March 9 - 15, 1999
Archive

Our tests proved just what you'd expect: high clock speed translates into blazing performance. For instance, running Quake II at 1,024 by 768, 16-bit, the TNT 2-based Viper delivered 67.9 frames per second, almost exactly the score of our Voodoo 2 SLI setup, which delivered 69.6fps. For comparison, a 32MB ATI Rage 128-based Rage Fury managed 42.8fps, and a TNT-based Graphics Blaster RIVA TNT churned out 38.4fps. Running Incoming at 800 by 600, 16-bit, however, the TNT 2 trounced all the competition, blasting ahead at 102.21fps, with the Voodoo 2 SLI trailing at 95.46fps, the TNT at 77.49fps, and the Rage 128 at 66.67fps.

 

Relatively unknown in the sound technology field up until recently, British based Sensaura have revealed some of their 1999 plans from the floor of this year's Game Developer's Conference. Adding to Creative's EAX, Aureal's A3D and Microsoft's DS3D will be Sensaura's own 3D positional technology: MacroFX. MacroFX sits atop DirectSound3D, making for an easy programming curve. " The games developer doesn't have to make any additional programming effort to implement MacroFX", says Sensaura's Peter Clare, "There are no additional rules to learn or programming complications, it couldn't be simpler and the outcome is just like real-life".

Complementing their MacroFX technology is their announcement of Multi-Drive, an algorithm that ensures optimal performance for multi-speaker system owners. "MultiDrive offers better azimuth sound placement, vertical and horizontal placement and a 'sweet spot' which is more tolerant to changes to the game players' position", says Alastair Sibbald, Sensaura's Chief Scientist. For more on both of these technologies, visit www.sensaura.co.uk or stop by their booth at the show.

 

Playback of music was incredible thanks to the surround effect brought with the addition of the two rear speakers. Closing your eyes and just listening to the music leaves you feeling like you are actually sitting in the middle of a concert. Highs and lows were reproduced very accurately, without even a crackle at the higher volume levels.

Synergy II includes ELSA's SIMDream optimization for the Intel Pentium III processor, which delivers Streaming SIMD Extensions to ELSA's unique OpenGL and Windows NT drivers for optimal use of the Pentium III architecture. Utilizing the RIVA TNT2 processing engine as its integrated hardware setup core, Synergy II leverages the Pentium III core for high-bandwidth graphics processing such as geometry transform and lighting acceleration. With the implementation of Intel's new Streaming SIMD Extensions instruction set, ELSA will maximize the Pentium III's potential by accelerating important parts of the geometry pipeline to deliver significant application performance improvements to customers.

 

Diamond Multimedia's best-of-class Viper V770 will be available for AGP 4X systems as well as support AGP 2X and features the RIVA TNT2 Ultra processor, the second-generation single-chip 128-bit 3D processor able to process two pixels per clock cycle from NVIDIA. Scaleable resolution support of up to 2048x1536, an enhanced dual 32-bit color 3D pipeline, and trilinear and anisotropic filtering all contribute to the Viper V770's impressive performance and visual quality output. Diamond's Viper V770 also delivers 32-bit Z-buffer including an 8-bit stencil buffer and MPEG support. In addition, Diamond's new Viper V770 graphics accelerator is optimized for the industry's most popular Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), including OpenGL® ICD and Microsoft's DirectX 6® and Windows 98/95/NT OS. The Diamond Viper V770 supports the Streaming SIMD Instructions in Pentium® III processor-based PCs as well as AMD's 3DNow!(tm) technology enhanced processors, delivering enhanced 3D graphics to the PC user.

 

Diamond Multimedia's new Stealth III S540 graphics accelerator will be available with 16MB of onboard memory and support for AGP 2X or AGP 4X in both a retail and system integrator/OEM configuration. The combination of support for textures up to 2048 x 2048 in size and Savage4's unique S3TC hardware texture compression, an industry standard included in DirectX 6.0 capable of storing 240MB in 64MB of system memory, brings high-quality resolutions and photorealistic images to complex 3D applications on the market. Additional features include a true 128-bit 2D/3D engine for high speed and quality, single-pass multi-texturing, 32-bit rendering, resolution support up to 1920 x 1440, stencil buffering, and complete DirectX 6 and OpenGL ICD support for added hardware acceleration in today's hottest 3D applications.

 

The Kenwood 52x TrueX CD-ROM uses TrueX technology to deliver a transfer rate performance of 45x - 52x across the entire disc, which equals a data transfer rate of 6750 - 7800Kb per second. TrueX technology is a component set that includes optics, detection devices, and a high speed ASIC. By illuminating multiple tracks on a CD-ROM simultaneously, TrueX allows up to seven tracks to be read and processed in parallel.

 

• Matrox Unified BIOS (version 3.49 - 717KB)

 

Both instruction sets target single precision floating point SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) operations. Since ISVs have stated that single precision floating point operations have posed a bottleneck in the 3D graphics pipeline, this is a natural target for enhancement. SIMD is a method of programming first introduced for the x86 architecture through MMX(TM) technology. SIMD enables multiple operations to be performed per processor instruction.

 

The concluding result of the Voodoo3 is an arguement of speed over quality. Without 32-Bit graphics, the V3 may lack the touch we've been waiting for from 3Dfx Interactive, but on the contrary, speed is probably the single most important factor to gamers. The end result will be overwhelming, with the added bonus of the AMD K6-2, 3DNow!, and Pentium3 support.

 

This morning (Monday) we placed a call to Intel and it promised it would get back to us. We now have that statement.

A representative said: "A prototype of the circuitry has been present in some PII and Celeron parts, purely for validation and testing purposes.

"It wasn't on all, by any means. It was disabled during the manufacturing process."

As intended, Aureal has taken care of most of the performance problems that plagued the Vortex 1. One way in which the performance of the Vortex 2 was increased, lies in the fact that it isn’t a fully programmable DSP, but a DSP hardwired for A3D 2.0, which gives it an extra speed boost. Since it is not a true DSP, it can’t be rated in MIPS, but Tony Schneider from Aureal Interactive has been quoted saying that 'if A3D 2.0 was to be done on a DSP, it would require around 1200-1800 MIPS', which is a far cry above the Vortex-2’s main competitor, the SoundBlaster Live!, which is rated at 1000MIPS. In addition to pure 3D sound performance on the Vortex 2, Aureal has also upped the MIDI support. While the Vortex 2 is still using a 64-voice wavetable and four megabytes of the system memory for MIDI patches, software drivers have increased the voice support by 256-voices to a total of 320, and the quality has improved.

 

The first is heat. Diamond is clocking the card "aggressively." The Viper 770 I tested had 32MB of 6 nanosecond SDRAM; when it booted up, the boot-up message described the card as the "Viper 770 Ultra." The 770 comes with a hefty heatsink/fan combination. During testing, the heatsink got only a little warm to the touch, and the memory chips stayed cool. So heat seems less of a problem than with overclocked TNTs.

 

• you can show resources below VUMeter
• Warning and interval log can be send to via e-mail. Yup, if this works then where ever you are MBM can warn/contact you via:
  • SMTP (this should work for everybody). If I did my job correctly then MBM will log on using the selected dial-up adaptor, send the mail to the selected address and then log off. Please note that you must select a dial-up adaptor which has the password saved box checked otherwise MBM can not log on.
  • MAPI (outlook, exchange & co), MBM will put the mail in your outbox and the MAPI mail program should take care of the rest
• Min RPM option for fan
• Changed layout of language file(s)
• CPUIdle and Resource tab no longer visible under NT

• MotherBoard Monitor (Win9X/NT - version 4.0 B7 - 511 KB)

S3 also did very well in increasing the amount of on-board memory, allowing up to 32 Megs RAM. Coupled with their patented S3TC texture compression and AGP 4X support, this allows for some pretty damned large textures to be loaded without slowdown. But they are not forgetting the lower end of the ladder either. The Savage 4 comes in 2 models, the Savage 4 LT, with 8 Megs RAM running at 110MHz, a 250 MHz RAMDAC and AGP 2X support, aimed at the same sub-$1000 PC market the Savage 3d did so well in, and the Savage 4 Pro, sporting 16 or 32 Megs RAM at 143MHz, a 270 MHz RAMDAC, and AGP 4X support, which is targetted at the power user. The Savage 4 Pro also has support for Digital Flat Panels, which apparently are starting to get somewhat popular in this arena.

 

The G200 is one great card loaded with all the features that anybody would want. The marvel is like the Swiss army knife of all video cards (has everything in one but not always as good as seperate things for each). The price of the card is $299 but you can find it priced around $250 or so. This might be a lot for people who just want a 2D/3D gaming card, but The Marvel is an excellent card for anyone who wants to do video encoding, considering a stand alone encoder will cost $200 or more with hardware JPEG. You get a good 3D card, an excelent 2D card, a TV-Tuner and a bundle of software worth $150. That all adds up to a price that doesn't seem so bad when you consider the features.

It is amazing to see that TNT2 is pretty much CPU limited in Crusher up to a resolution of 1024x768. This means that in those resolutions TNT2 will score even higher with a faster CPU. 1152x864 is where finally the 3D-chip limitation kicks in, but look at those numbers! TNT2 scores almost 46 fps at 1152x864! It's a shame that the current driver doesn't support 1280x960 in full screen mode, because I am sure that TNT2 at 175/200 will still score close to 40 fps in Crusher, which makes this resolution definitely playable. A Crusher result of almost 30 fps at 1600x1200 shows that even this resolution is still almost playable.

 

Both nVIDIA and Diamond told us that the TNT2 Ultra is capable of yet even greater clock speeds than the ones that achieved the incredibly high scores with our board. A bit more experimentation will be done no doubt before and indeed after TNT2 Ultra's ships so it could be a case of 'the best is yet to come'. Either way, we think you'll agree with us, when we say that the Viper V770 is out-and-out champion when it comes to visual quality and yet maintaining frame rates that are close to that of the Voodoo3 and in some cases higher (in D3D). Although the Voodoo3 outperforms the TNT2 by a couple of frames per second at high resolutions (1600x1200 and 1024x678) in Quake2 Massive1, the likelihood of this small gap being reversed is a distinct possibility. We could give you a rather boring maths lesson etc.. But let's just say that the Viper V770's Ultra TNT2 graphics clock still has a bit of mileage left in its tank before it fills out at 183MHz. If indeed the Viper V770 was to go up to (or above) 183MHz and nudge clear of the Voodoo3, then the end result would not be a welcome one for 3Dfx.

 

Net-N-Dude's Arctic Cap is an acceptable way to get a poor-man's celery sandwich if you have the Glacier 4500 or Global FAB24/28. The Glacier 4500 by itself is not a stand-out performer compared to either the Global FAB 24 or TennMax TF. Adding the Arctic Cap to the Cofan KC266 (Street price about $15) can't hurt either. It's about $10 cheaper to buy the Arctic Cap and add it or buy either the Global FAB24/28 for a total of $37 or the Cofan KC266 for a total of $27. The Glacier 4500 C at $35 is quite pricey considering Net-N-Dude adds 3 fans on the Cofan USA heatsink which you can buy for about $15 with a single fan.

 

The 3D Revelator will be presented to the public during Cebit'99. The H3D-technology has been improved while keeping full compatibility; among other things, the shutters themselves are larger and the distance between them can be adjusted manually to accomodate every face & nose <g>; plus, the IR unit has been improved too.

Software-wise, Elsa does eveything in-house. They use Microsoft D3D as the interface; anyone asking about OpenGl? This can be achieved through the SciTech OpenGl Wrapper (Elsa has tested Quake II and Sin and both worked very nicely). Still, I strongly suggest to Elsa (anyone listening?) that they have a conference about direct OpenGl support in their own drivers (give Vicor Vedovato of Rendition a call - that guy did it once before!).
Elsa-based-Driver-support for their Banshee (Elsa Victory II) and TNT (Elsa Erazor II) boards is available, their TNT2 board (Elsa Erazor III) will be supported to as well as that we have a statement here that Elsa most probably will support *all* future boards.

 

• added L1 cache toggle option on all CPUs
• added L1 caching strategy display
• added better framebuffer support (large buffers now preferred)
• added support for second graphics card and 3D accelerators (Voodoo 1/2)
• added display of on-die P6 style (PPro, PII, Celeron) caches
• added bus frequency detection for K6-CXT style CPUs
• added diagnostic eMail button if MAPI installed
• added failsafe feature (should stop optimization at bootup if it failed the last time)
• fixed display of on-module L2 caches
• fixed display of P2 cachable area value
• fixed linear burst problem on Cyrix systems (won't be optimized by default now)

• RawPower (Win9X - version 1.04 - 362 KB)

The Celeron PPGA processor premiered a few months ago, as a future replacement for the Slot One Celeron processors. The reason for this was to preserve Intel's price, by using the cheaper PPGA chips. This might have been good for the industry, instead of bad. It seems that I have had more overclocking luck with my Malaysian manufactured Celeron 300A PPGA chip, than I have with my Malaysian manufactured Celeron 300A Slot One chip. The PPGA chip has been much more stable and in my experience has reached higher speeds that are much more stable compared to the Slot One processor. I figured that the PPGA chip would be less than an "Overclocker's Dream", since you only have room for one fan on the processor. I guess I was wrong.

 

The Arctic cap, retailing for about $12 from www.net-n-dude.com (the manufacturers) is an add-on to the Glacier 4500C alone, however it can be purchased with a new Glacier 4500C cooler for around $45. The cap attaches to the rear of the processor via a relatively simple clamp that allows it to attach on to the exposed pillars of the Glacier 4500C's heatsink. The arctic cap essentially takes the place of the plastic back plate that normally clamps the Glacier 4500C to the Celeron processor. Due to its prime placement on the opposite side of the processor, the cap helps remove a considerable amount of heat and definitely improves the temperature of an already hot CPU.

 

Available to OEMs in early 1999, this board design will incorporate SP3D's EnVision2000 chipset, which will enable a quantum leap forward in performance for professional 3D applications. Paired with Samsung's leading DDR (double-data rate) SDRAM and SGRAM memory devices, EnVision2000 will provide graphics throughput up to 14M triangles per second and fill rates to 1 Gigapixel per second.

 

Number one with a bullet. There's just no polite way to say it: this card has abysmal 16-bit image quality. The good news is that 32-bit image quality is fantastic, as you would expect, and performance is close enough to 16-bit that it may not matter. The bad news is that a lot of games don't even allow you to run in 32-bit color, so you're stuck with it, even though it would probably run just as fast and certainly look a hell of a lot better in 32-bit color. That also means if you're a gamer who wants the fastest possible speed, you're paying a visual penalty to get it. That's a major bummer.

 

• VoodooDoctor (Win9X - version 2.0.0 - 94 KB)

Well this is the time to say good-bye and tell you how this unit stood up under dire conditions. Well I was able to maintain a working speed of 100Mhz on my Voodoo2 (90Mhz is factory set), while keeping the case temperature about 1-2 degrees cooler. The unit costs about $20 and is available at www.thecardcooler.com. Thanks again to Jacque Anderson for supplying me with this unit from The Card Cooler. Here are the ratings for this great product:

 

We've tested Apollo Pro based mainboards before, and the results of the V6BE+ in our standard benchmarks were very strong. In fact, the V6BE+ ranked in the top five for both ZD-Winbench 99's CPUMark32 score and ZD-Winbench's Winstone99 score out of the last 12 Slot-1 mainboards we've tested.

 

The purpose of the Kryotech Renegade isn't to bring the overclockability of the Cool K6-3 down to Slot-1 owners, rather it is to offer a dramatic stability increase due to the implementation of a more effective cooling method, at a semi reasonable cost. The room temperature cooling allows for the processor to virtually be removed from the temperature equation inside of your case. Especially for users that have SCSI hard drives and newer video cards that already generate considerable amounts of heat, the Renegade can definitely improve system stability. AnandTech's own tests show at least a 5% increase in stability in normal operating conditions, and you can expect a greater increase in stability as the conditions worsen. The AnandTech test system never crashed once during hours of back to back memory intensive application testing, it is for that reason that the Kryotech Renegade is being used in AnandTech's memory stability tests to prevent heat issues from adversely effecting the stability of memory modules during testing.

 

AVault: Is 3Dfx is preparing a 32-bit implementation?

Bruning: We are always preparing new technology. The specifics and timeframes will be announced when we're ready.

AVault: In what ways will Voodoo3 boards be superior to a combination of two 12 MB Voodoo2 SLI boards?

Bruning: Voodoo3 is an integrated 2D-3D chip rather than a 3D-only card. This allows for rendering into a window for web browsers, tools, and some games, and special rendering that requires using a rendered surface as a texture. Voodoo3 also offers resolutions up to 1600x1200 where V2 SLI maxes out at 1024x768. Lastly, Voodoo3 runs faster internally, which allows more triangles to be processed per second, and includes AGP 2x for increasing the triangle and texture transfer rate to the card.

 

The K7 is also a 3-way superscalar. So what is the big deal with this K7 ? Well first of all the decoders of the K7 are generalized, so they can decode without restrictions 3 arbitrary x86-instructions. The PII(I) has one powerful universal decoder, and two "wimpy"** ones that can only decode simpler x86 instructions. The K7 will be able to sustain higher decode rates on average. 

A special Micro Processor Report (MDR) claims that the K7 can decode in reality a bit more than 2.5 x86 instructions/clock cycle, while the PIII can not do more than about 2.1 x86 instructions/clock cycle on average (the K6-3 would come close to 1.8-1.9). 

On top of that the K7 has 9 execution units compared to the PII(I)'s 5 execution units and the K7 has a larger buffer, a larger cache (128 L1 compared to 32 KB). So you could say that the K7 is "more superscalar" than the PIII. It can come closer to the limit of decoding and retiring 3 instructions each clock cycle. 

 

• Matrox WHQL G200 Driver (Win9X - version 4.30 - 1.73 MB)

 

At first Jan Ström at CL Nordic launched Quake2 and wich ran pretty fluid and my immediate response to this was "Oh yeah, I’ve seen Quake2 before, what’s new?" but then he asked us what resolution we thought it was running at. That’s when I took a look at the HUD (the health-meter), I hadn’t noticed it before because it was too small, it was running at 1600*1200 in 32Bit color and it was fully playable!

 

Many people have been enjoying awesome frame rates with a Voodoo2 for over a year now, or great 3D image quality and impressive speed in a 2D/3D AGP card with the Riva TNT for the last six months. This card is basically catch-up as far as I'm concerned, and personally I myself won't be replacing my TNT with this card. Future Rage 128 cards, though, may be a different story.

STEP's new flagship cooling product designed for the Intel PIII, and Celeron lines is called the FAIRBANKS. STEP sent BXBoards a FAIRBANKS mounted to a Celeron 400A that they guarantee will run stable at 500mhz for life. The FAIRBANKS cooling system employs a double fan, heat sink and peltier combination mounted on a unique beryllium copper backing plate that runs nearly the full length of the entire CPU board itself. This copper backing plate is then fused directly to the CPU with titanium dioxide at over 100psi. Copper is an excellent conductor of heat that has been used for many years in cooking and is making it's way into microelectronics as well. The FAIRBANK's copper plate acts to evenly distribute heat generated by the CPU to dual peltiers which, in turn, actively pump the heat to a double heat sink/fan combination for dissipation. This, by itself, is a superb design that could do the job quite well on it's own.

 

A part running at 143Mhz would deliver some 286Mtexels per second and a 166Mhz part would do even better at 332Mtexels per second which is quite impressive. There's also the possibility of TNT2 SLI via Metabytes PGR process but this will of course depend upon different OEM's if they wish to license the technology. In theory a TNT2 SLI rig, if it ships in 166Mhz flavors would be capable of a massive 664Mtexels per second, in terms of real world performance it would mean Quake2 at 1600 x 1200 at close to 60fps, which is pretty much the performance goal to achieve before year 2K. Of course we would still benefit from the finer feature set the TNT2 offers over say the Voodoo3.

 

• Spectra 2500 Drivers Only (Win9X - version 2.02.01 - 920 KB)
• Spectra 2500 Drivers & Utilities (Win9X - version 2.02.01 - 5.46 MB)

I've got a 1.03 beta of RawPower online. The main thing is that it should recover if automatic optimization during Windows startup failed (after reboot it should display a message and NOT crash again).

One way to verify this would be on Cyrix CPUs (where automatically enabling the Linear Burst will most likely crash them).

I'd also like to know if the On-Die caches of CeleronA and PPro are displayed correctly...

• RawPower (Win9X - version 1.03 - 362 KB)

 

• MotherBoard Monitor (Win9X/NT - version 4.0 Beta 2 - 491 KB)

 

In conclusion, the Fireball CR once again demonstrates the performance Quantum can squeeze out from a drive with relatively modest specs. Even so, it's clear that the CR can't quite nudge the now-aging DiamondMax 4320 out of the throne. Though it -is- one of the best 5400rpm drives available today, the Fireball CR once again makes us wonder what a high-density 7200rpm Quantum disk could do- a figment slowly materializing into reality in the upcoming Fireball KA.

 

So after all of this, what do I conclude? The BM6 is a really fine board with features that make it more attractive than the BH6 for overclocking PPGA's with one major proviso: If serious overclocking is your goal, expect disappointment until you get really good socket 370 coolers or you are prepared to undertake some serious modifications to existing Celeron and PII coolers.

 

• Quantum3D Obsidian2 Full (Win9X - version 6c Beta 4)
• Quantum3D Obsidian2 Drivers Only (Win9X - version 6c Beta 4)
• Quantum3D Obsidian2 Full (WinNT - version 6c Beta 4)
• Quantum3D Obsidian2 Drivers Only (WinNT - version 6c Beta 4)

Multiple texture support (yep - like a TNT/Voodoo2)

32bit colour fillrate performance is nearly identical to 16bit color, as fast if not slightly faster than Rage128

FULL HARDWARE TRUE bump mapping support (you just wait - THIS will be the baby)

Stencil buffer

It's capable of playing Quake2 in 32bits color slightly faster than a Voodoo2 in 16bits colour, fast enough for 1024*768*32 at very good frame rates. From what I've read of the TNT2 the G400 should probably be faster yet look much better.

 

For those of you who haven't heard yet, Anand and some other sites are reporting that PIIIs are bus-locked. According to Anand, the PIII core works only within a certain range of speeds. Supposedly there is some tolerance here, and the chips aren't locked to one specific MHz rating, but the tolerance is tight enough (±5MHz) that, when combined with a multiplier lock, the chips should be impervious to overclocking.

 

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif., March 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Seagate Technology, Inc. (NYSE: SEG - news) today unveiled the new U4 and Medalist 17242 desktop disc drive families, featuring industry-leading reliability and Ultra ATA/66, today's newest interface choice that doubles burst data transfer rates from 33.3 to 66.6 Mbytes per second. The U4 is the first Ultra ATA/66 drive in the entry-level market, and it is Seagate's second generation of disc drives designed specifically for the growing sub-$1,000 PC market. The new Medalist 17242 family is aimed at the mainstream PC market and provides performance and robustness improvements which position it among the best in its class, ahead of same-class drives from Quantum, WD and others in initial WinBench 99 test scores. Both the Medalist 17242 and U4 families offer ground-breaking reliability with the expansion of the SeaShield System and the industry's best non-operating shock spec of 300 Gs. Ten of the top ten PC manufacturers already have plans to integrate one or both of these new drives in future PCs. Customer evaluation units are currently shipping to OEMs, and both product families are scheduled to be in volume production next month.

 

The Celeron gets no respect. Cursed with an odd-sounding name and always kept a few technological steps behind the Pentium II/III, the ugly duckling of Intel's processor lineup seems destined to be an also-ran. But as Intel continues dropping Celeron prices in an effort to crush rival AMD, the Celeron is quickly becoming one of the best values in CPUs. This is especially true once you discover Intel's little secret: With proper cooling, most Celerons are capable of running at well above their rated clock speeds.