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Abit Computer officially confirmed on July 29 that it has outsourced production of two low-end boards to Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS). Given the effectiveness of the operating model so far, Abit said that it would not rule out letting ECS handle all of its board production in the future.

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"Don't they have something better to do during the summer than hack our site?" asked the RIAA representative, who asked not to be identified. "Perhaps it at least took 10 minutes away from stealing music."

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A PC silencing project which involves underclocking and undervolting not just an AMD XP1700+ but also a hot GeForce 4 Ti4200 video card. Is it the Ultimate Underclock & Undervolt Project?

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Qwest Communications International, which is the subject of an accounting investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, said Sunday that it used improper accounting methods in 1999 through 2001, and will restate its financial results.

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Generally comparing a 64MB Ti 4200 to a 128MB Ti 4200 we found the results in performance to be a mixed bag depending on the game in question. In 3DMark2001SE the conclusion is pretty much that more RAM is beneficial when AA is implanted, otherwise its speed over size. Quake3 is definitely happy with 64MB of DDR, more is not needed as speed takes precedence over size. Serious Sam 2 seemed to prefer more core speed with anisotropic filtering since there is so much overdraw with the anisotropic filtering on the GF4 cards. Jedi Knight 2 turned the tables, however, showing us that more RAM was a benefit rather then higher speed RAM. There was a tremendous difference with a 128MB card vs. a 64MB card in the higher resolutions. Code creatures also displayed this trend. With newer games no doubt more memory has the added benefit of squeezing more information into the frame buffer without having to texture out to local RAM. And with a little overclocking both cards are able to reach past Ti 4400 clock speeds and benchmark results.

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While I don't feature overclocking performance in my reviews, it did push the 1.8A to 2.6Ghz without issue prvided the CPU was kept cool and with a Swiftech in my system, an 800MHz overclock is among the best I've seen for that CPU without serious voltage being needed.

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In terms of performance, SiS648 at DDR400 has manage to edge out Intel 850E with PC1066 RDRAM slightly although DDR400 theoretical bandwidth is lower than PC1066 RDRAM. However, one should note that the choice of memory is important too and not all DDR333 SDRAM out there can run at DDR400 stable and the memory timings set will certainly affect the stability as well as the performance. We can safely conclude here that SiS648 at DDR400 is performing as well as Intel 850E w/ PC1066 therefore it can too stand a good chance in the high performance desktop market segment. SiS648 at DDR333 is performing as good as Intel 845G too and its lower price will be make it an attractive platform to get. From now on, we should be seeing retail boards from motherboard manufacturers and the price, features and overclockability of those boards will determine how successful SiS648 chipset can capture the market.

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It was assembled quickly, as the system was needed by one of our employees. Everything went great, but it turned out to be quite a bit louder than I had expected. I was not the only one to notice. I had given the system to one of our Industrial Hygienists, who reminded me that OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) has noise regulations for office environments, and that this system might be pushing that limit!

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Meanwhile, AMD lowered the price on its Athlon XP 2000+ by 16 percent, from $193 to $163. The Athlon XP 1900+ chip fell 13 percent, from $172 to $150; the Athlon XP 1800+ dropped 11 percent, from $160 to $142; and the price of the Athlon XP 1700+ was shaved 7 percent, from $140 to $130. AMD's Athlon XP 1600+ desktop chip stayed at $130.

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The upcoming 2.4.19 version of the Linux kernel--the core part of the Unix-like operating system--for the first time will include support for many USB (universal serial bus) 2.0 features and devices. USB lets people easily plug devices such as digital cameras, mice or printers into a computer.

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Performance is adequate with the on-board video enabled, but is exemplary when you substitute your own AGP card. The freeing-up of system memory makes this little box as competitive as any desktop solution. Equipped with a fast processor, fast AGP graphics card and lots of memory, I can't see why the SS51G cannot be a direct replacement for your desktop PC, assuming you don't require a number of additional PCI slots. A number of uses spring to mind.

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On the operating system front, Jim Allchin, group vice president at Microsoft, said Windows XP has now sold more than 46 million copies in the nine months since its release, making it the fastest-selling version of Windows ever. Microsoft says that XP has sold 230 percent more copies than Windows 95 and 160 percent more than Windows 98 for the same time period after their debut.

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The biggest GeForce4 killers did not come from other companies, they come from NVIDIA themselves. What do I mean? Let's talk about it for a minute. The GeForce4 Ti4600 and Ti4400 launched with the GF4MX series of cards. It soon became apparent that the Ti4400 was the card to go with, leaving the GF4 MX card out in the cold. The features and performance made the Ti4400 the obvious choice over the GF4MX for the budget minded gamer. Then along comes the Ti4200 pumping out numbers that rival any Ti4400 at a price that is a full hundered dollars cheaper in most case. Did the Ti4200 steal some of the Radeon 8500 thunder, of course, but the biggest brunt of the Ti4200 blast when it hit the market was felt by both the MX and the Ti4400.

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Tokyo-based Scarabs has developed a prototype of the hard drive, which has a read-only head and a read-write head. The Web server can only read from the drive, theoretically making it impossible for attackers to deface the site or otherwise modify data.
For updating the site, an internal PC can be connected to the drive via the read-write head. "Each head works independently, so no synchronous control between two heads is needed," the company says on its Web site.

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The size of the SS51 chassis is attractive not to mention the appearance that is not only elegant but something that can look good on your desk. The PC is virtually silent, even with a 2.53GHz Pentium 4 and a GeForce4 Ti 4600 running beneath the hood. Every single feature you could possibly want (sans wireless and Gigabit Ethernet) is provided onboard and assuming you want more, there's always an available PCI slot for expansion. Drive bays are limited but with 120GB IDE drives already available and 200GB drives on the way, many users are only running with a single hard drive and a CD/DVD/R/RW drive. The performance of the platform is just about on par with an 845G setup with DDR333 SDRAM, which doesn't leave much to complain about.

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Finally due to the impressive design and layout we would have to say yes to those who frequently change there hardware or build systems on a regular basis it is just simply an uncluttered layout that offers you a substantial good amount of cooling outputs and the three phase power supply design offers a good regulation and distribution of the required voltages and current. Paired with an Nvidia TI 44/4600 series of video cards will give you no problems and as always ABIT has an air of stability surrounding it, so stability is where it counts and ABIT offers you a solution to that in the ABIT KX7-333.

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The links to Apache are expected to be announced Wednesday by Covalent Technologies, a venture-backed company that sells Apache along with support and enhancements. Covalent employs several of the central Apache programmers.
Apache competes with Microsoft's own Internet Information Server along with Sun Microsystems' iPlanet Web server. Red Hat, the top seller of Linux, includes an Apache-based Web server package called Stronghold in its products.

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The SS51 did very well in our tests, and we did verify that it could indeed be used in, and handle the heat and stress accompanied with, extreme LAN gaming. Gamers rejoice, for there is finally a small ultra portable computer system that is powerful enough to rocket by 10,000 points in 3DMark 2001. I for one am extremely glad that this day is finally here. No more carting around 40-50lb. computer systems to play games at great framerates at a LAN. You will, however, still have to carry that 70lb. 21" monitor...ugh! However, LCD's are getting cheaper and I myself have considered looking into a decent 17" LCD panel to take to LAN's. This would not only save a TON of space in the car, but would be much lighter as well. I already have a separate gaming computer, as well as extra equipment such as keyboard, surge suppressor, mouse, ethernet cable, etc. I have all that in a box just sitting waiting for a LAN to come around so that all I have to do is grab it and go. I could easily find something a bit bigger that would hold the SS51 and a LCD screen all in one spot so that I could just toss in the SS51 and go.

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The Overall score shows the MSI card just edging out the reference nVidia design. From a performance only standpoint this is a great showing. Some companies choose to cut corners in production and sometimes end up with a substandard product. MSI does no such thing. They've turned their expertise in motherboard making onto their video card production, and it shows. Some other caompanies may appear 'sexier' when it comes to video cards, but MSI makes a great card at a great price. The massive software bundle only sweetens the package. The combination of an amazing card and great software makes this card the best buy I've seen so far. Congrats to MSI.