the questions that I posed to him and also returned my call the following day with more answers to questions that were left on-answered the day before. His professional attitude reflects well on the company he speaks on behalf of. I have no doubt that ABIT will not let these minor problems tarnish their reputation as one of the premier manufacturers of motherboards on the market today.

ATI has recently introduced the ATI-TV WONDER, their latest TV tuner product. Unlike their previous offerings, the new TV Wonder is a PCI card, and does not need a special connector on the video card; nor a VESA standard feature connector; not even a pass-thru cable!

• Voodoo2 Tweaker (Win9X - 205 KB)
  
  
  

• Added support for Voodoo3 3500.
• Fixed the "Error Runtime 380" bug.
  
  
• Voodoo3 Tweaker (Win9X - version 1.6 - 100 KB)
  
  
  

• Powerstrip (Win9X/NT - version 2.51.06 - 661 KB)
  
  
  

I'd just like to start by saying holy crap is this mouse pad amazing! Some of you may think "This guy is on crack reviewing a mouse pad then saying how amazing it was, hasn't he ever seen one before?". To that I have to say, no one has seen a mouse pad until they have seen the Everglide! It's absolutely unbelievable how smooth mouse motion is. And this isn't only beneficial for gamers when railing people in Quake 2. Think about graphics editing, or for anyone that is extremely annoyed when spending ten minutes when trying to click on the smallest of links/graphics (*cough* the tracker on the nav-bar of FPS3D). The accuracy is just simply astonishing, and trust me, I have the demos to prove it; so let's get on with the review, or the rest anyhow...

Despite its evenly rounded speed, the 500MHz Celeron isn't a 100MHz front-side-bus chip, as the Pentium II and Pentium III are. Running at a (locked) multiplier of 7.5 x the 66MHz bus, the Celeron 500 does not require PC-100 memory, but overclocking would most likely call for such high-speed DIMMs.

• Voodoo3 Reference Driver (Win9X - version 1.02.11 - 5 MB)
  
  
  

The majority of e-mails TheSanctum receives are questions regarding the planning and building of high priced systems. 99.1% of these persons will use the machine for playing video games and doing just about everything else. Most are young adults that have the money to burn and can keep up with the latest and greatest technology ready for them. In this article, we'll attempt to assist users looking to build the best system money can buy them and run down each component that will make their system tackle anything and everything.

With Quake3: Arena SMP support and Windows 2000 on the horizon, it looks like the beginning of a new mainstream multiprocessor revolution. Abit has fired the first shot with their release of the low cost BP6 dual 370-pin processor motherboard, but will the masses follow? We believe SMP will eventually become mainstream, and the Abit BP6 and Celeron 366 PPGA combo, the first low-cost, high performance SMP setup is a huge step in that direction. It's only starting to catch on among hardcore techies, but many products that become popular among extreme users eventually make it to the average Joe.

Hewlett Packard really loaded the CD-Writer Plus 8200's box with goodies. Along with the drive, you will find all of the necessary cables, a CD-R disk, a CD-RW disk, the installation disk, a very detailed manual, and a Neato CD Labeler. The gigantic manual covered every question possible, and was written extremely well. The Neato CD Labeler is tough to use, but is nice to have if you want a custom label on your CDs. I was very impressed with how much stuff HP crammed in the box, it gives first time users a chance to experiment with the drive without worry

SGI is a recognized leader in 3D graphics, multimedia and computer systems technology since its founding in 1982 and has been awarded more than 400 patents related to these technologies.

``For the past 15 years, SGI has been the most important 3D graphics company in the world and has created many fundamental technologies for 3D computer graphics,'' said Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and president of NVIDIA. ``Our collaboration is bringing together the most talented 3D technologists in the world to develop products that will usher in a new era of breathtaking 3D experiences. This is a defining moment for the 3D graphics industry.''

``NVIDIA has an impressive team of 3D technologists, an intense focus on delivering industry-leading technology, and the strongest product roadmap for the high-volume 3D graphics industry,'' said Rick Belluzzo, chairman and CEO of SGI. ``This alliance with NVIDIA is a major step forward in our strategy to partner with industry leaders to develop groundbreaking visualization solutions and deliver them to our customers faster than ever before.''

• Rambus real loser in PC133 wars
• 64M memory parts rise 25 per cent in two weeks
  
  
  

Both the Camino and the new chipset for the Athlon reach beyond what we just adopted as standard FSB (Front System Bus) of 100MHz to deliver faster system speeds than we have ever seen before.  These new systems, operating at FSB speeds of 120 - 133 MHz, will deliver on the promised breakneck speeds that their developers have claimed, but they will only be able to do so by requiring that the components of the computer's sub-systems are capable of making the leap to the faster FSB.

In other words, PC-100 DRAM just aint cuttin' it for the PCs in our near future.

I Just got off the phone with Andrew over at AMK Service. He told me that he will be getting a shipment of new PowerColor SNiper TNT2s in tomorrow.  What's so special about this card? Nothing much as far as TNT2 goes. It's got all the features found in a 32 meg non Ultra TNT2, including optional TV out. The real selling point of this card is the price. Just $149.99 Canadian. That's  only $100US!!!!

I will be getting one tomorrow to try out but if it's like any other TNT 2 card it should do well. In the mean time, if you want a great deal of a 32 meg TNT2  video card, I recommend you head on over the AMK Services and reserve your card NOW. At this price, you know it's going to sell out.

To begin thinking about the way the K7 is laid out, it helps if we divide the processor into two parts: the back end and the front end. The back end is where all the work actually gets done. It contains the functional units, integer and floating-point, that crunch the numbers and produce the results. The K7’s back end is “wide”, and because of its width it’s capable of handling a heavy workload. What do I mean by a “wide back end”? If you’ll recall from my IA-64 preview, the “width” of a superscalar CPU depends on how many calculations it can do in parallel. For instance, imagine a supermarket. The more check-out lines there are, the “wider” the supermarket is and the more customers it can process in parallel. The K7 is equipped with three integer execution units and three floating-point execution units, about which we’ll talk more in a moment.

HZ Tool is a freeware tool for Windows 95/98 that lets you set the refreshrate for all resolutions, including the ones that Windows normally don't let you use. You can also change resolution and bit-depth.

It was programmed by me, Stefan Berglind, in 1998, because the drivers for my graphics card didn't allow me to easily set the refreshrates for games. It works in all programs that uses Windows routines to change resolution, for example:

• Direct3D games
• OpenGL games, i.e. Quake3 and Unreal
• Windows itself

Note that most games runs faster with a higher refreshrate if v-sync is enabled, which it is by default. It's also much more pleasant to your eyes looking at 120 Hz instead of 60 or 75 Hz. With Hz Tool you can also edit the properties of your monitor, which allows you to get the most out of it in refreshrates and resolution.

• Hz Tool (Win9X - version 1.4 - 244 KB)
  
  
  

• 66/100/133 MHz FSB and memory bus settings
• Supports 8 banks up to 1.5GB of FP, EDO, SDRAM and VCM DRAM types
• ATA 33/66
• PCI 2.2
• Supports PentiumIII/PentiumII/Celeron and upcoming processors for Slot-1 and Socket-370 platforms
• AGP 2X

Check out the full press release here.

• AGNHardware's Abit BP6 Motherboard Review
• Overclockers.com Abit BP6 Motherboard Review
  
  
  

Overall I'm very pleased with the PIII-450 I purchased, and plan on leaving it at 560 MHz for most of my testing, with a return to 450 MHz for CPU Scaling results and other benchmarking.  The only complaint I have is that after paying a premium for the PIII, you get a sticker that feels cheaper than the Celeron ones, and not even close to those PII metal babies. If you're thinking of buying a new CPU, the PIII-450 retail SL3CC CPU (manufactured in Malaysia) gets a thumb up from me. If my data is right, stay far away from the SL364 model and the PIII's made in the Philippines, and though I haven't seen any on sale, possibly Ireland and Costa Rica as well. The above overclocking results are gathered through extensive testing, but there might still be some long-term heat issues with the retail heatsink. If I'm looking to run at 581 MHz or higher, I think I'd better pry off that retail heatsink and slap on a serious CPU cooler.

Having said all that and not wanting to miss the point we're up to, let's say it clearly:
The Revelator glasses easily earn our stereo award. If the competition doesn't act lightning fast, Elsa will be reigning consumer-level stereovision gaming very very soon.