March 24 - 31, 1999
Archive

You have to love when you get more from a product than you had expected.  I already knew that I liked Plextor drives, but my expierences with this UltraPlex 40x WIDE CD-ROM have really convinced me that their drives are superior.  I do not feel that you should run out and replace your 40x Max drive with a Plextor 40x Max WIDE drive, but if you are looking for a new SCSI CD-ROM, I think it would be a waste to buy anything else.

 

The other big complaint about previous AMD chips has been their floating point performance. While the K6 has a faster FPU than an equally clocked PII, the PII can carry out more FPU operations over a period of time. This was again an issue of pipelining. While the K6 carries out a single FPU operation faster, the PII breaks the FPU operation down. Thus when the first FPU operation is leaving the PII's FPU, another is being processed while yet another is being decoded. Over time, this results in more FPU operations being done than the single faster FPU. The K7 has no such problem, it has a fully pipelined FPU. The K7 will be able to issue three whole instructions per cycle giving PII / III beating FPU performance for sequences of FPU operations (almost always the case), a first time for a non-Intel x86 chip. For single instructions speed the K7 FPU will be somewhere around the PII and PIII.

 

• ATi Rage 128 Driver (Win9X - version 6.11-A1E (CD05))

 

It’s obvious why ABIT’s SEL 100/66# trick is of no use to the re-marker, but what about Tom’s version of the B21 trick (the one that involves painting over or grinding in half of pin B21)? The problem with this technique is that it’s easily detectable via a cursory visual inspection of the PCB; you don’t have to remove any of the packaging to spot this modification. Luckily for the re-marker (and unluckily for the consumer), there’s an easy way to do the B21 hack on the PCB that’s not so easily detected. All you have to do is grind off resistors R5 and R6. Since both of these resistors are underneath the packaging, there’s no way to tell the chip has been hacked without taking it apart. That makes the R5/R6 trick the choice of re-markers worldwide. Any time you pick up a hacked PII, you can just about guarantee that its R5 and R6 resistors have been tampered with.

As a concept the premise is simple. Rather than incorporate a single BIOS chip within the printed circuit board, they incorporate two, labeled the Primary and Secondary BIOS.

The Primary BIOS handles the Boot Process, and the secondary is only called upon when the Primary fails. The Secondary can therefore be considered a "hot spare", which can be called upon in time of failure. So far, doesn't sound too exciting? Well the clever bit, is that the whole BIOS recovery process is automatic! As soon as a failure of the Primary is detected, the Secondary kicks in automatically and takes over. Indeed the process goes further still, and you are offered the chance to repair the Primary BIOS. Hit F1 and you enter a recovery screen and the Primary is re-flashed by the contents of the Secondary chip!

 

Fujitsu MPC3102AT
IBM Deskstar 14GXP
Maxtor DiamondMAX 4320
QuantumFireball CR
Seagate Medalist 10230
Western Digital Caviar AC313000 

 

Performance was as as advertised so it pretty much comes down to "Is it worth it?" Well, the $120 price tag is significantly higher than almost any other (non-SCSI) CD-ROM out there. It is a tough decision - the fastest CD-ROM drive on earth, but at a price. And to top it off, there is above average digital audio extraction and extremely quiet operation. Once you have experienced a TrueX drive, it is hard to go back. If you must have the best, go for the TrueX 52X. If you just need a CD-ROM for installing software, get something that costs less than half as much.

 

While I feel DVD is still in its baby stages, Creative Labs is giving it quite a push. DVD is a standard, and it's growing very rapidly. As we said in an editorial a week or so back, it's not a matter of if you'll be using DVD technology, it's a matter of when. The barebones DVD drive is running for about $117 now, and the full DVD kit with the decoder card is about $197. When you think about it, the 5x barebones drive is as capable as most new CDROM drives, and for just a few bucks more. It's worth it to get the barebones drive at the very least since DVD will undoubtedly become the technology everyone wants in the future. I'm quite impressed by what DVD has to offer, and Creative Labs has taken a great opportunity to put it in pretty packaging for us.

 

I am especially impressed with its performance in the Linux kernel compilation test I run - it beat a Celeron 300A that was overclocked to 450Mhz by seven seconds (user time)!

 

Power freaks will want a switch even for their small LAN setups.  With the dedicated bandwidth that only a Switch can offer, you can only imagine what the ping times are when plugged right into the Switch!  Can you imagine ping times of less than a 1/100th of a second?  I can, but only because I have seen it.

 

We've managed to get our grubby little hands on D-link's DFE-905 Network Kit. The DFE-905 kit looks like a great networking starter kit for beginners, and provides everything you need to network together 2 computers. It includes a 4 port 10/100Mbps DFE-904 hub, 2 10/100Mbps DFE-530TX PCI network cards, two 20' RJ45 cables, various user manuals, and a nifty setup CD-ROM with shareware versions of Blizzard's Diablo and WarCraft2.

 

Much like the results of the overclocked P3-450 CPUs we've looked at, the P3-500s showed a maximum overclocked speed of 560MHz while retaining full stability. 585MHz was troublesome at best, we weren't able to successfully boot into Win95 OSR 2.1 at that frequency level no matter what voltage we utilized.

 

Aside from virtual textures, the Permedia3 also offers single pass bump-mapping as well some serious multi-pass texturing. With the latter, the Permedia3 can produce 2 texture reads and 3 texture blends all in the same pass. On most cards this would take multiple clock cycles, seriously hindering performance. With the Permedia3, we will likely see some high benchmarks on certain games which do use many texture blends for each texture.

 

• Motherboard Monitor (Win9X - 4.0 - 1.2 MB)
• CPUIdle (Win9X - 5.5 Beta - 1MB)
• RawPower (Win9X - 1.10 Beta - 1MB)

 

Our source reiterated 3dfx's position that no speed sacrifice is acceptable for 32-bit performance, though many have cried sour grapes (and the truth is likely somewhere between the two stories). For those of us (everyone) wondering what the performance will be on this new card over Voodoo3, our source states that it should be close to the raw speed increase of Voodoo2 over Voodoo1. No mention was made of whether this was for 16 or 32-bit color, or with what settings. For a more subjective take on this, I first asked whether or not, from a pure performance standpoint, whether or not Thresh would prefer this card over Voodoo3. The answer, without a moment's hesitation, was "definitely."

For single V2 owners, the viability on purchasing another V2 is a toss up. Do you purchase another V2 at $129.00 (on average) for SLI mode, or spend the extra $50.00 bucks for a single V3 3000. This is a matter of where you want to be and what you'll have (machine wise) within the next 12 months. This last statement also goes for the already SLI'd endowed individuals. Do you plan on playing games above 1024x768? If so then this could very well be the option you've been waiting for. If your happy in your 1024x768 max world, I wouldn't spend that hard earned cash as of yet. The SLI'd V2s' raw performance is still one of the best combo's out. For the first time buyer, this accelerator will not disappoint and will scale nicely with your next CPU upgrade.

 

The Voodoo3 3000 offers incredible performance for a fair price. If you're looking for a wicked fast, compatible, high quality 3D card, don't overlook the Voodoo3. If you're trying to decide which of the three Voodoo3s to pick up, consider that the Voodoo3 3000 offers a lot more than the V3 2000, but costs a lot less than the even faster V3 3500. If you're a pure speed demon and want all of the performance you can get, save up some money and go for the V3 3500. However, no single video card currently on the market can come close to the absolute power of the V3 3000 for its price.

Feel is superb. Feels like an over assisted power steering, which is good enough. Means, it feels like a Honda Civic SiR. Overassisted. But in computers, that's great. It rotates a full 180 degrees left to right, very responsive. Force can be adjusted fully.

 

So it really does not matter what RAM will be available, AMD can use the 200 MHz EV6-bus. What RAM can be used depends on the chipset. When the first K7 for the retail market are shipped, you will plug cheap 100 or 133 MHz SDRAMs in your K7-motherboard and you will get a K7 with a 200 MHz EV6 bus. On top of that, don't forget that the K7 has a still a 512 KB backside L2-cache. 90 to 95 percent of the time, the K7 will look in the L2-cache for the data that is needed. So, regardless of whether you use DIMM modules running at 133 MHz or 200 MHz, the performance impact will be minimal. The notable exception to this, however, is AGP.

 

• Abit BH6 BIOS Update (version KG - 130 KB)
• Award Flash Utility (version 6.6)

 

• WinTune 98 (Win9X - version 1.0.37 - 1.75 MB)

The DreamCode is equipped with the well-behaving nVIDIA Riva TnT processor with 16Mb of 125Mhz SDRAM, feature-wise identical with Powercolors TNT-based graphics card, the Sniper. Alos incluided on the motherboard a Yamaha XG Wavetable Synthesizer, providing 32 bit, 64 voice, GM compatible, Sensaura (3D positional audio) enabled, DirectSound compliant audio.

 

The Ultra 66 won't give you a huge performance increase over the rest of the world's storage technologies, not with today's Ultra 66 hard drives, however shortly, as more and more manufacturers begin shipping faster and larger Ultra ATA/66 hard disks (especially 7200 RPM drives) the need will rise.

 

-Davo
How's the 32 bit color performance vrs. the old TNT? Can we run Quake 3 Arena at
1600X1200X32 bit at an acceptable frame rate?

-David
32 bit color performance for TNT2 is substantially improved over TNT. For most games, there is less than 1-2 FPS difference between 16 and 32 bit at most resolutions. I'm not sure about QA3 at 1600x1200x32 - I'll have to give you an update later about that.

 

Its WinBench scores under Windows 95 seem to good to be true. Is the Expert AC418000 for real? It really appears so! I've replaced my Barracuda ST39173LW with the Expert in my personal Win98 system and have been living with it for the past two weeks. Bootup times, application loads, and heavy disk activity all feel much faster. For Win9x performance, the Expert seems like the drive to beat. Under NT, however, it looks like the WD may be vulnerable to NT-powerhouse Maxtor with it's soon-to-ship DiamondMax Plus 5120. And let's not forget about Big Blue themselves either. Even so, however, it's my pleasure to congratulate WD with its shipment of this fine product. The predictable pattern of IBM vs. Maxtor may be coming to an end. Welcome back, Western Digital!

 

So why would you buy a more expensive Plextor CD-R instead of a cheaper one from Sony or TEAC?  For starters, look at buffer size.  While most manufacturers include only 1/4 of the buffer (1MB), only a handful of drives carry a full 2MB buffer, and almost none have a full 4MB!  Compatibility is also a big issue.   It is very hard to find CD-R drives that can read CD-RW disks.  If this sounds like a feature that your are interested, don't waste your time with anything but the PlexWriter.  One final consideration is bundled software.  Almost every retail CD-R comes with CD Mastering software, but only the PlexWriter comes with the Plextor Manager 96.

 

First of all, we should explain the technology. LCD glasses work by drawing two different sets of pictures -- One for the left eye, and one for the right eye, on alternating horizontal lines, and are also is slightly offsetted on the X-axis. The LCD glasses themselves are queued by the computer (through an InfraRed transmitter, in the EyeScream's case) to alternately switch off each eye. This is accomplished by LCD, or Liquid Crystal Display, shutters in each eye. When told, the LCD in the "lens" turns on, blocking vision for that eye. If this is done many times per second (imperceptible to the human eye) and synchronised with the alternating frames on the screen, this can create a very convincing 3D image.

 

• Viper V550 Driver (Win9X - version 2.55)
• Monster Fusion Driver (Win9X - version 2.13)
• Monster3D II Driver (Win9X - version 2.07)

Although the benchmarks won't exactly napalm your world, the board still proved itself adequately on all the test systems and actually scaled fairly well on the low-end Celeron 300A system (which is what it's possibly targeted for). Thus for the 'part-time' gamer the 2000 is a good choice. But we don't recommend this board for regulars of the online gaming scene nor would we automatically rip out a Voodoo2. For a little more money and on a high-end system it's well worth spending the extra dollars on a higher-clocked version of the Voodoo3. On the other hand, if you still want to remain cost-effective and yet want some of the more advanced 3D features, then it's probably worth waiting a little longer for an Nvidia UltraTNT2 based board.

 

Windows 95/98 Fixes/Updates:

• Is based on nVIDIA RIVA TNT driver version 1.13
• Supports OpenGL screensavers
• Allows real-time stencil shadow effects in games which support this feature, such as Unreal
• Solves video synchronization and misalignment problems in
  BlasterControl.
• Includes latest BlasterControl help files to add context-sensitive Help topics for three new options in the BlasterControl Tweak Module.  These options are for DirectX5 and DirectX6 compatibility features.

• Graphics Blaster Riva TNT Driver (Win9X - Revision 3 - 2.2 MB)

Windows NT 4.0 Fixes/Updates:

• Is based on nVIDIA RIVA TNT driver version 1.12
• New Tweak is supported.
• Solved display problems related to virtual desktop when set to higher resolution outside the viewable area.
• Fixes screen flickering when running Mystify screensaver in 8 bit color depth.

• Graphics Blaster Riva TNT Driver (WinNT - Revision 1 - 620 KB)

 

Nullsoft has released a new version of the very popular Winamp audio player.  There's is a lot of fixes and additions in this version, here is the info and a link to download:

• New preferences system
• New install screen stuff (with easier configuration)
• Improved CDDA plug-in, with auto-play
• Improved MPEG audio decoding (blip reduction, ID3v1 URL, Shoutcast URL, Shoutcast 1.1 title streaming)
• Improved MOD/XM/IT rendering (64 bit mixing, sample declicking, less loader bugs, etc)
• Totally new output driver (faster and more compatible)
• Language package support
• Windows font support w/ International characterset capability (optional)
• Better filetype registration (with options to register on start, etc)
• Desktop Icon and Quicklaunch adding
• Customizable DSP/Vis plug-in directories.
• Playlist editor has more intuitive moving
• Winamp Browser (for context-sensitive content)
• A TON of bugfixes (if you've been getting GDI errors this should fix)

• Winamp (Win9X/NT - version 2.10 - 540 KB)

 

The onscreen controls on the iiyama monitors are top notch.   They have thrown in everything but the kitchen sink with this model.  You have full control over all features of the display, including a few that some other manufacturers leave out. 

Not only do you get the standard position controlls, but also ones that control distortion, color (including the Sync on Green which we found very handy), Landing controls (to correct for discoloration in the corners), Functions (including Moire and On Screen Display location), and even multi language support.  Nice job iiyama!

 

The Linksys Fast Ethernet Starter Kit comes with everything you need to get started networking 2 PCs at Fast Ethernet speeds.   Included with the kit are 2 PCI 10/100 auto-sensing Network Interface Cards, a 100BaseTX 4 port hub and power brick, 2 15 foot Category 5 Fast Ethernet cables, drivers, user's manual, and a 2 user license of Virtual Motion's Internet LanBridge modem sharing software.

 

The Panther XL has 9 buttons, along with a pair of coolie hats, one allowing 4 degrees of freedom and the other usually mapped as four separate buttons. The 9 digital buttons can be assigned any control config necessary and in games that require extras, the coolie hats can have each of their 4 directions fixed to your control setup. This level of customization comes in handy in FPS games, and the 9 buttons ensure you'll have enough space to map the necessary game commands.

 

The Spressa USB drive supports quad speed (4X) recording of CD-R media, double speed (2X) of CD-RW media, and CD-ROM maximum reading performance of 6X. By using the versatile USB interface, the drive is easily shared between computers, and can even be disconnected and re-connected while the computer is still running. The Spressa USB drive also offers the added flexibility of attachment to both Macintosh® and Windows® computers.