News

AMDZone has a review of the AIW 8500.

When ATI first told me they were going to make a 128MB version of their All-in-Wonder cards I was not exactly impressed. It was only when the card showed up at the lab that I learned what this card was truly all about. Unlike it's severely underclocked (but highly featurized) 8500DV brother, this version of the Radeon8500 All-in-Wonder is a fully clocked version, sporting newer BPGA RAM and 128MB of it. Obviously ATI came to play when they created this card. This card looks to be a great all around solution for anyone wanting most of the features of the 8500DV but also want to have a killer gaming rig.

Digitimes reports that ATI and Nvidia will show their newest products at Computex. Finally, ATI's RV250 is coming out, but it is very close to the R300 I expect.

According to the companies’ roadmaps, both Nvidia and ATI said that they will showcase NV18 and RV250-based chips at Computex Taipei early next month, and the chips will replace the current GeForce4 MX440 and Radeon 7500 as the companies’ mainstream products. Their top-end products, the DirectX 9-supporting NV30 and R300 graphics cores, will not be launched until the end of the third quarter at the earliest. Funny, I thought the Ti 4200-4400 and the Radeon 8500 were the mainstream products?

HomeLan Fed chats about Gore. This is a new FPS comming out soon.

Gore was still looking for a publisher last year when 4D Rulers released not one but two different multiplayer test demos for the game. The demos were popular downloads and they found their way on several game magazine CD-Roms and the game and 4D Rulers even got an extensive article in Computer Gaming World magazine. Finally, earlier this year the game scored a publisher in DreamCatcher Games who were looking to break away from their normal adventure titles. Last week HomeLAN got a chance to check out a beta build of the full retail version of Gore and based on our play time with it Gore is fulfilling its promise as a simple but fun shooter title.

[PAGEBREAK]
HomeLan Fed has the full preview

Wow, I want like 4 of these! VIA Hardware has a new small form factor PC in their hands. AND! It comes with an AGP slot! LAN PARTY!!

In Shuttle's SS50 review, we said that we showed you the Shuttle SV24 last October. We then told you about the SS50, and the different uses for this system. Though the SV24/SS50 did some tasks very well, there was one arena which left you wanting more. This would be the realm of 3D games. With the fastest card available for these systems probably being the Voodoo5 5500 PCI, it's obvious that the SV24/SS50 would not be the greatest choice for a small LAN box. Today we are going to show you a product from Arprotek which is attempting to fill this gap. I attend many LAN's myself, usually local ones but other times larger ones. I know what it is like to cart around your computer to a LAN, and it can be a drag sometimes. However, the e-Cube barebone system from Arprotek (a.k.a. the CF-S868) seems to be aimed at fixing this. The CF-S868 is a small system which is easy to transport and comes with an AGP slot, allowing for excellent 3D gaming.

MODTHEBOX! reivews a serial LCD display.

Intelligent display devices are common place in today's society and we have seen this technology implemented into just about everything imaginable from wrist watches to VCR's and now high performance computer systems. The advantage of an intelligent display device is the ability to interactivity know how well a computer system is performing. The solution works two fold by taking the right piece of hardware and compliment it with the right application software. The end result is a package that can provide vital statistics that can be read at a mere glance. Matrix Orbital based out of Calgary, Alberta has been producing a wide range of popular LCD units for the last serveral years. Today in the MTB Labs, we will be evaluating the Matrix Orbital NK204-V 20x4 Serial LCD, a new budget minded intelligent LCD display for the personal PC.

The Tech Zone has a review of the DFI KT266a board

In the last few weeks the DFI-AD73 Raid has been getting a lot of press for its stability and performance. DFI has been making OEM motherboards for some time now but only recently has DFI become acknowledged as a contender in the performance PC market. The AD73 RAID has so far shown itself a stable and reliable motherboard. We at the thetechzone decided it was time for us to get our hands on this Bad Boy and put it to the test. DFI has been known for somewhat vanilla motherboards, but is this their first double dip chocolate hot fudge sundae with a cherry on top?

Time for some cleanup around here. In about a week, I'll be clearing out users that haven't posted or visited in 3 months. I'll also be clearing out posts older than 5 months. And, the downloads will be moved to ASE Tools, and a few other changes will be happening. Stay tuned.

XBit does 120GB hard drives. Two WD and one IBM.

As we have already compared the performance of a good many hard drives with 40GB platters (except for Samsung ones) in our Western Digital WD1200JB HDD Review, I made up my mind to have a look at only three products this time: WD1200BB, WD1200JB and IBM Deskstar 120GXP (IC35L120AVVA07). All of them boast 120GB storage capacity and 7200rpm spindle rotation speed.

Gamespy has done a preview of Warcraft 3, a follow up to the interview that I posted about earlier.

Lord Arthas the Paladin, son of the king of the Human realm in Azeroth, struggles to uncover the reason behind the plague that is sweeping through the towns and villages in the kingdom. The king's court has been visited by a dark stranger offering advice on how to deal with the plague, but the king and his advisors have turned a deaf ear, instead vowing to solve the problem themselves.[PAGEBREAK]
Gamespy has the full preview.

EL wire and lightstrip is one of the coolest things I've seen. The light that they let off is simply amazing.Next Page »

I just want to say hi to all the Mothers out there. And if you offspring didn't get your Mom a present yet, hurry up!

BlardOC does watercooling.

Dangerden manufactuer their Maze waterblocks with a circular channel (think the Sega Dreamcast logo) that moves round the inside of the block, with cold water entering just above the processors core, where temperatures are the highest, and then moving round the block, with the water increasing in temperature as it to the outside of the block. This means that the coldest water is always over the CPU core.

Serial Addiction has a review of the Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra. I should be getting the P4 SiS 645DX board sooner or later to try out.

Today, Soyo is most recognized for their Dragon line of motherboards, which combine an enormous list of features with dashingly good looks. For this review I managed to get my grubby little mitts on their latest model, the KT333 Dragon Ultra:

SocketA has reviewed the FIC AN17 Stealth based on the KT333 chipset.

FIC has refreshed their AN11 Stealth with the new AN17 Stealth Advanced. As you can see the trend to longer motherboard names is continuing. The AN17 is almost identical to the AN11 with the addition of the newer KT333 chipset that provides DDR333 support. Here's a quick look at the features of the board.

More leaks coming through. I got this one from Warp.

Digit-Life shows the specs of the Parhelia-512. Wow, looks to be one impressive card!

Specifications:

80 million transistors
0.15 technological norm
up to 350 MHz core/memory clock rate
Full 256-bit (!) DDR memory bus
About 20 GBytes/s local memory bandwidth
64/128/256 MBytes memory
AGP 2x/4x/8x including SBA and FastWrites
4 pixel pipelines
4 texture units per pipeline (!)
Fillrate: up to 1.4 and 5.6 Gpixel
Vertex Shader 2.0, four parallel execution blocks
Pixel Shader 1.3, 4 texture + 5 combination stages for each pixel pipeline, with the opportunity of pipeline coupling (to get 2 pipelines with 10 combination stages)
EMBM and DOT3 bump mapping
Fixed DX8 T&L (including improved features of matrix blending and skinning). A special vertex shader actually.
10-bit color component rendering, storage and monitor output (!). 10-bit GigaColor technology
Two 400 MHz integrated 10-bit/channel RAMDACs, supporting UltraSharp technology
Full 10-bit -> 10-bit table for output gamma correction
DVD and HDTV video decoder with 10-bit output precision
Up to 2048x1536x32bpp@85 Hz output support
Integrated TV-Out with 10-bit signal precision
Two digital TDMS interfaces for digital outputs or external RAMDACs. Up to 1920x1200x32bpp resolutions supported.
Two fully independent CRTC
The opportunity of dual- or even triple-monitor (!) output. For example, to 2 integrated and one external RAMDACs, or to both integrated RAMDACs and TV-Out. 3840x1024x32bpp resolution total in the triple-mode. TripleHead Desktop, Surround Gaming, and DualHead-HighFidelity (HF) technologies
Adaptive supersampling (not the multisampling!) - 16x Fragment SSAA with up to 16 samples. Activated on polygon borders only.
N-Patches hardware support with adaptive tesselation (!) and displacement mapping.
Glyph Antialiasing - font hardware border antialiasing and gamma correction (!)
Microsoft DirectX 8 and OpenGL 1.3. Some DirectX 9 features potentially.

AMDzone has reviewed Crucial's 128mb pc 333 ram. See it here.

Neoseeker has a great article on the upgrading of their servers. You know, this webserver has survived two /.s and tons of leeching, pretty good for a 450mhz P2 and 512MB of RAM.

At the time, we were running on a Dual PIII-600 system with only 512MB of RAM and a paltry 9GB of storage space. Initially our first reaction was to change servers; we were already well aware that the dual PIII setup was not quite powerful enough to handle the demand, but we were also reluctant to overreach our upgrade. So after much debate and performance testing, we discovered our bottleneck: our available RAM was pitifully small compared to what the server was demanding. During peak hours, we were swapping to disk so much that the drives never stopped their constant thrashing. And as a result, our database locked up mercilessly. Damn, I really don't want to worry about server stuff .

Tom has a roundup of 18 KT333 boards.

After KT266A came KT333 - it took almost six months to get to this step. Even though talk of the KT400 was already in the air at the recent CeBIT 2002, the KT333 made it to the market first. And this is exactly the moment at which a transformation will take place in the market; boards with the VIA Kt266A chipset, somewhat outdated now, were recently considered to be a last cry, but the chipset's successor, the VIA KT333, carries on in its place. One thing is for sure: demanding users will want to make the switch. After all, in addition to an increased memory clock of 166 MHz, other interesting new features that the KT266A did not provide are now offered. However, users who keep a cool head will probably wait a bit until the next generation or two is available. If you want to wait for the KT400, you'll have to be patient, because DDR400 modules will come in a new mechanical design, named DDR II/400, and they aren't expected to be available before 2003.

GameSpot has a preview of a Real time Strategy game based on World War 2. WWII has been getting alot of media lately.[PAGEBREAK]
GameSpot has even more

Yeah, I really don't like GNome. It shouldn't even be included in distros today. KDE is the much better interface, and concentrating on one Xfree interface is easier than two.

Another thing, Mandrake is 4 CDs! Windows 2000 is only 1! Lower the amount of install CDs so the install is easier!

Okay, that's my rant for now.

I saw this pic at Warp. It shows the specs of the new Matrox cards. I don't know if it is true or not.

I will follow this article. KDE 3.0 looks to be a great improvement over 2.x. This wil show you how to install KDE 3.0 into Mandrake 8.2 (The lastest one that doesn't include KDE 3.0).[PAGEBREAK]
Goto Linux Beginner for more

Something useful, INQ has some slides of the new chipsets from Intel. Notice that the Hard Drive and PCI are not on the same chain. Moving on, this will pave the way to 3GIO.

The 845GL chipset is pin and software compatible with the 845G, has integrated graphics including 32bpp true colour and high res support, can take PC-133 SDRAM or DDR200/266, up to 2GB of max memory no ECC in two DIMMs. It uses ICH4 connectivity, including six USB 2.0 ports and ATA 100 IDE.

MODTHEBOX! reviews a Pentium 4 heatsink. You don't see many P4 heatsink reviews to often now.

Today’s CPU cooler market is almost to the saturation point with so many choices for cooling products. Many companies have now started to realize that the average computer enthusiast does have working knowledge on the basic principles of thermal cooling. CPU coolers are the most important part of any computer system which makes the selection process much more difficult. Whether it is by air or liquid, without utilizing a proper cooling method, one may find themselves with a burned out CPU chip and spending the time and money to obtain a replacement. Arkua Technology is one of the newer companies to come out with a suite of Thermalsonic based products for the cooling market. Today in the MTB Labs, we will be evaluating the Arkua 8568, a HSF designed to cool a high performance P4 system.