July 9 - 16, 1999
Archive

S1598 Trinity ATX is a unique motherboard: its expandability makes it one of the most complete Socket 7 motherboard available at the moment. The main characteristic of this motherboard is the combination of the north bridge of the Via MVP3 chipset with the south bridge of the Via MVP4 chipset; this solution can be easily explained: taking full advantage of the Via MVP4 chipset (audio integrated and, above all, support for ATA-66 interface) avoiding its limits (integrated AGP video which allows to reduce the costs but also the general speed performance). S1598 seems to be the definitive solution for Socket 7 processors; except for some limitations due to the lack of bus frequencies higher than 100 MHz, we can say that it is the reference motherboard for Socket 7 CPUs.

New to this guide are more cooling and program recommendations (along with better explanations), a few new questions/answers, and a couple new links.

Here's a clip from the FAQ:

Q: If I overclock my video card at all times for months and months and play games every day, will my card eventually fail permanently?

A: This question comes up often. If the card is cooled sufficiently, it should last for several years. If you're worried, lower the clock speed unless you need it. For example, a certain game runs slowly so you overclock only for that game... set your clock speed back when you're not playing that game.

• Northbridge: AMD-751 Irongate with 200 Mhz EV6 interface speed, 100 Mhz SDRAM, 2X AGP
• Southbridge: AMD-756 Viper with UDMA-66, OHCI USB, APIC, ACPI Power Management
• 5 PCI/2 ISA/1 AGP and 3 DIMM (up to 768 MB PC100 SDRAM)
• 100 Mhz FSB, with DDR to 200 Mhz for the EV6
• 2 IDE, 1 floppy, 2 serial, 1 parallel and 4 USB ports with 1 IR connector
• CPU speed auto-detection
  
  
  

After several weeks of use the 303S hasn't let us down yet. It's speed and performance was second to none and the best fact was finding negatives about the drive itself. We couldn't find any and it's low price was also a huge selling point. We located this drive selling under $150.00 and all the necessary cables were included. It's a cinch to install and once up and running it will not let you down. If you don't get turned on by SCSI, Pioneer also makes an EIDE version of it.

I can second that opinion, as I have the EIDE version and I can't find any flaws with it either and that slot-loaded mechanism is awesome!

• Abit Hotrod 66 UltraDMA/66 PCI Controller Review
• DPT SmartRAID V Decade SCSI Controller Review
• Abit BE6 Slot-1 Motherboard w/UDMA/66 Review
  
  
  

The MSI MS-6163 is an exceptional mainboard that easily wins a recommendation from our staff. Its low cost, large number of features, overclocking ability, and high end FSB stability make the board a very solid and well rounded 440BX-based solution.

So, now we are offered a different chipset version with the reduced memory bus. It is nVidia Riva TNT2 M64. Try to imagine what most people thought about this chipset after its name was revealed in the press. Namely they thought that this chipset supported only 64MB memory, which aroused even more sarcastic attitude towards nVidia's innovations. However, according to nVidia, its Riva TNT2 M64 is not a Vanta but an absolutely new chipset with Riva TNT2 core and a 64bit memory bus. And which is very pleasant, this chip allegedly shouldn't suffer any significant performance worsening.

The hard drive is probably the most important component in your computer. Sometimes these babies tend to heat up, causing room for worry. This is where the Ultra Thin Exhauster comes into play. The Ultra Thin Exhauster screws right on to the hard drive and it's main job is to suck the air off of your hard drive and blow it out the back exhaust port. The hard drive radiates alot of heat, let's see how the Ultra Thin Exhauster handles it.

I proceeded to test the speed of the network through the process of transferring files and running multiplayer games. It took about 3 mins to transfer a 100MB file from one computer to the next. My old 10Mbps network was practically left in the dust with a good 7 mins left to transfer the same file.

I tried out MechWarrior 3 and Need for Speed 4 on a LAN connected multiplayer game. Game play was smooth on both computers and there wasn't a slightest evidence of lag on both machines.

• Latest drivers (v4.05)
• Sound Blaster PCI64 Mixer
• Creative Configurator
• Improves 8-Bit recording quality
• Improves DirectSound Capture support
• Fixes audio problems in popular games such as FIFA99, Red Line Racer, Half Life
  
  
  
• Sound Blaster PCI 64 Driver (Win9X - Revision 3 - 850 KB)
  
  
  

• Leadtek Winfast S320 II Drivers (build 121)
• Leadtek Winfast S320 II Ultra Drivers (build 106)
  
  
  

It's cheap, and it's straightforward, a perfect basic motherboard for the average user with a little touch of an overclocker's soul."

The Intel Pentium III-500 is for all intents and purpose exactly the same as my Pentium III-450. Both units look the same and uses the same 4ns cache ram. However when you buy a PIII-500 you can be 100% sure you'll be getting a CPU with 4ns L2 cache. You can't say that with a PIII-450. I was lucky that my PIII-450 came with 4ns cache. Some are shipped with 4.5ns cache. You would only be concern about this if you plan to overclock your CPU.

SAN JOSE, Calif., July 14 /PRNewswire/ -- 3dfx Interactive® Inc. (Nasdaq: TDFX - news) today announced that Compaq Computer Corp. (NYSE: CPQ - news) is offering the new high-performance 3dfx® Voodoo3(TM) 3500 graphics accelerator as an option for Compaq Presario Performance Series PCs. 3dfx Voodoo3 3500 technology represents the top of the Voodoo3 line for maximum PC graphics performance.

``The Voodoo3 3500 is the Voodoo3 family's premier performance product, designed to satisfy even the most demanding PC users,'' said Shane Long, senior vice president of worldwide sales at 3dfx Interactive. ``Voodoo3 has the architecture to bring even the most sophisticated 3D content to life with blistering speed. With Voodoo3 3500, Compaq Presario users can experience games and other applications with unequaled realism.''

Intel has managed to tape out its design for the Merced IA-64 microprocessor.  That means that samples are likely to be with customers within eight weeks or so. Paul Otellini, a senior VP at Intel, confirmed the news at a conference call following the release of its Q2 financial results.  The completion of the design means that factories can start to produce first silicon samples of the microprocessor, which it will test and then send to customers. Because the Merced processor is aimed at the high end of the workstation and the server market, PC companies are likely to spend some time testing the design. Volume production is still slated for the middle of next year, Intel said.

• Canopus Pure3D II Driver (Win9X - version 1.40.04 - 2.9 MB)
  
  
  

Its price tag is approximately $20 - $35 higher than the boards from its competitors though, which is a source of concern. Thankfully the AOpen AX6BC Pro Gold is one of the most stable boards we've ever tested, which makes it a good "crossover" product that will be able to effectively use Intel's Coppermine .18 micron CPUs if a user decides to purchase one later this year.

• WSZ (Winamp Skin Zip) handling (simply open a .WSZ file in explorer to have it installed)
• Two distributions (one with WMA and ASFS, one without)
• Better equalizer presets
• Better shuffle logic
• Better docking code
• Better support for invalid ID3v2 tags (for people putting invalid tags on)
• Minibrowser optimizations
• Fixed occasional random crashes from 2.23
  
  
• Winamp Basic (Win9X/NT - version 2.24 - 540KB) 
• Winamp w/WMA (Win9X/NT - version 2.24 - 1.16MB)
  
  
  

• NVidia TNT/TNT2 AGP Driver (Win9X - version 2.08)
• NVidia TNT/TNT2 PCI Driver (Win9X - version 2.08)
• NVidia TNT/TNT2 Driver (WinNT - version 2.08)
  
  
  

This is the perfect card for the gamer with a 17-inch or lower monitor which can handle up to say 1152x864. It offers some very cool, unique features and generally looks the best I've seen. Power Gamers however will not accept the trade-off in speed for that quality gain. We'll want to go for the G400 Max, I expect.

Well Alienware has the solution, choose both! Now Alienware offers an exclusive technology that will allow you to have both an Nvidia TNT2 and a 3DFX Voodoo III, in the same system, at the same time. You are probably asking yourself how is Alienware getting two (2) 2D/3D video cards running in the same system. Alienware in cooperation with Metabyte have developed special drivers that essentially let you pick and choose what video card you want to use when playing the game of your choice. Essentially we have taken the robust, full-featured set that comes with Nvidia's TNT2 and the powerful performer that is the 3DFX Voodoo III and put them in one system.

Many users understand the basic concept of texture compression, but don't know exactly how it works or how it can be good for games. Texture compression is like any other type of image compression, where a formula is applied to an image, making it able to be represented with less information than normal. This lets the same image take up less memory and hard disk space than an uncompressed image of equal size. Users who have used jpeg (.jpg) images know how this works—they are much smaller than equivalent bitmap (.bmp) or targa (.tga) files. Like jpeg compression, DXTn is a "lossy" compression format. This means that each and every pixel of the compressed image isn't necessarily exactly the same as the uncompressed image. Whether the differences are enough to be noticed by the naked eye is another matter altogether.

• ATi Rage 128 Driver (Win9X - version 6.12CDH21)
• ATi Rage 128 Driver (WinNT4 - version 6.12CDH21)
  
  
  

This, of course, was the question that struck me first when I received this product from 3DCool. It's not as if anyone overclocks their monitors (do they?). I had just picked up a very high-quality 19" monitor the other day, and of course, it was my baby... No one wants anything to happen to a $600+ piece of hardware now do they?
Then I thought... monitors run pretty damn hot right now, it's really nothing but a furnace behind those pretty pixels. I slowly slid my hand on top of my brand new 19 incher to find that not only was it hot, but it had also accumulated a little dust already! So I decided to give the monitor cooler a chance, hoping to prolong the life of my new toy.

• Powerstrip (Win9X/NT - version 2.05.51 - 659 KB)
  
  
  

Wouldn't it be really cool if you could monitor the temperature of your video card, CPU, hard drive(s), motherboard, and sound card at all times? How about if the device that monitored these items had a built in clock, heat alarms, and two powerful fans to cool your hard drive? This kind of device would be a dream for overclockers, or anyone that is really careful about the heat their system produces. But wait - this isn't a dream; it's a reality! AMK Computers has these puppies for sale. They sure sound like a great idea.. but they cost a pretty penny. Are they worth it?

With the advent of the new Ultra DMA/66 and Ultra3 SCSI hard drive transfer protocols, it has become increasingly difficult to muddle through the mess of technologies to find a total hard drive solution that's right for your needs. Is SCSI right for you? Should you go out instead and buy an add-on UDMA/66 controller and hard drive? Will you really see a performance difference between any of these options?

• Now you can save your tweaks into different profiles !
• 2 new pre-set profiles added (Max Performance & Best Visual)
• Added 'Enable Hardware GDI' under the DirectX/D3D section
• Added a 'About' button, fixed a bug, and change the interface a little.
  
  
• Voodoo3 Tweaker (Win9X - version 1.5 - 100 KB)
  
  
  

• Rage 128 Tweaker (Win9X - version 1.2 - 905 KB)
  
  
  

• 5-way Flightgear (flightsticks/other device) Comparison
• Dell Inspirion 7000 Notebook Video Review
  
  
  

If 13.0GB is the capacity that you are looking for, I recommend choosing the Quantum Fireball CR over the Western Digital Caviar. Both drives boast the same specifications and carry the exact same cost; however, the Quantum outperformed the Western Digital in every test. The only drawback to choosing the Quantum is that it is slightly louder than the Western Digital, but if performance is all you care about, by all means, go for the Fireball.

It used to be that if you wanted reliable performance from a CD writer that only SCSI would do. While reasonably priced IDE devices hit the market in a flood, a great number produced little more than flashy drink coasters. Even the most minor of interruptions like a screensaver activating would often result in the entire write-process corrupting. With this in mind we took a good hard look at Yamaha's CRW4416EZ IDE CD-RW. Though it has been on the market for some little while now, pricing and availability have now come to a level where if the product performs as described, it would offer great value at an excellent price.

• FOURCC code for optimized texture format
• Direct control of TNT/TNT2 hardware for more complex multi-texturing
• Faster fog calculations in OpenGL
• Rendering to texture
• P3/AMD optimizations
  
  
  

The A3D 2.0 engine and API has been undergoing progressive tweaking by Aureal.  With the release of the latest drivers we decided to take a quick look at where performance was with the initial release of A3D 2.0 and where it is today using Heretic II as our prime benchmarking tool.  Heretic II is the focus because it uses the latest A3D 2.0 engine that we have access to but we also looked at results from Motorhead and Half-Life to see what CPU usage of the original (in game) wavetracing engine was like.  If the performance of Hertic II with the A3D 2.20 drivers is sign of things to come then Aureal will be hearing nothing in the way of compaints regarding unacceptable CPU usage for wavetracing

We know from their Super7 motherboards that Iwill is a serious contender in the computer hardware market. Many people aren't aware of Iwill's extensive line of Slot-1 BX boards. They offer many boards including dual Slot-1 boards. It just happens to be that Iwill had perfect timing with their release of the Super7 XA100 and XA100Plus motherboards that entered the market just as AMD released their K6-2. It's a little harder to capture the BX market when there are so many BX boards available.

One of the best coolers on the market today is Global Win's VEK 12 (Soon to be called the VEK 32). It's low price and really great performance has made it a favorite among overclockers. The problem with it is Global Win never designed the VEK 12 to work with a Celeron CPU.

First, let's take a look at the board itself. The first thing you'll notice about this board is that it is long….longer than the width of our motherboard, actually! The next visibly obvious thing is that it has SGRAM - lots of it. Symmetrically arranged between the front and the back of the GVX1, this board has no less than 32MB of texture memory and 96MB of video memory. That's some hardcore frame buffer! Considering that this card can have anywhere from 32 - 256MB onboard, ours is pretty moderate. Upon closer inspection, we see that the specific SGRAM in question is SEC 7ns.

We're talking 27 different FSB selections here, which in simple terms makes the V3 the board with the most FSB options on the market, period. That includes Abit's hot BE6 mainboard, and also includes their new dual Socket370 BP6 board, which is the part that held the "FSB option champion" title until the SY-6BA+ III arrived in our office.

The bottom line for this card? It was fast and it was really smooth when playing with quake2 and 3. However, all the hype about the card and how well it would perform is a bit of an over-statement. I did use the card on an AMD-K6 II Processor, I have to remind you. Using a Pentium-class system might offer some better scores. Even so, I do give my seal of approval for this card...if you can afford it. The card costs $200-$250 so, if you have the cash, I recommend it to the hard-core gamers.

It wasn’t too long ago that almost all cases were alike. Most clone makers used the same cases and there really wasn’t much individuality. Due to boredom, the need for better cooling, or jealousy of non-PC cases, that has started to change. Initially seen in computers made by large vendors such as Dell, Compaq, or HP, these new and more feature rich cases are available for those of us that build our own computers.

What can't be seen is the massive improvement of stability in Quake 2, the 1.88 drivers are about impossible to switch resolutions with without crashing the system, the 2.08 are silky smooth for that (the 2.03 were much better already as well), so AMD owners should consider upgrading if they can grab the drivers somewhere.

• NVidia TNT/TNT2 Ref Driver (Win9X - version 2.08 - 964 KB) 
  
  
  

Sources close to AMD said today that overclocking Athlon K7s is an easy matter, with systems builders easily able to achieve speeds of 700MHz.

But things could get even better for overclocking freaks, because the same source said that AMD is likely to introduce a 750MHz part either late in Q3 or early in Q4 this year.

Rana Mainee, European research director at AMD, said: "We don't recommend overclocking but we haven't done anything in K7 to prevent it. If people want to do that, they can choose to do so at their own risk."

My new 550 MHz AMD Athlon (K7) just clocked a jaw-dropping 68.5 Unreal timedemo at 1024x768, running on a Voodoo3 3000 card.  Even more telling, at no point did the frame rate ever drop below 38.0 fps.  That's astounding, considering the intense lightmap and geometry usage in the timedemo level.  Even while playing Unreal Tournament's most texture and polygon intensive level (Shane Caudle's DmGothic), the frame rate hardly ever went below 60 fps.

The Athlon's 128K L1 cache is awesome for memory-intensive games like Unreal.   Operations like visibility determination, which thrash on the Pentium III's 32K cache, now run at full speed on the Athlon.  This CPU truly shows a generational performance improvement, like going from my old 486 to my first Pentium.

Head over to check out the rest!  I'm getting really excited about the Athlon.

• Spectra 2500 Driver (Win9X - version 0208-3.10.11)
  
  
  

This card gets the much sought after riva extreme "superior." Justifications? The low noise is definitely key. It helps make everything more realistic and gives you a better listening experience. Also the switched input/output is a great feature of the card, I believe this is a very innovative, useful utilization of card real estate. But it's not perfect, I'm still looking for more. 9/10 means that it's got most of its act together. AWOL gave the MX300 an 'A', and this card is certainly on a par with that one. Here's the graphic:

Does the Athlon processor have any features/commands designed to compete with Intel's "SIMD" instruction set?

Yep, we have enhanced 3DNow! technology with 24 new instructions ---- 19 of which are designed to match the integer accelerating capabilities of SSE. These 19 new instructions improve multimedia-enhanced integer calculations for speech or video encoding and improved data movement for Internet plug-ins and other streaming applications. The 5 additional instructions are for DSP or communications extensions which can improve performance for soft modems, soft xDSL, AC-3, and MP3. These 5 DSP instructions are not supported in Intel's SSE.

Palo Alto Design Group may not be the first name that comes to mind when you think about computer cases, but chances are pretty good that you've actually used one of their cases before. They are the creators of the sleek Palm Pilot casing. On the PC case side of things, they are the ones behind the enclosures used in Dell's Dimension and Micron's Millennia PC lines.

• Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 Review
• Super G 1GHz Athlon System Preview
• CH ForceFX Flightstick Review
• Contest: Win a G400
  
  
  

The Diamond S540 is a great value. It performs wonderfully in low resolutions, as well as in MeTaL. Where the Creative Savage4 lacked strength, the S540 conquers. The driver bugs on both Savage4 cards were a little depressing, but Diamond should be working on a fix soon. If you are in the market for a card to replace your TNT/Banshee, the S540 is for you. S3TC will be a wonderful feature to have when Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament hit the store shelves, and for around $100, it's a simple upgrade. The Creative Savage4 just can't compete with the S540's amazing performance and drivers. If you are stuck between which Savage4 PRO to buy, go with the Diamond, you wont be disappointed.

For those of you not familiar with the Super G K7, the computer is from the folks over at Kryotech and includes a speedy K7 Athlon processor running at 1000MHz or 1GHz. It seems that the new Athlon is much more overclockable then past AMD processors, allowing for them to bring the speed much higher. I spoke a bit with Kryotech about the Super G and they informed me that the new computer will not be out until this fall. Another thing to remember about the Super G is that the price will be quite expensive, most likely due to the fact that it is going to be the fastest K7 computer in the world. But then again there is quite a few of us who want the fastest computers and don't mind paying for it.

Called the GA-6WMM7, this Gigabyte board is exactly what we speculated that most i810-based boards would be once they were announced. Namely that instead of the usual 440BX mainboard design which features support for large amounts of SDRAM and PCI peripherals, the 810 boards would be geared for the system integrator or OEM customer who would then build low cost systems around the foundational 810 mainboard.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a BETA OEM release. It is NOT intended for end-users. A retail release (4.06.2035) will be made available shortly that will fix many outstanding issues. This release only fixes problems with Dungeon Keeper 2, Need For Speed 3, and Need For Speed: High Stakes. This release also supports an upcoming motherboard technology. If you are not experiencing problems with the above three games, it is recommended that you wait for the release of 4.06.2035 which will address other issues, including fixes for many intermittent game crashes.

• Aureal A3D Driver (Win9X - version 2.20 - 287 KB)
• Aureal Vortex2 Driver (Win9X - version 2031 - 7.6 MB)