News

AMDZone reviews ANOTHER ti4600.

Leadtek has come to the forefront of video cards by offering high quality cards based on high powered GPU's. Leadtek is also known for their agressive styling and cooling methods, and this card is no exception. Obviously not everyone in the world can afford a GeForce4 Ti4600, but for those with the means it is the only card that can claim to be the fastest gaming card on the planet. This card has been such a great performer that it has become the standard card in AMDZone motherboard tests. Check out SocketA.com for all the tests with the WinFast A250 Ultra TD.

Hexus reviews an Asus Ti 4600.

To sum up, if you're after a solid Ti 4600, from a respected manufacturer, with a comprehensive warranty, and have no real need for VIVO functionality, the ASUS V8460 Ultra Geforce4 Ti 4600 really should make it on your shortlist.

HotHardware reviews an Abit Ti 4600.

What, then, is there to sway the customer into a purchase? Surely, the NV25 chipset is a selling point in its own right, offering the most power in a GPU. At $400 dollars, however, there needs to be something special offered. The craftsmanship of the card was good, but the GPU was not completely covered with thermal paste, thereby leaving room between it and the HSF. This could have caused problems after long use since proper heat dissipation would not occur. While there was a helpful manual and installation CD, there were no bonuses in the box to whet my appetite. Based on the small difference in the scores between the two Abit GF4 cards, it was hard to say that the $200 difference in price was well spent. It’s still a great card, but there is room for improvement, and my score for the Abit Siluro GeForce 4 Ti 4600 will be a 7.5 on the HotHardware HeatMeter.

Running at 800mhz, the hammer kicks some ass.

It seems AMD has been very conservative in regard of its first Hammer processors at 800 MHz. They are optimized on stability for hardware and software developers and not really on performance results. An indication: While testing the system the aluminium heatsink with its relatively quiet fan didn't even get hand-hot. That says something about the low power consumption of the rather small die.

I just got an Email from NewsFactory from Warp. Seems that they found a leak of WinXP SP1, I do not recommend downloading it though. Wait until the final release.[PAGEBREAK]
Goto Warp2Search for more!

Lostcircuits does an excellent review of the MSI KT3.

So, what's the final verdict? Is the KT3 good, bad, somewhere in between? The answer is up to whoever wants to buy it and what the needs are. There is no support for the Memory Stick or the Secure Digital media, there is no real hardware audio, there is no integrated network controller. Instead, there are RAID, AC97 and USB 2.0. And there is some potential ...., quite honestly, I personally like the KT3.

There are new Intel Chipset software drivers for like every chipset.

Ok Peeps here's a brand new Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility v4.00.1013 for windows 9X/ME/2000/XP and the following chipsets![PAGEBREAK]
Goto Driverheaven.net.

PCStats has a roundup of 7 sticks of DDR.

Of all the three sticks of memory that we tested which are at or above the PC2700 speed, only the Crucial PC2700 is JEDEC compliant; the others, the KingMAX and OCZ PC3000 are both compatible. If one was to buy memory right now the Crucial PC2700 is the best bet since it's damn fast, damn cheap, and pretty damn good!

AMDZone reviews a Ti 4200.

No conclusion given...

got apex? (nope) has a shootout of the KT333 boards from Abit and Asus.

The ABIT AT7 MAX is innovative in its design, offers great performance when compared to earlier generation chipsets and it has a grip of features chucked onboard. ASUS, with the A7V333, offers even better performance, a tried and true approach to the board layout, outstanding stability and a handful of onboard devices. The AT7 owns the comparison where overclocking is concerned, as it offers greater tweakability of the system BIOS, and at the end of the day was able to push our chip the farthest. ASUS does offer overclocking toggles in their BIOS but not to the extent that the AT7 offers. The A7V333 was, however, a much more stable board in our testing, but this may be a case of just a bad board from ABIT and not indicative of a standard off the shelf retail AT7. Speaking of stability, on a couple of instances we lost power to the AT7's USB bus and thus we were unable to access the BIOS because there are no legacy PS/2 keyboard or mouse ports. So if you find yourself in a situation where your USB input device fails, you can not just slap in an older keyboard or test the USB ports functionality by swapping the keyboard to the legacy port.

Nine months more for the Hammer?.

Although, as we've reported earlier, you can find boards at many places at the Computex show, two separate sources at chipset companies have told us that the Clawhammer, for example, is far from ready and may be delayed even beyond December. One said that realistically we were talking nine months from now. If that's true, this will be a real blow not only to people waiting for the uniprocessor systems but also to AMD.

Hard has their Day 3 coverage up.

TweakTown.

Anandtech.

There's a little writeup over at THG about the newly released 1Ghz C3 from VIA. Looks to me like this little cpu is starting to catch on with the masses, in an era of high powered and albiet noisy PC's these days.

In an effort to quell the nine US states seeking the demise of Microsoft, the company is releasing a new service pack that has many option that (basically) bog down the OS. You'll go to even remove Internet Explorer!!![PAGEBREAK]
The service pack will introduce four options for managing, customizing or removing Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Windows Media Player, Windows Messenger, Microsoft's version of the Java Virtual Machine, and competing so-called middleware from other companies. The States have not considered this action as retribution just yet.

News.com has the great story.

Just got word from my bud Mike that he has done a review on a variable speed fan PSU. Quiet is the name of the game.

Compared to ALL other unmodified power supply units I have used, the Seasonic SS-300FS is about the quietest. These other units include 2 models of Enermax, SH, Zalman and many generic power supplies. Despite the slightly quieter noise level of the Zalman ST-300BLP, my sample's rapid speedup to a much higher noise level makes it significantly more intrusive than the Seasonic, overall. As mentioned before, this is the same behavior observed in the Enermax and SH models, as described in detail in my previous PSU articles. The new Antec True Power PSU appears to suffer the same affliction.

The Athlon XP may be out on Monday of next week. The new chip is built on 130 nanometer process.

This time, however, though the Athlon XP 2200+ continues to match most Pentium 4s, analysts said it is likely to be outpaced by the two fastest chips from Intel: the 2.4GHz and 2.53GHz Pentium 4s.

The Tech Report reviews an MP 2000+.

The test between the SMP rig and the KT333 rig is more complex. Clearly there are some applications where you will see a definite benefit from that extra processor. Just as clearly there are situations where the 760MPX's dated memory controller will hold you back. The logical decision comes down to what software you run, and how much multitasking you do while running it.

Ars has updated their 1999 article to bring it to current standards.

SCSI by definition is the Small Computer Systems Interface (typically pronounced scuzzy--although some people take offense at this). However, as the SCSI architecture has evolved over the last several years, especially with the advent of SCSI-3, this definition has become misleading. When SCSI began in the very early 1980's, computers and computer peripherals were far from being mainstream and during this nascent age the definition fit like a glove. Like any good standard, SCSI has evolved over time to (1) keep pace with the ever-increasing options available for computers as well as to (2) keep up with the increasing demands for performance and stability that are now expected not only of servers, but also from home PCs and higher-end workstations.

The Tech Zone reviews a Ti 4400. bleh...

As I said on the last page, the performance offered by the Leadtek Winfast A250TD is excellent. with excellent overclocking capabilities, pushing this Ti4400 card into Ti4600 performance territory isnt much of a struggle at all.

Phones will get even smaller and lighter thanks to IBM.

The microscopic machines, technically known as Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, or MEMS, do the work of current components such as radio frequency receivers. However, they are smaller and often more efficient than those components, said Jennifer Lund, a MEMS researcher in IBM's Research division.

So when will AMDZone review Intel products? (VIAHardware reviewed this)

Throughout all of our benchmarks we can clearly see that the PC1066 memory that the Intel i850e supports comes out with a win, but one that is not exceptionally stellar by any means. The better choice when basing conclusions solely on the performance is the choice of PC1066. However, what about the price of this new RAM? Currently it would cost you about $80-90 or so to purchase 256MB (2 X 128MB) of PC800 RDRAM. This price has fallen a lot since the initial release of RDRAM, and is now a solution that doesn't cost much, if any more than DDR. But if you look for pricing on PC1066, to buy the same amount of RAM it would cost $160-200, over twice that of the PC800, and the PC1066 definitely doesn't offer twice the performance. Still, the RAM is very new and the price should drop but as it stands now I don't think that PC1066 is worth this price premium. PC800 still performs very well, and with the new 533MHz FSB and 512K of cache, the new Pentium 4 CPU's should leave you very pleased with their speed.

Hard has their coverage up.

I have to admit that Tuesday at the show was not as exciting as Day 1, so this might seem a bit tame. We can continue to show you the same chipsets hanging on different walls at different booths but will instead try to cover something new.

Anandtech has Day 2.


While the first day of Computex was stolen by AMD's Hammer announcements today's events were spread out much more evenly among a handful of companies. Through the sweltering heat while drowning in humidity in Taipei we managed to grab photos of ATI's R300, NVIDIA's nForce2 and learn even more about the omnipresent Hammer platform from AMD.

TweakTown has Day 2 coverage.

Computex is certainly shaping up to be a very exciting event. In yesterday's coverage we brought you information about AMD's 8th generation processors (Opteron and ClawHammer) as well as detailed information about upcoming products from VIA. Yesterday's conferences left us barely any time to take a proper look at what the companies were displaying on the show floor. Today, however, our schedule was slightly more relaxed so we took the opportunity to head out onto the show floor.

Take the Hammer to go.

Advanced Micro Devices will introduce a set of notebooks from the ultra-small to full size machines using future 130 and 90 nanometer designs, it said today. But it claims it doesn't need to design a processor "from the ground up" like Intel is doing with its Banias design next year because it is ahead of its much larger competitor in technology.

INQ has some details of the R300.

The ATI 300 will support DirectX 9.0, will have as many as 107 million transistors, and have eight pipes with 16 textures. It will include 4 vertex shader engines, and use 256-bit DDR memory, and use a technology called HyperZ III.
We also expect that the R300 will support AGP8X, be out before Direct X9.0 and support it, include both MPEG 2 encoding and decoding, video acceleration and the rest.

TweakTown does Day 1 at Computex.

It's summer in Taiwan and that can only mean one thing... Computex. Computex is regarded by many as one of the most interesting and exciting computer trade shows in the world and is the biggest computer trade show in Asia. Each year, thousands of people from all over the world come to Taipei, Taiwan in order to view first-hand the products and technologies they will be seeing over the following year and beyond. Cameron Wilmot and myself made the trip to Taipei from Australia for the duration of Computex and we will of course be bringing you daily coverage as the event unfolds with all the latest announcements and maybe even some Intel vs VIA entertainment (those who have read about last year's Computex will know what i'm talking about).

eMac gets out of the academic arena and into the retail sector.

The company has started selling a new eMac--originally a version of the iMac for the education market--to anyone who wants one. The retail version is similar to its education counterpart, but costs a little more and adds a few additional features such as a CD-rewritable drive and 56kbps modem. Like the original iMac introduced four years ago, the new model is built around a CRT monitor.

10,000 by Nov 1st. My sorrow goes out to the pink slippers .

Fiorina said the company is moving faster on integrating the companies and reiterated confidence that HP could cut more than $2.5 billion in costs through non-personnel items such as procurement and real estate. Cost-cutting will be crucial if the company wants not only to survive but also thrive, in part because it doesn't foresee a recovery in information technology spending until next year.

I'm on my lunch break .

Nvidia released new Win 98SE drivers for its chipset series (220D, 415, 420, 420D). New drivers solve some compatibility issues.

Get nForce drivers.

I'm off to bed early tonight. I'm making a quick $200 at the Primary tomorrow (yeah, that's an election). They said that turn out should be pitiful as always.

Microsoft has revealed a very dangerous security hole in it's exchange 2000 email program.[PAGEBREAK]
Microsoft has published a security advisory warning of a "critical" bug in its Exchange e-mail server software. An intruder who sends a message with an invalid header can cause the entire server to waste all of its computing power figuring out what to do about the bad input. Web services, file services, and/or any other services provided by the machine come to a grinding halt until this process is finished. Executing repeated bad commands can take the server down indefinitely. Rebooting a server that has received a bad command doesn't help; when Exchange is restarted, it picks up where it left off.

Read the whole article.