News

Overclockers has a story on why we need 1/5 PCI dividers. Yep, I need some of that action.

At 133MHz/266MHz FSB, the bandwidth of an Athlon motherboard is 2.1GHz. At 150MHz; it's 2.4GHz. At 166MHz; it's 2.7GHz. The Front Side Bus not only handles memory transfers; it also normally handles all the other communications between other devices in your computer like hard drives and sound cards and network cards. They all have to fit into that FSB space. (That would be Gb/s, not GHZ).

Active Hardware reviews an AOpen KT333 board.

What really sets the AK77-333 apart though, are its options: a six port USB 2.0 controller, DieHard BIOS protection, and a Dr. LED diagnostic panel. OF course, the Realtek ALC650 onboard soundcard is also a nice feature that'll be appreciated by the gamers

Envy News reviews a new Antec PSU.

Continuing the evolution in power output, Antec has done something that is just as helpful in maintaining system stability. Rather than increasing the combined voltage that the 12V, 3.3V, and 5.0V lines have to share, Antec has separated the lines and allowed them to draw from the main power base separately. In the past, the 5.0V and 3.3V lines were lumped together on one regulator circuit; increasing 3.3V line voltage demand would cause sag or power dip for the 5.0V line and vice versa. With the new regulating system, each line is able to draw the amount of power it needs from the entire power output instead of from a predetermined portion as most power supplies do.

Whoa. No Westwood anymore!

It's true. The team that brought you the C&C series of games began operating under the name EA Pacific in late 2001 after Electronic Arts felt the Westwood Studios Irvine, CA, office had earned the right to branch out on its own. But don't be fooled by the name change because the same passion that went into Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge is already quite evident in the team's latest project, Command & Conquer: Generals.[PAGEBREAK]
Gamespy has more

Got this from VR-Zone

NV30 :
0.13 micron process
400MHz GPU
512-bit chip structure
AGP 8X
8 rendering pipelines
Supports 128-256MB of DDR SDRAM
900MHz DDR SDRAM
200 million polygons per second
Lightspeed Memory Architecture III
Supports DirectX 9 and OpenGL 1.3
In 3rd or 4th Quarter 2002

NV35 :
0.13 micron process
500MHz GPU
512-bit chip structure
AGP 8X
8 rendering pipelines
Supports 128-256MB of DDR SDRAM
1000-1200MHz DDR or QDR
400Mhz RAMDAC
Lightspeed Memory Architecture III
Supports DirectX 9.1 and OpenGL 2.0
In H1 2003

I have decided to go ahead and make Version 2.0 of the forums. What I need from everyone is the features they want in the new forum.

Please give me your suggestions here.

Overclockers Online has reviewed the Soyo P4I Fire Dragon which uses the i845D chipset.

Today I am taking a closer look at the Soyo P4I Fire Dragon, a Pentium 4 motherboard based upon Intel's 845D chipset. Frequent Overclockers Online visitors should have noticed that this is the first time a Soyo motherboard is being reviewed in our lab, so I was very eager to find out how this company and its products would compare to the other Pentium 4 solutions out there. Although Soyo products are new to me, I must say that I am very impressed by the fact that this company is donating $5 of each P4I board that is sold to the WTC Disaster Fund. And remember, in about a month or so the wreckage from the WTC will have been cleared.

Tom has a review of the IGP 320M chipset paired with Tbred CPU to become a mobile user's wet dream.

Bottom line is that Radeon IGP320M is a good Mobile Athlon XP chipset, but it still lacks the memory performance to give Athlon the performance numbers it deserves. It is rather sad to see that no notebook OEM is interested in offering an Athlon notebook with discrete graphics, since that could finally demonstrate the full potential of Mobile Athlon. As for now, Athlon notebooks need good integrated chipsets and that is what ATi delivered. Kudos!

Don't get the 3DLabs Wildcat 3 for gaming. Its a workhorse card that can do CAD and other 3d modeling stuff with ease.

The reasons for doing this article were not just to get the chance to play around with one of the most expensive 3D graphics cards available for a the PC platform, but to investigate where the differences lie between workstation and consumer 3D cards. With the convergence of the two classes getting ever closer, with Workstation cards taking their quality and getting faster and consumer cards increasing the quality of rendered output as well as increasing speed, this article may give us some insights into the areas that consumer cards will be going. This very much applies the the quality of AntiAliased rendering coming up as well; its probably unquestioned that Wildcat's SuperScene AntiAliasing is by far the most advanced form of Multisampling AA currently available on the PC platform today and its likely that we'll see advanced AA approaching this in the not too distant future on consumer cards -- with the recent 3Dlabs P10 and Matrox Parhelia-512 technology announcements it would seem that we may have techniques approaching some of the elements of SuperScene AA already.

Warp2Search has new 4 in 1s for your downloading frenzy. The file is version 4.39 and dated May 14th. Warp2Search has more.

OCWorkbench has a review of this board dated the 21st of May!

MSI leads the rest in introducing one of the top notch P4 mainboard supporting the new series of 533Mhz FSB P4 CPUs. Indeed, there is not much of a technology difference between the i845 DDR chipset and the i845E chipset ; the latter supporting the official 533Mhz CPUs. Something that makes a difference is the capabilities of this board. It has an amazing line up of features that you would never have thought of. One such capability is the Bluetooth PC2PC which I am pretty impressed. Kudos to the hardworking and innovative MSI engineers which makes this possible - a first in PC history, a PC with built-in wireless connectivity.

OCWorkbench reviews the SS40 which is the Athlon variant of the SS series.

Shuttle SS40 is quite a breakthrough from the conventional desktop or slim casing. Although the performance needs some tuning up as it has almost everything you could have thought of integrated on board. That box is really feature rich with all the necessary connectors already there for immediate usage.

Bill Gates Oracle and others can't seem to keep their email private...

The Microsoft chairman, who's been stung by e-mail several times, got caught yet again discussing schemes against a corporate enemy in e-mail messages admitted as evidence in antitrust testimony last week. In one note to top executives, Gates said he approved of Microsoft's association with the Web Services Interoperability Group (WS-I), code-named "foo," as long as Sun Microsystems was kept on the sidelines.

This comes only a month after a January 1999 e-mail surfaced in court in which Gates described a plan to use the Windows operating system to promote Microsoft's audio and video delivery software over that of rival RealNetworks.



Gates isn't alone in the court of public embarrassment over e-mail better forgotten.

Just this week, Oracle and its business partner Logicon were accused by a California legislator of defrauding the state of California, based on an incriminating e-mail exchange. In another case, the New York attorney general uncovered embarrassing e-mail from Merrill Lynch analysts, including former Internet Pied Piper Henry Blodget, in which they privately criticized dot-com stocks that they were at the same time publicly promoting to clients. Prosecutors this week said settlement talks in the case are ongoing. [PAGEBREAK]
News.com has more email blunders.

Copper Iceberg is a pretty cool name, but how does it perform? Coppe Iceberg Review

News.com reports that Intel and AMD are in a different price war, chip costs. I don't care who's chip costs less to make, as long as they pass the savings on to me.

Intel Chief Financial Officer Andy Bryant threw gas on the fire at the company's analyst meeting in April by declaring that Intel's new factories, which process larger wafers, with 300-millimeter diameters, make it the low-cost leader. He added that Intel's yield, or number of good chips per wafer, was 50 percent higher than that of an unnamed competitor.
"Through these investments we have cost leadership," Bryant said. "Don't buy a story that says Intel has a cost problem."
Days later, AMD Chairman Jerry Sanders gleefully responded to Intel's claim of superior yields.
"How do you spell 'bull****'?" Sanders asked investors and analysts at Merrill Lynch's Hardware Heaven conference in San Francisco in late April. "The only way they could do that would be to invent a perpetual-motion machine...We will put our yields up against anybody's."

News.com is reporting that AOL is finally dropping IE from versions of their software (a test version so far). More will follow later I'm sure. As you may or may not know, AOL owns Netscape.

AOL's Gecko tests signal the latest salvo in an ongoing battle between two technology giants vying for domination of the Internet. AOL has the largest Internet audience, and switching to its own browser could greatly affect how those people view the Web. Most browsers do not generate any direct revenue, but they can influence where Web surfers go and what applications they use.[PAGEBREAK]
News.com has the full story.

Watch out for this hoax in your inbox...

The fake advisory warns users of the file "jdbgmgr.exe," purportedly a virus that damages a victim's computer system two weeks after first infecting the PC. The hoax has been forwarded by users who believe they have been infected and need to tell other victims to clean out the virus.

In reality, the component is the Java Debugger Manager and is part of the Java software installed on all Windows systems. If deleted, its absence could cause some Java applets and JavaScript to stop working, said Sharon Ruckman, senior director of security response for antivirus company Symantec. [PAGEBREAK]
News.com has more

The Inquirer has a post about how the Opteron is running Windows .NET already.

AMD's Euro marketing chief Robert Stead told an audience here that the companies MP systems were already a success. He claimed Chimpzilla had sliced off some 8.3 per cent of the dual processor market for itself, having delivered some 973,814 MP servers since launch. He said AMD had made massive gains in the server and workstation markets largely at the expense of that other chipmaker Stead forgets the name of.

Anandtech has a review of the P4 celeron, which sucks. (oops, I didn't say that)

The new Celeron ends up being a logical next-step for Intel and a good one at that. The processor needs a 256KB L2 cache and it will eventually get one but it won't be able to trample all over the Duron, instead it will be forced to compete with the lower end of AMD's Athlon XP line. A 256KB L2 Celeron up against older Athlon XPs while AMD's Hammer takes the high-end, this should sound a lot like the Pentium 4 vs. Athlon comparison that has been going on for quite a while. If you remember, before the Pentium 4 got a 512KB L2 cache it was losing out to the Athlon XP on a fairly consistent basis. A price and clock speed war will determine how the future of the Celeron and AMD's low-end Athlons turns out.

Hot Hardware review the AK35GT2R using the KT333 chipset.

If one thing is certain, the KT333 is a step in the right direction, but there is no reason to replace your KT266A based board just yet. While the performance shows a marked improvement, I doubt most people would feel the difference in everyday use. However, for those of you looking to make a major upgrade from something pre-KT266A, this motherboard would be a wise choice. The AK35GT2/R is a prime motherboard for those of you who more concerned with quality and performance rather than having the prettiest motherboard on the block. This is a motherboard that is all substance and nothing else, focusing on stability and performance. We've seen this board selling on the web for around $90, an excellent price for what you get. It is difficult to believe that anyone would be disappointed with the AK35GT2/R.

HardwarePub reviews the FIC AN11.

The AN11 features the essentials and also RAID support through a Promise RAID , which the popular EPoX 8KHA+, as well as other KT266A motherboards, lacked. The FIC AN11 also has an ACR slot, which most motherboard manufacturers choose not to include. Unfortunately, the overclocking features on the AN11 are rather basic. Hopefully, FIC will be releasing a revision with the Multiplier Ratio dip-switches working, and perhaps allow more FSB options in the BIOS. FIC makes up for this downside by complimenting this motherboard with their NOVUS software, which features many utilities, including an overclock one, in addition to a worthy Norton Software Suite (Anti-Virus, Firewall, and Ghost).

tBreak has a review of the MSI i845E board.

The 845E Max 2 is an awesome board that is limited in performance simply because of the chipset. Intel had the perfect opportunity to win the crown in terms of performance for DDR chipsets as the scores for DDR-266 are extremely impressive. I guess they have their reasons for not choosing to do so. We have heard of rumors of DDR-333 support for the P4 from Intel in September- but those a re just rumors for now. So here's the deal- if your priority is stability and features, then go ahead and get the 845E Max2 as you will get some good performance out of it as well. However, if it's pure performance that you're looking at, then we suggest waiting for just a little bit longer until the P4X333 from VIA shows its face.

3DVelocity reviews the Epox 8K3A.

For the most part the 8K3A+ is identical to the 8KHA+ with the only obvious differences being the lack of active cooling on the North bridge and a bit of a component shuffle to make space for the two additional IDE channels (in red) provided for by the HighPoint HPT372 RAID controller offering RAID 0, 1 and 0/1 support, which allows data mirroring and striping and also throws ATA-133 support in to the mix. The HPT372 is fully backward compatible with all ATA devices - including Ultra DMA/ATA100,66, 33 and EIDE Fast ATA-2.

SimHQ has an interview with Matrox about Parhelia.

SimHQ: What do you see as your advantages and disadvantages over NVIDIA and ATi right now?

Sebastian: Well, they are bigger than we are, have deeper pockets and are more established in the enthusiast market than we are. However, they don’t have the Parhelia-512 and the quality, performance and features it offers. Matrox also has a loyal fan base. We’ve been in the graphics card business and have been profitable for over 25 years and a lot of people don’t know that. I still hear from some contacts who are running their original Millenniums and refuse to put anything else in. But most importantly though is our reputation for quality and multi-display computing that has made our technology in these areas the standard by which all other hardware is compared to.

Don't forget to enter you name in this week for the AMD/nVidia sweepstakes going on right now to win some great goodies.

Please vote on This poll if you are a registered user. I think it is time to update the forums, and by that I mean from the ground up.

Not a member yet? Sign up!

Gamespot has their first impressions up of GTA 3 for the PC!

The PC version of GTAIII is roughly the same as the PlayStation 2 version. The real improvements come in the obvious areas. For starters, the graphics are, of course, much crisper and cleaner than those in the PS2 version. The game can run in resolutions up to 1600x1200, and the game can run in 32-bit color. The textures are nice and crisp, and on the test system we used--a Pentium 4 1.8GHz with a GeForce3--the frame rate was pretty smooth. Options menu sliders let you adjust things like draw distance, and you can toggle the blur effect used throughout the PS2 version on or off. The game also allows some slight modification. You can create skins for the game's main character, and you can create your own radio station using your MP3 collection. You can also view replays of your past antics at any time and save those replays for later viewing or sharing. The loading times have also been greatly shortened, now taking no more than a couple of seconds to load up things like mission briefings.

I will be getting this game as soon as it comes out so expect a review near that time as well.[PAGEBREAK]
Read more of w00t at Gamespot.

Good stuff at News.com

To get the skinny on the new 2MB patch on the flaws of IE, you should read this.


The first flaw occurs when the browser sends information within a link to another browser. Known as cross-site scripting, the technique can be abused by an attacker to get the other site to run a program specified by a malicious user. The flaw outlined by Microsoft on Wednesday would require that the attacker either host a Web page with the malicious link or send an HTML command via e-mail.

The two critical flaws that could compromise user information occur because of the way IE handles popular site templates, known as cascading style sheets, and the way it processes cookies. Both require the exact names of files on the target system to work, reducing the risk somewhat. [PAGEBREAK]
Read more about the bugs at News.com

Ahhh the benefits of a virtual machine. Intel uses this technology somewhat in hyperthreading, java uses VMs. VMware allows multiple OSes to run on the same machine to handle multiple tasks on the same hardware.

For example, large Web sites often use dozens of low-end servers to send Web pages to browsers as quickly as possible. With virtual-machine technology, several such Web servers could be running independently on the same hardware--potentially saving money, reducing clutter and streamlining system-management chores.[PAGEBREAK]
News.com has more.