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March
16 - 24,
2000: Archive
Friday
- March 24th
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Abit has officially announced their
first Athlon motherboard which will be based on the VIA KX133 chipset.
Along with that, they've announced a new i820/RDRAM motherboard, the
CX6. Check out the press releases below:
The KA7 has a couple of distinctive features, first of all it has 6
Data Buffers for the 4DIMM slots, 6 PCI slots and SoftMenu III which
should make it the best board to overclock with.
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3DHardware has posted a review
of AOpen's 952E 52X ATAPI CD-ROM drive. It received a decent A-
rating. I personally will only buy Pioneer slot loaded DVD/CD-ROM
drives for now on, I just like them so much.
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Diamond/S3 has released a new Windows NT
4.0 driver for cards based on the Savage4 chip. Grav it below:
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extremecooling has posted a review
of Senfu's DIY overclocking house. This is basically a unit that
replaces your case and is open to the air for the best and cheapest form
of cooling, air.
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Razerzone has posted a Beta Razer
Boomslang driver for Windows 2000. If you have this mouse, you
will probably need this if you want to get all it's benefits under
Win2K:
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The Guru3D has posted a review
of Gigabyte's GA-GF2560 GeForce SDR card. This card is nothing
more than a reference design with a blue PCB. Not to say there is
anything wrong with that :)
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The Tech Zone has posted a shootout
of three card cooler type devices. One is the Card Cooler itself,
and the other two are from Global WIN. Head over and see which one
works best.
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Gamers Depot has posted a review
of Plextor's top-of-the-line PlexWriter 12x4x32 CD-ReWritable
drive. Probably the best consumer writer money can buy, period.
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got apex? has posted a review
of Diamond's Viper II Savage2000 based 32MB video card. The price
is a lot cheaper than a GeForce and it's performance is ok most of the
time. Drivers have always been a problem with the S3 Savage line
of chips however.
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Dan's Data has done a review
of the KeyGhost Security Keyboard. What exactly is the KeyGhost?
Check it out:
A KeyGhost is a tiny gizmo that connects between
an ordinary PC keyboard - AT or PS/2 - and a computer, and records
every keystroke. The KeyGhost Standard has enough memory for 97,000
keystrokes; the more expensive KeyGhost Pro can store 500,000. They
need no batteries, they need no software installed, and they'll work
on any PC. You can plug them into one computer to record and into
another to play back, if you like.
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PC Accelerate has posted an article
on Intel's Memory Translator (MTH/MRH-S). A very interesting read,
and explains why the i820 is so slow with SDRAM.
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Thursday
- March 23rd
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Thresh's Firing Squad has
posted an article
on how monitor work. Here is a bit from this informative piece:
In essence, the electron gun is really nothing more than a big,
powerful diode, passing electrons from one point to another (but not
vice versa). The electron gun emits a stream of electrons at a screen
made up of a matrix of photoconductive and photo-resistant layers. The
beam of energy strikes the phosphor screen, which excites each
individual phosphor and causes it to give off energy, making it glow.
This makes up the visible display you are looking at right now. The
device itself is amazingly complex, and yet is very reliable, offering
many thousands of hours of operation without fail or error.
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SystemLogic (with a nice
looking new layout) has conducted an interview
with Dave Taylor, an engineer from Transmeta. Quite a bit of
interesting information on the new family of Crusoe chips and other
general discussion about benchmarks, etc.
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It seems that the ASUS P3V4X motherboard has developed quite a
following, and from that, you're bound to have a lot of people asking
questions or having problems. So, Overclockers
Australia has opened up a forum
dedicated to the P3V4X. Head over check it out if you want some
tweaking tips or have a problem.
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Gamers Depot has posted a review
of ASUS' K7V-RM VIA KX133 based Slot-A motherboard. This is the
microATX version that only has 3 PCI slots, but does have built-in
audio.
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3D Accelerated has posted a review
of Pinnacle System's DC30 digital capture card. Interested in doing some
heavy duty digital video editing? Then head over and see if this
one fits your needs (or your budget).
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3DSoundSurge has posted a review
of the Cambridge SoundWorks Digital 2.1 speaker system. This
3-piece system connects directly to the digital out of the newer Sound
Blaster Live! cards to give you purely digital sound.
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G3d has posted a hard
drive tweaking guide. It is a well known fact that limiting
factor in the performance of most PC's is the slow speed of hard drives,
and most of us can't afford a 7,200 or 10,000 RPM Ultra160/m hard
drive.
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Wednesday
- March 22nd
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The CoolerGuys have just
received a large shipment of the 2Cool PC Plus PC & Server Cooling
systems. They are selling them for $5 cheaper than the
manufacturer and they ship faster! Click here
for the details.
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Creative Labs has finally
released drivers
for their Sound Blaster Live! series of cards for Windows 2000.
Grab them from the link below:
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Sharky Extreme has posted a comparison
between Dell's custom made 64MB GeForce card and a regular GeForce 32MB
DDR card. Does an extra 32MB make a big difference? It seems
to at very high resolutions @32-bit color, but that's about it.
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Speaking of the VIA KX133, Anand Tech
has posted a review
of AOpen's AK72 Slot-A motherboard which is based on the KX133
chipset. Looks pretty good, but not quite up to AOpen's standards.
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got apex? has posted a review
of MSI's MS-6195 K7 Pro AMD 750 (Irongate) based Slot-A
motherboard. I wonder why they chose to make a second board based
on the Irongate instead of going straight to the VIA KX133 chipset.
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Hip Hardware has posted an editorial
on what we should see in the next generation of 3D video cards along
with some of the upcoming boards. This eight page article talks about
terms such as FSAA (Full Scene Anti-Aliasing), T&L, Texture
Compression, etc and they've got some great info on upcoming chips.
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Gamers Depot has posted a review
of Smart and Friendly's CD Rocket Mach12 12x4x32 external CD-RW
drive. This drive does seem to have a few problems because of it's
extremely high speed. Unless you're extremely impatient, I'd
suggest saving some money and going with a 6X or 8X drive.
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The Tech Zone has posted a review
of ASUS' V6800 Deluxe GeForce 256 DDR card. This is one of the best you
can get, but will cost you a pretty penny. If you've waited this
long, you may as well wait for the Voodoo4/5's to come out, that way if
you still want a GeForce, the prices are likely to drop.
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HardwareCentral has posted
a review
of IWill's sIDE RAID66 ATA-66 controller card. Since RAID has been
a high-end server only product, what it does and how it works is not
common knowledge. Head over and read this article if you want to
learn about RAID.
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TweakTown has posted a review
of the JustCooler FC-900L cooler. This expansion card slot cooler
is much longer than the previous model.
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Tech-Report has updated their Athlon
Overclocking FAQ to adhere to the new changes in the Athlon
overclocking scene, namely, software L2 cache control, Gold Finger cards
and VIA's KX133 chipset.
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3D Accelerated has posted a review
of the Kensignton MouseWorks USB mouse. This one has a strange
shape that might take a little getting used to, and as they mention in
the review, the price is much lower than the Intellimouse Explorer or
Boomslang.
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iXBT Hardware has posted a review
of MSI's MS-6301 i820 based Slot-1 motherboard. This board uses
SDRAM only, so you might want to look elsewhere if you're looking for
performance.
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3DHardware has posted their review
of Intel's Pentium III Coppermine 550E CPU. This CPU is being
heralded as the next Celeron 300A because of its low price and wonderful
overclocking potential. I've been able to get mine to 825MHz and
run Windows 2000 24 hours a day.
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Tuesday
- March 21st
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The Quantum Atlas V is a 7,200 RPM Ultra160/m SCSI hard drive. It
comes in capacities of 9.1, 18.2 and 36.7GB (we tested the 36.7GB
model). The specs are quite impressive: 9.1GB per platter,
6.3ms access time and a 4MB cache. Check out the review here.
Update: Quantum has sent us the new lower prices for the
Atlas V line. Here is the low down:
9.1 GB: $299
18.2 GB: $449
36.7 GB: $675
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The Tech-Junkie has posted a comparison
between ATI's Rage Fury MAXX (dual ATI Rage 128 Pro chips w/64MB SDRAM)
and Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro GeForce 256 32MB DDR card.
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Overclocker's Australia has
posted a roundup
of Athlon GFD overclocking cards. Included in this roundup is the K7OC,
NinjaMicro FreeSpeed Pro and Northwind GFD 2.0.
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Gamers Depot has posted a review
of Iomega's Internal Zip 250 IDE drive. These have become quite
cheap lately and I suspect people will start buying them over Zip 100
drives. Having backwards compatibility with the Zip 100 disks
makes them a great buy. I'm thinking of getting one myself.
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HardwareCentral has posted
a motherboard
roundup (more like a chipset roundup) in which they use one board
with the i440BX chipset, one with the i820 and one with the VIA Apollo
Pro 133A at 600, 800 and 1GHz. Very nice stuff for comparing chipsets.
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Overclocker Workbench has
posted a review
of Soltek's SL77KV VIA KX133 based Slot-A motherboard. Here is a bit
from the review:
The Soltek SL77KV is one of those boards there that has most of the
features a general user would need to start off building an Athlon
system. e.g. built in audio, easy installation. PC133 SDRAM support,
4X AGP, ATA66. It has almost all the latest stuff on the Intel
platform. It is an average performer according to the benchmarks
obtained.
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Monday
- March 20th
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G3d has posted a review
of the FreeSpeed Pro GFD Athlon overclocking device. Head over and
see what they thought of it.
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HardwareCentral has posted
a review
of Best Data's Home PC Link kit. This kit uses the old 1Mbps
phoneline networking technology. I would not recommend setting up
a network this slow, you will regret it.
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iXBT Hardware has posted a review
of Gigabyte's GA-GF2560 GeForce 256 SDR card. This is a generic
GeForce card (no special modifications), but it does have a nice blue
PCB.
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Speedy3D has posted a review
of Soltek's new SL-77KV VIA KX133 based Slot-A motherboard. This board
doesn't have anything special, but having the KX133 itself gives it
quite a boost and earned it an overall rating of 85%
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TweakTown has posted their review
of Aureal's very own Vortex2 SQ2500 Quad speaker PCI sound card.
You'll be hard pressed to find a bad review of this card.
Update: The review has been removed because it was plagiarized.
This is the fault of a user who submitted the review, not TweakTown
themselves.
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got apex? has posted a review
of the Logitech Cordless iTouch keyboard. The price is decent and
it's great for gaming on your TV.
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AMDZone has posted a preview
of AMD's upcoming 64-bit processor, the Sledgehammer (or K8). Here
is a bit from this information article:
The x86 architecture has been beaten and tweaked to death, as shown
by the development of 3DNow! and SSE. The once huge rift between the
x86 and RISC chips on integer performance is beginning to close, but
this does not mean that RISC is going out to pasture, nor that x86 is
heading to the server market. The floating-point unit in x86 chips,
the x87, is very inefficient. The x87 uses eight 80-bit registers in a
stack as its FPU architecture. Too many processor cycles are spent
reorganizing the stack to get at the data that needs to be operated
on. It is this inefficiency that is going to keep the x86 and x87 from
ever taking the lead in SPECfp performance from the RISC chips offered
by HP, Sun or Alpha
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Finally, the last item from Anand
Tech is a review
of the MSI K7Pro AMD Irongate based Slot-A motherboard. Looks like
a decent board, but you're probably better off getting a board with the
KX133 chipset.
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Anand Tech has posted a review
of Pine's D'music portable MP3 player. They gave this one a higher
rating that the Best Data Cabo despite the fact that the Best Data has
more built-in RAM and much faster PC to player data transfers rates.
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Sharky Extreme has posted a review
of Intel's Pentium III 866MHz CPU. It's nice to see the benchmarks
and all, but it's even nicer to go out and get a $600 cheaper PIII 550E
and overclock it to 825MHz. Anand
Tech has also posted a review
of the Pentium III 800 and 850.
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The people over at the Gamer Depot
have posted an Athlon 1GHz CPU review.
They compared it to a PIII Coppermine 800 and an Athlon 850. As a side
note, I have to say, their new flash menu on the left really impressed
me!
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HardwareCentral has updated
their article
on the i-opener hack. Ken Segler has found a way to take
Netpliance's $99 i-opener and make it into a fully functional PC.
Head over and check it out if you're on an extreme budget.
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3dgn has posted a review
of D-Link's DSB-H3SP USB Bay. This external devices has 3 USB
ports, a serial and a parallel port.
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Sunday
- March 19th
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Anand Tech has posted a review
of Gigabyte's GA-6VX Slot-1 VIA Apollo Pro 133A based ATX
motherboard. It received a decent 7.5/10 rating, but there are
other 133A boards that are a bit better.
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CNewz has send word that
Gallant has announced
it's digital audio solution for the Playstation 2 and the X-box.
This is one serious sound system, and has a serious price tag of $299.
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Alive! has posted a review
of Cambridge Soundworks's Desktop Theatre 5.1 DTT2500 Digital speaker
system. This set comes with 5 speakers, a subwoofer and a Dolby
Digital decoder/amp.
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Reactor Critical has
written up an interesting article
which takes a look at the architecture of NVIDIA's GeForce 256, paying
special attention to it's T&L pipeline.
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Sharky Extreme has posted a review
of D-Link's DMP-100 32MB MP3 digital audio player/recorder. The
price is average, head over and see if it's any good.
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3AG has posted a review
of the Buss-Cool cooling card from PC Power & Cooling. This
thing looks like a regular expansion card, but it has a couple fans on
it.
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HotHardware has posted a review
of the Quantum Atlas V Ultra160/m SCSI hard drive. We're working on a
review of this 36.7GB 7200 RPM drive as well, expect to see it soon.
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Frosty Tech has posted a review
of Sony's 40X CD-ROM drive. This is you're pretty much standard run of
the mill drive.
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Friday
- March 17th
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GamePC has posted a review
of Quantum's new Fireball Plus LM 7200 RPM ATA-66 hard drive. This
drive is identical to the KX, except that it now has a 2MB cache!
I want one of these!
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Hardware-One has posted the
first review
of IWill's new SIDE-RAID66 controller card which is based on High Points
HPT-368 chip. This provides an inexpensive ATA-66 RAID setup for
server setup's or high-end workstations.
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HardwareCentral has posted
a review
of WebGear's Aviator 2.4. Despite it's name, this is simply a
wireless NIC setup for your Laptop(s).
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Reminds you of your old high school biology class, where you dissected a
rat, doesn't it? Tom's
Hardware Guide has dissected Rambus
RDRAM for any of you who actually care about the details and
architecture. It is quite interesting actually.
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Active Hardware has posted a review
of Gigabyte's GA-6CXC i820 Slot-1 ATX motherboard. They tested it
along with the GA-6R7Pro Socket-370 to Slot-1 converter card. Head
over to see the results.
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I noticed over at Voodoo Extreme,
that NVIDIA has released some new
Windows 2000 reference drivers on their developer site. These
drivers are for their chips ranging from the TNT to the GeForce
256. Grab the zip file below:
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Overclockers Workbench has
gotten hold of some specs of Abit's upcoming KA7 Athlon motheboard which
will be based on the VIA KX133 chipset. They also mention the KA72
which is supposed to have ATA100 support, but this is still not verified
to be true.
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Diamond has released a new set of drivers for their Stealth III S540 and
Stealth III S540 Xtreme Savage4 based cards. Here are the fixes
and links to download:
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Jsi Hardware has written up a
guide
which shows you how to remove the retail P3's heatsink, so you can put
your own on.
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Anand Tech has posted a review
of ASUS's extremely popular P3V4X VIA Apollo Pro 133A based Slot-1
motherboard. It has 6 PCI slots, 4 DIMM slots, PC133, AGP4X and
ATA-66 support built-in.
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Thursday
- March 16th
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Good old Dan has posted a review
of Diamond's Monster Sound MX400 card. This card uses the ESS
Canyon3D chip, which is decent, but not even close to a successor to the
Vortex2 in my mind.
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One of the things that drives me nuts, is the lack of availability of
decent power supplies in my area. Not a single store can get a
decent power supply, and I've had to change mine three times in the last
year because of seizing fans. Frosty
Tech has posted an overview
of Enermax's 350W Power supply. It costs $80 CDN, but in my
opinion, it's well worth it.
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The Tech Zone has posted a review
of Aureal's Vortex2 SQ2500 Quad PCI sound card. I still consider
this the best sound card available, head over and decide for yourself.
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Hardware Central has posted
a SECC2
heatsink comparison. This is a pretty big one! They've taken a
look at the Coolermaster TS2-5020B2, Memory Man's Global WIN Dual VGS08,
TennMax's P3STF, Vantec's P3D-5030, RDJD P-302 Fanatic and no comparison
would be complete without ALPHA's P3125S.
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Hexus.com has posted a review
of the Free Speed Pro GFD Athlon overclocker. Head over and see if it's
any good, if you're looking to overclock your Athlon.
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TweakTown has posted a CPU
software cooling guide. If you don't know, there are software
tools out there that insert an idle process when the CPU is not busy so
that it consumes less power and therefore runs cooler. In fact
Windows 2000 has this built-in and my P3 550E runs at 825MHz at 35-37
degrees as opposed to 39-41 on Windows 98.
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Sharky Extreme has updated
their weekly
CPU price list. More drops, just as expected, with some pretty
large drops at the high end. They also mention that the only way
you'll be able to buy a 1GHz CPU is from one of the brand name
manufacturers like HP or Compaq.
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Anand Tech has posted a preview
of ATI's Rage Mobility 128. Why is this chip so exciting?
Well because 3D on laptop's has pretty much sucked, and this chip should
finally change that. By the way, this preview has benchmarks of
this chip running against a TNT2 and the Rage 128 (Desktop version).
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Sharky Extreme went on a
trip to visit Abit in Taipei. Interested to see what's cooking at
Abit, product wise? Then head over and check
it out.
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I noticed over at Savagenews
that Diamond/S3 has yet again released a new driver for their Viper II
board. Here is the info and a link as usual:
High Heat 20001 seems to no longer have the flashing line at the
top of the screen, not sure what else theyve changed. The driver file
dates are also different (the 13th instead of the 10th). Also, one of
the S3 guys mentioned
on the SDN board that
the readme mentioned the drivers werent DX7 optimized, when in fact
they were. Im assuming they incorporated the new readme's as well.
Finally, they also incorporated the Diamond Installer. The previous
file was just a self extracting Zip File. Heres some more Info For you
as far as driver versions:
- Driver Version: 4.12.01.9002-9.10.30
- ICT Core Version: 1.07
- ICT Switch Version: 1.00.11-0602
- Build Date: 03/13/00
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3DWars has written up an excellent article
on how you can decrease your Windows boot-up time and clean up other
various areas like your directory structure.
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HardwareCentral has posted
a review
of ATI's TV Wonder TV Tuner card. For some reason, I don't find watching
TV on my PC that intriguing, but if you do, check out this card.
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Overclockin.com has posted a review
of Road Rebel's Maximizer Athlon overclockig card. Head over and
see what they thought of it.
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3dfx has released a beta
driver for the Voodoo3 3500TV under Windows 2000. Grab it
below:
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Planet Hardware has posted
an excellent high-end speaker system shootout.
The Altec Lansing ADA880R, Cambridge Soundworks DDT2500 Digital and
Klipsch Pro Media v.2-400 are included in this comparison.
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3dgn has posted an informative Q&A
with AMD. Here is a bit from it:
Q5--- Can you
give readers an Idea of the clock speeds that the various upcoming AMD
chips will release at, and point out some of the primary differences
between product waves?
Here is a quick rundown on each of the upcoming Athlon core derivative
products.
* Thunderbird is planned to be a high-performance version of the AMD
Athlon processor with integrated, full-speed L2 cache. Both Slot and
Socket A implementations are possible. Thunderbird will be targeted at
the performance workstation and desktop markets.
* Spitfire is planned to be a value version of the AMD Athlon
processor with integrated, full-speed L2 cache. Spitfire is planned
for Socket A implementation only. Spitfire will be targeted at the
value desktop market.
* Mustang is planned to be an enhanced version of Thunderbird,
featuring a reduced core size, lower power requirements and large,
full-speed, on-die L2 cache. Multiple versions of the Mustang core are
planned to be targeted at the high-performance server/workstation, and
high-performance desktop, and mobile markets. As for frequencies, we
think we can offer processors that operate at competitive frequencies.
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