News

On the look out for some rounded cables? Check out Nivram's latest review of these babies. Surprising enough (to me at least) is the fact that the rounded cables are a little better than the flat cables. I have a few theories on why this is, and it has something todo with why CAT-5 is twisted.

The Tech Report has a review of the legacy free IT7 from Abit.

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The IT7 MAX bristles with useful integrated peripherals, and it's built with an eye to the future. Abit hasn't skimped on performance or BIOS options, either. You simply don't get a more complete motherboard package than this, and certainly not one with a BIOS LED display. If you can stomach leaving behind your legacy peripherals, you'll be hard pressed to find a more feature-rich Pentium 4 motherboard.

There is a short review of the Thermaltake GF4 copper heatsink over at Extreme Overclocking. Can this new offering from Thermaltake cool off these new hotter running GPU's to so you boost those 3DMark scores into the stratosphere?

Thermaltake has been making various cooling solutions for computers for some time, mainly providing CPU coolers. Recently Thermaltake has diversified into other areas as well to provide cooling for all PC components such as hard-drives, cases, and chipsets. With the release of the GeForce 4 by NVIDIA, Thermaltake has again came to the rescue and released another cooler. It is called the "Thermaltake GeForce 4 Highest Performance Cooler". This is their solution to the high heat produced by today's graphics cards which can shorten the life of your card and limit overclocking abilities.

They also have a tweak guide for 3DMark posted in thier forums once you get that cooler installed. Linkage

*Sidenote*-I'd also like to add from my own personal experience that any aftermarket cooler won't do jack squat above a few degrees better than the stock, due to the fact that GPU's (and mobo chipsets for that matter too) hare a notoriously uneven surface and if you've read anything about how thermal compound works it's capabilities are severely limited in what it can do to improve heat transfer if the gap it is filling between the HSF and the GPU (or chipset) is far to great to be of any real value. I usually find that the corners are raised up leaving the center of the chip which is the hottest part of the chip with a huge gap. It's a tricky manuever due to the crowded neighborhood around these chipsets, but if you are an extremeist sanding these chips flat is the only way your going to get any kind of decent improvement in cooling and put the true capabilities of that new cooler to use.

Post your own experiences or ideas in our forums.

Round or flat drive cables? Which is best?Next Page »

TweakTown reviews the silvery KT333 board from Soyo.

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Like its predecessor, the KT333 Dragon Ultra, the Platinum features high performance that is on par with competing KT333 boards and is also feature packed, providing onboard 6-channel audio, 10/100 Ethernet, USB 2.0 w/ drive bay panel, ATA133 RAID support and a decent software bundle. It also features an excellent layout and to top things off, it looks great too!

Anandtech looks at the SiS 648 chipset.

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Based on benchmarks of SiS' own reference board, the 648 seems like a very promising solution. The chipset almost always performed within a few percent of Intel's 850E and does so at a significantly lower cost; this explains why the 648 has the most initial support out of any SiS chipset we've seen.

Intel will release its new CPUs and upgrade the speeds on the Pentium 4s.

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Additionally, the company plans to release a 2.2GHz Pentium 4 for notebooks before the end of the year and unveil "Banias" a new, energy-efficient mobile chip designed specifically for notebooks. Banias will not be sold under the Pentium name, a source said, but will be given its own brand name similar to the budget Celeron line or the Xeon chips for servers.

I wonder what Bananas will be called? The Intel Freon! Thats a good name for a CPU, I'm ©Copywriting that.

Users of PHP 4.2.x should think about upgrading to 4.2.2.

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The vulnerability affects versions 4.2.0 and 4.2.1 of PHP, according to the PHP Group. The flaw compromises different computer architectures in different ways: Web servers running on Intel IA-32 hardware could crash, while other systems, including Sun Microsystems' Solaris, could allow the attacker to infiltrate the computer.

Head over to PHP.net for the upgraded version.

Well, it seems that Sony needs to make more money with entry level units.

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The consumer electronics maker announced Monday that beginning in August it will sell the Clie PEG-SL10 for $150. The timing of the product launch is meant to coincide with the back-to-school buying season, which next to the holidays, is traditionally the second most lucrative period for retailers. However, this year analysts are expecting students to hit the books instead of the stores.

VH has some thoughts about the SiS 648.

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Regardless of the long-term market positions that result from today's launch, SiS has definitely ratcheted up their level of competition another notch with this latest release. Time will tell how much support the 648 finds in the market, but for now the chipset stands as the new performance and feature set leader of the Pentium 4 market.

Not really, that's what social security numbers are as well. National ID cards, your once again a number. Haven't you always been?

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The White House proposal, released last week, says federal agencies should "coordinate suggested minimum standards for state driver's licenses." At first glance, that's pretty close to what the ad hoc coalition has long opposed.

Driver's licenses are a state matter, which means another state right will be taken away.

Tech Report has one of the first reviews of this new P4 chipset.

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In the 648 chipset, SiS has delivered one of the best Pentium 4 chipsets available. Paired up with DDR400 memory, the 648 is faster than anything we've tested except the 850E chipset with PC1066 RDRAM. With DDR333 memory, the 648 isn't always fastest, but it's often close. Not only that, but the 648 showed no significant weaknesses in any of our tests, which is an especially important consideration in third-party Pentium 4 chipsets.

Omegadrive has put out some new drivers version 1080, this time based on the nVidia 29.80's. As Omegadrive will tell you on his page, these are slower fps wise than the nVidia drivers themselves, since they are tweaked not for speed but for quality. Give them a whirl and download them from over at his home page. He also has sections for Radeon as well as 3Dfx based video cards.

OmegaDrive's Homepage

Relating to WorldCom, the stock market is in a terrible position. Traders are losing faith in the market and are 'sour' towards the US economy. Big business has really put us in the shitter hasn't it?

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On Friday, the Dow Jones industrial average logged its seventh-largest points decline, falling nearly 400 points.
The rush of corporate earnings reports continues in one of the busiest weeks of the reporting period. So far, the mountain of numbers and forecasts digested by investors every 90 days has stoked the July meltdown. It is not so much the results that have weighed, but the dim outlook for the future.

It's chapter 11, a restructuring of the company basically. For those that forgot, Northpoint, an SDSL provider went Chapter 11 for a few months and then fell into Chap 7 (Say bye bye to company), I was a consumer that lost like $300 in a contract for DSL service.

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WorldCom, which has 85,000 employees and operations in 65 countries, aims to emerge from Chapter 11 in about nine to 12 months. The company expects to hire a restructuring expert within the next two weeks to aid the current management team.

LEP devices are starting to show off in the form of a wearable TV. Couldn't think of anything better huh? Just think, a roll up TV or better, a computer monitor.

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Roll-up, flexible televisions, akin to the melting watches of Salvador Dali's surreal landscapes, have become possible thanks to a glowing plastic compound perfected in the laboratories of Britain's Cambridge Display Technology (CDT).
"You're effectively printing televisions," CDT Chief Executive David Fyfe told Reuters. "They can be printed onto thin plastic almost like paper."
Roll-up televisions will allow viewers of the future to flip their sets out of sight like projector screens and will come with a similar price tag to bulkier boxes.

Economic times are hitting hard and Abit is lowering costs anyway it can.
[QUOTE]Meanwhile, with the partnership between Abit and ECS strengthening, market rumors are circulating that Abit will downsize its plant in Taoyuan County, and that people with links to ECS may buy a substantial stake in Abit’s recent issue of 100 million new shares.[/QUOTE

O^2 has a review of the Shuttle AK35GT2-R with KT333 action.

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As expected, the board runs just fine at 166MHz ... heck, the KT333 chipset officially supports those speeds . Anything greater was not stable with my Crucial PC2100 DDR memory because it needs more "juice" to achieve greater speeds ... If it would be possible to set the DDR voltage to +3V, speeds of 180MHz and more are achievable (and stable) with this memory. When combined with PC2700 memory (which can run at 166MHz at default voltage), speeds up to 184MHz were obtainable. Pretty sweet huh? And if you remember the 1/5 PCI divider, you know that this kind of speed is really usable because there is no risk of losing data or PCI cards malfunctioning due to the high PCI bus speeds.

Although RDRam is on the way out, this is one of the fastest boards out there.

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Voltage kills Pentium 4 processors really, so to be on the safe side I left it at default vcore and cranked up the FSB. The CPU was 100% stable at 2810MHz (150FSB). I'm sure the board and CPU would have gone higher but I didn't have time to flash the board BIOS to allow adjustments past 150FSB.
This shows the board certainly has potential right out of the box. Standard cooling was used. This amount of overclocking (nearly 300MHz straight away) shows the P4T533-C is extremely stable.

Why not? Google is the best search engine.

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The company said the new partnership will produce more than $100 million in revenue, which will be shared over three years between the two companies. Specific terms of the revenue sharing agreement were not disclosed.

It's all about the money isn't it?

Looks like people are buying MS stuff after all .

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During fiscal 2003, Microsoft is expected to release many important software upgrades and major building blocks for the Web services strategy, including the expected release of .Net Server, Windows Media 9 Series Edition, Exchange Server, Windows Media Center Edition and Tablet PC.

Accelenation has a review of the legacy free IT7.

Abit has attempted to go where no manufacturer has gone before, while the IT7 is mainly aimed towards the niche market, it is a solid board with many features. Featuring onboard 4 Channel RAID, USB 2.0, Firewire, Ethernet, and 6 channel audio, the MAX IT7 is a great board for everyday use. While the performance is a tad short compared to its counterpart, it’s not a real noticeable amount. Nonetheless for a price of $156 lowest on Price Watch, the MAX IT7 is a good buy considering the integrated features.