News

You knew it would happen and now it did!

Paid content will invade the Kazaa file-swapping network Monday in a major commercial test of a service that until now has lured millions of people with free music, video and other digital files.
Along with finding search results that point to unfettered MP3s, Kazaa users will begin to see links to songs for sale from record labels and advertisements linked to keyword searches. WTF???[PAGEBREAK]
News.com has more BS

Before you jump to conclusions, it is an ENG sample.

It's quite clear that the Xabre is not ready for prime-time. SiS have a lot of work on their hands if they are to target the Xabre as the Geforce4 MX killer as they're positioning it to be. Triplex informed us that a new batch of drivers should be arriving later this month and we will surely come back to the card once we receive the updated drivers.

VIA Hardware has reviewed a DFI i845G based motherboard.

Intel has been a bit behind in releasing a chipset with integrated video, but what they did release is a very good product. Overall I would have to say that it performs right alongside the SiS650. It wins some tests, and loses some as well, but it does a very good job with the memory bandwidth it has available, and excels at office and content creation tasks. The i845G is even suitable for the casual gamer, though you will need to lower some settings in the games in order for them to run acceptably. This is true about every integrated video solution however.

Lost Circuits does the SS50 from Shuttle for the P4.

Performance metrics have been in the crossfire lately. We have MHz, IPCs, QuantiSpeed and PR ratings and all of them are somewhat arbitrary definitions of performance. To add to the list of metrics, we propose a novel metric and that is Power Per Cubic Inch or PpCI. According to the PpCI rating, and I don't see why we should not use this metric, the SS50 is beyond any doubts a performance megastar of galactic proportions.

ZDNet reports that IBM has had a breakthrough with carbon nanotubes being used for transistors. This is great news because the silicon speed barrier is approaching fast!

In an article to be published on Monday in the journal Applied Physics Letters, IBM researchers outline how transistors made of carbon nanotubes--long, thin strands of carbon molecules--delivered more than twice the amount of electrical current at a faster rate than cutting-edge transistors made from silicon and metal, the basis for chips today.

Increased current leads, potentially, to faster transistors and integrated circuits. And since transistors and integrated circuits are the building blocks of chips, the results imply that carbon could someday become the foundation for tomorrow's computers.

We've got hardware pretty much covered, but software, I guess, no one knows (Including me) that well.

Does anyone want to help out with the site to post software news? You get a nice @aselabs.com email address. If you want to help out, shoot me an email: aronschatz@asetools.com.

(I post here because site announcements get posted on this site)

While not exactly a PC subject I thought this article might be of interest to readers, since many PC enthusiasts are also interested in the 'final frontier'.

Get your fill from the Chinese Communist party mouthpiece......Manned Flight To The Moon

.....and here's to hoping that NASA won't sit still.

The Tech Report has a first look on the i845G board from Abit.

In fact, you can run the BG7 as a fully functional computer without a single card installed in an expansion slot. Eerie. (Uhh, there are many boards that do that)

got apex? review the Abit branded Ti 4600.

In terms of performance, the ABIT board was superb. Beyond the expected insane framerates afforded by the Ti4600, we were very pleased with the overall 2D and 3D image quality. Because of this, we are happy to award the SILURO a score of 5 / 5 for the Performance category. When we discuss the reliability of the ABIT board we must make mention that we were quite impressed with the build quality and overall stability present with the SILURO. Of course the category of Reliability and Stability is really a catchall for many different facets of our evaluation, such as included drivers, available technical support and ease of installation. While ABIT does come up smelling like roses with their excellent build quality, they fall well short of the industry standard for technical support, and their drivers on the CD are not based on the most recent WHQL'd Nvidia drivers. After considering these factors, we scored the SILURO a 4 / 5 for Reliability and Stability. (Don't they know what a paragraph is?)

The Inquirer has learned that ATI does not plan to introduce a DX9 part for the mobile front yet. The reason being is that it needs to mature the current graphics products for the DX9 cards. (Where do you see a DX9 part anyway?)

This likely means that ATI will intro a post-M9 chip which will be DirectX 9 compatible, but that may not arrive until ATI finishes its DirectX 10 card sometime in Q3 of 2003.

The Inquirer has learned that the next gen MX versions will contain DX8 stuff. Good thing too, games are coming out that use it. (And no one wants to buy a Geforce 4 MX 4xx).

DirectX 8 hardware is about to become a necessary component because of the long awaited games coming up, so we think Nvidia may well introduce this new MX part by the end of the year. It would also make sense to assume that this chip will be launched side by side with the NV30, that we expect to see being introduced in late summer or early autumn.

OC Workbench has 5 reviews of i845E and the new integrated video chipset i845G based mainboards up for your viewing pleasure.

PC Stats gives you the scoop on why the KT266a may out perform the KT333 in some situations.

With everything at stock speeds, the KT333CE performs about 1-5% faster then the KT266A chipset which is what we expect. The tide turns once the FSB is upp'ed to 166 MHz! With the 1/2.5 AGP and 1/5 PCI dividers kicking in at 166 MHz FSB the VIA KT333CE based boards and all the peripherals in the computer (HDD, Videocard, soundcard, etc) are all running at default speeds while the VIA KT266A chipset based motherboards are overclocking them all. 3D Performance suffers quite badly from this, office based benchmarks don't seem to have a big problem though.

X Bit Labs has put up a little test of some hard drive makes using the PCMark2002 benchmark in order to see if this new benchmarking tool from Madonion which is fast becoming a popular tool among a lot of reviewing sites these days is really a reliable test. See for yourself in the PCMark2002 as Hard Disk Drive Test.

Win a fan and cables compliments of KDComputers. Enter Here

Many who have heard about a serious bug in Microsoft's "MSN Chat" ActiveX control have ignored the warnings because they don't use Microsoft's instant messaging services. But alas, you don't need to be a user of MSN Chat to have your computer taken over via this recently disclosed security vulnerability. All you must do is use Microsoft Internet Explorer to visit one specially crafted Web page, and your system may be history. Use MSN? Read this story.

Xbit has a nice table of AMD cpus. They include Tbred cpus as well.

We managed to get hold of the AMD processor OPN tables for the month of May. OPN, Ordering Part Number, stands for the marking of the AMD processors available for ordering via the distributor network. Besides the processor marking, the OPN tables list their major specifications, such as: core clock frequency, bus frequency, Vcore, core type and packaging type. This way, if you take a closer look at the data in an OPN table, you will be able to get highly detailed info about the already shipping and upcoming CPUs from AMD.

Hexus brings you overclocking your video card to the extreme.

While this method is extreme and most definitely voids any warranty, but then so do most mods. It can be a valid solution to anyone wishing to attach any sort of cooling to the GF4 core.

Usually the celeron boards don't include much features, Intel wants to change that.

PC makers will launch a slew of new desktop PCs next week that will pair Intel's newest 1.7GHz Celeron chip, announced Wednesday, with two new versions of its 845 chipset, dubbed the 845G and the 845GL, that include built-in graphics and Universal Serial Bus 2.0, a high-speed connection for digital cameras and other devices.

At the same conference in Monaco where AMD has been showing off it's Opteron silicon, VIA has been leaking info on it's next chipsets. They will be incorporating a version with graphics and one without. They will also be using 800Mhz hypertransport connection. You can read about it here at The Inquirer.

Also of further interest in this article I noted some news that VIA will be bumping up the cache of it's 'Nehemiah' core C3 to a healthier 256k.

The Inquirer has posted some pics of a dually Opteron rig from the recent show in Monaco. O how sweet it is!

This article was really informative. The Thoroughbred's scheduled June release is just around the corner. Know your processor. Check out Extreme Tech's article.

Tweakers AU has done a roundup of 5 highspeed sticks of DDR Ram

In summary, I have to give the performance award to Crucial. They have produced an excellent PC2700 stick, and are one of the few companies that waited until JDEC approved the DDR333 standard. The best value award is going to Apacer for their PC2100 product, which has some great overclocking potential and performs pretty much on par with the Kingmax module at 166MHz. As for looks, the OCZ PC2700 scoops up this one as the only company that includes those cool copper heatspreaders - despite having no effect on performance. I would like to thank Apacer, Crucial, Kingmax and OCZ for providing Tweakers Australia with the samples, and I hope we get the same opportunity next time. Stay tuned for more memory inclusions in this roundup, and part two which will focus primarily on overclocking.