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May
17 - 24,
2000: Archive
Wednesday
- May 24th
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If you haven't already heard, Abit
has released their KA7 100 Athlon motherboard which is based on VIA's
KX133 chipset and has an integrated High Point HPT370 chip for ATA100
support. Well that's not all, the 370 chip also supports RAID 0
and 1. Here is a bit from GamePC's
review:
This is where it gets interesting. When snooping around the
motherboards settings, we noticed that the Highpoint's BIOS screen had
an "Evaluation Only" tag at the top of the screen.
Intrigued, we wandered into the Highpoint BIOS and found an
interesting feature, onboard ATA/100 RAID support. Amazingly, it
appears the Highpoint 370 chipset supports not only ATA/100 standard
disk support, but can support RAID 0 (Striping) and RAID 1
(Mirroring).
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Glide Underground has
posted a preview
of Matrox's upcoming G450 chip. Head over if you want to find out
what new features this chip will have.
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Why is it that these three sites (especially Sharky and Anand) always
put out processors reviews at the exact same time, with the exact same
rating? In any case, if you're interested in the new 933MHz beast,
check them out:
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Stomped has posted a table
which shows the performance differences between the official released
drivers (3.68) and the newer 5.16 and 5.22 drivers. These are with
FSAA turned off.
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We are going to be seeing quite a few of these over the next little
while. GameFan has posted a
very good comparison,
with screenshots, FSAA and regular benchmarks and some good analysis,
head over and check it out.
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Gamers Depot has posted a review
of the retail version of 3dfx's Voodoo5 5500 AGP card. This should
give you a good indication of how the final board and drivers perform
against a GeForce 2 GTS.
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This is not entirely hardware related, but important nonetheless. Tech
Extreme has written up an article
on one of the significant new features of Windows Me (Millennium
Edition), faster boot times. Head over and see how Microsoft did
this.
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iXBT Hardware has posted their review
of Aureal's Vortex2 SQ2500 PCI sound card. You can also check out
our review of this card here.
Ever since they announced financial trouble, we haven't really heard
much from them. Why couldn't Creative Labs just leave them alone?
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3DHardware has posted their report
of this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo. They focus on the
hardware that was displayed, in case you didn't already know that :)
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Electric.com has notified us that
Soltek has released a new BIOS update for their 77KV Athlon motherboard
which resolves problems with the Sound Blaster PCI 128 and the Matrox
G400. Grab it from the link below:
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AthlonOC is giving away a
Northwind GFD Rev.2 and all you have to do is enter your email address here.
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3D Accelerated has posted a review
of 3Com's Megahertz 56K Global GSM and Cellular Modem as well as the
10/100 LAN Cardbus PC card. 3Com makes some very good stuff, but
the price is sometimes unbearable.
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3D GameForce has posted a Questions
& Answers article on common PC hardware. If you're new to
computers, these are a few general questions which may teach you a thing
or two.
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Tuesday
- May 23rd
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Tom's Hardware Guide has
posted a preview
of Intel's highly anticipated i815 Solano chipset. If you've been
waiting for a replacement for that aging BX board and don't want an
RDRAM board, this looks like a promising choice. But according to
Tom, it will be available in limited quantities so it may be hard to
find.
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HardOCP has posted a review
of Abit's brand spanking new (just
announced today) KA7 100 board which has ATA100 support. Head
over and see the hard drive benchmarks, they look quite intriguing.
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PCStats has posted a review
of the FrontX CPX Multimedia ports. This interesting device allows
you to bring all your sound card connectors (including gameport) to the
front of your PC.
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Thresh's Firing Squad has
posted an article
which compares the FSAA capabilities of 3dfx's Voodoo5 and NVIDIA's
GeForce 2 using the latest drivers. I think NVIDIA's Direct3D FSAA
implementation is way to immature to be in any competitions, but that's
just me.
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AthlonOC has posted a review
of Biostar's M7MKE VIA KX133 based Slot-A motherboard. They had
some complaints, mainly in the lack of overclocking features.
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Abit has released new BIOS updates
for their KA7 and KA7 100 Athlon motherboards. Grab them below:
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Gamers Depot has posted a review
of Guillemot/Hercules' 3D Prophet II GeForce 2 GTS card. Head over
and see if those heatsinks on the memory chips make any difference in
overclocking.
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Sharky Extreme has posted an E3
coverage article which focuses on the hardware that was shown at the
Expo. If hardware is your thing (which it probably is, since
you're here) then head over and give it a read.
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Incite.com has posted a comparison
between 3dfx's Voodoo5 5500 and NVIDIA's GeForce 2 GTS using 3D Mark
2000 (keep in mind that it supports T&L). I think most of us
already know the GeForce 2 kicks the V5's butt in 3DMark
2000.
Update: Check out this
article on 3dfx Gamers which states 3dfx's position on hardware
T&L.
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Tech Extreme has posted a review
of AVB's Pegasus Force Feedback joystick. Looks like a decent
stick, but I'd rather go with Microsoft's or Logitech products simply
for support. Force Feedback stuff has a very high probability of
breaking down.
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The Duke of URL has posted a review
of PelTEC's BlackIce MAX Socket-370 Peltier cooler. If you don't
want to go through the trouble of putting together your own peltier
cooler, head over and see what this one can do.
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iXBT Hardware has posted an article which describes their experience
putting a NVIDIA's GeForce 2 GTS card in a freezer and overclocking the
hell out of it. They've posted separate benchmarks which show the
increases you can get when increasing the core speed and memory speed
respectively. Can you believe they got the memory up to
440MHz?!? You can also check out Anand
Tech's experiences overclocking the GeForce 2 GTS.
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Monday
- May 22nd
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got apex? has posted a review
of ASUS's CUBX i440BX based Socket-370 motherboard. It has a very
good performing ATA66 controller on board, 6 PCI slots and 4 DIMM
slots. If I were looking for a Socket-370, this one would probably
be at the top of my list. It got a 10/10 on their scale!
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The Guru3D has posted a review
of Guillemot's 3DProphet II GeForce 2 GTS card. Head over and see
what they thought of it.
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3dfx has issued a press
release stating that the Voodoo5 5500's are now shipping. Here
is a bit from the press release:
SAN JOSE, Calif., May 22 /PRNewswire/ -- 3dfx Interactive® Inc. (Nasdaq:
TDFX - news)
today announced the company has begun shipping its highly-anticipated
Voodoo5(TM) 5500 AGP. The product will be available to consumers
Friday May 26. Voodoo5 5500 is the only consumer graphics board to
offer application-independent, real-time full-scene hardware anti-aliasing
(FSAA) that is compatible with all major APIs including Direct3D®,
OpenGL® and Glide® titles. It features dual 3dfx VSA-100 (Voodoo
Scalable Architecture) processors with the T-Buffer(TM) digital
cinematic effects engine and 64MB of total graphics memory.
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ASUS has released a new driver for
their V6600/6800 video cards which probably works with the V7700 as
well. Grab it below:
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I've tried the drivers myself on a GeForce DDR and must say that they
need a lot of work to get performance where it should be, but it
definitely looks promising. Speedy3D
has posted some screenshots
and benchmarks using the 5.22 drivers and a GeForce 2 GTS.
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Anand Tech has posted the second
part of their look at Rambus's RDRAM technology. In this
portion they take a close look at it's performance on today's
platforms/applications and look at the latency vs. bandwidth issues.
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Electric.com has posted a review
of the HandSpring Visor Deluxe. Instead of me trying to explain
it, here is a bit from the review:
HandSpring emerged in 1998 as a low cost solution to the popular
but expensive Palm Pilots. Initially it was only possible to obtain
the Visor from Handspring itself, but in May of 2000, Handspring hit
the retail shelves and has had explosive sales compared to Palm
Computing's Palm Pilot. The Visor has all of the features of a
traditional Palm Pilot and also sports the popular PalmOS that has
given Palm a commanding lead in the PDA market.
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PC Scoop (a brand new site) has
managed scoop some news on Abit's upcoming i815 (Solano) based boards,
the SL6 and SL6 II. Head over and check it out if you're
interested.
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HardwareCentral has posted
an article
which takes a look at both AMD's and Intel's latest and upcoming
processors and tries to help you decide which one you should get.
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The Tech Report has posted a review
of karna's Razor Boomslang 2000 dpi mouse. If you want a
supersensitive mouse for gaming that doesn't experience the pick-up
problems of Microsoft's Intellieye technology, take a good look at this
one.
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Frosty Tech has posted a review
of Supermicro's SC-750 Server/Full Tower Case. I'd really like to
have one of these.
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Arash's Best Hardware Guide has
posted a review
of Hauppauge's WinTV PCI TV Tuner Card. Seems like one of the best
you can get, but I'd much rather watch TV on my 50 incher lying on my
comfy couch.
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CPU Burn has posted an article
which tells you how you can convert that old PC that is lying around
collecting dust, into a network file server. Trust me, they come
in handy.
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Saturday
- May 20th
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Here is a nice treat for the weekend! 3DChipset
has gotten their hands on the Detonator
5.22 unofficial beta drivers that we've been seeing a lot of
lately. These new drivers allow you to enable FSAA (8 different
settings) in Direct3D applications. They work with all NVIDIA
chipsets from the TNT up, grab it below:
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nVNews has posted some 3DMark
benchmarks using NVIDIA's newest 5.22 drivers and FSAA turned on
medium (4X) and high (16X). The performance hit is quite
significant, but medium (4X) should definitely be playable.
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iXBT Hardware (with their new
simple, yet snazzy site layout) has posted a review
of Leadtek's Winfast GeForce 2 GTS 32MB DDR card. Even with it's
huge heatsink, the card doesn't seem to overclock as well as most people
expect, but is still a great card nonetheless.
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PCExtremes has posted a review
of Alpha's CO-6030MFC Heatsink/Fan. An excellent choice for Socket-370
Celeron processors.
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G3D has posted a review
of Diamond/S3's Monster Sound MX400 PCI audio card. Head over and
see how it scored.
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Matrox has released a new
set of drivers for their Marvel and Rainbow Runner G series of
cards. They've also released a new
BIOS update for the entire G200/G400 series. Grab the appropriate
files one below:
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GamePC has gotten hold of a version
of Intel's new Pentium III FC-PGA cB0 stepping processors and wrote up a
report.
Apparently, these are the first revisions to support SMP (Dual
processors) and apparently overclock a little better.
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Diamond/S3 has also released a
new driver for their Monster Sound MX400 Cayon3D based audio card.
Again, here is the info and a link:
- Version 1.02 Win9x Web:
- Web release of Win9x VxD v4.12.01.2008 driver, AICT, and Update
Wizard.
- Incorporates new Sensaura code.
- Program Group entries for driver, Audio InControl Tools and Update
Wizard all include uninstall option.
- Fixed: Front and Rear speaker outputs are no longer out-of-phase.
Corrects low frequency loss on speaker systems that combine bass
signals into a single sub woofer. (Klipsch ProMedia, etc.)
- Fixed: "Enable S/PDIF" settings are retained after
system reboot.
- Fixed: Occasional blue screen error in "CRLDS3D.VXD"
while playing Rogue Spear on some platforms for extended sessions.
Known Limitations
-----------------
1. If S/PDIF is enabled and the system goes into APM sleep mode,
upon resume S/PDIF will be disabled. This issue will be addressed in
a future release. As an interim workaround, open the Audio InControl
Tools panel and close, and the S/PDIF setting will be refreshed.
2. Distorted or "watery" sound on some games (Need For
Speed: Porsche Unleased, etc.). This issue is currently being
investigated. Try disabling the "Enable DirectSound
Acceleration" option in the Audio InControl Tools panel. The
application in question should be closed prior to making this
change.
- Diamond/S3
MX400 Driver (Win9x - v1.02 - 7.9 MB)
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3DGameForce has posted a review
of Razor's excellent Boomslang 2000 DPI USB mouse. You can also
check out our review of this mouse here.
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Diamond/S3 has released a new
Win9x driver for the Viper II Z200 video card. Here is the info
and a link to download:
Issue Addressed
- Improved Transformation and Lighting support.
- Corrected issue with offset polygons in Soldier of Fortune.
- Corrected AGP texture upload issue.
- Corrected issue with Gamma properties where user changes were not
being saved across reboots.
Features Added
- OpenGL options now included on Diamond 3D property page.
- Transformation and Lighting improvements in OpenGL and Direct3D.
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The Game Den has posted a review
of HardOCP's Ratpadz mouse pad. To say the least, the reviewer
likes it a lot. They've added a little extra to the review as
well, "10 Reasons to buy a Ratpadz."
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Microstar has has released a whole
bunch of new drivers for their video card lineup, grab the appropriate
one below:
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Friday
- May 19th
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HardOCP has posted a review
of the Agilent (a Hewlett Packard Company) ArtiCooler Socket370
cooler. This is not an ordinary heatsink, it uses a special 2-way
heat exchange system that only takes effect when the heatsink reaches a
certain temperature. They've even compared it to the king of
FC-PGA coolers, the Alpha PEP66U, head over and see how it did.
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You may have heard by now that Intel's upcoming Willamette processor is
going to be an RDRAM only platform. According this
this article over at the
Register, Intel is developing a chipset that will work with SDRAM,
just in case production levels and acceptance are still low with RDRAM.
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Tom's Hardware Guide has
posted a review
of ASUS' AGP-V7700 Pure GeForce 2 GTS 32MB DDR card. They briefly
looked at overclocking a BX board with the V7770 but did not go higher
than 133, I would have liked to see how far it could go in comparison to
a GeForce 256. The problem is that there is no AGP/2 option on BX
boards which limits overclocking.
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Penstar Systems has posted their
review
of 3dfx's Voodoo5 5500 AGP 64MB SDRAM card. The nice thing about
the GeForce 2 is that the drivers are already finely tuned and optimized
because NVIDIA just builds on them on every new product release.
3dfx on the other hand has to work a lot more to get their drivers up to
the level of NVIDIA's.
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3DRage has posted an article
on the overclocking capabilities of a Pentium III 650E (Coppermine)
Slot-1 CPU they picked up. Looks like 866MHz was the highest speed
they could reach before their GeForce locked up in games. That's
the same situation I'm in. I feel my 550 could get to 852, but the
GeForce won't work at anything higher than 90MHz AGP bus.
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HotHardware has posted a review
of Soyo's SY-6ICA i820 RDRAM based Slot-1 motherboard. How does an
8 out of 10 sound to you?
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Tech Extreme has posted an editorial
about the future processor war brewing between Intel's upcoming
Williamette and AMD's different versions of the Athlon (ie Thunderbird,
Mustang).
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Anand Tech has gotten their hands
on the NVIDIA Detonator 5.22 drivers and have re-benchmarked
the GeForce 2 GTS in Direct3D with Full Scene Anti-Aliasing on using the
new 5.22 drivers. Head over and check out the results. While
you're there you can also check out their E3
2000 Report.
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Overclockers Australia has
posted an article
which tells you how to wire up a remote network activity LED. Here
is an explanation of why you would want to do this:
This article details how to connect an external activity LED to
your network card. Let's face it, that 'act' LED on the back of the
network card is pretty useless, and I find it rather handy to see when
there is network activity, especially as I use an NT server, and share
my modem via the network. I don't have that little connection box down
in the system tray, so I can't tell if a page has stalled or not. But
with the network LED wired up I can tell at a glance. :) Some network
cards have a connector for a remote LED, but most don't. In this
article I show how I hooked one up to my card. This is not
particularly difficult to do, as long as you can solder a bit, and can
read a multimeter you'll be fine.
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HardwareCentral has posted
a review
of ELSA's GLADIAC NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS based video card. Head over
and see what they thought of the first GeForce 2 card on the market.
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Thursday
- May 18th
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Sharky Extreme has posted a review
of Abit's first entry into the Athlon motherboard market, the KA7.
This fine board is based on VIA's KX133 chipset and has the best
overclocking features available for the Athlon.
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Electric.com sent over some very
interesting pieces of news which you may want to check out:
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ATI has released a new
driver for their ATI Rage Fury MAXX card. Grab it below:
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BrokenPixel has posted a review
of EPoX's EP-7KXA VIA KX133 based Athlon motherboard (Slot-A). A
decent board, but those of you waiting for the Thunderbird, may want to
wait until the KZ133 chipset is released.
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Quantum9 has posted a review
of D-Link's DHN-910 phoneline networking kit. As you probably know
by know, I don't condone the use of anything below 100Mbps :)
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Frosty Tech has posted an article
on Surface Mapped Athlons and whether Lapping (sanding to get a smooth
surface) is necessary for optimal efficiency. Head over and see
the results.
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Thresh's Firing Squad has
shared their experiences
overclocking a Pentium III Coppermine 800MHz Slot-1 CPU. How does
976MHz sound to you? To me it sounds pretty good, but not after
seeing the price of the 800.
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Anand Tech has posted a review
of Quantum's Fireball Plus LM ATA66 hard drive. It sports a 2MB
cache, 7200 RPM spindle speed and an 8ms average access time. It's
one of the best ATA66 drives you can get.
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PCStats has posted a review
of Amacom's Baby DVD drive. Here is a description from the review,
in case you are wondering what the "baby" means:
Thinking about getting a DVD drive for the computer? Maybe one for the home and
one for the Laptop? Well the Baby-DVD from Amacom would allow you
to do just that - with just one drive... This small CD/DVD-drive
is about the size of a portable CD-player, and can be attached
via PCMCIA port without the need for external power cords. Ultra
portable, the drive can also be used on the home PC via USB cable.
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Dan's Data has posted a review
of Leadtek's Winfast GeForce 2 GTS card. Looks like a decent board
with a nice big heatsink, but doesn't have TV-Out unfortunately.
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Tech Extreme has posted an article/debate
on whether RDRAM or SDRAM is better. People with i820 boards and
the faulty MTH components are faced with this choice and a lot of them
don't know what to do.
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AthlonOC has posted the
first part of their guide to overclocking the AMD Athlon
processor. Head over and see what tips you can pick up.
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3DSoundSurge has posted a review
of Diamond Audio Technology's Pro Media 3025 3-piece speaker set.
This is the company that designed the S2 4100 and 4030 speakers for
MidiLand, so they're not a new player on the block.
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The Duke of URL has posted a review
of Soyo's SY-7VCA VIA Apollo Pro 133A based Socket-370
motherboard. From what I've seen, bypassing the Slocket and using
a Socket directly on the board may help you overclock further due to
less signal loss. Here is a bit from the review:
I was able to overclock my Coppermine 650E (must have been a good
batch) up to 897MHz with the case wide open and the GlobalWin FEP32
attached. Not too bad for a $250 processor, I'd say.
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Wednesday
- May 17th
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BrokenPixel
has posted a review
of ELSA's excellent ERAZOR X2 GeForce 256 DDR card. Maybe the prices are
reasonable enough now for most people to consider it a practical
upgrade. Check out our review
of this card as well.
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Hexus.com has posted a review
of the Athlon Freezer Pro cooler. It has a nice purple heatsink and some
pretty big fans.
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High Point Technologies has
released a new set of drivers for their HPT366 chip which is found on
many ATA66 controller cards and motherboards such as the Abit BE6/BE6-II
and Soyo's SY-6BA+IV. Grab them below:
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PCStats has posted a review
of ASUS' V6600 Pro GeForce 256 64MB DDR card. The only reason you
would want 64MB is because it will give you that extra edge at high
resolution x 32-bit color when memory bandwidth becomes the
bottleneck. Is it really worth the money? I don't think so,
but that's just me.
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Now that's what I'm talking about! None of that wimpy phoneline
networking stuff. Ars Technica has
posted a guide
which takes you through the process of installing the Ethernet wiring
for a real 100Mbps LAN. This is a pretty detailed and informative
guide, so definitely give it a read if you're interested.
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HardwareCentral has posted
a review
of Intel's Anypoint 10Mbps phoneline home networking kit. If you
need a quick and easy network connection, this will do the job, but
don't expect fast transfer speeds.
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Next Dimension Hardware has
posted shootout
between Nikon's Coolpix 990 and Fuji's FinePix 4700. The Coolpix
990 costs a bit more because of it's professional-like features, but
either camera looks like a good bet.
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Frosty Tech has taken their home
made Socket 370 heatsink and put it through some overclocking
tests. I don't know about you, but physical appearance of a
heatsink is very important to me :)
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Those of you who open up your case regularly know how quickly the dust
piles up. I blow mine out every few weeks actually, since I'm
always tinkering with something or other. If you want some ideas
on how to keep the dust out, head over and check out this
article at Fast-MHz.
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GamePC has posted a review
of Mitsubishi's massive Diamond Plus 200 22" monitor.
Looks to be a very nice piece of hardware, with one of the best prices
in it's class:
To make the 200 more affordable for the public, Mitsubishi removed
features that they thought wouldn't be needed for an enjoyable
operation in the average home. So in essence, the 200 is basically a
high-end monitors stripped of most of its extra features. Weighing in
at close to 66 pounds, it isn't the heaviest monitor we have tested
but certainly isn't the lightest. Standing behind their design,
Mitsubishi based the 200 off the DiamondTron NF tube. Holding the
DiamondTron tube is basically the same exact casing found with both
2020u and 2040u, making the difference between the high-end and
low-end models virtually indistinguishable.
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G3D has posted a review
of Senfu's Super Water Cooler. It's a decent entry into the
consumer water cooling market, but has a few minor issues that should be
worked out.
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Here are the latest articles about what's going on at this year's
Electronic Entertainment Expo:
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Anand Tech has written up an article
which tries to explain what's happening with the ASUS P3V4X VIA Apollo
Pro 133A based board and the VIA 4-in-1 4.20 drivers. As many of
you know, performance is very crappy with the latest version, but using
4.17 restores it. Head over and find out why this happens.
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