News

AMDZone has reviewed some Smart Fans from Antec. They come with a brain too.

Unfortunately I do not think SmartFan's intelligence is that high. When at room temperature, the fan is still looks and sounds like it is going full speed. What is special about a SmartFan that is not idling down? Antec has a great concept, but hopefully they will fix these problems and the next generation of fans will indeed be smarter.

VH has done a roundup of 10 KT333 boards.

EPoX was chosen as the all around champion for the fastest board available for AMD Athlon XP Processors. If this company continues to improve on their current designs by adding more features, Gold will almost continuously be in their future. The 8K3A+ is priced very well and is built for the highest performance available. Put your hands together for EPoX and their McLaren F1 in a bright green box.

The Tech-Report has a review of the P4X333 chipset from VIA. Pentium 4 goodness, but does it beat the popular SiS 645DX?

The P4X333, however, is a substantial leap over both of those releases. With the P4X333, VIA has not only produced what is arguably the best performing Pentium 4 chipset available today, VIA has also future-proofed it by packing in such features as AGP 8X and USB 2.0 before most users are even asking for them. This forward-thinking attitude will serve VIA well, and if the redesigned PCI implementation can exorcise Darth VIA once and for all, it should make even more people happy.

So you want to improve the lagging performance of your hard drive and don't know which defrag utility to use? X-Bit Labs has a review of defraggers run on some of the more popular hard drive manufacturers.

I was at my Dad's store today to help move some stuff around. Some guy took a whole bunch of expensive items (Asprin and Advil...) and ran off out of the store with them. We chased after him but he got away, and dropped a whole load of stuff while running. We filed a police report, but that doesn't do much.

It is not surprising why my Dad is forced to give up his store, people rob him all the time. I haven't witnessed anything like this before though, this opened my eyes. How horrible a human can be.

Extremetech has an excellent overview of the features of the parhelia.

Multi-monitor displays have been part of PCs for going on ten years now, but most of them tend to come in even-numbered configurations: two, four, sometimes even eight. And while Nvidia, ATI, and Matrox have all made big noises about their respective multi-monitor display technology trouncing the competition, none of them to date had much use in 3D games. Why? Several reasons: for starters, it would likely involve going back and tweaking game code to support a feature that isn't widely deployed and won't net the game maker many incremental sales. Game developers will sometimes implement features they think are cool for that reason alone, but with the game business being more bottom-line-oriented than ever, and with engineering man-hours tight, feature support for its own sake is increasingly rare. Secondly, and this is the show-stopper, most 3D GPUs simply didn't have the horsepower to drive two (or more) displays owing to both increased fill-rate requirements, and the memory management issues of the multiple display surfaces.

Reviewmakers has a review of a pre-modded case. How awesome to get a case with a windows for under $50!

One such "off the shelf" solution for modded cases are the Xoxide modded cases. Xoxide has come into the market with pre-modded cases fairly recently and in the short time that they have been in the game they seem to have made themselves a permanent niche in the hardware community. Some reasons for this are the vast selection on the modded cases, customization, low prices and general high quality and good service. Today we present the budget case of them all, the Z-40 Insight case and we are here to find out if this sub $50 case is worth your hard earned money.

Hardware Pub has reviewed this nice-looking aluminum case. If you're in the market for a nice case, Read this review.

With the recent price drop of this board, it's become more popular. Is it worth buying?

[H]ard|OCP does the features of the Parhelia.

One of the most exciting features beyond frames per second performance (which we never saw a benchmark) is "Surround Gaming". Basically a three monitor spread that opens up your field of vision (FOV) in first person shooters and games such as flight simulators. We did get to experience this playing Jedi Knight 2, Quake 3, and MS Flight Sim. It seems as if the technology should pretty much work with any Quake 3 engine game plus many others. I'm sure Matrox will be giving us an updated list soon.

Mirrorbit will pack twice the density on flash cards than current generation on to future cards.

Utilizing an innovative architecture that stores two full and distinct charges within a single memory cell, AMD's MirrorBit architecture breaks the traditional tradeoff between cost and performance, by coupling uncompromising reliability and performance with the industry's leading cost structure.

AMDZone reviews a stick of 512MB Corsair memory.

Wow! Obtaining 376 MHz at CAS 2 and 402 MHz CAS 2.5 at only 2.5V is very impressive for this large of a memory stick. Considering it only required 2.5V for 402 MHz, I'm sure this stick can obtain more...much more, unfortunately I may have to wait for the KT400s to come out to find out how fast this memory stick can go.

So you put all that money into your computer to turn it into a super stereo system, only to have the big record companies put copy protection on those CD's so you can't play it any more? It may be easier undone than you thought. But with a magic marker or a post-it note? Check out the article over at The Inquirer.

You may find the link there needs a translator, so here's one from Google.

Well folks, Matrox has now unleashed the reviewers to do reviews and deliver the juicy details we've all been waiting for, concerning this new video card. Will it have the current kings of the pixel, nVidia and ATI sweating? All I can say is don't drool on that keyboard. Check out the Matrox Parhelia at Hartware.net

News.com reports that the Gamecube will actually have an online component. Getting game systems online are a little different that full fledged PCs (except for the Xbox, which is a PC).

The first games to take advantage of online GameCube play will be two new versions of Sega's "Phantasy Star Online," the first major console game to offer online play, through Sega's now-defunct Dreamcast console. GameCube versions of "Phantasy Star Online I" and "Phantasy Star Online II" are set to be available this fall. The service will work with most ISP (Internet service provider) connections. I will be interested to learn if this really works out. I like online gaming on my PC, but something about a controller in my hands rather than a mouse and keyboard seems a bit different.

UT2003 has an official website now. It is filled with screenies and other goodies.[PAGEBREAK]
Click here to visit it.

Mikhailtech review an Engineering sample of Crucial's PC2700.

As you can see, they're virtually identical with the exception of the manufacturing date and ES mark. Both chips are marked -6ns which means 166.67MHz clock speed, 333.33MHz data rate because these are DDR chips. The DIMM has 16 of these chips, 8 on each side and it is a double sided module, for a total of 256MB, which means that each chip can store up to 16MB (128Megabits or 16MegaBytes) each.

Warp2Search has uploaded some beta Det drivers for Nvidia based cards.

2K/XP: 29.40
9x: 29.41[PAGEBREAK]
Head over there for the download.

Tweaknews has a review up pitting 2 dual fan heatsinks agianst one another. The Globalwin TAK-68 and the Coolink H2TWIN, socket A coolers are compared with not so much overclocking ability in mind but rather how well they cool with 2 lower rpm fans.(Read lower decibels) BATTLE OF THE TWIN TITANS: GLOBALWIN TAK-68 vs COOLINK H2TWIN Review

Hardware Test has a review of MSI's K7D Master dual AMD motherboardboard up for your perusal.

For those of you who have ever heard the term CMOS, but didn't know quite what it is or what it does, this article, The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of gives a bit of an explanation into what CMOS or Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor is and does. It's a bit technical at times, but does give some insight into how important this CMOS is and how it has changed our world.

I have just finished my review of the lightstrip and wire provided from EL Custom Shop. My Mom was really impressed by the wire as well. This is simply one of the coolest things I have had the pleasure of playing with.

Look at the MASSIVE heatsink on this thing. I saw this at Akiba!

That is one HUGE heatsink.

VR-Zone has a review of the Leadtek!? 420-D motherboard. New one to me.

Leadtek, this is a name definitely not known for its motherboards but more for their high end graphic cards. When nForce came around the opportunity arose for them to get involved in the motherboard market and this they did, this is because nForce incorporates Nvidia graphics chip and in this case it uses the Integrated GeForce 2 MX GPU. Considering that this is onboard this actually is a pretty good graphics processor. Though these days new technologies are coming out fast and new motherboards and motherboard companies monthly so now is to find out if Leadtek can keep up with the big boys and provide us all with a quality product at a good cost.

Icrontic has a review of both the Crucial and Corsair high speed memory offerings. They test them side by side.

To sum up what we've observed from these tests, Corsair's XMS PC3000C2 is without a doubt some of the most high performing and overclockable memory you're going to find on the market. Not only does it overclock very well but it does so while maintaining aggressive memory settings, which is just as important to overall memory bandwidth and performance as a high FSB. Crucial's PC2700 performed well overall, edging out the XMS PC2700. However, you really can't utilize its full overclocking potential unless you decide to use conservative timings. If high quality RAM is all you need, either one of these sticks will definitely fit the bill. If killer overclocking is what you crave, then Corsair is definitely the way to go.