News

Lost Circuits does SiS 645DX Pentium 4 from Asus.

To put things into one paragraph, the ASUS P4S533 costs around $100 street price and offers about everything one could wish for except for hardware add-ons like front panel USB and audio. The software bundle is relatively small compared to what you get from e.g. Soyo, mostly because ASUS has not included the free download versions of programs x, y, and z, we see on many other CDs. The P4S533 is extremely well-behaved, that is, we have thrown about everything we had at the board, regardless of what it was, it installed without problems, regardless of what program we were running, it didn't crash and regardless of the speed we overclocked to, the system kept purring away.

[H]ard reviews an i845G offering from MSI.

The real value that we see in integrated boards, besides the obvious features you get to enjoy, is what it allows you to do when you tire of the system and are looking for that next upgrade. The 845 Max adds value beyond the grave. When you go get rid of your integrated product you have something that is truly valuable for a change. Moving the 845 Max into a non-gaming desktop box is a no-brainer and could be very cheap to boot! A stick of bargain ram and a bargain bin CPU to match give you a system that can easily be turned into a server for yourself or an email/web browser box for Aunt Sally or your little sister.

The topics today were Tablet PCs and Serial ATA. I stayed for 3 hours, then I got board.

Newsfactory emailed me and there is a new version of Rivatuner out!

I just got an email from my buddy Mike.

Silent PC Review is conducting a short survey designed to answer the question "What is a Quiet or Silent PC worth to you?" There is a draw for some prizes -- performance heatsinks and a high quality, noise-reduced power supply unit. What is your opinion about PC noise? Whether it drives you nuts or don't notice that it exists, we're interested in your opinion. One entry per person. Results will be posted periodically on our site.

Thanks for your participation! The suvery is here.

I'm running out of space on my Digicam and I can't really upload them to my laptop, so once I get those pics, I'm off back to home. Good thing too, the traffic was insane getting home yesterday. I waited almost an hour to move 2 blocks.

I have pics of this hard drive and the serial ATA interface.

Seagate's first native Serial ATA drives will be based on the new Barracuda ATA V drives, says Bernard Eisman, product marketing manager in the personal storage division. The Serial ATA-based drives will include a different drive chip set than the Ultra ATA 100-based Barracuda drives and also include a larger buffer (8MB, up from 2MB).

Great news for Intel and good news for AMD as well.

HP is moving its entire server line to Itanium over the next few years; the last new models of its older PA-RISC processor family will arrive in 2004. The success of its Itanium products--everything from workstations to million-dollar multiprocessor servers--depends in large measure on how well software runs on the new chips. These servers, in turn, drive sales of services, software and storage systems.

Yeah, I saw some of the Itanium servers here, big whoop.

I told you the Tablet PC was going to be a hit.

With its electromagnetic pen, touch screen and software that recognizes letters written on a screen, the Tablet PC hopes to be the notepad of the 21st century. Ten years of research and the analysis of millions of handwriting samples went into the final product, said a Microsoft representative.

By the way, I'm at the show at an AMD internet booth. w00t AMD!

The ones at the show seemed alot faster than my Ipaq.


The new devices, which contain Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel's 400MHz XScale PXA250 processors, perform about as well as older Pocket PC-based devices that use 206MHz StrongARM SA-1110 chips on similar applications.

Tweakers AU reviews an Abit Ti 4200.

Well there you have it folks! Of course we would expect any Ti4600 card to come out on top, but the results published here today show an amazing effort from the Ti4200 underdog. It looks as if the Ti4200's specialty lies at the lower resolutions such as 800x600 and 1024x768, but performance will quickly diminish at anything at, or above 1280x1024. I don't know about you, but I rarely use a resolution higher than 1024x768 for games, although application resolutions are another story. The demand for Ti4200 cards is at an all-time high now, and the pressure is on NVIDIA to deliver. Retailing around the $350-400 AUD or $180-220 USD mark, which is almost half the cost of most Ti4600 models, it's now wonder why Ti4200 competition is so fierce. Being the first Ti4200 card I've taken a look at, I can't really comment on how good a job ABIT has done with theirs, but if you're in the market for one of these cards, I can definitely recommend the Siluro GeForce4 Ti4200.

VR-Zone has a review of a nice case from Swiftech.

The Swiftech Q-Power system is a really sweet overall package, and includes great cooling with low noise levels, any computer users dream. Installation of everything was easy, with a few bumps along the road, but we got around them and everything worked out well. The only thing that could be done to improve the Q-Power would be to include extra power cords along with the intake fan connectors, allowing you not to worry about buying extenders to power your other components. The Q-Power provides the consumer with a great cooling solution at an affordable price, and is recommended by VR-Zone Hardware. A bit pricey at $360.

NeoSeeker.
Anandtech.
The Tech Report.

News will be slow this week . Maybe Subj and Warlock will take up the slack .

Day one at PC Expo, meeting with AMD and very tired. Tomorrow will have a ton of good stuff in it.

Tablet PCs and Serial ATA are the topics for todayNext Page »

If anyone has HP photosmart windows 2000 digicam drivers, could you send them to me ASAP!!!???

I will never buy an HP product again, they make you order the CD instead of offering a download. What a stupid company.

I had a rough day today, but I had the chance to meet with AMD.Next Page »

This taken from HardOCP. It seems that the Parhelia is having some problems...

Aquanox - Parhelia was beaten by ATI's 128MB 8500 and the Ti4600 nearly doubled the score.

Comanche 4 - Parhelia not breaking the 30FPS barrier at 1024x768 while the Ti4600 broke 40.

Jedi Knight 2 - At 1024x768 the Parhelia was about 30% behind both the 8500 and the Ti4600.

3DMark2002 SE v330 - Just breaking into the 7000s while their test system was breaking 10K with the Ti4600. The 8500 dusted it again as well.

Quake 3 Arena - Parhelia lagging way behind both cards and not even giving deathmatch playable frame rates at 1600x1200 in my opinion.

Anandtech does a roundup of 5 Ti 4200.

Based on our 64MB vs. 128MB discussions it would make sense for you to go with a 128MB card. With that said, we were particularly impressed with Prolink from a cooling standpoint. All of the fans in this comparison operated at relatively similar noise levels, so it was heatsink design that really factored into our decisions as far as cooling went. We would encourage Prolink to include a DVI-to-VGA adapter for those users that want to take advantage of nView and have two VGA monitors.

My bud Mike reviews another silent product, this time a PSU from Zalman.

The Zalman ZM300A-APF raises the stakes in the quiet PSU races. Impressively constructed and designed for excellent cooling while maintaining low noise for a wide range system loads, the new Zalman takes clear aim at the growing market for quiet computer power supplies. The shot, while not quite dead center, is close enough to make the ZM300A-APF a major contender.

Warp has new WHQL drivers for your nVidia cards.[PAGEBREAK]
Driver dated 05/24/02 - 24th of May 2002
tested and certified by Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL)
All nVidia cards to date supported
full multi-language support
nView support present
Win2k/XP driver not compatible with old Refresh Rate Fixes - use RivaTuner 10.2 instead.
Unofficial release - not supported by NVIDIA - install only @ your own risk!

Grab them here!

VisionTek selling out to cheaper Asian manufacturing...
The well-known company VisionTek made an official press-release saying that their products will be manufactured not only in North America, where they are going to manufacture only high-performance graphics cards. And the value and mainstream solutions will be produced by some Asian company.

In other words, the largest graphics card retailer in the USA decided to resort to outsourcing. This is not all surprising, we should say. VisionTek has just entered the European market and no wonder they need bigger production capacities now.

News.com has a bit of good stuff about the TechXNY-PC Expo that I'll be going to... tomorrow!

Wireless networking will be the dominant theme of the weeklong trade show. Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba, for instance, will unveil new notebooks, tablet PCs and handhelds that prominently feature 802.11b wireless, and they'll discuss plans to create the necessary infrastructure to make building hot spots feasible. The show is only 3 day, not a week. And if I get stuck in traffic, there will be hell to pay (I have a VERY low tolerance for traffic, ROAD RAGE!)

Exuse me, do you have a 64 way computer?

The 64-processor Superdome server is on the vanguard of HP's effort to steal market share from Sun and stave off the growth of IBM in the Unix server market. It has used HP's PA-RISC 8700 processors running at 750MHz, but a new model now shipping is equipped with 875MHz 8700+ processors, HP will announce Monday. Now a 125MHz upgrade may not seem high, but with 64 CPUs, that's like an extra 8000Mhz!

Intel dominates the mobile market and now releases a 2Ghz chip.

The new 2GHz chip makes the Pentium 4-M one of Intel's fastest new processor ramps. The Pentium 4-M moved from 1.7GHz at its introduction to 2GHz in just three months. It took the desktop Pentium 4 several quarters to make the same journey. I think that Intel realizes that mobile and desktop should offer the same performance, AMD where are you!!!??

Bjorn3d reviews a Visiontek Ti 4200.

If you have about $220 burning a hole in your pocket and really want to see games how they are meant to be seen, then let go of your mouse and keyboard just long enough to go grab yourself one of these great cards! VisionTek consistently delivers high quality products, and they definitely continue that trend with this entry level GF4 Ti card. It seems strange in some way though to call such a high performing card an "entry level" card. You really get a lot for what you pay for with this product, and you can sleep easy at night after punishing the card with 8 hour frag fests knowing that you have a lifetime warranty and good tech support by your side. Since the features are great, the performance is great and the quality is great, you really can't go wrong with this card. I am very happy with the card, but I am really excited to see how much more it has under the hood once I get a faster processor. The considerable performance gains will make it feel like getting a whole new card all over again. :-)

Hot Hardware busts out another review, this one on the Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra.

Now that we're bringing this review to a close, let's recap some of the things we loved and loathed, and issue the infamous "Rating." From a features perspective, the Soyo KT333 Dragon Ultra has it all. From USB 2.0, to the latest High-Point RAID controller to the external USB Sigma box, Soyo has all the bases covered. Although the performance was a little low with the current release BIOS in comparison to the reference system, Soyo has already begun to address this and the results are shaping up nicely. The improved performance gains achieved with the new Release Candidate BIOS helped to make this board one of the best performing KT333 boards we've reviewed to date. Throw in excellent overclocking features and the Dragon Ultra really shines. Unfortunately, there were a few things that did tarnish the Dragon Ultra's image. Like we noted earlier, the lack of any retention device on the AGP slot, some capacitors crowding the CPU socket, and the omission of any type of thermal layer between the active cooling on the Northbridge all detract from a beautiful product. Some of you may be more forgiving than others when it comes to the weight these negatives carry in the big picture. With this reviewer, however, these are significant enough to take away from an otherwise stellar rating.

Twice each year since 1993, the TOP500 Supercomputer organization publishes its list of the 500 most powerful computer systems based on the LINPACK performance benchmark that measures performance among all classes of supercomputers. The HELICS supercomputer is 35th on the new TOP500 list, and TITECH's Presto III Cluster ranks 47th, marking the first time AMD processor-based systems have earned places in the top ten percent of the TOP500 rankings. Both systems use the Linux operating system. The most recent list was released June 20th during the International Supercomputer Conference in Heidelberg, Germany. (http://www.top500.org).

Nice. Read the rest of the press release.

TFT at 24" = $4600.

The 240T is probably the only LCD display I will ever say this about... it is the ultimate monitor for workstations, home theatre rigs and high end consumers - there simply isn't any competition. The only display I know of that comes close to the 240T in terms of size is a 24.1" display by SUN Microsystems (not exactly a household brand).

Stick your hard drive in this thing.

A smarter realization of the old "seal-up-that-hard-drive" idea? Smart Drive is a slick aluminum hard drive enclosure with the superb fit & finish done so well by the Japanese. Does it work? Read on & find out!