March 2000

AllAdvantage cough up! (0 Comments) (link)  Thursday, 30-March-2000  21:53:55 (GMT +10) - by Agg Ok, sorry for the images clogging up today's newspage, but I promised I would scan this when it arrived so here it is: Finally, proof that AllAdvantage is not just a scam. Not bad for a week's surfing that I was going to do anyway.. :) Many thanks to everyone who's signed up under me so far. I hope you guys all got your cheques too! Golden Orb Review (0 Comments) (link)  Thursday, 30-March-2000  21:49:52 (GMT +10) - by Agg Somebody is importing Golden Orb coolers into Australia! They sent me one to check out and here's my review of it. Yep, they work as well as they look! Thursday Morning (0 Comments) (link)  Thursday, 30-March-2000  09:23:52 (GMT +10) - by Agg Ow, I ache all over again. :) Yesterday was fun, Eastern Creek is a much, much nicer racetrack than Oran Park. 240Km/h down the straight, back off (but don't actually roll off the throttle) and tip into turn 1, toe skimming the asphalt, doing about 160km/h exiting the turn.. what an amazing experience. There was a photographer there too, so I might have some cool photos soon. Looks like Intel's NDA for the new coppermine Celeron II has lifted, check out the reviews here on Anandtech and here on HardwareCentral. Intel's press-release is here. FiringSquad have an article up, "The Basics of Overclocking" - I haven't read it all yet but it seems to be quite detailed, might be some good info there. Chris from TerabytePC wrote in to say he has a special offer on the 1GHz Athlon for OcAust readers, if you're itchin' for some gigahertz action you can have it for AUD$2749, this is $150 off their normal price. Still a mighty big wad of cash, though. :) They also have the Ultra66 card for $55 and Guillemot DDR/DVI's for $530. Speaking of the 1GHz mark, there's a preview of the new Dell 1GHz P3 box here. Remember the Detonator 5.08 drivers that [a] were "leaked" and offered substantially improved performance? Well, now version 5.13 has been "leaked".. I suspect this may be nvidia's new distribution method. :) These drivers now support Full Screen Anti-Aliasing in D3D. More info here (scroll down the page a little). A review of a budget GeForce here, the Powercolor Sniper 2. UPDATE: Damn, it's a TNT2 card, not a GeForce. Whoops! Interesting article here on AMD's chairman, it's mostly propaganda but tells an interesting tale.. they make a reference to the "Pentium Plus" though.. I think they mean Pro. Saw a new Aussie site dedicated to Unreal - www.OzUnreal.com - check out the "CaptureTheKitchen" map! :) Tuesday Night (0 Comments) (link)  Tuesday, 28-March-2000  21:52:53 (GMT +10) - by Agg Another day at the track tomorrow, this time at Eastern Creek. This is mostly left-handers (which I'm better at than right-handers) so hopefully I'll be a bit quicker. :) Thresh has done a thing on overclocking the P3-600E. Their example doesn't seem to be hitting any higher core speeds than the 550E's, and it has a higher multiplier so lower FSB (memory/pci/agp speed) and, of course, it's more expensive. The new king is not dead yet. :) There's an interview with some guy from Aureal here. Kinda funny, the interview is cut short suddenly because Aureal announced that everyone had resigned and suddenly the "no comment" sign went up. :) Dan the man has done a 3-way comparo of LCD screens here. I've got a 15" LCD unit from Acer here at the moment, still checking it out.. yeah, I can see myself needing a good couple of months to check this out properly.. maybe a year. :) There's no doubt about it, they are damned nice to look at compared to a CRT. Anyway, Dan's review is chockers with info as usual. Thresh has a preview of Abit's KA7 (new athlon board) here. Can't wait to get my hands on one of those.. I found a roundup of what people are buying at the moment, from a salesperson's perspective. Slot1 P3-550E's and P3V4X's are the winning combo apparently. More info here - it's from a Canadian I think, but still interesting. Hey, has anyone bought anything from these Illusion guys? Seems to be an Australian second-hand hardware auction site.. never heard of them before, stumbled across it. Anyone had any experience with 'em? Finally, I've had enough of Zip dicking me around. This time they misconfigured something and broke a stack of my domains, and they're now telling me it'll take them 10 days to fix it. Riiiight. So I'll be moving all my hosting to another provider soonish, most likely vservers.com in the US. It'll still be the same domain and all, so you won't notice the change hopefully, it should even be faster with a bit of luck. So, I need a new ISP too. Flat rate unlimited hours dialup, no download limits, no BUSY tones, I don't need webspace, gotta be speedy. Got any suggestions? Please reply in this thread in the Pub. Thanks! New Abit Apollo Pro 133A Board (0 Comments) (link)  Tuesday, 28-March-2000  12:43:34 (GMT +10) - by Agg Abit announced their VT6X4 here. I was all excited until I saw the max FSB is 150MHz.. Telstra is a Monopoly! (derr) (0 Comments) (link)  Monday, 27-March-2000  21:06:06 (GMT +10) - by Agg Check it out on Slashdot here. "Well as it seem's Telstra, Australia's telephone monopoly has finally been recognized as one, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commision (ACCC) has forced Telstra to grant full local loop access to it's competitor's and to bring extensive testing to a halt and begin the mainstream ADSL rollout by August at the latest. If you don't live in Australia, Telstra is the only reason we're all stuck to poor modem speeds, Telstra owns all exchanges in Australia and is privatised and thus wouldn't open them to other companies so they could install the relevant ADSL equipment." This might be something big - bring it on! More info on Aureal (0 Comments) (link)  Monday, 27-March-2000  12:15:24 (GMT +10) - by Agg MWP let me know there's more info here about Aureal. Apparently all the senior staff of the company have resigned. We got the link from here but their link to the actual story is broken. Monday (0 Comments) (link)  Monday, 27-March-2000  11:17:04 (GMT +10) - by Agg Austin sent along a link to someone's experience with a remarked Athlon on AMDZone. As I said in a previous news update, AMD and Intel are always VERY interested in this kind of stuff. Aureal, who were basically Creative's only real competition in the soundcard market, have apparently gone belly-up. There's nothing on their website about it, but a few people emailed me the news (quote your sources!) and there's a thread in the forums about it. If you know anything else add it to there please.. Someone's ideas on water-cooling here, a few tips for builders.. I don't agree with some of the things he says, particularly his feelings on water-jackets, but it's food for thought. Another home-made water-block system here. ClubOC check out the Globalwin FKP-32 here. You can read our review here for comparison. Processor Thermal Info (0 Comments) (link)  Monday, 27-March-2000  03:07:15 (GMT +10) - by Agg Saw this while wandering around - someone has nicely collated all the datasheets on thermal performance for pretty much every x86 CPU you could care about, it seems. Everything from 1GHz Athlons to the 386sx-16. :) A bookmark for sure. Sunday Misc (0 Comments) (link)  Sunday, 26-March-2000  08:52:55 (GMT +10) - by Agg PCInsight have a thingy up about how modems work, here. How long do you think it'll be before analog modems go away completely? Then again, people have been saying that about FAX for years and years now.. Speaking of which, Dan has a comparison of Optus@HOME and Telstra BigPond Cable here. I already know I don't want Telstra and I can't have Optus (not in my street, bastards).. I'll keep waiting for ADSL.. Thresh has a review of the Boomslang 2000 up. Nice picture here on HardOCP. Now he just has to make a little jacket for the BX chipset and include it in the loop.. Sick of trains and buses? Get your own personal mini-helicopter to work. I'll stick to the R6.. :) Fragserve LAN in Melbourne (0 Comments) (link)  Sunday, 26-March-2000  08:24:05 (GMT +10) - by Agg All you south-of-the-border Quakeheads, here's some info on a LAN party for you: Website: http://fragserve.virtualave.net/ Venue: CLAYTON HALL, 264 Clayton Rd, Clayton (In Melbourne) Event Time: Event will be held on a Saturday, from 11:00am, through to 1pm on sunday Cost: $25 entry regardless of player or spectator status, payable on entry General Info: *Tables, chairs, networking cables, and power shall all be supplied for the event. We would like it however if you brang along a power board... And a crossover cable for file transferring! *Food and drink shall be available on the day, at good prices *Approx 100 - 140 max computers to be running on the LAN. *Gaming tournaments running all day, QUAKE 2 Action, Quake III, Half Life Counterstrike , Action, and more to be decided upon. *Prizes incorporated into the tournaments, such as Force Feedback J/S, Specialised Gaming Mouse pads, slabs of Jolt Cola and others to come Contact: NeO_SwaNN -ICQ UIN 59705044, e-mail warner@acepia.net.au Grand_Exe - ICQ UIN 35103345, e-mail ehatton@eisa.net.au sign up at http://fragserve.virtualave.net/register.html Remarked Athlons in Oz? (0 Comments) (link)  Sunday, 26-March-2000  08:15:27 (GMT +10) - by Agg Fad sent this along: Hi I went to the computer market in canberra, at natex, and while i was there i look at serveral athlons and there serial numbers, i found several nice .18 k7-600mhz athlons week 11 2000 for around $355, but i also found some .25 650mhz week 36 99 for more i dont remember, these athlons (650) im pretty sure, are remarked. check it out at this page, there were a lot of these, they are mostly 500->650 cores, and they all seem to be in week 36, also i looked at the edges of these cases, and they were all rounded, so i have very good grounds for saying that there were alot of 650mhz remarked cores at the computer market, and prob other ones too in australia. My advice is to bring it to AMD's attention. If they're anything like Intel in this regard they will be VERY interested. Abit KA7 (0 Comments) (link)  Sunday, 26-March-2000  08:08:04 (GMT +10) - by Agg Well, the rumours are flying thick and fast about Abit's KA7, their new Athlon board. Abit's official page for it is here. OCWorkbench have a larger picture of it here (scroll down a little). Check out the acres of room in front of the SlotA connector! Alright. Note also the 2 extra (but unused) IDE header spaces on the PCB, rumour #1 is that they will be a future built-in ATA-100 adapter (as the KX133 chipset supports UDMA/66 already). Rumour #2 is about the possibility of a built-in GFD for changing your Athlon's multiplier and voltage, and even a hardware L2 cache adjuster. James Andrewartha had this to say: Apparently when Abit announced the board, all the oveclockers asked if it had built in golden fingers, L2 cache control in BIOS etc. They didn't, so apparently they'll release another board in a month's time or so, with a built in GFD, and hopefully L2 cache divider control. This is all rumour of course, more details can be found at slota.com. I can't find the info at SlotA.com, but anyway.. interesting to see what happens with this. UPDATE: Now I'm awake, I noticed this big preview article at Sharky's. This confirms the ATA-100 rumour but makes no mention of the GFD rumour. However they mention a funky little diagnostic LED thing that comes with it. Also, it apparently has monster tweakability in the BIOS.. hopefully also a "Set Turbo Defaults" option for lazy people like me. Saturday Morning (0 Comments) (link)  Saturday, 25-March-2000  09:12:04 (GMT +10) - by Agg I was quite surprised to see AnandTech reviewing the Senfu water-cooling unit this morning. They don't put a peltier under it but it's an interesting read. Keep an eye out for my own review soonish. The P3V4X forum is going pretty well, nearly 200 messages in 3 or 4 days - if you've been experimenting with your Asus P3V4X (or are just confused by it) check it out and share your experiences, the end result from all this should be a decent FAQ.. Dan reviewed an evil device last night, a keyboard that, in hardware, can secretly record everything you type.. up to 500,000 characters! Scroll down the page a bit here and you'll see that Abit have announced their KX133-based Athlon board.. using the 686A south-bridge (good), 4 DIMM slots, 6 PCI, 4 USB - and SoftMenu III, giving you 100-183MHz FSB in 1-MHz increments.. on an Athlon board! Wow. I wonder if this'll be stable above 115, no other Athlon board seems to be. The big surprise for me is that Abit didn't include a GFD with it. I was sure they'd have a little ribbon-cable-connected device so you could change the settings in the BIOS. Ahh well.. FirztPerson has a rant about the 3-tube, finned water-jacket from yesterday's news here. Well, now that 3COM have dropped their modem market, that means the end of the USRobotics name. Jim Baker pointed out this article with some more details. Their Courier modem was a very impressive unit, The Modem To Have for a fair while. I remember back in the BBS days when a friend got a USRobotics Dual Standard HST .. 19.2k of blistering data-pumping power, presuming you knew someone else who had an HST modem.. :) Sad to see the brand die. Japanese news, the Athlon 900 and 950 are now on sale in Akiba, that holy city of high technology. Intel have countered by making their 866MHz P3 available. Hmm. :) Guru3D reviewed the Gigabyte GA-GF256, GigaByte's SDR GeForce board, and found it to be relatively unexciting and probably a little late to market.. Friday Stuff (0 Comments) (link)  Friday, 24-March-2000  16:52:32 (GMT +10) - by Agg Ok, been doing lots of stuff over the last few days, meeting with people etc. Suffice to say there's going to be a lot happening with this site in the future. Thanks to all you guys for being interested and turning this into a community instead of yet another crappy hardware website. Anyway, on with the news.. ArsTechnica have an interesting rambling article about the state of the hardware scene at the moment. TweakTown check out a Slot Cooler, they give it 6 out of 10.. hmm. Interesting-looking water-jacket here. I dunno, but the idea of fins on top of a water-jacket seems kinda counterproductive to me, especially if you're going to be using fluid below room temperature. I guess the theory is that it will radiate a bit of heat into the air, but you'd have to be careful that it wasn't COOLING the air, too.. depending on your setup, I guess. The Tech Report have updated their Athlon Overclocking FAQ .. some good info there. Ever wondered how monitors work? FiringSquad will set you right.. Simple Technology have announced their 1GHz-compliant RAMBUS chips. The scariest thing is that they really think people will pay these prices.. ArsTechnica also have a thing up about Dynamo, that gets your whites brighter but won't fade your dark wash! Errr.. no, it's another code-morphing processor, like Transmeta's Crusoe, made by HP. Your iMac not looking weird enough for you? Well, slap one of these onto your desk. Dig the vertical open-front CD-ROM drive.. Who makes a motherboard with 3 ISA slots these days? DFI do. I dunno, an extra PCI slot or 2 sounds more useful, given it's only got 4.. Funny interview with Dan from Dan's Data, one of my favourite sites (an Aussie one, too) .. here. Contest Winners! (0 Comments) (link)  Wednesday, 22-March-2000  23:48:02 (GMT +10) - by Agg Ok, the following people were randomly drawn to win a T-shirt: ADITLOOP (arrow@xxxx.xxx.xx) Mike Smith (esmith14@xxxxx.xxx) Chris (apple189@xxxxx.xxx) Jonathan Bridgstock (jbridgs@xxxxxxx.xxx) a (okey_dokey_jones@xxxxxxx.xxx) Chris (chris@xxxxxxxxxx.xxx.xx) Samuli Lantianinen (clonex@xxxxxxx.xxx.xx) Hary (hary@xxxxxxxx.xxx) Adrian Chiang (aychiang@xxxxxxx.xxx) Tom Butler (tig@xx.xxx.xx) Congrats to the winners! Many thanks to Acer Peripherals for sponsoring this contest. Now go visit their website. :) Tap-dance your way to social ridicule.. (0 Comments) (link)  Wednesday, 22-March-2000  15:11:08 (GMT +10) - by Agg ..or, turn up to work with an e-holster bristling with PalmPilots and wireless faxes. Actually, they're kinda cool. But please, guys, UNDER the jacket, ok? Wednesday Misc (0 Comments) (link)  Wednesday, 22-March-2000  11:13:17 (GMT +10) - by Agg Dean Claxton sent along an easier/neater way to do the Promise hack. I've put his info into the current forum thread here, there's even a pic. OCWorkbench checked out the new Soltek Athlon board. The most interesting thing about this board, for me, is the support for 133MHz FSB. Pretty sure that's the highest I've seen on an Athlon board. They only test it to 115 however.. Anand has reviewed the new AOpen Athlon motherboard. As they say, it's finally here but was it worth the wait? PCInsight have a review of the ASUS S500 50X CD-ROM drive. I actually picked up one of these babies in Bangkok about a year or so ago, worked out to about $80AUD.. f'n bargain. Good drive but a bit loud. I should do a comparison of it against the cheapy 68X speed.. (adds another entry to review queue) FiringSquad have another Q3 videocard shootout here. Saw this interesting link on HouseOfStuff - a cool 'lil SMP utility that seems to look at affinity from the other way around - instead of assigning tasks to processors, you assign your processors to tasks - which stops them running other tasks. So your single-thread games are the ONLY things running on a given processor, hence speedier. That's the theory, at least - not had much chance to dick around with it yet. It's here, anyway. UPDATE: Actually, there are a bunch of cool utilities on that page. Instant bookmark for me. CNewZ have a switchbox reviewed, hook up 4 PC's to 1 KB/Mouse/Vid. I've not read it yet but probably should, tried to buy some of these things for work a month or so ago and they were incredibly expensive for what they are.. Seemed to be quite a bit of interest in the GFD roundup from last night, a few more companies are sending their GFD's along for the next one. You can keep yer cable-internet.. (7 Comments) (link)  Wednesday, 22-March-2000  09:17:12 (GMT +10) - by Agg I'll have this stuff. 3.28 terabits per second. I expect it'll be a while until they roll it out to my street, though.. :) A terabit -- thats a trillion bits -- is roughly equal to all of the daily traffic on the Internet for the entire world. The Lucent fiber could transmit three times the daily global Internet traffic every second. GFD Roundup (0 Comments) (link)  Tuesday, 21-March-2000  21:05:20 (GMT +10) - by Agg Had the bits of this one lying around for a while, finally wrote it up today. Jim and I compare the K70C, NinjaMicro FreeSpeed Pro and NorthWind GFD 2.0. What are they? Athlon Gold-Finger Devices, of course, which let you overclock your athlon.. (hopefully like the guy in the last news post :) ). Read all about it here. 1008MHz from 550Mhz Athlon! (0 Comments) (link)  Tuesday, 21-March-2000  21:02:43 (GMT +10) - by Agg Alright. Air cooled, too. Check it out here and I snarfed the link from HardOCP, as you do. Misc Reviews (0 Comments) (link)  Tuesday, 21-March-2000  15:22:02 (GMT +10) - by Agg A few interesting ones. Firstly, GamePC have looked at the P3V4X, see what they think of this much-talked-about motherboard here. ArsTechnica have an interesting look at a couple of Asus GeForce cards, comparing two SDR versions - the "Deluxe" and the "Pure" - here. You've gotta love a site that does jokes in BASIC. :) Incidentally, we did a review of the "Deluxe" a few months ago, you can read it here for comparison. Finally, DeezTech take a Slot1 P3-550E to 850MHz, just like everyone else is doing. :) Dang, I am this close to buying one of those things for myself.. hmmmm.. 3DFX scoopage on HardOCP (0 Comments) (link)  Tuesday, 21-March-2000  09:46:28 (GMT +10) - by Agg HardOCP went over to 3DFX's HQ and checked out some of their new stuff, very interesting.. Gigabyte GeForce (0 Comments) (link)  Tuesday, 21-March-2000  09:14:21 (GMT +10) - by Agg IXBT-Labs have taken a look at Gigabyte's new GeForce card, the GA-GF2560. Here's a snip: The card is equipped with a nicely made cooler. The air flow from the fan cools the heatsink. We don't know what kind of bearings are used in this cooler (if there are any at all), because there is no sticker on the cooler saying anything about it. As we have already mentioned above, there is a piece of sticky thermal tape between the heatsink and the chipset. However, we don't consider it the best solution, because according to our experience, thermal paste turns out more effective for heat dissipation through the chipset heatsink. Plenty of screenshots and benchmarks - check it out here. CardCooler Review (0 Comments) (link)  Monday, 20-March-2000  22:14:12 (GMT +10) - by Agg I took a look at the cardcooler and posted my review today. It's not a bad little unit, check it out here. Soyo SY-6VCA Review (0 Comments) (link)  Monday, 20-March-2000  16:22:48 (GMT +10) - by Agg This is Soyo's VIA Apollo Pro 133A board and there's a kinda-review here. I've been waiting to see how Soyo go with this chipset, the benchmarks in this review, particularly the 3DMark2K score for the 600E at 800MHz, seem a little low to me. Thanks to Manik for the link. Articles archive sorted (0 Comments) (link)  Monday, 20-March-2000  15:23:41 (GMT +10) - by Agg I've sorted out the Article and Review Archive ("articles", on the left menu). It's now organized into categories instead of being a date-sorted list, impossible to find stuff. The disadvantage to the new layout, I guess, is that it's harder to find new stuff. Maybe I'll put the date next to them or "New!" or something when I add new items to the page. Anyway. Oh, it's also using the new design as a futher test. Comments in the Pub forum please. More stuff.. (0 Comments) (link)  Monday, 20-March-2000  12:15:30 (GMT +10) - by Agg StorageReview have posted an article on what really makes a HDD fast, so you know which stats to ignore.. Ars-Technica have an interesting article, the top 5 cool things about Win2K's various versions. AnandTech check out the new Apollo Pro 133A board from Gigabyte. Looks like a good one, check it out here. Monday Morning (0 Comments) (link)  Monday, 20-March-2000  10:42:28 (GMT +10) - by Agg Wow, did anyone watch the motorcycle GP last night? I'm not going to spoil it for those who recorded it and haven't seen it yet, but WOW! What a nail-biter of a finish. Anyway, on with the news. Forum regulars will have seen the amount of P3V4X-related traffic lately. It seems to be a hit with Australian tweakers - at the request of Beast I have created a new forum for discussion of this motherboard. He has a site up to centralize info on the board too, here. I see on slashdot that some clever people have made a 10GB hard disk from a roll of sticky tape. No, I'm not kidding. :) If you've got AUD$2900 just lying around the house, you could always buy an Athlon 1GHz from TerabytePC, an Aussie company that claims to have them in stock. They also have the 700MHz part for AUD$549.00, and RAMBUS. I've never dealt with them so caveat emptor! JSI Hardware have a review of Globalwin's 802 case up. HardwareNewsNet have a new search engine, Crawler, which is only for hardware reviews etc. Just as a quick test I typed in "Water" and got a bunch of links, including a few to this site, so it seems fairly well populated.. JC's PC News has info on the Evergreen AccelleraPCI, a pci-pluggable CPU card for old PC's.. (but not so old that they don't have a PCI slot, presumably) For those of you who have no arms or a pathological fear of soldering irons and therefore can't perform this piss-easy Promise66 hack, InsaneHardware is willing to do it for you and only charge you a few shekels. Hmm. FrostyTech take a look at a Sony 40X cd-rom. Be warned, they start the review with "The cornerstone of any good system is the CD-ROM drive" so they may be raving crack-heads. I just thought you should know. Interesting roundup of the month's happenings in hardware on iXBT. I'm impressed with these Russian guys, their english isn't always great (but much better than my Russian, da) but they're usually very thorough and honest. Buncha Japanese links now, so just look at the pictures. This kinda sums up the 1GHz race, 1GHz Athlons are just now hitting the markets in Japan - so are 850MHz P3 systems. :) Also, the K6-2/550 is on the streets there. Win2K support for Acer USB scanners! (0 Comments) (link)  Monday, 20-March-2000  10:01:07 (GMT +10) - by Agg I know some of you guys have been waiting for this: ------------------------- Dear Customer: Please download the formally released Acer USB-interface series scanner driver (updated on Mar-17-2000) from the following web: http://www.api.com.tw/products/imaging/service/down.htm or just link to the following web address to download the driver file: http://www.api.com.tw/products/imaging/service/driver/Win2000/MIRA340U.exe As the driver is just released, there are thousands of users might access the web page in these days. Therefore, if you would not access the web page, please try it later. Sincerely sorry for the long time waiting and the trouble. Wish you enjoy the Acer scanner in Windows 2000. Sincerely, Customer Service Division Imaging B.U. Acer Peripherals, Inc. Tel: +886-2-27998800 Fax: +886-2-27999688 Email: faeimg@api.com.tw http://www.api.com.tw More nails in RAMBUS's coffin (6 Comments) (link)  Saturday, 18-March-2000  14:22:03 (GMT +10) - by Agg I dunno who Intel are trying to kid, but now the word is that RAMBUS is for desktop systems only, while big-ass servers should be using DDR SDRAM. Right. At AUD$1,800 for 128MB, I can see myself sticking a RAMBUS-based box on my desk any day now. This has all come about because Intel have announced that Foster, the server version (Xeon?) of their Willamette processor, will use DDR SDRAM. More info here. Also, Tom's Hardware takes a look at RAMBUS and realises, just as everyone else did some months ago, that it's really expensive and slow. Silly Stuff (0 Comments) (link)  Saturday, 18-March-2000  14:12:01 (GMT +10) - by Agg Someone with way too much time has made a Flash version of Star Wars. Pretty funny, it's 1MB to download and worth a few chuckles. Get it here. Some stuff from The Register - Microsoft accidentally gave away $330 million worth of software, the US patent office allows yet another patent which blatantly violates the laws of physics and finally, PlayStation2's are frying themselves and corrupting their video cards.. Sony's considering recalling all of the ones they've sold so far. What was it, a million in the first 2 days? Ouch. Saturday (0 Comments) (link)  Saturday, 18-March-2000  11:58:13 (GMT +10) - by Agg FrostyTech has reviewed a 350W PSU here. TweakTown have checked out 5 software CPU-cooling programs. Article here, they don't compare them, just seem to list features but in case you're looking for one, check it out. Interesting if long-winded article on decreasing boot time, general file tidiness etc here. A high-end computer speaker shootout here. I've still got the creative ones that came with my 6X cdrom and ISA SB32 combo. :) Another Aussie water-cooling site here. Not too much there for now, but a fairly cranked P2 system.. Urrggh, I ache all over. Not the fastest on the track (in fact, first day on that track, and first day on this bike on ANY track, so I was one of the slowest :( ) .. hard work but fun. RAMBUS in Oz (0 Comments) (link)  Saturday, 18-March-2000  10:17:39 (GMT +10) - by Agg Realtime Systems have RAMBUS available - 2 week turnaround. You can check the prices etc on this page - scroll to the bottom. You'll need a stiff drink first, though. Anand's review of the Asus P3V4X (0 Comments) (link)  Saturday, 18-March-2000  09:22:22 (GMT +10) - by Agg Anand's reviewed this Apollo Pro 133A motherboard which has received so much coverage in our own forums. Hear what he had to say here. Here's a snip: The P3V4X also features an undocumented jumper that's labeled VIO near the DIMM slot. It's purpose is to raise the I/O voltage of the memory, chipset, and CPU to 3.6V from the already high 3.5V (the traditional value is 3.3V). While we've yet to see it actually make a difference, it can theoretically help in certain overclocking situations. Epox EP-7KXA Install Guide (0 Comments) (link)  Saturday, 18-March-2000  09:08:53 (GMT +10) - by Agg The experience of quite a few EP-7KXA owners has been distilled into an installation guide to help you with some of the quirks and niggles of this otherwise fine Athlon motherboard. Check it out here. Thanks again to BuRnInICE. Busy Tomorrow.. (0 Comments) (link)  Thursday, 16-March-2000  22:00:12 (GMT +10) - by Agg No morning news from me tomorrow. Getting up early 'coz I'm taking my bike to Oran Park Raceway for a day on the track. In case you're wondering, here's a pic: I'm sure you understand. :) Unusual GFD Card Review (0 Comments) (link)  Thursday, 16-March-2000  21:44:08 (GMT +10) - by Agg Overclockin.com have reviewed the "Maximiser", an unusual Athlon GFD card, that hangs down the back of the CPU card.. check it out: http://www.overclockin.com/reviews/Maximizer/ New Epox EP-7KXA BIOS (0 Comments) (link)  Thursday, 16-March-2000  21:40:31 (GMT +10) - by Agg Epox has finally posted their 7KXA bios version 310. Here's the fixes: http://www.epox.com/html/english/support/motherboard/bios/k7.htm Set L2 cache ECC checking disabled as a default setting. Improved IDE performance. Fixed "Init Display First" CMOS option. Fixed cracking sound problem when an additional sound card is installed. Thanks to BuRnInICE for the heads-up. Thursday Morning News (0 Comments) (link)  Thursday, 16-March-2000  09:33:17 (GMT +10) - by Agg Interesting article on Athlon overclocking here. Some basic info on the first page but the second has details on picking the best chips.. Comparison of the Globalwin FKK-32 and Alpha P7125 (Athlon coolers) here. InsaneHardware, another Aussie site, have some interesting stuff up today. They have a Slot1 Coppermine 550, like the one Kyle was bragging about, and crank it to it's limit.. also a look at the NinjaMicro FreeSpeedPro, an Athlon overclocking GFD-thingy. IBM have announced a 75GB HDD that uses glass instead of aluminium for the platters.. cor. Oh my god, they killed HardOCP! :) Site Redesign Beta (3 Comments) (link)  Wednesday, 15-March-2000  23:12:12 (GMT +10) - by Agg There's an (early) beta of the new site layout here: http://www.overclockers.com.au/index2.shtml I'd appreciate it if people could check it out, if you have a problem with it please let me know (in here) your browser, version, OS version and current screen resolution. Thanks! Evergreen Spectra 400 (0 Comments) (link)  Wednesday, 15-March-2000  21:53:15 (GMT +10) - by Agg Jeff McLuckie sent in a review of the Evergreen Spectra 400. Not really aimed at hardcore hardware freaks, but an interesting product. Check it out here. Wednesday Morning News (0 Comments) (link)  Wednesday, 15-March-2000  10:28:21 (GMT +10) - by Agg 3DSoundSurge have taken a look at the new LiveDrive II, the funky 5.25-bay-filling sound-plug rack that comes with the SBLive! Platinum. Dan over at Dan's Data has checked out a very funky-looking butane soldering iron. All you folks with Ultra66 cards on back-order take heed. :) However, he does list the fact that it occasionally belches out flame and unburnt fuel as a "con".. Anandtech has a huge (of course) UDMA/66 HDD roundup posted. They also have an Athlon heatsink roundup and a look at Asus's K7V-RM posted. This is (apparently) the first motherboard approved by AMD for the 1GHz Athlon. FiringSquad have a QuakeIII video-card shootout posted. Buncha cards tested on Celeron, P3 and Athlon systems. I had a quick read, looked like the GeForce DDR was winning (surprised expression) TweakTown checked out the CardCooler. I've got one in the review queue here.. I've gotta confess to secretly lusting after the Sunon fans, I want to rip it apart and use them as exhaust fans in the back of the HX-08 fulltower.. anyway (ahem) read their review of it here. 2CPU.com prove, as you'd expect, that 2 CPU's really is faster than 1. NVNews have some screenshots of the Ebola.. errr, Evolva demo posted. HotHardware have taken a look at the Shuttle 56X CDROM drive. That reminds me, I picked up a 68X drive at the PC show for AUD$75.00! And, it's quieter than my Asus 50X drive. Woo. Tech Report have a review of the Matrox G400 32MB up. HardOCP took a look at the VOS-32 monster cooler. My review is here for comparison. OverclockingWorldWide (must be running out of URL's with the word "overclock" in them) have taken a long, careful look at the Pablo Internet Tablet (the writing-on kind, not the "take 2 and call me in the morning" kind) and decided it sucks. TechWatch have an Everglide Giganta on review. AussieGamer have a review of BattleZone II, a cheapie RTS/Action game that's surprisingly good.. Reinstalled my Win2K box last night (just couldn't get Internet Connection Sharing to work again after swapping the LAN card out, very odd). Anyway, it was surprisingly painless - remembering now NT4 worked, I had copied all my data from the software-striped SCSI RAID set (thinking I would have to set it up again in Disk Manager after the reinstall) to another drive which I unplugged. Deleted my system partitions, reinstalled Win2K, logged in, and there it was, my F:\ drive, fully populated with data. That's a definite improvement over NT4, the config info (including the drive letter!?) must be stored in the file system somewhere, no doubt one of the "New NTFS Features" they were going on about.. UH X2 Slocket Cooler (0 Comments) (link)  Tuesday, 14-March-2000  14:42:18 (GMT +10) - by Agg I've been waiting for this for a while. UnlimitedHardware have posted instructions for building their Alpha-killing X2 slocket cooler, complete with 2 Nidec gamma blowers. Monster cooling with no DIMM blockage - pics and instructions here. P3 Xeon 866 announced (0 Comments) (link)  Tuesday, 14-March-2000  10:51:21 (GMT +10) - by Agg Intel have announced their 866MHz P3 Xeon. This is a coppermine Xeon, but given it has 256KB of L2 cache, I'm not sure what the difference between it and a normal P3 is (besides packaging + greater SMP support) .. maybe that's is all it is, so Slot2 motherboard owners can have a speed boost. Still, we're used to 1MB and 2MB L2 caches in these things. Anyway, I suppose I could always just read the datasheet.. Morning Stuff (0 Comments) (link)  Tuesday, 14-March-2000  08:41:36 (GMT +10) - by Agg A bit'o'news this morning. The Game Developers Conference was on in the US recently. Thresh has some info from ATI there, about their Rage6 (they have silicon). ExtremeHW have a quite a lot of hardware info from there, interesting read.. There's a cool water-cooled rig on TheTechZone this morning. He managed to resist the urge to put wet-tshirt pics of Kim in, damnit. This is a pretty neat hardware hack, turning a USD$99.00 "internet appliance" into a real(ish) PC which can load Linux, BeOS or Win98. Details here. Also, by designing a logo for that site you can win crappy prizes! There's a comparison of 2 water-cooling radiators here, including the Senfu twin-fan jobbie. I've got the Senfu gear here, had it for a couple of months, but have been waiting for their new pump to get here as the current one is too weak. Some stuff on VIA, their corporate philosophy, if you like, on ZDNet. What's that in your cereal box? Might be a PC game. It's not in Oz yet, but apparently in the US people are finding PC games in their cereal boxes.. Hehe, a peltier for your head.. PC Games and Console Games with no porting? (0 Comments) (link)  Monday, 13-March-2000  21:19:29 (GMT +10) - by Agg Interesting article here, perhaps a little off-topic, but it's about the launch of a new development environment that lets people write graphics code that will work on PC's and consoles, without needing to be ported. A snip: "We are very excited to be working closely with NVIDIA to demonstrate our product on their current graphics hardware,'' says Steve Gleitsmann, director of Business Development at Intrinsic Graphics. ``At our special demonstration at GDC, we are showing an example of exactly what we can deliver -- identical game code running at peak performance on both GeForce256 GPU and Sony PlayStation2." Athlon and P3 at 1GHz - Overclocked by default? (0 Comments) (link)  Monday, 13-March-2000  17:15:26 (GMT +10) - by Agg Interesting article here which has some info on the efforts that AMD and Intel have gone to in order to get 1GHz parts out. Voltage boosts, stockpiling the best cores, enhanced cooling.. sound familiar? All this would probably indicate less headroom for overclocking, which has been the case for the high-spec parts. There's a similar article here, too. Peltier on G3 Mac (0 Comments) (link)  Monday, 13-March-2000  14:42:00 (GMT +10) - by Agg This is a little old, but this article from Oct-98 shows a guy using a 10W peltier to overclock his G3 macintosh. Pretty interesting, thanks to Chris for the link. Here's some snippage: Several tests I performed on the cooler assembly convinced me of 2 things - the heat output using 12v is beyond the reasonable capacity of the heat sink & blower (in other words, it got too hot IMO), and the other voltage available, 5v, didn't provide enough cooling. If the resistance of the PJ stays constant the amount of cooling will be proportional to the square of the voltage that's applied, and 7v would give 2X the cooling of 5v, 8.7v would give 3X, 10v, 4X, ect. To the best of my recollection the G3 cpu generates about 5w of heat so I chose to design a 10w Peltier cooler. The PJ had an internal resistance of about 5 ohm , so a resistance load of 3.3 ohm in a 12v circut would drop the voltage to the PJ to just over 7v and yield 10w. The load was made by putting three 10 ohm power resistors in parallel in the circut. The resistors will get quite warm, so were mounted in a "tree" behind the internal speaker so as not to touch anything in the case. Catchin' Up (4 Comments) (link)  Monday, 13-March-2000  12:06:08 (GMT +10) - by Agg Ok, buncha stuff to be posted. In the future I might do 1 item per post. Dunno. Seagate are shipping 15,000rpm drives, info here. How's this sound - 4MB cache, with the option of 16MB! Ars-Technica have updated their Recommended Systems Guide. Not sure I agree with them completely, but it's an interesting read. TweakTown have some info on the microsoft X-Box here. They have their own proper domain now, too. OverclockersWorkbench have reviewed the MSI 6192, an i820 board with rambus. FiringSquad have a review showing a VIA Apollo Pro 133A board stomping a BX board in Quake3, very interesting. InsaneHardware have an interesting thingy up, a registry hack that is supposed to increase your modem speed by tweaking the windows IP stack to allow more streams. Dunno if it works or not, someone let me know. :) It's on their main page, scroll down a little. NVidia have "leaked" some 5.08 drivers. These are apparently alpha stage, but seem quite a bit quicker than the 3.xx family of drivers. Lotsa info out there, some here on NVNews, also a 2 parter on FiringSquad, Part 1 and Part 2.. FastMHz also have some benchmarks here This guy in adelaide has a very silly computer, it's a combination fishtank and case.. (bizarre) Some water-cooling stuff here. The guy's name is Bill Lowrey.. name kinda rings a bell.. isn't he somebody famous in Oz? This may be completely out there, but apparently someone has gotten a Coppermine working on a BP6. Not much info, but what there is is here. Thanks to FireMaster for the info. Can't remember if I posted this already or not, but it's a classic. Someone has put up a really well-done Microsoft parody page. Check it out here and follow the links etc.. hehehe! I discovered this the other day - you may be interested. It's the Australian branch of 2600.org, the hacker/crypto/etc group. Some interesting stuff. 2600.org.au Some Japanese guys have ripped open their PlayStation2 to show us what it looks like inside. Interesting temperature monitoring stuff here. UnlimitedHardware have been quiet for a while but they have some stuff there now on H.Oda's WCPUA2, which lets you change L2 cache settings on your Athlon. Apparently there's a Win2K issue in the current version, UnlimitedHardware have a fixed executable on their site. (There may be a new version on H-Oda.com by now, dunno.) Finally, IXBT have an interesting Willamette preview article up here. They don't reckon it'll be any faster than Coppermine or Athlon at the same speed. Hmm.. Promise Hacking (0 Comments) (link)  Monday, 13-March-2000  10:43:11 (GMT +10) - by Agg Poly, who you should all know from the forums, sent in a cool article detailing his experiences with the Promise Ultra66 to FastTrack66 hack. Loads of pics and benchmarks. Don't know what I'm talking about? The article explains that, too. :) Check it out here. Thanks Poly! New Articles (0 Comments) (link)  Monday, 13-March-2000  10:38:08 (GMT +10) - by Agg Just in case you thought I was slacking off, I've reviewed the new GlobalWin FKP-32 here. This is a pretty amazing cooler, I compare it to the MUCH larger FDP-32 and an Alpha unit.. with surprising results. Also, while I was at the PCShow in Sydney, I met up with John Gatt of FIC (remember, he sent the info on the SD-11 motherboard fix). He was demoing a 1GHz Athlon running on the SD-11, so I ran a few benchmarks on it. Not heaps, but a few. You can see 'em here. I've also been working on the site redesign. It's coming along nicely. This news script will of course feature in the new design (which is why I had to get it working first). News about News! (9 Comments) (link)  Monday, 13-March-2000  10:24:00 (GMT +10) - by Agg Well, the response in the forums was generally that news should stay. Ok, I'm now using a (very funky) script called NewsPro to manage the news. This should make my life a lot easier and hopefully keep the news-addicts happy, too. I'll be able to update whenever I get something interesting instead of letting them pile up knee-deep in my inbox and posting big updates every few days like I did until now. Of course, all feedback is welcome! If you're looking for something mentioned on the old news, you can see it here.. it's a huge text file, though (250kb+) and will be deleted when I need space. :) It was last updated on Tue 07-March-2000 (what a slacker) so if that was the last one you saw then don't bother looking at it.

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