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April 2001 |
Hmm.. played in a proper CS clan war tonight. Was fun, even tho my ping wasn't all you'd expect from a cable connection. I know alot of you write of clans as being full of 12yo power trippers, and to some extent your right. But playing in a team where everyone is working as a team to acheive the same result really brings CS together.. And then bringing the whole we-need-to-win-one-more-round-to-win-the-set type thing into it makes it even better.. more pressure. mmm.. pressure. Anyway, it's definitely (!!!!) a fun way of taking cs to another level.
LWD have a guide to changing the boot/startup screen in Windows 2000.
enfz sent in this article which I think he stole of /. about how IBM has developed a method of using carbon in a a similar manner to silicon in fabricating CPU dies. Except carbon is better..
DangerousDog have possibly the first review of Zalman ZM17CU video card cooler. It's basically one of those different-looking 'flower' heatsinks for your cpu's that has been squashed down to fit on a video card. Verrrry long, but thankfully flat. Be interested to see how it performs, as it's hard to get a fan onto 'em.
ElectricTech has intereviewed some guy called Dan Wood from Matrox.. Interesting thing that I read somewhere that some of you might of missed.. Matrox has decided the Hardcore Gaming market isn't one they want to compete in, with the product cycles and massive R&D costs involved just not balancing out for them.
Taconuts has built another one of those damn 'hs/f heat-stresser-tester' thing-o's, citing the lack of a thermal diode in the Athlon core as their reason. Why they just don't use a P3 is beyond me..
AMD has some *cough* price cuts *cough* about to take effect. Why the coughing? 48% drop in price is one hell of a price cut. Go AMD!! Incidently, someone pasted article in IRC, but a Mr Bell emailed it to me first, so he gets the cred for it. Please! e-mail all news to news@overclockers.com.au people! Telling us/me on IRC or to our personal emails is pointless.
Finally, alot of you might of probably already seen the plain-vanilla stickdeath animated .gif series. Well, this is the next level. Pretty hardcore.. for sticks, that is.
Reviews:
Mini Copper Orb on PCStats.
Sony MZ-R70 MiniDisc Player on Tech-Report.
GW CAK-38 at The-TechZone.
GW IStorm HDD/System Cooler on MikhailTech.
Dr Kildare sent in this funny video titled Every OS Sucks.. worth the download. It's 5 and a bit minutes of streaming video/audio but fairly low quality so I dunno how dialup peeps will fare..
There's some new Radeon drivers, says Hometek.
FutureLooks have an article on wearable computers.. very Borg.
More of the usual silly/interesting stuff on ZZZ Online.. including a crazy-looking monocycle (unicycle?) thing..
Icrontic have a document seemingly ripped from the latest Windows XP beta which lists the kernel enhancements of that new O/S.
I get a heap of spam mail here, but I just got one that made me double-take .. it's asking if I'm interested in a recipe for Chestnut Cookies. Not hot teen porn, not make a million dollars in 2 days by reading email, no.. a fabulous 3-generation-old authentic chestnut cookie recipe. Is that a code for drugs or something?! :)
Reviews:
Leadtek Winfast GeForce 2 Pro 64 video card on Cole3D.
Hercules Game Theatre XP sound card on digit-life.
Soltek SL-75DRV KT266 DDR motherboard on PCReview.
Zalman CNPS3000 socket cooler on FrostyTech.
AVGS socket coolers on AcidHardware.
Dead quiet Sunday as per usual.. went down to the local bistro today, had some very nice beer-battered perch fillets and drank a quiet beer with my girlfriend in the courtyard there with the sun on my back.. very pleasant way to pass the midday. :)
A few people sent this link to getting AMD Case Badges. They say they're for personal use so I guess they want you to get 'em. I've been waiting until mine arrived before posting the link - they arrived last tuesday, a couple of weeks after I ordered them. They're the thin metal sticker-type badges but they look pretty cool and hey, free stuff is free stuff.
Xenofex have a beginner's guide to networking. No cocktail parties involved.
Hmm, not seen a clear desktop case before..
Reviews:
Mouse Skatez on OCMelbourne.
Iwill DVD266R dual S370 motherboard with DDR on ClubOC.
InWin Q500 fulltower case on PCStats.
Thermaltake Volcano II socket cooler on OCTools.
Thermaltake Mini Copper Orb on IANAG.
Globalwin WBK-38 socket cooler on WildAndyC.
hmmm.. went out and had a good night last night. So good, in fact, that I woke up at 12.30pm.. it's rad not having to do anything sometimes. Then again.. the news *does* have to be done, so maybe I'm not as think as I free I am.
ClubOC is into it's second week of giving away MemMan ram. It's free, it's not a forum comp, it's open to .au residents. There is still 2 days and 16 prizes left to go on IANAG's contest, and not all the good stuff is gone!!
Kenn's Hardware has reviewed a Samsung DVD/CD-RW drive.. I think this is the first one of these I've linked to even tho they've been around for a while.. Looks to be an alright way of doing things. They also reviewed just a normal Samsung CD-RW as well if you've already got a DVD/are on a budget/whatever.
Umm, someone, Agg I *think* sent this to the news box.. it appears to be a series of videos about the human genome project. Or something, my netstats are a bit high from watching big brother so I'm not about to check it out.. you do need quicktime to watch them however, but you'd already have that from watching WAYD.
VyW have decided they're making case badges.. however, problem being they suck at art. So, they're giving away a Swiftech MC370 to whoever designs the best looking case badge.
BlueSmoke has quite possibly the first review of Microsoft WindowsXP Beta 2. It can't be that far away now.. but it seems stupid to have it come so close to the release of Windows2000..
Sad news for SMP AMD fans over on [H]ard|OCP.. apparently AMD has decided to keep the cost of the 760MP chipset high, so you won't be seeing any cheapish SMP boards like we have with the Intel platform recently. Kyle says he'd be suprised to see ones below $400 US, which means at least $800AUD. So, umm, yeah. There goes that idea. Damn.. hopefully the KT266 is dual capable like the Apollo Pro is.
I think Icrontic are missing the KT7 FAQ, so they've started up their own KT133 FAQ.. good for them. But arnt there already enough KT133-esque FAQ's?
Stasis sent in a link to this in-depth article about the upcomming Intel Xeon based on the P4 core.. yes, they are dropping the Pentium name from the Xeon branding. Seems to be getting closer and closer to the P4 design. It seems a bit dodgy to me to make people pay extra for SMP-capable processors when in the previous generation SMP compatability was standard.. more of a step backwards than a step forwards.
ExtremeOverclocking have a guide to adding a LCD character display to your tricked-out case. Looks to be pretty swanky to me. But remember.. swanky is just wanky with an s.
BlargOC have an article about AXIA cpus.. comparing the overclock ability of a 1.0GHz AXIA against that of a 1.2GHz. And when the 1.0GHz wins, they think somethings wrong with the AXIA craze. Thats sort-of ignoring the fact that EVERY chip is different, and they could of just got a dud 1.2 and a good 1.0. They're not going to stop the AXIA dance that easily.
Umm, it seems The Ctrl-Alt-Del is back, because they've got a few new det's up for you to download.. namely 7.65 for WinME as well as 7.58WHQL ones as well. Icrontic has just finished "hacking" the Det 12.10 drivers as well.. I wonder what they mean by that.
Icrontic has sort-of a ghetto review up of the Hispeed PC fan adaptor.. a bit confusing to me tho.. a ghetto review? Hmm..
Overclockers Online has reviewed the Elsa Gladiac 920 GeForce3. Sorry, not in much of a ranty mood this arvo.
RojakPot has reviewed a 10x lite-on CD-RW that features burn-proof technology.. good to see burn-proof filtering through from the top-of-the-range plextors down to the more affordable drives like the lite-on.
Finally today, it seems Acid Hardware suffer from the same spelling disease as me. They've reviewed a Skyhawk Aluminium case and told us that a news post would be Grealty Appreciated. I'm sure it will ;)
I was supposed to do the news yesterday, but somehow I forgot.. and I've got no idea what happened. Sort of a case of "Dude - wheres my car?" Agg's suggested I lay off the crack pipe for a bit.. but I can't remember smokin' crack. hmm.. Here's today's news.
Props to fad who sent in an email about the Via 686 bug.. Apparently Via Germany has aknowledged the bug in this word doc, and has released a list of KT133A boards affected by it, along with links to relevant BIOS updates.. So far the KK266, KA266 and 8KTA3 boards all have fixes..
Adaptec have released a USB 2.0 card, cashing in at $80US.. so it looks like USB 2.0 is going to be with us soon. The most interesting thing about USB2 that I missed was that it is fully backwards-compatible with the current USB1 format. Up until now I was gunning for firewire as it seemed to be the stronger technology, but backwards-compatability with existing technology is a big feather in USB2's cap.
Many of you I'm sure have been a bit worried about the upcomming WindowsXP copy protection scheme, and how's it going to affect "known misuse" of your Microsoft Software.. easy way out of it seemed to be to stick to existing software like Win2K. Unless of course, Microsoft introduce the copy-protection scheme into the already existing software like Tech-Report is.. *ahem* reporting.
PCHardware.ro have some info on modding heatsinks for better performance.. after having a quick glance at the article it seems they do so by adding a copper coldplate to the bottom. Not sure about performance increases, but you'd be stupid to add one to say, a hedgehog or an Alpha PAL6035 that's already toting a copper construction.
Anandtech has an interview with someone from ATi, of Raedon fame.. not a very interesting interview, they're pretty tersley answered questions. Still, if you're interested in the direction ATi is taking, I 'spose it's interesting enough (How many times can I fit the word interesting into a sentence you ask? Interesting question..)
VR-Zone has a guide to performing a voltage mod on the IWill KK-266R board allowing them to reach a theoritcal maximum of 2.6V! They only get to 2.13 before the Over-Voltage Protection kicks in tho.. this guide uses a variable resistor as well, making it possible to modify the voltage while the computer is running ??? (That is a question)
ExtremeOverclocking also have guide on how to perform this mod to the KT7(A) series of boards as well.. thanks to James.
More voltage mods today! This time it's OCmod with a guide to performing the mod on the EPoX 8KTA3 board.. hope alot of you don't perform these mods and end up with burn-out CPU's tommorrow! *crosses fingers*
IANAG have interviewd Mike Magee of The Inquirer fame.. formally The Register. I can't get to the interview atm tho, even tho I can get to the main IANAG page.. hrrrm.
GlideUnderground has gone open source.. not really sure what they mean by this, but the speak about it like it's the best thing since vapour phase cooling. Something about a site FOR the people, ran BY the people. I wonder, if someone screws up do they get THE people's elbow? hehe
DSLweb has an article up talking about USB network cards. They seem to be good in theory, but once you use them they're not really.. or maybe the o@h one is just screwy, I don't know. Anyway, moving from the o@h usb nic to a PCI Intel EtherExpress PRO/100+ dropped my pings down about 30-45ms. You decide.
ChillBlast has done a Thermal Paste shootout providing yet more ammo for those campaiging against guns. There was a thing on the TV news few days ago about anti-gun campaigners putting up a screen in shopping malls featuring a gun-site that locks onto visions of passer-by's in an effort to ban semi-automatic handguns. Creepy.. can't seem to find a URL about it tho.
MikhailTech has a thing, but they're not sure what to name it. Is it an article? review? comparison? shoot-out? I don't know. They look at the WBK series of Global-Win Heatsinks.
James Brown sent in this article talking about new developments in memory technology allowing Japanese scientists to pack 1TB (thats 1,000 Gigabytes kids) of memory into a cubic centimeter. Don't expect sugar-cube sized hard drives any time soon, but do expect storage technology to change from it's current magnetic-blips-on-a-peice-of-glass form to something like what they mention in the article in the future sometime.
X-Bit labs has a preview of three upcomming KT266-based boards from EPoX, Gigabyte and Shuttle.. and they don't think the boards seem to promising, even for pre-production samples. I'm personally waiting for another review of the A7V266 to confirm it's a good board, because it looks to be the one to get for now.. havn't seen anything from ABIT yet tho..
Speaking of Asus' boards, AmdMB have updated their A7V(133) FAQ again.. incidently Paul's KT7-FAQ moved to ViaHardware from Icrontic a while back if you've missed it.. even tho it's written specifically for the KT7 series of boards, alot of the issues/solutions apply to a wide range of KT133(A) situations as well.
Digit-Life have reviewed the Asus CUEP2-M, a mATX i815EP-based socket370 board. Now there's a mouthfull of geek anacronyms for ya.
If you're computer is pissing you off royally, maybe it might make for good therapy to go and have a poke around this site which features different computers getting fired up from a range of different firearms.
AMDuk have a guide to tweaking KT7A memory settings in your BIOS. It seems to be a little misguided tho, because they talk about OEM machines from Dell and Compaq.. and I've never even heard RUMORS about an OEM using a KT7-based board. Hmmm.
HiSpeed PC are giving away a range of free stuff including your choice of DDR or normal SDRAM Mushkin memory, a Claw and some rounded cables.. only 3 days left to enter, and all you have to do is email them. Toooo easyyy!
FutureLooks have a guide up to using eBay! It's written fairly simply, they actually say it's for dummies, so, um, yeah. If you're a dummie, this is for you.
Saturday Afternoon
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Saturday, 28-April-2001 15:02:28 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Fan adapters seem to be the new rage - Kyle over at the HardOCP has gotten in on the action too, now. He checked out some adapters now available in the US that look suspiciously like the ones we checked out from Japan here last month. Lombers points out that there are some perspex ones available in Oz now!
Randy got his 650MHz Athlon to 1154MHz which is not too shabby at all - monster cooling with watercooled 156W peltier. Check out his website for more info and also his PCDB entry.
Acidhardware wandered along to the Sydney Consumer Electronics Show (which I believe is still running) .. anyway, pics and info for those who can't attend in person..
Scott points out an interesting clear pc project.
Catalyst mentioned a huge list of all Detonators, official or otherwise, on Guru3D. Now you see why I said "there's just too many versions" in my Transcend TS-ASL3 earlier in the week. :)
Quick bunch'o'reviews..
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Saturday, 28-April-2001 09:14:45 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Leadtek GeForce2 MX video card on THC.
ThermoSonic ThermoEngine socket cooler on Inside-Hardware.
FrontX Multimedia Ports front-panel connectors on PCExtremes - our review here.
Enermax 350W PSU on Athlon-Planet.
1.33GHz AMD Athlon 266MHz-FSB processor on Hexus.
ECS K7VMA SocketA motherboard on MrPCPro.
CaseAce GearGripPro PC carry-kit on LostUniverse.
ASUS AGP-V7100 Pro mx400-based video card on Digit-Life.
AVGS socketA coolers on Ripnet.
OCZ Monster II socket cooler on TweakTown.
Cooler Master DP5-5H51 socket cooler on Icrontic.
Transcend AKT4 SocketA motherboard (in German) on TecCentral.
MS Optical Wheel Mouse on G3D.
Xeenon MPire in-car entertainment system (!) on Tech-Report.
DFI AK75-EC SocketA motherboard on VIAHW.
Olympus E-10 digicam on NeoSeeker.
Samsung ML-4600 laser printer on IANAG.
Thursday Night
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Thursday, 26-April-2001 23:57:54 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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It feels like ages since I did news! Thanks to alchemy for holding the fort - your spelling's improving daily, dude! :)
Trevor has some cool PC mods happening on his site - click "case mods" in the top graphic to get to 'em.. go the VB-PC. :)
Cool stuff in the PCDB, too - DrRom has updated pics of his (truly) monstrous box, Michael.O has a very cool neon-window jobbie and fp3 has some pet-inhaling action happening..
HighSpeedPC have fan adapters. Sure, they're in the US, but at least they speak English (kinda) - remember the only other place we've seen this has been in Japan. Our review of some japanese ones here. Alchemy has scammed one of these new ones for review already I think.
Ye gods, the Courier Mail is reporting on this crazy, dangerous new fad called overclocking. Sounds much too dangerous for sensible people to experiment with. Who's up for an afternoon's trainspotting or stamp collecting? "I'm one of the last people I know to start doing it and my house-mates all overclock. They use a demister switch taken out of a car," he said. GET BACK, HE'S GOT A SWITCH! Bwaha, this stuff cracks me up. :) Thanks Chuckler.
Tech-Report have a thermal dissipation table - what heat is a certain CPU at a certain speed giving out? Very useful..
TheTechZone wondered which CPU would be best coupled with a GeForce3.. 1GHz P3 or 1GHz Athlon.
Dan has checked out a bunch of cool flashy things. Insert standard Agg-grumble about Dan getting all the cool toys here.
Reviews:
Asus A7M266 SocketA DDR motherboard on OCPrices.
ThermoPhobia copper shims on ExtremeOC.
QPS Que! Fire external CDRW drive on NeoSeeker.
WITHOUT PREJUDICE
Ok, I wanted to set a few things straight. Firstly, I really do apologise for the lack of information I've been providing about what's going on. Unfortunately I am not very knowledgeable in things legal and my advice has been to say as little as possible, as anything I say could be seen as an admission of liability - of course, I strongly deny ANY liability at all. The lawyers tell me that by saying "WITHOUT PREJUDICE" it indicates that I am NOT accepting any liability and that this can't be used against me in court. So that's why it says it above - because I really don't believe I'm at fault and indeed there seems to be some legislation which protects me in this instance. Anyway, I CAN confirm that it's a legal issue to do with Vendor Verdicts. Somebody felt they were defamed by someone else and, despite there being some legislation which seems clearly designed to protect webmasters in this situation, they claim I am liable. I had to take the forums down to prevent any further problems while we sort out this one.
I have received literally hundreds of emails since taking the forums down. Most express support. Many express confusion. Some are abusive because they don't understand why I'm "destroying the community". Please understand that I took the forum down as an absolute last resort to PROTECT the community and to protect myself. OCAU represents the last two years of my life. Ask my girlfriend - this website is my baby, it's my pet, it's been my obsession for the last two years. No, I'm not going to frivolously destroy it. Having shut the forums down feels like I've chopped my arm off. In fact for the last three weeks or so I've been in a state of near panic because I simply haven't known what to do. I spent last night at my parents place, and the 4-hour ride there and back and some home-cooked food helped me calm down and sort out my thoughts.
So what happens from here? There are a few directions I can take things and I'm investigating them now. I WILL keep you posted as much as I can - unfortunately I simply can't say as much as I'd like to about what's going on for reasons I explained earlier. Please understand that there are things I'd like to do or say but I can't because of external forces. I really do appreciate your support and patience and I hope to put this behind us ASAP.
Now I've just got to wade through another 200 emails - apologies that I can't reply to them all individually, but I am reading them all and it really makes it seem worthwhile to read the positive stuff there. Stay tuned..
Hmmm.. sorry no news yesterday night.. I was über tired, wrote up two articles and nearly faceplanted the keyboard - fun! Anyway, now with the support of every uni students good friend, caffiene, I bring you the news. And its long. Really long.
Top of the 'box this morning is TweakTown, who have been busy and whipped up two reviews.. first review is of a Netcomm Smart I-Share.. basically an integrated 56k modem, 4 port 10mbit hub, NAT and firewall.. sounds alright, apart from the modem bit. Second review is of a Vantec Socket-A hs/f which pretty much looks like a fop38.. same huge fan, same huge heatsink style. So performs about the same, but this one costs a little less.
Guru3D have an eeeextremley long review of the Hercules Prophet III, 64Mb GeForce3 card. 20 pages long in fact.. and guess what?!? half of it is graphs. We all know how much I luuuurrrrve graphs. *cough* They're a good card tho, VooDoo and myself have been playing around with one.
RipnetUK have just finished a massive heatsink roundup.. 14 different heatsinks went under the microscope to see which one performed best.. and of course it was one of the turbine-fan based models.
ClubOverclocker have just reviewed the OCZ Gladiator hs/f.. a fully copper jobbie that according to them works really well.. looks absolutley tiny too.. makes the 60mm delta (geblah! I've had enough of turbine fans) look like it's 80mm.
Stuart sent us in a link to a new Half-Life mod called SvenCo-op.. their page seems to be under a bit of load at the moment, so I can't really say that much about it. He assures me it's pretty cool tho.. pretty amazing how much life has been extracted from the eons-old q2/hl engine.
PC Stats have reviewed a *thing* of questionable usefullness, but still quite neat nonetheless.. its an CD-ROM, Floppy Disk Drive and Hard Drive all integrated into a single 5 1/4" bay. It uses laptop components to get down to such a small size.. so don't expect it to be fast or cheap. Still, could be *very* usefull for a tiny PC.. MP3 player maybe?
3D Spotlight has reviewed what they call two 'budget gaming laptops'. I think their title is a bit wrong tho.. the words budget, gaming and laptop where never meant to be used together. Gaming on a 500MHz celeron with 4mb of really slow laptop video ram? I don't think so.. Might be usefull for the review of budget laptops tho.
TechExtreme has reviewed the Sony MZR 9000, continuing their rampage of MiniDisc madness. I'd expect it to be F'n Expensive© by the time it's even available in Australia, so this is only a toy for those with well-lined pockets. Mini-Disc is really the format that could, if only the heavy handed big companies could free up the format and allow companies to make lower end (cheaper!) products.
X-Bit Labs has an in-depth guide to the GeForce3 chipset and range of graphics cards. I think they missed out on a card. Ahahahaah! We didn't ;)
VyW has a guide to making your own fan adpators ghetto style.. ie. out of cardboard. Definatley a good idea if you want to get rid of that f'n annoying turbine fan noise tho.
NeoSeeker have reviewed the Samsung Yepp! YP-NDU portable MP3 player. See what I mean about Mini-Disc.. even the younger and computer-based format of MP3 has overtaken it. Sheesh. The Samsung player looks a bit like the X-Box with that Green Thing on the front of it tho..
HardOCP are quashing the rumors about the piracy system of the upcomming WindowsXP which was thought to be F'n Crap©. Basically, the only downside is that you won't be able to pass your CD-Key around to all your mates, because MS will figure it out and 'null' your key. (ie. stop it from working) It is aknowledged in the article that within a week (hah! I reckon thats a bit generous, I'd say 3 days) there will be a "workaround" for it.. they've also reviewed the MSI KT133A board and found out that they really like it. Really, realllly like it in fact.
Dave from SystemLogic has reviewed the D-Link Wireless DSL/Cable router. I'm guessing this is going to mean Wireless LAN cards for all your computers as well.. pretty pricey, and slow. How much do you hate wires, that is the $64k question..
FutureLooks have got themselves confused with DansData I think.. they think that the Kodak DC5000 they reviewed is a sherman tank. But then, we all know that Dan is the only one that reviews tanks.
ViaHardware has just finished reviewing a really interesting little device.. it's basically a thing (technical term) that you put between your Socket-A and your processor, and it will allow you to change the multiplier of the CPU, even on a board that dosn't support mult adjustment. Two questions popped into my head looking at this.. first - would it be possible to make something similar, but alot higher so you could fit absoltutley *monster* heatsinks on your processor. Second, is extending the length between pin and socket bad?
EverythingUSB has reviewed those Keyring USB storage stick things I linked to maybe a week ago. They're definitely leet. (look! I splet it write!)
MikhailTech has reviewed a case we've never seen before. And may possible never see again, because I have no idea where you could get one in Oz. Funny name tho.. Sungmin's Minion 4000B. Wonder who thought of that.
It seems the Ctrl-Alt-Del has lost their host, so until they can find a new one, their site will be down.. taking their place, however, is Overclockers Melbourne, which has officially launched with a new URL - www.ocmelbourne.com. Go over and check em out.
The Guru of 3D has released RC4 of their RivaTuner 2.0 software. No, RC4 isn't like RC5. RC stands for Release Candiate.. and a RC of a 2.0 version software? I'm confused.
A reminder that the GameServe ANZAC lan is happening on the 12th and 13th of May at the Gold Coast.. in the 5-star Gold Coast international Hotel! fwoar, shmick-o.. no volleyball courts for me, no sir. I'm going, and so are a few other OCAU people I think.. so come over and say g'day if you go too.
JeffK has a guide to OvarCloaking.
Finally, JSI Hardware has a review of some OCZ MicroBGA PC166 SDRAM. Interesting thing about this is that at 166MHz, it'd be possible to have the PCI and AGP buses running at their default.. if we had some higher dividers that is. Hmmm.. there's an idea Via, give us some custom multipliers and make an 'overclockers' chipset. That'd be leet.
Anyway, VooDoo reckons the chicks on big brother are in the shower, so I'm going to go do that now ;)
Reviews:
Thermosonic Thermoengine on Inside-Hardware here.
Updated Logitech Cordless Ballless mouse on HardcoreWare here.
Pentium4 1.7GHz on Digit-Life here.
650W Enermax PSU on Icrontic here.
CrazyPC rounded IDE cables on IPKonfig here.
ABIT KT7A on TheTechZone here.
DigiDoc5 on lost universe here.
MemoryMan PC166 on ClubOverclocker here.
Tuesday Night Depression Session
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Tuesday, 24-April-2001 23:40:56 (GMT +10) - by alchemy
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Well, the forums may be gone, but everything else is staying the same.. and that includes the news. So here it is :)
Icrontic are back, and have reviewed the Zalman Flower Gold heatsink.. they've also taken a trip to Plycon Computers, one of the larger US online retailers. Whilst the article reads a bit like an advertisement, there there are some pretty cool pictures from the store. Be hard to keep your hands to yourself in there ;)
Pat from Tech Patrol has reviewed the new ThermalTake Copper Orb.. good to see Australian Hardware sites putting in the hard yards.
NVnews has some info on price drops on the GeForce range of video cards.. all prices are in US$, so a rough guide is to double it, and then add some more. Gotta love our currency.. thing that's got me wondering tho - is a GeForce3 almost 8 times better than a GFMX200? Because it's about 8 times the price..
GamingIn3D have a really interesting article about, funnily enough, Gaming in 3D. More specifically, proper IMAX-style 3D, not GeForce style 3D.. I remember having a go of that Life Saver's 3D game that was in shopping centres almost 8yrs ago now.. the one where you put on a pair of goggles and a glove, and stood on a stage. That was just awesome, even by today's standards. I find it odd that the same level of technology has not yet been brought to the PC gaming scene, as it's just simplimg amazing. You think B+W is an immersive game, imagine what it's like being in a computer generated world where you turn your head, not drag your mouse. Wonder how much longer we have to wait..
Well, OCWorkbench definitley have the review that I've been waiting for.. that being the Asus A7V266, KT266 mobo. Not much a fan of their page layout for this review, waaaay too many pages.. but the results are there to see - it performs well! Very well, in fact. Wouldn't mind laying my paws on one of these babies. They also have some other info about KT266 on their news page.
ClubOverclocker have reviewed some fan filters.. sounds like a pretty stupid thing to buy tho.. could easily make them out of a pair of.. *ameh* stockings. But anyway, sounds like a dumb idea, but is actually a very wise one. Dust can be very bad.
EverythingUSB have info up about a new type of Kodak digicam, the 'EasyShare' range. Basically, what they bring is automatic battery charging and synchronisation of data once it's connected to a computer.. exactly like a Palm Pilot does. Old idea, but very handy one.
IANAG have reviewed the Samsung ML-4500, what they reckon to be the cheapest 600dpi laser printer on the market. Handy thing to have if you need to print out lots and lots and lots of stuff, like I do. Lucky parent's have a *massive* Fujitsu digital photocopier jobbie.
FutureLooks has looked at a Kodak PalmPix digicam.. a sort of clip-on camera for your Palm Series3. Good for people aiming for the James Bond look. Or if you're trying to out-31337 someone. Can't think of any actual real-world uses for it tho. Hrrm..
LWD have reviewed an Earthmate GPS with a Street Atlas package.. 'spoze that's usefull for geeks that actually go out of the house.. I know that I can't be the only one. Also be good if you still havn't won that I'm-more-31337-than-you competition.
Finally, something with a bit of culture for you tonight. Well, actually, just an another foreign-language article. (Back to the 'fish).. an Italian overclocking site has a 1GHz Athlon running at 1.6GHz with 2.2V.
Reviews:
Evergreen RumbleFX Headfones on AwareMag here.
1.30GHz Athlon on OCOnline here.
Senfu Thermal Proble on WillAndyC here.
Core vs Alpha PEP66 @ WWF.. I mean VR-Zone, here.
Forums unavailable.
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Tuesday, 24-April-2001 21:13:25 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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WITHOUT PREJUDICE
Effective immediately the Overclockers Australia Forums are unavailable. This is because it is impossible for the operators of this website to personally examine and approve every message posted to the system. While we explicitly (as per the "Rules, Policies, and Disclaimers" of the forum) deny any responsibility for the content of postings by other people, we feel it is in the best interests of all involved that the forum be removed.
They will be down indefinitely. This is not something I do lightly - I probably feel worse about the closure of the forums than you do. I hope people will continue to use the PCDB, to read and submit reviews/articles and of course to visit the news page. I intend for this to be a speedhump for OCAU, not the end of the road.
I hope to provide more information as and when I can. I appreciate your patience and support.
Well, here's part #2, as promised...
Alot of people pointed out to me that the Hard OCP Shower-Head thing I linked to was also on Overclockers.com (no relation to OCAU).. where they get all technical and actually use the correct term for a device like that.. a water tower!
Well, the GeForce3 is going to be hitting the retail market soon, so you're going to be seeing *ALOT* more reviews of it.. as if the 20-odd we've already seen arn't enough.. still, more reviews mean more viewpoints.. and if theres, say, 50 reviews - not all of them can be written by someone under nVidia's thumb can they? CAN THEY? (Tech-Zone has their review here).
The Overclocker Cafe has pitted Artic Silver Adhesive up against Frag tape in a battle to the end.. its pretty obvious which one will win, but the catch with Artic Silver is that you can't get the damn stuff off.. making it hard to return your card if it breaks (for some totally unrelated reason of course).
Hypothermia, as always, are giving away lots of free stuff in the easy-as-pie send-us-an-email-and-your-in-the-draw competition.. This time it's a *complete* water cooling kit from Overclockers Hideout.. good-o.
Tech-Planet are doing the timewarp thing and reviewing an Alpha PAL6035 (no, they're not doing the nutbush dance).. a pretty old but still really decent performing heatsink.. They've come down in price quite a bit over the last couple of months, so might be worth looking at.
Digital-Science has joined in the AMD Tech Tour.. basically a heap of AMD guys touring 'round the country (the USA, not Aus :() showing off AMD's wares. Pretty interesting read in itself.. but what *really* seals it is the confirmation of Dual Duron's.. YES- Durons will work in SMP (according to this article).. and from that I'm assuming that there will be a couple of *cheaper* 760MP mobos to use them in as well.. I can't wait!
PCExtremes has reviewed and benchmarked the nVidia Det's 12.0, for those that want to be on the cutting edge.. Speaking of the cutting edge, best reasons why you'd want to run a leaked beta of pre-release MS software was 'So you can get used to dealing with the bugs in tomorrows software', from Greg.. putting a positive spin on that reason however, was Scot, an IT professional who said he want's to get a grip on the software before his (l)user's start playing around with it.
MikhailTech have reviewed a copper heatsink radiator thing. Hard to describe, but it looks bloody awesome.. kind of like those Kendon things, but made out of copper. If CPU's keep on hotting up I beleive designs like this are the next step up from todays lots-of-fins-and-a-fan heatsink designs.. so let's hope Athlon stays on the market long enough for some killer designs like this to mature, so we're left with awesome cooling solutions for when Palamino and other 'cooler' designs come onto the market.
Thanks to John, who pointed out this article over on ZDNet.UK talking about a precedent set in a US court to back free speech on the web. Short and curlies of it is a federal US judge has ruled in favour of anonymous free speech online, and defended peoples rights to do so without implicating the owner of where they're posting in a great mess. Why is Australia so backwards? *sigh*
ElecticTech has reviewed a HP Omnibook 6000, a 900MHz lappy. Looks to be a pretty killer rig if your a road warrior or something like that.. nothing like some of the 'portable' systems people have been building themselves of late however.
ViaHardware has reviewed the Shuttle FV24, Via PL133-based mobo.. and it is absoltutley tiny! How small? Well.. marginally longer than a pair of DIMM slots.. can anyone say 'car mp3 player' ?
VooDoo pointed this out to me on IRC.. a pretty amusing version of YMCA with AXIA words instead. Very good work funkychild.. got me laughing :)
Guru3D has two bits of nVidia Geforce news.. first off is a review of a 32Mb GeForce PRO.. don't think I've seen one of these reviewed yet. Looks good.. second of all is what they claim to be the first pictures of the retail-boxes Hercules Prophet III, Geforce3 card..
PCReview want you to register and post in their forums just so you can win a crappy Intel internal modem. Hah! 'sif.
EverythingUSB has compiled a list of the top 30 most popular USB products on the market. Whoop-de-do-da!
Finally today, PCStats has looked at a Voice Pen. Why can't the bloody digital future inventors leave already working things alone. I know how a pen works, and I don't need one that talks to me. Or one that listens to me either. A pen that writes stuff, as it should, is fine. Thankyou :)
Reviews:
P4 1.7GHz goes Chip-to-Chip with a 1.33GHz Athlon on X-Bit Labs.
KT7A-RAID reviewed on PCHardware.RO.
BlueOrb reviewed on CydroTech.
Transcend TS-ASL3 i815E motherboard review!
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Tuesday, 24-April-2001 02:03:55 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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It's been a while since I reviewed a motherboard, hasn't it? :) Achieva sent this one over and to be honest I was a little wary. It's integrated, you see - it's got onboard video and sound. Oh dear, I thought, this'll be some horrible OEM-destined thing, no fun at all.. I was actually quite surprised. As it's the first i815E motherboard I've reviewed, I did some benchmarking of the onboard stuff and had to find out some info about the chipset too. 3 pages, I hope you enjoy it..
Click here for the full review!
Well.. I *was* hoping to save myself from doing the news tomorrow morning by doing the news tonight.. However, because I did that same thing last night.. it didn't work. News box is chockas.. so here's half of it, expect another half whenever I regain conciousness tomorrow morning.
First off tonight is Dan.. he's written an verrrrry long article about watercooling, more specifically the infinipro kit. I must warn you tho, a hammer was harmed in the production of his article.. that's still illegal in Tasmania you know. Poor Dan.. time is limited.. soon he'll be dodging spring shrapnel and obtuse screws in prison.
Chillblast have reviewed the Coolermaster EP5-6III.. a rather bland looking okish performing heatsink, but nonetheless is AMD certified for 1.33GHz. Starting to wonder what's with the flood of bland looking heatsinks lately.. are manufacturers turning away from the flashy-and-good-performing design as we reach the limits of air cooling? Or are more webmasters just desperate for stuff to review.
WildAndyC has reviewed a full computer system. Not something we'd normally link to, but I've only done it to point out where it's lacking.. I mean, a 1.2GHz AMD system with an MX video card? and 128Mb of RAM? Who can pick the cost cutting.. it's pretty obvious they've built it to a CPU clock speed. *shakes head*
NeoN of PCMonkey has decided that he's better off spending his time poking fun at the PC hardware scene than participating in the race to be the first to review a new piece of hardware before anyone else does... the site is marginally humerous, so it's probably worth taking a look at.
Digit-Life have reviewed a MiSEL MPJuke-2000.. a discman MP3 CD thingo.. I reckon the major problem with this type of product is all of them are lacking the sony-esque quality of portable cd players.. Those creative ones however, are definatley not half bad. Not half-bad at all..
HardAvenue have crawled out of nowhere to review a Hercules KyroII 64Mb card.. no idea where they managed to get the card from - but good work Nza.. good to see you back and reviewing stuff thats current :)
There's a pretty neat idea, more of an article really, that's been posted on the Hard OCP Forums.. and that's running the coolant in your water cooling system through a shower head and letting it fall.. cooling the water as it does. No doubt about it working, it's dropped temps as much as 7deg in some instances.. but what worries me is having your coolant interact with the air in the atmosphere.. IMHO it'll give you alot of gunk in your system, increase chances of corrosion and all that.
If you're thinking of adding or replacing some LED's to your mod'd case (or keyboard or mouse or whatever), then TweakMax have a decent review of all the different types of LED's.. like ultra-bright blue, white, yellow, etc.. definitely a handy thing to go and have a read of.
Tech-Report have gone into great detail with their review of the the new Intel P4 1.7GHz.. nothing's changed, except for a new clock speed.. no core updates or anything. Still, as pointed out in the first reviews of the P4, it's longer instruction pipeline means that what it needed was to quickly ramp up in speed.. and 200MHz is a fair old jump.. remember when 16MHz was a big one?
Anand also has his review of the P4 1.7Ghz up, albeit not going into as much detail as TR did.. they also have an editorial concering the Graphics Card industry at the moment.. quite cut-throat it is.
[rant] Incidently.. one thing thats really starting to confuse me is the huge mass that alot of people seem to think is required with a review these days. Anand's P4 review includes 3 different processor architectures, and no less than five different motherboards. That's good, as it gives them a broad spectrum on which to test.. but I havn't got the patience to look at five pages of benchmarks.. I don't doubt the usefulness of benchmarks in determining how good (or bad) a peice of hardware is in regard to another peice of hardware (even tho some may not show the true story.. GF3/DX8 comes to mind), but what's with all the graphs? I don't even load them.. I click right through. Be interesting for to see what how many users do the same thing as well.. I may be correct in guessing that the extensive benchmarks many reviews go into now are just a waste of time and bandwith. Or maybe they're not. Anyway.. [/rant]
Finally tonight, just to weird you out.. ZZZ Online #80 is out!
Don't you hate it when you can't sleep.. you lie there, and you just cannot, no matter how many sheep you count, lapse into sweet sleep? Well, thats me now. So hopefully after doing the news I'll be sleepy.. hopefully :)
First email out of the box tonight is from ClubOverclocker, 'cuz they're giving away an IWill KK266 KT133A mobo.. and to win all you have to do is email them.. too easy!
Akiba have some info (well, stuff in Japanese.. the 'fish does an alright job of translating it) about a Benchmark developed by AMD called N'Bench.. it features a ninja and space ship scene, so I'm guessing it's kind of like 3DMark2001.. of course, when pitted against a P4 1.5GHz, an Athlon 1.2GHz came out on top.. which should be expected.
Digit-Life has a review of the IBM 60GXP, the successor to the 75GXP.. only difference being the 60GXP uses 20gb platters instead of 15Gb of the 75GXP. Performance stays ~ the same.. so no need to upgrade, just more of an evolutionary than revolutionary shift.
TweakTown waltzed along to the launch of the Via C3 processor the other night in Sydney, and they look a few photos of the event.. interesting to have a stickybeak to see what goes on at an IT launch event.
If that wasn't news, then this definitley IS.. the Modding Zone headed off to The Gathering.. the ultimate in über lans.. to get what I'm on about, take a squiz at this pic.. just insane.. 48Mbit connection to the net as well!
3D chipsets has a link to DirectX 8.1 beta.. no idea whats new.. no idea really why you'd want it at all. Guru3D also has it if that first site is down. I'm sure there's a mad bunch of you out there that do tho, so this is for you.. you mad people :)
The CAD have the latest build of MS IE6 Beta as well.. good if your looking to stock up on beta pre-release MS software.. if for any reason you'd actually want to do that. Actually.. mail me and tell me the best reason why you'd want to get a leaked beta of a peice of microsoft software, and I'll post the funniest one(s) tommorrow.
OCWorkbench have some pics up of the upcomming Asus A7V266, KT266-based mobo.. looks alright, maybe the first KT266 board I've seen with both DDR and SDR RAM slots.. bit curious as to why the floppy connector is down near IDE4 tho.. might want to get one with the Promise IDE controller as well.. mine/Agg's experiences with the onboard Via IDE controllers hasn't been that good.
A reader emailed me in a link to this review of a new Orb.. a Mini Copper Orb.. now, the whole thing isnt copper, just the base.. but that dosn't matter so much, can actually be more effecient than a solid-copper block.. they benched it up against a ThermoEngine.. and it won by a few degrees, but without the Delta 7k rpm fan that makes that hs/f a killer.. so if you're looking for a hs/f in the quiet-but-good category that might be it.. if you want killer performance tho - probably not.
VooDoo went on a bit of a paste-fest on IRC tonight, and let us all know these two gems.. First of all, a Cyborg bear.. maybe to match his borg case perhaps? hehe.. also, about some case badges that could possibly be better than the OCAU ones.. maybe. nahhhhr. but close.
Finally, ClubOverclocker has reviewed those perdy looking Zalman Flower heatsinks.. and decided that they suck, badly so. Need more airflow.. thats sort of a downfall of that design. Be interested to see what they could do in the form of passive (ie: no fan) cooling tho.. I'm starting to get darn sick of fan noise.
Sabrtooth, a regular in IRC and the forums, has put some pictures up from a recent Queensland Gamers League event. Jim from Realtime Systems was there giving away sticks of Corsair memory and VooDoo from Computer Alliance was showing off his new laser-cut "Borg 2" case. Despite the AMD DDR logos on the side it is currently a dual Socket370 machine while waiting for a dual SocketA motherboard to arrive for it.
Anyway, pics are here, you should be able to work out what's what from the filenames. If the page doesn't load properly, hit reload, people have reported it being a little dodgy. Looks like a lot of people having a lot of fun - for more info on QGL check out their site.
How to make your 7000rpm fan quiet!
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Sunday, 22-April-2001 01:44:49 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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This article from Tom Simpson, who details a simple circuit to lower the voltage supplied to a fan. It's a pretty good explanation of a very useful mod, something to incorporate into your fanbus no doubt..
Click for the full article!
With Agg being busy I offered to not say no if he asked me to do the news.. hehe, so he asked and I didn't say no. Not much there, but then - I'd imagine with the news drought of late you'd be thirsty for whatever you can get. I went home up the coast to celebrate a mate's 19th birthday by getting nice 'n drunk on free alcohol, so that's my excuse.
PCCitrix have updated their preview of the MSI KT266 board thats been creating quite a stir over performance based on the placement of a resistor.. so maybe it's best that they're leaving their review sit for a while until the dust settles. Like we all are with KT266 platforms..
RipNet have posted a quick guide to tweaking your memory settings in the BIOS for optimum performance. Incidently, if you've got an A7V133 (like me), it'd pay to track down an article written a while ago (check news archives, I'm too lazy after working at the Bronco's game tonight) on using WCPSET to enable 4-way interleaving on this board.. pretty respectable increase in performance from doing so.
DeezNutz has had an interesting rant to the news box about the anti-piracy measures microsoft will be implementing in the upcomming WindowsXP release.. and while I agree with what he's saying, as I understand it, there has been a "final" copy of OfficeXP floating around the warez sites of late, and through use of a special OEM cdkey it bypasses all this stupid product registration crap. Now I'm not a microsoft employee, but I won't be at all suprised if WindowsXP has the exact same feature, which will no doubt be requested by several large (and influencial) OEM's.
The CAD has reviewed a Microsoft Cordless Wheel Mouse. I'm not going to try and babble on about this one, I'm not pleased with MS mouses atm.. mine is screwed, and can't be fixed under warranty :~(
VoidYourWarranty has started ricing up cases, and have posted a review of sorts, about the PCMods smoked window kit..
HardCoreWare have reviewed the Tennmax LasagneII chip cooler.. like a blue orb, except it dosn't take up a PCI slot... and it's not blue. That can be tonight's paradoxx as well.. a small chip cooler being hardcoreware? hmm..
ClubOverclocker have reviewed a professional computer toolkit.. well and good. My toolkit consits of One (1) phillips head screw driver. That's it.
Futurelooks has looked (as they do) at a Flash USB pocket hard drive. Basically a flash card with a capacity of anywhere between 16mb (easy on the hip pocket) to 1gig (emptying out the hip pocket).. pretty handy little thing too by the looks of it, only hampered by the cost of flash memory. Which is sort of a big hampering.. other thing to remember is that one of the advantages of flash memory (blazing fast solid-state speed) is removed by the relative slowness of the USB interface.
OverclockingDK (German?) has reviewed the KinetiZ 7E-A KT133A mobo from QDI.. I think their site is down at the moment tho, I can't get to it. Might be up later or the o@h proxy is possibly just screwed. Who Knows?
AllTechBox has a guide on giving case fans CPR... or just bringing the back to life with the aid of mouth-to-fan ressuciation. eh, I'm too tired to make non-lame jokes. Maybe I'll just not make jokes instead.
SpodesAbode has crawled out of a hole and reviewed some Senfu water cooling gear.. as reviewed by the rest of the scene ages ago.
Finally, there's a pre-rounded IDE cable review on TheTechZone. Bed time now. More in the morning when the news box is semi-full.
Saturday Evening
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Saturday, 21-April-2001 19:17:23 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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There's a competition to win some jun^H^H^Hsecondhand stuff here in the forums. :)
David says: Win2k driver 2.0 for Game Theatre XP. Win2k people have been waiting for this one, brings driver up to date with 98/ME version.
Mike points out this interesting little digital photography state-of-the-nation type thing on ArsTechnica.
XG8 sends word that the GeForce FAQ has been updated yet again..
Reviews:
NewQ Platinum on FullOn3D.
Asus CUV4X-D dual socket370 motherboard on VIAHW - not stable in dual mode for them.
Globalwin CAF-12 cardcooler on ClubOC. Our review here.
Etherfast 10/100 5-port switch on MadnessPC.
Mandrake 8, a Linux distribution, on PCTalk. Check out our quick look at 7.0 here.
ATI Radeon VE video card on xbit.
Sorry for the gap in news.. I spent last night in jail! No, my violent past hasn't caught up with me (yet), I was doing a "Ghost Tour" of Maitland Gaol with a few friends. A tour of the (now empty) facility before spending the night in a cell with the spooks! Or in my case, with a bottle of vodka and a group of progressively drunker and louder friends. Didn't see any ghosts, but fun was had. The ride there and back in torrential, freezing rain I could probably have lived without, tho. I think all the other news people were off doing things too, hopefully not involving jails.. although, hang on, I think Sciby's still locked in that cupboard, whoops.
(ps: in anticipation of the people who are going to hassle me for spelling "gaol" as "jail", my early education was in a heavily americanised (overseas) culture, so "gaol" just looks really weird and wrong to me. cope with it. :) )
I'm hoping to catch up on a few articles this weekend, mostly reader submitted stuff like the Blue Orb thing below but hopefully a couple of my own reviews too. This is because Monday week I'm hitting the road, riding from Sydney to Perth via the Nullarbor, destination Exmouth for a week or so SCUBA diving and snorkeling with Whale Sharks. This is a trip I've been intending to do for 3 years or more, so I'm really looking forward to it. I've got a lot of loose ends to tie up before then and right now I'm operating on about an hour's sleep and nursing a hangover, so bear with me, news is on the way!
Lapping the Blue Orb
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Saturday, 21-April-2001 17:19:23 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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David sent in a quick article detailing his experiences changing the northbridge fan on his A7V133 to a Blue Orb. All was not as initially smooth as he had hoped, in more ways than one..
Click for the full article!
Amazing the stuff you receive via the NASA press-release mailing list. As well as the scramjet stuff you might have seen on the tv news last night, today they released a brochure on identity theft and another on fully removing data from a PC. Both fairly basic but kinda interesting.
OCWB have more info about the MSI K7T266 Pro saga, including an explanation (of sorts) from MSI.
About a zillion people sent in this flash anim which XG8 describes as "Jackie Chan VS Stick Men in the Matrix". Very cleverly done in an ultraviolent-stickmen kinda way. :)
Mikhailtech have a guide to being cool and quiet.
Apparently Jai from InsaneHardware discovered this thread which claims to have a fix for the Vortex2+Win2K+VIA chipset motherboard issue. From the looks of the replies it works well. :)
TheHeatsinkGuide have some pics and info on new coolers.. click the first news story on that page due to the Frame Suckage Effect.
PCStats have a quick BIOS optimization guide..
I obviously haven't been paying enough attention to the hard drive market lately. Digit-life have reviewed a 180GB Seagate drive. 180GB?!? That's not a typo.
DangerousDog have a newbie benchmarking guide. So you can see if your newbie is faster than your mate's newbie, presumably.
Reviews:
Epox 8KTA3 KT133A socketA motherboard on VYW.
Samsung SW212 12x8x32x CDRW drive on NeoSeeker.
VisionTek GeForce 3 on ProCooling.
Terratec TerraCam USB Pro webcam on AllTechBox.
Coolermaster CH5-5K12 socket cooler on ChillBlast.
PowerColour GeForce2MX on OC.DK.
Saitek P8000 Command Pad on TE.
MSI K7T266 Pro socketA DDR motherboard on PCCritix.
Seagate Baracuda ATA III hard drive on BlargOC (?)
Shuttle's AV32 socket370 DDR motherboard on Radeonic. I wonder what ATI think of that domain.
It looks like ViaHardware have found a fix for the 686B issue thats been plauging alot of boards recently, this one is for the KT7 series of boards, it's on their news page so you might have to scroll down a bit. On this topic, I had my IBM 75GXP on the on-board IDE controller for a while, and strangely enuff I was have lots of performance issues (slowdowns, lockups, crashes), got sick of it and couldn't figure it out, so moved the drive back onto the Promise controller on my A7V133, and *wham*, computer is rock-solid and runs decently again.. coincidence? Maybe all these external IDE controllers we've been seeing on KT133 boards are a tad more than a 'feature'?
ChicksHardware is giving away a crazy amount of kit from the OCZ store... and this time it's open to the whole world! Even the residents of the Australian Antartic Teritory (yes, all six of you) can enter! And you don't even have to post in their forum to enter! MADNESS!
More free stuff is still flying out of IANAG, they've still got 45 prizes to give away from the original total of 62.. they've also added a few new ones including a USB CD-RW and a Sony Discman. I'm sure you all know how much I love FREE STUFF!!
More CeBit2001 coverage on OverclockersOnline.. I think this'll be one of the last coverage peices you'll see.. they're starting to make me jealous. They make Australia's computer fairs look like primary school fetes. SMALL primary school fetes.. from an underfunded tiny outback school of the air with three students. Worst part is, I can't even get down to Sydney to go. Oh the shame!
MikhailTech have a guide to building a system that won't overheat and crash. It's getting a bit more involved by the day.. but a monitor cooler? WTF? somehow, I think that's just sitting in the palm of the cooling companies for a tad too long. I'm trying to work out how to get one of those Koolance jobbies that HardOCP reviewed yesterday.. without paying for it of course :) they look uber sexy, and quiet as well as good performing to boot.
StuLittle sent this in, and I'm pretty sure he heard it on the radio as did I a few days ago.. Some guy has mp3-ed the 80+ messages his psycho ex-girlfriend left on his answering machine, and turned them into psychoexgirlfriend.com. Only in America..
WinAmp 2.74 has been realeased, not many changes over 2.73, just a slaw of bugfixes.. but I'm sure alot of you are using it right now to listen to your collection of backed up mp3 files, so might as well go update. It's good to see a fully featured peice of Windows Software come in at under a meg these days too.. (excluding the crappy .wma support)
RipNetUK have built a Borg Dual-P3 system with a pair of P3/700@1008 and 1Gb of Crucial RAM.. pretty toasty. Interesting what's mentioned right at the end of the article "Who said I'd given up on Intel?! Just can't afford 'em..."
FullOn3D has taken a close look at FSAA, which is a pretty brutal way of getting nice image quality out of your video card.. was one of the few things the Voodoo5 did brilliantly.. if any of you have been to a LAN and seen two people playing cstrike side by side, and one of them's using a Voodoo5 with FSAA, and the other's using whatever card without FSAA, you'll know what I'm talking about.
The box designs and names for video cards are starting to worry/scare me. First there was the visiontek box design.. and now Digit-Life have reviewed Chaintech's new GF2Pro card, named the Desperado.
If you're looking at making the jump to DDR, ClubOverclocker have a review of some MemMan and Corsair 256Mb PC2100 modules. I'd say the MemMan stuff is a bit hard to source locally, but you should have no problems finding Corsair, just have a poke around the forums :)
Finally, if you've been looking for a good reason to keep your case sealed, LWD has a pretty decent one posted on their news page.. might have to scroll down a bit.. mmmm.. floppy cable says the mouse. yum yum.
Wednesday Night
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Wednesday, 18-April-2001 23:55:36 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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You know what's embarrassing? Writing down the wrong street name and spending 20 minutes shouting over the fence of someone else's house in the the wrong street in a neighbouring suburb. More so when you had to ride PAST your mate standing on the side of the road gesturing at you to turn up his street, and fail to see him. Extra bonus points for forgetting your mobile phone and having to find a payphone in a strange suburb at night.
TacoNuts have a guide to lapping stuff. Y'know, it's been nearly TWO YEARS since I wrote my original Slug Sanding article. Bit dated now (as am I).
Hmm, off-the-shelf pre-built watercooled machines by Koolance. HardOCP checks one out. Videocard, PSU, the works.
Yet another SocketA overclocking guide here on MadnessPC.
Yet another SocketA heatsink roundup on PCScoop.
Yet another detonator comparison on PCTalk.
Reviews:
Samsung SyncMaster 900NF monitor on IANAG.
Seagate Cheetah 36XL SCSI HDD on xbit.
Devil and Angel speakers on TheTechZone.
Samsung SM304 4X/4X/24X CDRW & 4X DVD-ROM drive on NeoSeeker.
AOpen AK73ProA KT133A SocketA motherboard on VIAHW.
Arrg, windows died this morning and I've just finished a full reinstall.. sometimes I wonder why I bother, ahhhhr well, here's the news :)
First out this morning is a benchmark that is sure to overtake Sandra and 3DMark2001 COMBINED, its that good.. thanks to Julian for pointing it out, and if you don't get it - it's a unix thing, ok? :)
We told you AXIA was the four letter word of the moment, and XOverclocker has more proof of our prediction.. they've got a 1GHz peice running at 1670.. not without a bit of effort mind you, (2.2V water cooled) but a 670MHz overclock is nothing to sneeze at.
Hexus.net is first out the door with a review of the Reactor waterblock from Overclockers Hideout.. dosn't look too shabby at all, the mounting method looks especially good..
More watercooling over on OverclockersOnline with a review of the Overclockers Hideout Blizzard WaterCooling Kit.. I think they're new to all of this tho, because their email confirmed that water cooling uses water, not blood.. lucky that, I was starting to get a bit concerned.. .. .. ...
Now to clear up what seems to be the P4 mess that I started last post.. it seems the post made by Bert was jumping the gun a bit, and several people have pointed me in the direction of HardOCP where Kyle pretty much rejects everything he says as grandstanding.. its on their news page so you've got to scroll down a bit.. Seem's people are quick to jump on the Intel-bashing bandwagon of late.. just remember this when AMD makes a mistake, as they no doubt will.
Speaking of Kyle, RipNetUK have rounded him up for an interview and asked some pretty odd questions..
HardCOREware have started having a weekly rant^H^H^H^Hbitch, and on this weeks agenda is nVidia.. pretty fair alot of what they're saying too - remember how we all hated 3dfx while nVidia was the underdog, and laughed at 3dfx when they crashed and burned? Well.. you'd be a fool if you didn't acknowledge nVidia's standing as the current market leader, so it's only a matter of time until they start copping the flack too.. and I reckon some of it (especially about their attitude towards the KyroII) is well deserved.
PCStats have looked at tweaking your computer so it boots faster, which - if your running Win9X, is something you'd do a fair few times a day :) Simple solution to the problem is the less you load, the quicker it boots.. they've also quickly showed you how to enable DMA in WinME, one of the easiest and best performance tweaks you can do.
One of our readers, LiamC, has been benchmarking a WD harddive under Win2K on a Via-based motherboard and came across a few issues, and documented them here, as well as a workaround.. quite a few issues cropping up lately, luckily they're all being nailed as soon as they appear :)
ClubOC is giving away a 256Mb stick of MemMan's PC166 a week until MemMan get sick of giving it away.. sounds to be pretty good, aaand, me being ever vigilant as I am, it's NOT one of those post-in-our-forum contests - EXCELLENT! Actually, no.. Scott informed me via email that it's only open to residents of the USA. Damn.
Dan has made graphs. I don't think I've ever seen him make graphs before, usually he just refers to his all-purpose graph. But this time is special, it's a KyroII and the easterbunny gave it to him. So he made graphs. Better go check it out :)
Digit-Life has taken a look at the Fujitsu MPG series of ATA/100 hard drives. They don't seem to be that bad either, pretty decent for cheapies.
SystemLogic has taken a look at a fairly interesting device.. it's basically a stand-alone MPEG1 recorder, designed to replace your VCR. It writes to normal CD-R/CD-RW discs and works in pretty much the same way as a VCR. It uses the same compression system as the popular-in-asia-VCD's, so the quality is o-k.. kind of. Go and have a read for yourself, I'm having a hard time explaining it :)
Lomber's has emailed me with the stats page for the OCAU Folding@Home team which I wrote about a few posts ago.. no doubt a good cause and one that you should all be directing your spare processor cycles at.
Now the KT266 news.. first of all, OCWorkbench have updated their review of the Soltek KT266 board, the SL75DRV. Tom's Hardware has also done the same, and updated their review of the MSI board. ViaHardware dosn't seem to be too happy with the arrogant remarks on Tom's behalf as well, with his remarks regarding a possible bias on VH's behalf cutting a bit close to the bone.
Finally today, two things from The Inquierer.. first of all, they've confirmed the price cuts to Intel's processor range and it turns out the P3 cuts arnt as great as he expected, which is a bit of a shame. Secondly, they've got a bit of info up about Cisco, with the CEO quoting that they have *billions* of dollars of excess stock.. That's insane. There's always room at my house cisco :)
Reviews:
Thermosonic Thermoengine reviewed on RizeNet here.
Guillemot MaxiSound MUSE on OCAddiction here.
Nexland ISB-SOHO Cable/DSL sharing device on SpeedGuide here.
AwareMag have reviewed the AudioPanel 3.5, similar to the FrontX Ports we reviewed here.
Early Wednesday Morning
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Wednesday, 18-April-2001 01:22:48 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Got an interesting Word doc from Transcend (via achieva.com.au) expressing their feelings about overclockable memory modules. It's pretty much an ad, but it's an interesting stance to take. I don't recall ever seeing any Transcend memory for sale here in Oz tho..
Overclockers.com (no relation :) ) have a basic guide to overclocking posted. Good for newbies.
More crazy cooling, this time with dry ice..
TweakHardware have a guide to getting full RAID functionality on A7V133 motherboards. I came sooo close to buying one of these today, but I decided to wait and see what's hot when I come back from my holiday in June. More info on what I'm doing and where I'm going in a coupla weeks. :)
MrPCPro checked out a GeForce2 MX card from IOMagic.
CaseJunkiez have a cool XRay pic of a GeForce3 card posted..
TE have an old interview getting some people's opinions on.. uhm, 3DFX or something.. from a while ago.. or something. Must sleep. :)
Well, the OCAU Forums reached 5000 registered members today. User "Bravo5K" who I suspect is not a real account :) was the magic number. We've been using UBB for almost a year now and for a board that doesn't require registration (except for the commercial areas) I think we've done pretty well. :)
Chaintbolt pointed out this article on AnandTech about the MSI K7T266 Pro motherboard, related to our "Monday Afternoon" news below and his own musings in the forums. Further to that, Overclockers.com have an editorial directed at TomsHardware and AnandTech for their part in the saga.
VIAHW have a workaround for the VIA 686B bug that I mentioned on Friday. This is for people who can't wait for the relevant BIOS fixes which VIA have said should be available in a week or so..
VooDoo points out more heatsinks from Zalman, they of the "Flower" design that's all the rage at the moment. These new ones are pretty wild too..
VR-Zone got their 1.33GHz Athlon to 1.6Ghz with aircooling..
WildAndyC has tried to explain the various models in the GeForce2 family.
TacoNuts updated their Case Mod Gallery.. I should think by now I don't need to remind you about the PC Database.. :)
Redback pointed out some crazy cooling on the 3DGameMan forums..
Reviews:
Acer CRW1208A 32x8x12 CDRW drive on CDRInfo.
Flexi Keyboard on VH, kinda like our folding keyboard but more so, thanks LoneWolf.
Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-S70 digicam on BootMax.
DigiDoc5 fan-controller temp-monitor thing on IANAG, our review here.
Transcend TS-ALR4 DDR Socket370 mobo on xbit.
Rocco 5.1 speakers on PC-Extremes.
SuSE 7.0 Pro Linux distribution on CPU-Review. Real men use Debian. :)
ABIT VH6-II socket370 motherboard on ExtremeOC.
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card on Guru3D.
RumbleFX headphones on AcidHW.
Tues Morn - Yes Still Kicking
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Tuesday, 17-April-2001 12:25:36 (GMT +10) - by YYK
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I got uni break! YAY! I got work! BOO! I guess they cancel each other out…
Rom tells me that my network engineers should be doing this type of thing.
I know how much you’ve wanted to impress that certain someone with your amazing dance moves, so here’s a great way to learn.
Have you had a strong desire to be a pirate, wear big jackets, big chains, and muck about in a poop deck?
Ever wanted to know the real truth instead of all that FUD? Well here are all the old government movies such as ”duck and cover”.
Since Agg and Alchemy aren’t working like the rest of us, they might as well do something productive and take this job.
Work? Pfft.. heard of Uni Break Agg? hehe
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Tuesday, 17-April-2001 11:48:32 (GMT +10) - by alchemy
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Biiiiiiiiig happy birthday goes out to Gary_J, OCAU and IRC regular, who turns 18 today.. oh the joy of it. He'll be celebrating big time :)
LittleWhiteDog have put a Kensington Box Mouse into a comparo with two other mice.. word has it they "rigorously" tested each candidate..
Bit of P4 news floating around.. first is this article over at ZDNet pointing to a price drop of up to 50% of the said chip in attempt to bring the price/performance ratio closer to AMD chips.. this is supposedly going to start a fire sale of P3 chips and systems, so now might be the time to get in.
The other peice of P4 news floating around started over here in this Ace's Hardware thread, with a staff member of market research firm InQuest suggesting that the P4 uses a form of clock throttling, winding back the clock speed to keep the processor cool when it's under load. What this means is that when you need the processor grunt most, it is supposedly wound back to as much as 750MHz in order to keep the processor cool. This Inquirer article also talks about it.. if the accusations are true, it means that Intel has told white lies about the power dissipation of the P4, giving consumers a max figure that isn't the max at all.. might explain all those beefy P4 heatsinks we've seen.
FullOn3D have reviewed reviewed the IWill DVD266, Dually P3 Via DDR mobo.. and with P3 prices about to take a huge nosedive, dual P3's are going to be an increasingly attractive option..
The CAD have put a GlobalWin WBK38 up against an OCZ MonsterII Copper to see which one comes out on top.. seeing's you cant get the MonsterII's easily in AU, answer seems to be pretty clear for us :)
Finally today, Hardware-One have reviewed the Logitech I-Feel mouse, a USB product that vibrates.. oh so hard it is to resist the temptation to link to other products instead hehe..
Reviews:
Samsung ML-4600 Laser Printer on PCStats here.
Senfu DIY Computer Housing on OCTools here.
Asante FR3004LC Cable/DSL Router on VCD here.
TDK CyClone CDRW161040 16x ATAPI CD-RW on Digit-Life here.
WindTunnel Plus 2.0 Pre-Modded case on ClubOverclocker here.
WesternDigital Caviar 200BB 20Gb ATA/100 Hard Drive review on HardAvenue here.
Back to work tomorrow, slackers! :)
QCI are having a case-modding comp.. enter pics of your machine to win an AUD$50 voucher for use in their store.
PCStats have a guide to getting the right PC. "Needs" analysis?? Pfft, what's the fastest thing you got?! :)
Sniper650 pointed this out.. if it's real, then.. yow.
Chillblast have an idiot's guide to AMD multiplier unlocking. To prove they're fully qualified idiots, all the images on their page point to their local hard drive and hence are broken. I for one am damn happy, don't want no non-idiots writing idiot's guides, it'd upset the Union. :)
Reviews:
Taisol CGK742092 socket cooler with copper insert on VYW.
Lian-Li PC60 aluminium case on TheTechZone.
Adaptec AAA-UDMA IDE RAID controller on PCStats.
FragMaster2000 mini-keyboard controller thingy on SpodesAbode.
Coolermaster EP5-6l11 socket cooler on MikhailTech.
Monday Afternoon
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Monday, 16-April-2001 12:48:57 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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First up, news from Paul that Microsoft will be crippling MP3 support in WindowsXP, unsurprisingly enough in favour of its own digital audio standard. Info on TheReg.
There's a lot of jumping up and down about the KT266 chipset at the moment and specifically the MSI K7T266 Pro motherboard. This chipset of course is for DDR SocketA motherboards and competes with AMD's 760 and ALi's MAGiK 1 chipsets. Some of this I have linked before but let's get it all in once place. AcesHardware were first out with a review back on the 3rd of this month which showed the KT266 slightly faster than AMD760. TomsHardware's review on the 9th and AnandTech's here on the 10th both found the reverse to be true. AcesHardware's explanation is that the shipping BIOS is really slow and flashing to a newer one gives you up to 17% more memory bandwidth. OCWorkBench seem to feel it's an actual design fault with early revisions of the board, on their news page they detail their lack of success from flashing an older board - someone modifying their board by moving a resistor improved performance. Chainbolt has his own theory (not necessarily one I share) here and here in our forums. The plot thickens..
Eski points out an interesting addition to some of the IBM HDD problems that people are reporting. This person claims a faulty pin (due to stress) on the power-plug was to blame..
OCOnline have their CeBIT coverage posted. Europe's biggest computer fair..
The usual interesting/weird stuff on ZZZ Online.
Digit-Life have a guide to digital photography of water. I had fun trying to get my Nikon to focus on the jets of water in my cool-computers radiator review. Thank god for manual focus.. :)
Hmm, Widefault has some cool stuff happening in his computer room, thanks Stuart.
Reviews:
GlobalWin WKB38 socket cooler on JSI.
Enermax 330W PSU on RizeNet.
Tweakmonster copper shim on RipNet.
Only one more day of holidays..
Black&White addicts take note, there are some spyware concerns about the game, according to TheReg.
3dRage have a Dream System guide posted, thanks Paul.
Epoch points out this cool multi-monitor guide showing how to configure a few popular games to play across multiple video cards and monitors on one PC..
OCMod have a guide to constructing an air chiller for lowering the temperature of air entering your fans.
This has got to be the dodgiest cooler mount I think I've ever seen, perhaps even besting Vegeta's gorb mangling exploits. Thanks Sabrtooth.
Sick of counter-strike? Julian recommends you check out FireArms, a mod for Half-Life that's very much like "Saving Private Ryan" apparently.. okey dokey.
Reviews:
GlobalWin WBK socket coolers on VYW.
Thermaltake Mini Super Orb socker cooler on TweakTown.
GlobalWin WBK38 socket cooler on ClubOC.
Swiftech MC462-A socket cooler also on ClubOC.
EyeScream Light socket coo... err, 3D-view system on AcidHW.
Happy Birthday Adam Tuffery of Queensland! From Chris! For yesterday. :)
TheTechZone have a video card comparo - but not based on pure performance, they are comparing the dual monitor capabilities of the Matrox G450 and NVIDIA GeForce2 MX..
AcidHardware have a review of the Hercules 3D Prophet 4500. This is a new card based on the STMicro KyroII chipset. They compare it to a GF2MX.
Digit-Life have a comparo of three Sigma video cards using various flavours of the GeForce2 chipset..
They also have a monthly mobile technologies digest if you're into that kinda thing..
Reviews:
Iomega HipZip MP3 player on EverythingUSB.
CDC-30370 socketA cooler on AMDMB.
Epox KL133M SocketA motherboard on WildAndyC (having some hosting problems at the moment)
Senfu Thermal Probe on SpodesAbode.
Everglide fUnc Surface on PCNewsCenter. Our review here.
Samsung SM-308 DVD/CD-RW combo drive on GideonTech.
Rounded cables on OCIA. Our version here.
Saturday Afternoon
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Saturday, 14-April-2001 14:09:53 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Lazy saturday.. not a whole lot happening out there today. The site is still very busy tho, looks like being another 100K+ pageview day..
OCWB have some interesting stuff on their front page, they are arguing that early revisions of the MSI K7T266Pro had some design flaw that gave them poor performance (not fixed by the recent BIOS update). A reader has modded his with some improvement..
Incidentally, from looking at the logs there's an older OCAU article/review that keeps drawing traffic, a few thousand pageviews a month even though it's a year or so old now. That's Dean's REALmagic Hollywood Plus DVD Decoder Card review, still going strong.
Reviews:
Abit KT7E SocketA kt133e-based motherboard on VIAHW. Good overclocking..
CoolerGuys WindTunnel II pre-modded case on Hexus.
fUnc mousing surface on PhearFactory. Our review here.
Blizzard 360 pre-modded case on OCOnline.
ThermoSonic ThermoEngine socket cooler review on Radeonic.
Quiet PC Copper socket cooler on G3D.
MSI K7T266 SocketA motherboard on TweakMax.
GlobalWin FOP38 socket cooler on TweakTown.
Hope you all had a Good Friday and enjoyed your fish if you're into that kind of thing. I notice the site is quite busy today, seems a lot of you chose to spend part of the public holiday chillin' in the forums.. :)
Joel pointed out this ultimate underclock pic which is amusing, but while wandering around the site that it's on I found this excellent guide to socketA heatsink installation. Scarily enough he thinks the Golden Orb is acceptable for SocketA, but he argues and demonstrates that it can be used, so fair enough. Lots of horrible pics of What Can Go Wrong etc.
Xoverclocker have a guide to voltage-modding the Iwill KK266 socketA motherboard.
Bradley points out that AOpen have a wireless mouse now too..
Dan gets all the cool toys. Now he has a camcorder that writes DVD's. I hate him.
InsaneHardware have some "scoopage" (rolls eyes) about new cooling stuff from ThermalTake. DDR SDRAM and heat spreaders packaged together, handy-dandy.
Reviews:
RatPad mousing surface on ClubOC.
Dlink MP3 Player on AcidHW.
Soyo K7VTA-B socketA motherboard on NeoSeeker.
VIA 686b bug - confirmed
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Friday, 13-April-2001 18:21:21 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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There has been some talk of this for a while now but nothing official. I can't find anything on VIA's site, but TheRegister are saying VIA has confirmed a "data-damaging glitch" in the 686B southbridge chip. This chip is widely used in various motherboard chipsets. VIA say it's a BIOS issue and the forthcoming fix will involve tweaking some PCI settings.
It's not exactly a common problem: the date corruption affects large, 100MB and up file transfers between two hard drives connected to separate IDE channels exchanging the data by DMA. Having a Creative Labs Soundblaster Live card in place seems to exacerbate the problem.
D'oh. Doesn't sound like my current IDE problem on the A7V, which has the 686A chip anyway. Still, will be interesting to see what VIA have to say about this..
VP6 + Zalman "Flower" heatsink issue
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Friday, 13-April-2001 13:43:52 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Greg sent in some pics of his system based on an Abit VP6 dual-socket370 motherboard and two of the new Zalman "Flower" heatsinks. It's not super-clear from the pictures, but apparently the width of the heatsink is a problem, in that it contacts the back of a card in the AGP slot. Nasty way to fry your ultra and who knows what else once things start shorting there. Looks like an easy one to fix though, trim a little off 2 or 3 fins of the heatsink, maybe some electrical tape to be sure..
  
click images to enlarge
BLEH!! Club's closed at midnight, was pretty boring... then all the taxi's dissapeared and we had to walk home. Oh well.. clubs open at midnight tonight I hear ;)
Someone over at Overclockers.com is learning old lessons, namely the one about don't-boot-a-tbird-without-a-hs/f rule. That's a big one kids..
OCWorkbench has looked at the Soltek SL75DRV KT266-based mobo, and compared it to six other DDR boards with ALi and Via Chipsets.. yay.
Thermosonic Thermoengine review on RipNet.. these things are a killer as soon as you strap a Delta fan onto them.. I wish someone would really start selling those fan adaptors in au.. the turbine fan trick is starting to get annoying..
ViaHardware has found some new 4in1 drivers, now at 4.30.. of course these are DEFINITLEY beta software, so use at your own risk.. apparently the only new features is the ability to uninstall the IDE drivers.. so I'd suggest waiting until it's been more widely.. tested :)
Another review of the Hercules GameTheaterXP, this time over on HardCoreWare.. and, just like everybody else - they like it!
Digit-Life has taken a look at the new GeForceMX 200 and 400 chipsets. What's the difference between your garden variety MX and a 200 or 400 you ask? Well, a 200 is exactly the same, and a 400 has a higher memory clock of 200MHz.. which, if you already own a MX, you'd know extra memory clock does SFA. So yay.. what a confusing waste of time.
DangerousDog has reviewed the Hercules Prophet II MX Dual Display video card.. they're not half bad (I've got one), they just run a bit *warm*.
Well, thats all there is this morning, pretty slow I know :/
Late Thursday Night
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Friday, 13-April-2001 00:51:56 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Oooh, I'm gonna ache tomorrow. Very windy day out on the track today, spent much of the time fighting crosswinds etc. Still, fun was had. Once again I thought the X-Files was pretty lame today. Interesting story but Dogget and Scully make me want to hit things.
Oh, the shame! Entry #1300 in the PCDB was a Mac!!
About every couple of months or so, we see an article about some new whizzo technology that can make computers a gazillion times faster than anything we've seen before, and then we hear nothing more about it. Usually they contain references to (a) chipmakers hitting a "wall" soon in terms of die size and (b) Moore's law. Well, here's another one. Hurrah. Maybe I've been doing this too long. :)
VIAHW have info about a bios fix greatly improving the until now woeful performance of KT266-based motherboards.
Silly/funny thing on Techmocracy about PCChimps motherboards being recalled..
Reviews:
Star Tech USB Hub on VoidYourWarranty. Not Star Trek unfortunately.
DangerDen Copper Waterblock on InsaneHW. Our review here.
ThermoSonic ThermoEngine socket cooler on FrostyTech.
Copper Orb socket cooler on OCCafe.
ASUS A7VI-VM KM133-based SocketA motherboard on VIAHW.
Abit TH7-RAID i850-based Pentium4 motherboard on TweakTown.
Swiftech M462-A socket cooler on ChillBlast.
SC-080 and SC-180 slot coolers on Mikhailtech.
Klipsch Pro Media 2.1 speakers on GameSurge.
Samsung QwikLaser 7050 laser printer on NeoSeeker.
Uni Break starts tonight!!! yesssss, can't wait. Also, was a mate's birthday on Tuesday (Happy Birthday Sting), so if you see a large group of drunk Uni bums out in Brisbane tonight, it could possibly be us. There's suprisingly a bit of news in the box this morning.. I thought after Agg's fairly hefty post last night that I'd be able to go back to bed for a bit. Oh well, no rest for the wicked.
Lombers has decided to do soemthing good, for a change (hehe), and he's started an OCAU Folding@Home Team.. if you don't know what Folding@Home is, well - in a nutshell it's another distributed computing project, but this time it's to help find a cure to cancer and other diseases as such.. if you want to join the team just put your name in and then Overclockers Australia in () brackets after it.. it's case sensitive so be careful. You might want to check out this little tool to monitor your progress as well..
There's a short blurb over on TechWeb about a server that went missing at UNC. Even tho it hadn't had any downtime in 4yrs, network admins couldn't find the blasted thing.. turns out some idiot builders had built it into a wall. Fun fun..
AOpen are back in black again.. and OCWorkbench has a review of the AK37+ (which is black, duh), socket370 Apollo266 (DDR) mobo.. looks pretty good, shame about the power connector and that pair of capacitors below the socket..
MikhailTech has been spending time putting together a hs/f testbed.. good for them, but I personally reckon they're a waste of time.. I reckon sticking said hs/f on a hot P3 is the best way to do it.. P3 because it has a thermal diode inside the core. Doing it on AMD processors also works fine, and gives pretty much the same results as well. I don't really see the need for a specialised testbed, all that needs to be done is maintain a constant ambient/case temeperature and your sweet.
Thanks to LoneWolf for sending this in - there are now Detanator 12 drivers on The-CAD.. what next, Detanator 345's? The nVidia driver team must be either really busy or have a slack-o naming convention..
OverclockersOnline has reviewed the MSI 694D Master-S, a Via based Dual s370 motherboard. It's not a DDR board, but it's got 4 DIMM slots and onboard U160 SCSI.. looks pretty good, make a nice alternative to a VP6 imo.
I found this whilst browsing one of those show-us-a-picture-of-ya-room threads on HardOCP.. and yes, it is apparently some guys room.. note the bed in one of those photos.. highly insane, I wish I had that sort of money (or even just that sort of monitor).
With one swoop Microsoft has pretty much doomed USB 2.0, choosing to drop support for it in the upcomming WinXP in favour of Apple's Firewire Technology.. Whilst USB2 is the technically superior technology, it's not a large margin and Firewire, or IEEE1394, is already established in the market place.. it has a cooler name as well :)
Finally, this one is for anyone who spends alot of time in our Newbie Lounge.. PCStats has an article up explaining why motherboard chipsets matter..
Reviews:
Madness PC has a Maxtor DiamondMAX 60+ HDD Review.
Inside Hardware does a DFI AK75-EC KT133A mobo.
ClubOverclocker looks at a Thermaltake VolcanoII HS/F.
Late Wednesday Night
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Thursday, 12-April-2001 00:21:24 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Taking my bike to the track tomorrow! So quickies tonight.
The big news is that Dick Smith is buying Tandy..
Interesting memory analysis on JC's..
Tee points out a 6-way DDR SDRAM shootout on GamePC. Talk about jumping the gun. :)
AnandTech have an i815 motherboard roundup.
IANAG are giving away a bunch'o'stuff.
USBWorkshop have a little info on a Sony drive that turns 1.44MB floppy into a 32MB one..
Wokket sent word of a software piracy map, Australia is in the lowest category. Go team! Boy, those other countries must be really bad. :)
Reviews:
Pre-rounded IDE cables on PhearFactory. Our cheapy version here.
Gamers Toolkit on G3D.
IWill DVD266 Dual Socket370 motherboard with DDR on VIAHW.
Eye Module2 camera add-on for the Handspring Visor.
Zalman "flower" heatsink on FrostyTech.
OCZ Glacier II heatsink on TweakTown.
VIA KT133A socketA chipset on Tech-Report.
MSI K7T Turbo SocketA motherboard on PCTalk.
Avance CI-7004 midtower case on TacoNuts.
Gigabyte 7VTX KT266 chipset SocketA motherboard on Digit-Life.
Lian-Li PC20-3333 case on PCExtremes.
Archive updated..
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Wednesday, 11-April-2001 11:12:35 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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I've updated the Article and Review Archive as I do from time to time, with all the content from the last couple of months, including:
Black Ice water-cooling radiator.
DigiDoc 5 fan controller and temperature monitor.
Fan Adapters to use 92mm or 80mm fans on 60mm heatsinks.
Multiplier modification for Asus A7M266.
Sydney PC Show March 2001.
Sennheiser HD570 headphones (missed this in the last update)
Pretty quiet this morning, but some of it is ok.. so here it is.
First up is the Germans.. they're not too happy with people running Neo-Nazi websites so they've done what any good script kiddie would do and threaten to smurf (Denial of Service attack) them. Seriously.. bloody idiots.
TweakTown has crawled out of the rock they've been living under and reviewed the Pentium 4 1.5GHz Reference System that Intel's been doing the rounds with since the CPU's release.
I'm not sure if this has already been done or not, but anyway.. StorageReview have a review of the new IBM 60GXP.. successor to the 75GXP. What's the difference you ask? The new one has 20Gb platters.. and thats about it. Performs about-the-same-if-not-a-little-better than the 75GXP which is good. Thing that caught my attention tho is that you can get it in a 10Gb model.. now if they're using 20Gb platters, does this mean that there is 10Gb of space just sitting there not being accessed? Maybe there could be a way around that.. *maybe*
Alltechbox have a thoughtful article about static electricity and how it has the potential to fry your hardware. Whilst this is something most computer businesses pay alot of attention to.. I've built half a dozen computer standing on carpet and not had a problem.. I've not even heard of anyone frying anything due to static. So maybe take it with a grain of salt.. can never be too careful with exxy hardware tho :)
One of our Forum Mods, Danthemanz is holding a LAN at Frenches Forrest, Sydney on 28th of April. He's told me there'll be a lucky door prize.. so even you people playing cs with a keyboard might win something!
ClubOverclocker has reviewed the DigiDoc5.. our review is here, maybe you can pit them together in a fight for to the death? Or maybe I just need more sleep.
Digit-Life has posted their Video Card digest for March 2001.. and I tell you, a *lot* of stuff happened in March..
GideonTech has reviewed the CVChill Socket CPU Cooler.. shiny silver thing looking alot like an Alpha HS/F with a Delta 7k fan screwed onto it. Comes with a Socket-A shim as well, which I reckon is a neat idea.. maybe they should release a version that comes with an 80 or 92mm fan as well? I don't like 7k fan noise..
Speaking of Alpha, CaseJunkiez have reviewed some Alpha RAMsinks, and they reckon that they're dam good. Problem is that you can't source them through any retail channels in au atm.. MOS *did* sell them, but now only in wholesale quantities. Maybe I can smell a group purchase comming on? nahhhhr..
Eurogamer have taken a look at a T-Bird 1.33GHz processor.. and I can't hear them singing A-X-I-A along to the village people yet. Give them time..
Now this one sound's pretty interesting.. RaedonInc are running a competition to give away a Socket-A Multiplier Device thing-o.. It's basically a small device that sits between the socket and your processor, and will give mult adjustment to a board that dosn't have it built in.. might be just the thing to update an old KT133 MOBO lacking the feature..
Finally today, we have some PORN for you.. yes you heard correctly, free pr0n!! of the geek variety of course.. hope it dosn't get you too excited teehehe..
"Black Ice" Radiator Review!
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Wednesday, 11-April-2001 00:01:13 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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I've checked out a new radiator about to hit the market - the "Black Ice" from HWLabs.com. It's pretty impressive..
click for the full review!
Tuesday Night (just!)
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Tuesday, 10-April-2001 23:54:43 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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You might remember the NVIDIA/KyroII PDF file floating around a few days ago. Jean-Francois from Guillemot Australia sent me this - this is an official statement from their headquarters which I quote in its entirety:
Kyro II - What You Should Know
"They are right to be scared, 3D Prophet 4500 will really be a great product.
Street Date: May 16th, 2001"
Claude Guillemot, President, Hercules Technologies.
Hehe, pretty confident there guys. :)
There's been some noise in the forums about a WCPREDIT tweak for SocketA systems to enable proper use of the HLT command. This can apparently lower your idle temperature quite dramatically as some motherboards reportedly do not implement the use of that instruction properly by default. The thread is here, results seem mixed but mostly positive there - there were also some people trying it in the IRC channel last night and getting good results (even with KT7A which the thread says is not affected). Probably worth checking out - remember this is idle temps only, if you have a heat problem under load you will still have it. If if blows your PC up I don't wanna know. :)
The case-modding craze continues. FastMHz have a bunch more in their gallery, as do TweakTown. SmokinMHz have a new CaseDB which in my completely unbiased opinion is nowhere near as cool as our PC Database. :) Naah, it's a different approach which is always good to see. Speaking of which, check out this cool new case in the PCDB.. love it. :)
Win y'self some coolers on G3D..
WildAndyC has a guide to interpreting SocketA markings..
Seahorse thinks that with all the Black&White reviews lately, what people really need is a guide to playing the game.. so he wrote one.
Another new game that's been attracting a lot of attention lately is Serious Sam. TE have an article about how its optimization for modern video chipsets makes it an ideal benchmark.
PCStats want to tell you all about different memory types..
ExtremeOC have a guide to getting more voltage from your Abit KT7/KT7A motherboard.
TheRegister have jumped on the AXIA bandwagon, thanks Ian. These are apparently really easy to find in Oz, if you're in the market for a Tbird you'd have to be insane to buy anything else at the moment.
VR-Zone have a 6-way SocketA Cooler Shootout happening..
ProCooling have a quickie comparo of some waterblocks and radiators.
Matex sends word that the Microsoft Train Simulator site has been updated. I'm really curious as to what this will be like when it comes out. I'm not really a train freak but it looks impressive.
Simple games are often more addictive tho and Bilbana seems to be another example. I first saw it on HardOCP and now it's appeared in our forums. Cool little slotcar game, build a track then play against a cockatoo who taunts you in Swedish (I think).
Reviews:
Zalman Flower socket cooler on Overclockers.com.
RCA REB1200 E-Book handheld on FutureLooks.
Asus A7V133 KT133A SocketA motherboard on AllAboutPC.
ThermalTake Mini SuperOrb low-profile socket cooler on NeoSeeker.
ThermalTake CopperOrb socket cooler on HardCoreWare.
LiteOn FS020 pet-inhaling case on FullOn3D.
Boston Acoustics BA7500 speakers on GameSurge which seems to be an Oz site.
Heh, not sure I agree with the sentiment but this is pretty funny.. :)
click to enlarge
Thanks Mace and of course Smirnoff. :)
Tuesday Morning
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Tuesday, 10-April-2001 11:51:23 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Whenever I ask someone to do the news coz I'm busy, they comment on the page about how I'm going to whip them. Do they want me to whip them? You dirty, dirty little newsweasels. That thing about locking Sciby in the cupboard was true, though.
EuroGamer have a performance SDRAM comparison posted. A fairly basic look at Crucial and Mushkin offerings.
Speaking of RAM, in my wanderings I found this handy RAMFinder thing on Frostytech, which can help you identify mystery sticks, lots of photos of ram chips with URL's for specs etc.
Plenty of people in the IRC channel have been deathly silent lately, off playing the new game Black&White instead of more traditional IRC pursuits (such as hurling abuse at each other or attempting to pursuade everyone that 2x500MHz CPU's really does equal a 1GHz CPU). Dan from DansData seems to be quite badly hooked too, and has written a review of it.
LoneWolf, forum Moderator extraordinaire, Sciby impersonator and all-around good guy, thinks the world should know about this "Hare" utility which apparently makes Windows multitask a little more intelligently. I've not tried it, but it apparently speeds things up nicely.
Manaz, forum Administrator extraordinaire, professional stunt driver and all-around good guy (too), points out this PC in a Nintendo.. hmm, where's the power supply..
From there I found a funny Marshmallow Bunny Testing site.. the best bits are the description of the "control bunny" responses. :)
OCCafe discover that ducting aircon into your PC makes it colder. I'll be danged! :)
PCHardware have a SocketA cooler roundup happening, quite a few tested..
Mort sends word of another silly translator, this time it's homeboy speak..
ClubOC have reviewed some non-conductive CPU shims. Finally someone's making these, I ranted about this over a year ago (shortly after frying my SlotA classic athlon, d'oh).
Reviews:
GlobalWin WBK38 socket cooler on MikhailTech.
X-Micro Hulk V MX-based videocards on Guru3D.
FrontX Multimedia Ports on 8Balls, our review here.
Future Power NewQ EQ Platinum 3379 fancy-schmancy graphic equaliser thingy on CAD.
F&D IHOO 5.1 speakers on Digit-Life.
Alpha Ramsinks for your video card on CaseJunkiez.
GlobalWin FOP55 premodded FOP38 with a 92mm fan on it, on OC.DK.
Agg's getting back at me for not doing the news this morning, so he's made me do it tonight. He said if I procrastinate anymore he'll whip me. I'm not sure if that was supposed to be encouragement or a deterrent, but anyway. On with the news!
First up is an article over on T3 about adultery and SMS.. who would of thought. Just a side-note, T3 is a pretty interesting pommie site to have a look around every now and then.. its a cut-down version of a print magazine that costs almost $20 in au.
Robert sent in a link to a company providing well made liquid cooled computer cases.. It's really worth having a look at, the clip on the waterblock looks pretty special, and the video card one doesnt look half bad either. A liquid cooled PSU and Hard Drive tho? eh.. maybe stretching it a bit far. If you could make a radiator without a fan tho.. you'd have one hell of a quiet system.
TheTechZone have reviewed the long-awaited game Tribes 2.. and when I say long awaited, I mean years, not months. Verrry long time. Good game luckily enough :)
IANAG are running a comp to give away 54 assorted goodies.. and once again, be the ever trained watchdog I am, I made sure that it's not one of those post-in-our-forum comps. Another contest is running over on TweakTown.. this time all you have to do is vote in their Case Mod's Gallery.. which they've added 10 more entries to.. kind of like our PCDB really.. except not.
ClubOverclocker sends word that the new IWill Dually P3 DDR Mobo, based on the Via Pro266 chipset, is now shipping. They've also got the scoop that it'll ship with a pair of Taisol hs/f units - for free. Free stuff is always good!
Doglet has informed me that you can now easily buy that neon string stuff easily in Australia.. from the epicentre of rice, none other than Hot-4's Magazine.. 'spose this is proof, case mods really ARE a form of rice.
Now onto the hardcore Japaneese stuff.. first of all theres a 1.33GHz AXIA (there go those village people again) T-Bird running at an astounding 2173MHz @ a FSB of 189MHz.. crazy stuff. Crazy benchmarks too.. coming very close to RDRAM scores without the latency the RAMBUS platform brings. You think thats crazy.. then have a look at this.. that's a multiplier unlocked P3 running at 252MHz FSB on a CUSL2.. that's a 190% overclock of the FSB - just simple madess. Finishing off the insanities with a big bang is this P4.. at 2.7GHz.. I don't think I could make the font big enough to convey just how insane I think this is. That's an overclock of 1GHz.. with the help of Liquid Nitrogen of course :)
If you havn't got enough madness just yet, ZZZ Online Number 78 is out.. seems to be madness central here at OCAU tonight..
If you're looking to get rid of the madness with a bit of LAN action and you live in the S-E Queensland Area, GameServe is holding an ANZAC LAN at the Gold Coast International Hotel Ballroom - swiishhhh.. what a venue for a LAN :).. anyway, its on the 12-13th of May, and it's only $25 to get yourself two solid days of fragging.. I'm seriously thinking about going :)
Everything USB has info about a 100Mbit USB network card.. no great news to me, I'm using an o@h one right here.. the funny thing is tho, that 100Mbit network speeds are faster than the theoretical maximum of the whole USB format.. whoop de doo. Other on the USB front is that it appears that the US Army is now using USB technology in their Land Warrior project. I think that goes along with what I heard about them using NT4 in a submarine somewhere.. maybe all that's needed to win a war these days is a copy of winnuke.exe ?
Interesting interview with Steve Jobs, of Apple fame, over on the Sydney Morning Herald.. and, whilst pretty much all of us have gone down the Wintel path (or laybe AMDux ?), it's still interesting to find out what the competition is upto.. and with Apple doing everything themselves inhouse, it makes it all the more interesting.
Reviews:
KT7A-RAID on Tech-Report here.
Samsung Syncmaster 753DF 17" Flatscreen Montior on Madness PC here.
KyroII Preview on HardCoreWare here.
Visiontek GF2GTS on AcidHardware here.
Monday Afternoon
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Monday, 9-April-2001 14:26:16 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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In the AMD Hardware Forum, VooDoo is giving away AMD case badges to people who have an entry in the PC DataBase.. stocks are limited..
TheArenalineVault have a review of a NVIDIA GeForce3 reference board. Their webserver is coping pretty well considering they're being slashdotted at the moment. :)
I normally don't like to gratuitous "people smashing up/burning/shooting old pc junk" articles anymore because they're old news now, but this one is worthwhile for the "non-burnproof cdrom" photo. :)
IPKonfig have a guide to closing SocketA bridges, fairly basic stuff..
When watercooling goes bad. You know things are going to go bang when you hear people saying Well after my water cooling system was all done, I made a decision to just start leaving my PC on 24/7.. they just never learn.. unsurprisingly, pump stopped, things died. Some good tips learned the hard way tho..
VCD have compared a range of file compression utilities.. weird sense of deja-vu about this article, maybe we already linked it.
Digit-Life have their monthly storage roundup posted..
Win y'self a broken CPU on Spode's. Yay. Oh, it's a keyring. :)
AcidHardware have a socket cooler roundup posted.
Reviews:
Iwill KA266-R SocketA motherboard on RizeNet.
Thermosonic ThermoEngine socket cooler on WimbeesReview.
Kyro II video card on Digit-Life.
Soyo K7VTA Pro KT133A socketA motherboard on AwareMag.
Abit KT7A-RAID KT133A socketA motherboard on ClubOC.
GlobalWin P4 cooler on TweakTown.
Canopus Firebird R7 socket cooler mini-review on VR-Zone.
X-bit have a guide to the why's and where's of flashing your award bios. I've been using the Asus update flashing-in-windows thing lately, seems to work well at flashing from a file on the HDD but can't seem to grab them from the net.. weird. Anyway. My A7V seems less troublesome now I've (thanks dennis_b) flashed to v1007, using 4-in-1 v4.29 and ata100 drivers v33 .. and put a device by itself on each IDE channel.. and said "PNP OS: No" in BIOS.. see, easy.. grr.
From the "Someone spent a lot of time making this flash animation but I don't know why" department comes this this pseudo-japenese tribute to.. err.. something. Very surreal. Thanks Matex.
Speaking of "Why did they bother", Linus says Mac OS X is a peice of crap (his words). Just kidding, Apple users, we still love you.. just not when any of our other friends are around, ok? Thanks Malleus.
HardAvenue have their Value/Performance PC Guide updated..
AcidHW had some hosting problems earlier in the week but they're back with a vengeance.. or is that a mousepad roundup.. they're back, anyway.
Win y'self a sound card and some speakers on hypothermia..
Not sure what to have for brekky today? Here's a tasty and economical suggestion from Falkor.. or perhaps fries with your X-box..? Thanks Dan.
OCPrices have reviewed some case-modding goodies.. windows and neon string and stuff.
VIAHardware have taken over and updated the KT7/KT7-RAID FAQ..
This made me laugh (maybe it's too early on Sunday morning for me, what am I doing up anyway?) .. VYW had a extreme videocard modding competition, you can see the entrants there. The winner had some peltier+water monstrosity on his video card, I'm sure he'll have a lot of use for the Alpha heatsink he won.. :)
PCReview checked out the MacPower DigiDoc 5. This is an uber-fan-controller baybus jobbie, we reviewed it last month.
ExtremeOC reviewed a SocketA overclocking kit.. conductive epoxy and tape..
Chiliblast reviewed a 330W Enermax PSU. I have the 550W in my main machine and the 330W in one of the testbeds.. Enermax good but pricey.
Some info on the Final Fantasy movie from Dan.. blurb, more detail and some trailers..
(village people) A X I A! A X I A!
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Saturday, 7-April-2001 20:36:33 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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This from Choon Ling:
This isn't new news, but juz wanted to reiterate that the AMD Athlon AXIAs are a real gem and it's so easy to find them down under...
Juz came back from the Canberra computer fair with an AXIA0110MPMW 1GHz, and it's running at 1533Mhz on my Iwill KK266R without a hitch... all these done with air cooling on a WBK with an 80mm Sunon fan... it's that simple, no fancy peltiers or water-cooling...
The best part about it is that I'm running at 11.5x133, so I've not even gone into FSB overclocking yet... it runs pretty warm at 49C full load... but I guess since winter's coming soon... it wouldn't be much of a prob, haha...
Well, for $375 and 1.5Ghz action... I should say it's pretty good value for money... 50% overclock of a 1Ghz silicon... hmm, I must say I'm a pretty happy boy... so spread the news... get those AXIA beauties... and run them at obscene speeds... :o)
Saturday Evening
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Saturday, 7-April-2001 17:29:34 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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TheTechZone have an article on how they made their Quake3 Case.. nothing totally revolutionary but an impressive-looking machine.
Looking for cheap storage? IANAG have a 3-way 40GB 5400rpm HDD showdown happening..
VR-Zone are giving away some AMD Posters.
Reviews:
20GB Creative Nomad MP3 player on CAD.
Plextor 161040A CDRW on TweakMax.
Wicked3D eyeSCREAM glasses on Hexus.
Abit KT7A-RAID on TweakTown.
Leadtek GF2 32MB on Cydrotech.
MSI 694D dual FCPGA motherboard on PCHardware.
Serious Sam, a new game, on FutureLooks.
Zalman "Flower" Heatsink on FrostyTech.
Eski sent in some pics of her C400.. as if being a keyring wasn't bad enough, she discovered if you push firmly enough on the core it will pop completely out:
 
If you're wondering what was used to drill the keyring hole, she says a simple 12v hand-drill. Not as difficult as a lot of other people have reported..
Early Saturday Morning
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Saturday, 7-April-2001 00:59:29 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Hmm, can't remember exactly where I got this from, I suspect the forums.. anyway, here's a cool guess the sitcom star or dictator game where you pretend to be someone and the computer guesses who you are. I picked someone fairly obscure (Jeannie from "I dream of Jeannie") and it guessed right. Spooky. :)
AnandTech have a SocketA Chipset Comparison posted. Interesting stuff as always..
OCHW have an interesting one, an article on making a Keyboard-Bus. Like a fanbus, or a baybus, but in your keyboard. Neato. :)
MadnessPC have a guide to IDE cable rounding. Our version is here.
NeoSeeker have a 3-way 19" Flatscreen CRT Roundup posted.
Mikhailtech have a guide to replacing your PSU fan. Mmmm, mains power..
Reviews:
OCZ Monster2 copper heatsink on IPKonfig.
MSI Pro 266 Master Socket370 motherboard on VIAHW.
AXIA (yeah baby) Tbird on TheTechZone.
RadPad, not seen one of these reviewed for a while, on Cydrotech (?) ..
Friday Afternoon
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Friday, 6-April-2001 16:56:38 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Wow, we did 113,213 pageviews yesterday compared to our average of 85k/day from last month. A quick sniff around the logfiles reveals a lot of sudden interest in the Speed Cheat - Not Just For Half-Life Anymore article from a couple of months ago. Weird, it didn't attract that much attention when it was first put up. Oh well, greets to everyone from HardOCP and OverClockers.com (USA) and the other sites that suddenly decided to link - good to have you here. :)
Another thing that attracted a lot of attention last month was some coverage of fan adapters that we had thanks to Chainbolt, a reader in Japan. Firstly we had a sneak preview of one that appeared on the market over there. Then, we had a full review of the 92mm-to-60mm and 80mm-to-60mm versions. Today on ClubOverclocker they have the same concept but executed differently - a 120mm to 60mm flat-plate fan adapter as opposed to the conical ones we checked out. They weren't too impressed with the performance, but it's good to see some manufacturers thinking about this way to get high CFM with less noise.
Kyle over at the HardOCP has done his best to answer a burning question at the moment - Is the GeForce3 really faster than the GeForce2 Ultra?. The problem with this question to date is, of course, that very little out there has been written with the GeForce3 in mind so performing a fair benchmark has been tricky. Kyle however has a couple of pre-release games which HAVE been written to use the optimizations of the GeForce3 core. Serious eye-candy and interesting results.
A few recent highlights from the PCDB - techfuzz's machine is certainly tricked out, but I dunno, the big square window is a little too blatant for my tastes. :) Martin7922 has a nicer finish to the window while Rockin69's box is sweet indeed - but surely you can fit another fan on the rear there somewhere! :)
RivaTuner has been updated. This is apparently a program to tweak a lot of undocumented features in the Detonator drivers for NVIDIA cards. In general they cannot give you big performance boost but they can improve image quality and solve some compatibility problems.
Digit-Life have their monthly hardware roundup posted.
Reviews:
ThermoEngine socket cooler on OCCafe.
Blizzard 360 case on OCOnline.
OCZ PC166 micro-bga SDRAM on ClubOC.
VGA PenCam Trio cheap tiny digicam on DansData.
Midiland S4 3050M 3 piece speakers on CAD.
Jazz ROCCO 5.1 speakers on Digit-Life.
Thursday Night
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Thursday, 5-April-2001 22:57:12 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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I dunno, the new X-Files is just.. kinda annoying. The "maybe it's something supernatural", "oh no, it couldn't be that", "but what other option is there?" banter is so tiresome now.. Scully's (sudden) role reversal is completely implausible and Doggett is like a big drawling lump of wood that's been everywhere and done everything. Even the irony of tonight's episode, with Robert Patrick (ex-T1000) chasing a metal-memory man around, saying "But that only happens in movies!" was really contrived. Bah. Dunno why I bother watching TV sometimes. :)
Maybe I'm just grumpy because of the stupid problems I'm having with my A7V. It seems that the southbridge IDE ports (ie, the normal motherboard ones) are corrupting data something chronic. Flashing to a newer bios (thanks Pace) seems to have fixed it, but all the CD's I've burned recently have got data errors on them. Now the machine is pausing for a few seconds every couple of minutes or so, seems to be something to do with the new BIOS so I'll fiddle with settings later. Now I've been told that BIOSes previous to 1003 are best. Argh! Don't mind me ranting. :)
VooDoo pointed out this interesting thread started by John Gatt from VIA. He is trying to help Creative and VIA get a fix happening for a conflict between VIA chipsets and SBLive! sound cards. If you're having the problems described, add your info and maybe we can get it resolved. Hell, it might even explain my A7V problems at the moment!
Klif had a bit of a go with a circle cutting drill press.. not a resounding success but an interesting way to make a hole..
VIAHW have a utility to enable 4-way interleave on a variety of VIA-chipset motherboards.
About a zillion (rounded up) people have sent me the "Pretend to be a Jedi in the census!" thing but I have steadfastly refused to post it, for a variety of reasons.. here's a really good reason not to do it, in the form of a $1000 fine for knowingly providing false information on a census, thanks Dan.
Win stuff! GlacierII coolers here on SystemLogic, some more heatsinks here on LWD, and a HEAP of cool stuff here in this Australians-only (gotta love it) competition on CaseJunkiez.
Reviews:
Enermax 330W PSU on Inside-hardware.. mmm, Enermax.
Quantum Snap Servers network storage on Digit-Life.
Samsung Syncmaster 753DF monitor on TerraGaming.
LabTec Pulse 424 speakers also on TerraGaming.
Arctic Silver II thermal paste on HyperOC.
Plextor Plexwriter 16/10/40A CDRW on NeoSeeker.
Abit SH6 Socket370 motherboard on 3DSpotlight.
Very slow in the news box this morning.. oh well, you get that sometimes..
The Guru of 3D have a review up of of that Hercules GameTheatre XP everyone's getting all hot and bothered about.
the Ctrl-Alt-Del has a review of the GlacierII hs/f.. and it seems to work alright.
If, for some reason, you've decided you simply *must* buy a Pentium 4, first of all, don't. If you still must.. then VR-Zone have got a review of the ABIT TH7-RAID i850 mobo. Once again, looks alright.
Another sound card review this mornin.. this time it's the Phillips Acoustic Edge, and it's reviewed over on 3D Spotlight. They seem to like it.. and what I like is all the competition in the market nowadays.
WimbeesReview (I just don't know about kids these days..) has reviewed the CoolerMaster DP5 6H11.. socket-a HS/F that looks alot like a TT Volcano II.
PCReview have looked at a 128Mb Stick of Crucial PC1600 DDR RAM. Luckily enough it stably overclocks to PC2100 Speed @ CAS2.. and just as well.. PC1600 isn't that great.
The QGL LAN is on again.. comming up on the 14th of April.. quite a few OCAU people are going, including sabretooth, VooDoo and myself, and it's definatley one of the best LAN's in SE Qld. If you're keen on going, go here to register as places are filling up fast, and its $20 for the day of play @ ANZ as usual. You might want to be quick with the rego btw.. it only opened (for rego's) exactly 12hrs ago and already ~200 people have put their name down.
ChillBlast look at the Neng Tyi KA02 HS/F unit and discover that it's.. pretty much crap. Good as a stock-o cooler, and thats about it.
Last of all this morning is this hardcore looking waterblock thing over on Hexus. Looks pretty dangerous to me.. and I'm pretty sure VooDoo told me the more dangerous something looks, the faster it performs. Or something.
Well, I told you it was slow this morning.. maybe if you've still got time to kill before doing something productive you might wanna head over for a browse of the forums.
Wednesday Night (just!)
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Wednesday, 4-April-2001 23:57:03 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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I guess the big news for today is this PDF file which claims (and certainly appears) to be a leaked internal-NVIDIA document prepping them for the Kyro invasion. Do they seem worried? Are their points valid? There's a rebuttal of sorts on this page.
TekFront have reviewed a 3-dimensional monitor. Is this a late April Fools joke? Sounds pretty amazing..
..so do these powerskip kangaroo-shoe things. I want a pair! But I expect I'd hurt myself a lot before I got the hang of them. :) Thanks mike.
Anyone who frequents the AMD Hardware forum will already know that AXIA are THE Athlons to get if you're shooting for big speed - and we're talking 1.4-1.5GHz here. FoamingSuds have jumped on the funk train and have an article all about overclocking the AXIA's..
There's a network card roundup on dslwebserver.com - 11 cards tested for performance etc. First roundup of this kind that I've seen.
That site led me to this one, which has RAMdisk utilities for various flavours of Windows. I've been wanting to play with ramdrives again lately, these look like what I'm after.
WildAndyC has an AMD Roadmap posted..
Polygamus sent in a query that I have no idea about, so I'll post it intact here: Thort this was interesting... The photo in this review of the Gigabyte 7vtx kt266 board shows a dip switch block, with a table of settings for fsb, agp/pci clk. Did anyone notice that the agp/pci divider of 2.5/5 seems to have been implemented? The last line on the table shows 170/68/34 .... hmmm Anyone know if this is just a rehash of the 4:3 feature of pro133a boards, with the mem & pci running @ fsb minus pci? The review starts here and David quotes some impressive Sandra memory figures from it - 656 MB/s (ALU) and 797 MB/s (FPU) for 6x150 FSB..
Reviews:
AMD Athlon 1.33GHz on ClubOC.
TweakMonster copper ramsinks on OCAddiction.
VIA KT266 SocketA chipset on AcesHW, thanks David.
Mouse skatez on ChunkyHardware.
Globalwin WBK38 socket cooler on Tech-Planet.
Iomega HipZip on TechWatch, an Oz site.
Copper shims on IANAG.
Umax UGate 3300 wireless cable/dsl router on HardCoreWare.
MSI K7T Pro 2-A socketA mobo on MadnessPC.
Max cool case on TheTechZone.
Quite a bit of news to get through today.. so best be quick..
First cab off the rank is OCWorkbench with an updated review of the Gigabyte 7VTX KT266 Motherboard.. apparently with a BIOS flash the board performs *alot* better.. I hope this is true for all KT266-based boards :)
ViaHardware have pretty much confirmed this.. posting a beta IDE Driver on their page that is said to increase performance as well.. They also received a beta BIOS but didn't post it for NDA reasons. Good to see VIA getting their act together.. Another thing that I found on the VH page is a blurb about Intel selling their i81x chipsets at a *loss* to combat the Via PM133 and Pro133A contendors.. that's pretty snakey.
It seems Intel have given up on making decent CPU's and are instead concentrating on curing Cancer instead.. I 'spose it's up to you to decide what you like best.. j/k about the CPU bit - but they are actually helping in some distributed computing efforts designed to cure medical ill's like cancer. Thanks to Firemoth for the link.
X-Bit Labs have been to CeBit 2001 and taken a lot of pictures and stuff and put em up for you to gawk at. I swear I've posted 1001 of these before.. but I can't remember if it was CeBit or something else.. oh well.
Digit-Life have reviewed the Canon EOS D30 DigiCam.. a fairly serious looking peice of gear.
HardCoreWare reckons they've found the best way to blow $1,000 (US) without taking a visit to your local red light district. It's a guide on building a PC on the cheap.. and I reckon they're about right. For $1,500 you can get a killer (well, in a way) Duron/GF2MX system these days.. 17" monitor and all, and no scimping on components.
Digit-Life have a few specs and pics of Leadtek's upcomming GF2MX 200/400 based cards. No one seems to of taken my hint and reviewed a GeForce3 MX yet tho..
There's some hardcore waterblock thing-o on CLubOC.. no time for me to look, I've suddeny ran out of time !
Finally, a few people have corrected some things I said yesterday.. First of all regarding combo NIC/Hubs.. they do exist. First of all, Snypher sent in this one from BlackBox for US$250 or so.. maybe BlackBoxOz has one too? Matt also sent in this link to one from Microgram in Aus.. for only $160 (AUD).. looks pretty good to me, especially for the price.. Finally, Andrew pointed out that you can get those Fong-Kai cases in Aus.. thanks :)
Reviews:
Artic Silver 2 review on UKGamer.
ECS P6SSM SiS mATX Motherboard review on TechnoYard.
Gigabyte GA-7ZXR 2.1 Motherboard reviewd at NeoSeeker.
Crazy days..
Spode have had another crack at direct-die watercooling, with some good results..
TE have some more rants and raves posted.
Interesting heat-pipe vest developed by the CSIRO to keep soldiers and emergency workers cool under their protective clothing.. "The PCS is based on new, patented heat pipe technology which works by collecting body heat through vapour filled cavities in a vest worn on the body. The heat is then transferred via a flexible heat pipe to the atmosphere with the help of an evaporative cooling heat exchanger". Neato! Thanks Fortigurn.
ExtremeOC compared some OCZ 150MHz SDRAM to the KingMax 150MHz part..
XG8 pointed out this Mir Re-entry Screensaver. Kinda cool, but a bit short.
Reviews:
MSI K7T Turbo-R socketA motherboard on FullOn3D.
Shuttle AV32 socketA motherboard with DDR and SDR memory on Tech-Report.
Gigabyte GA-7ZXR Rev2.1 socketA motherboard on NeoSeeker.
OCZ Quicksilver thermal paste on HardAvenue.
GlobalWin WBK-38 socket cooler on FrostyTech.
ASUS P4T Pentium IV motherboard on OCWB.
ACE CAD Acecat Flair super-cheap graphics tablet on DansData.
Forgot to add this before.. it's Messiah's 16th birthday today - so happy birthday to him! He's a regular on #overclockers if you want to say g'day.
MikhailTech has looked at a Fong Kai FK-320 case.. probably can't get one in Aus tho.
EuroGamer has a roundup of the mobos of the moment.. that being the KT133A-based boards.
Yet another GF2MX review on GotApex.. this time the Asus V7100 Deluxe.. wonder how long until we start seeing GeForce3 MX's?
OverclockerCafe is giving away Four 2CoolPC system coolers.. and I've just checked, and it's NOT one of those forum contests.. EXCELLENT!
sluDge sent in this link to the "ultimate windows tweaking program".. I havn't had a look, but he gives it a pretty good wrap. Might be worth checking out.
ChillBlast has taken a look at some Crucial PC133 CL2 RAM.. and OCWorkBench sends word that Crucial PC2100 (DDR) RAM is on special.
MrPCPro has taken a look at some hubs.. both fitting in your 5 1/4 (CD-ROM) bay. They looked at a 4-port USB hub and an 8-port 100mbit Ethernet Hub.. the Ethernet one looks pretty interesting.. tho having a big cable mess at the front of your computer probably isnt that appealing.. one that goes in a PCI slot with an inbuilt NIC.. now there's an idea.
RojakPot has got a review of a 32Mb Compact Flash Card.. and also a press release from Samsung regarding Quad Data Rate RAM.. sort of like double-pumped DDR RAM (which is already double-pumped.. hence the quad name)
PCHardware have reviewed the MSI 694D Master-S Dual s370 mobo with onboard SCSI.. starting to see quite a few Dually reviews now.. none of the AMD.. yet!
Digit-Life has some info up about the upcomming GF2MX 400 based cards.. I think rumor has had it that these cards are slower than the current GF2MX cards.. whoop-de-doo then.
Finally, VideoCardDrivers are back into their element.. now reviewing the nVidia Detantor's 8.33 drivers.
Agg stole my post this morning (just as well, heh, I slept in *again* - I know you love hearing about my sleeping patterns LoneWolf).. so I'm doing the nightshift. So here goes..
TacoNuts have posted a review of the 3DfxCOOL Voodoo-1-120 video card cooler. No, its got nothing to do with the defunct 3dfx video chip/card company nVidia inhaled. Yes, it is a cooler thing-o for your video card.. looks to be a cardcooler type of device. Big fan on it..
VoidYourWarranty have updated their RAID tutorial.. incidently, chainbolt has started a really interesting discussion in the forums about the effectivness of said RAID. With every motherboard maker and their dog putting RAID chipsets on anything that might pass as a PCB, comes at a nice time.
ArsTechnia have reviewed and critiqued the release version of MacOS X.. and a very interesting read it is. In the Ars' style it goes into alot of detail, but MacOS X is probably one of *the* OS releases of the year. The future of Apple rides heavily on this.. no funky colored iMac would be able to pull them out of a bad OS. I don't know about you, but I'd be sad to see them go.. and if the price of PC's wasnt so insanely low at the moment I'd seriously consider getting an iMac..
Still on alternative OS's, its probably old news to alot of you.. but it seems that one of the best (imho anyway) OS's out there is about to stop development.. the BeOS team have announced they havn't got enough cash to keep going much longer. They are really victims of their own doing tho.. didn't advertise much, didn't create any had-to-have-em applications for their own platform.. just turned out of the coolest most efficient OS I've seen in a while. Slashdot are giving them a big hint to GPL the code if they do close their doors.. and I hope they do something along those lines.
The TechZone is giving away a LianLi PC60 case.. but, I've just checked and it's one of those god-awful post-in-our-forums competitions that I think are stupid. Why don't they give people a better reason to post in their forums than a free case? Still.. it is a nice case.. so if you want one it may be one way to get one on the cheap. Maybe.
There's a funny guide over on 3D Action Planet on how to win at a LAN Party.. if you can't win fairly that is. Pretty amusing read I must say, thanks to Firemoth for pointing it out.
Interesting 60mm fan roundup on TechPatrol.. they take a look at the usual suspects (Delta, Sunon & YS-Tech), but also have a look at the new Everflow fan that comes stock on the TT VolcanoII hs/f's. The Everflow is rumored to be a good contendor for the Black Label Delta, without giving the neighborhood dogs something to bark at.
The NDA on the new Duron clock speed has been lifted.. its now at 900MHz.. reviews here on CPU Review, Hexus has one here and here on AMD MB. Performance is exactly that the same of any Duron @ 900MHz, so no suprises there. Just to think that you can now buy so called "value" processors at 900MHz is mind boggling.. bloody good value indeed.
OCWorkbench are confirming what most of us already know to be true.. that the KT266, performance wise, just isn't up to speed. They've had some japanese "corespondant" post them a few figures showing the AMD760 out-bench a KT266 board. It's on their main page if you wanna have a look.. incidently, I saw an article *somewhere* (can't remember, it the bookmark dissapeared in a recent format) showing a MSI KT266 board performing quite well.. better than AMD760 in fact. Hopefully all KT266 needs is a well designed board, and thats what we're not getting yet.
OCShootOut have a guide up showing you how to hack fan's with Molex connectors to get an RPM reading.. basically showing that all the fans they checked had the solder points for an RPM monitor, and all you have to do is add a wire and a new plug.
TweakTown have a compatibility guide up for Kingmax PC150 SDRAM. I must note however, that the results they acheived are very much dependant on a large number of factors.. Mainly variances in quality of RAM chips and Chipset performance.. and you may not have anywhere near the same luck. Good to see that Cameron is back into it after some family troubles tho..
Quite a few people in IRC have been raving about new FPS game called Serious Sam.. TE have reviewed it if you wanna find out what all the hype is about.
IANAG have thrown some Thermal Paste into a ring and waited for them to fight it out.. unfortunatley nothing happened, so they've compared their performance instead.. Artic Silver II vs OCZ QuickSilver.. its a bloody battle!
Last of all today.. [P]engo sent in this link to a MS TechNet article.. what's scary is it appears to be real. I bet someone at MS is having a good laugh :)
I almost forgot this.. Bryan's RiceBoyPage has been updated.. for those that don't already know.. it's basically a page to take the piss out of 4cyl cars done up to look as if they go fast.. but they actually don't. Sort of like a 486 in a Lian-Li PC60 to use an overclocking comparison if you want. It's bloody funny to say the least, even more so if you've seen a few rice rockets on the street.
Bah, most of the news today is silly April 1st jokes that have been retracted overnight anyway.
A couple of interesting new entries in the PCDB.. Fox's unusual paintjob and Superbuss's very trick system, shame there aren't more photos of it.
Dan has checked out an aluminium case that's made by Skyhawks, not Lian Li. We saw these guys at the Sydney PC Show this year.
There's yet another issue of ZZZ Online posted. Might pay to keep in mind that in their part of the world it is still April 1..
Reviews:
Olympus Camedia E-10 digicam on Digit-Life.
ASUS Terminator bare-bones system also on Digit-Life.
Hmm, very quiet today. I'm also paranoid about April Fools jokes now, so some of this news may be completely fictitious. :)
Most suspicious is news on Hexus that VIA is being inhaled by AMD. Is this an April Fools joke? Nothing obvious that I can see, except they quote VIA as having a bad year when I thought they were having a fantastic year with the success of their chipset products. Hmm. If it's serious, it's seriously big news, and AMD will massively strengthen their hold on the CPU/chipset market. Update: They have retracted it, surprise surprise. :)
In even more shocking news, BitBoys Bought NVIDIA.. pffft. :)
IPKonfig have info on a tiny peltier.. not sure what it'd really be useful for, tho.
Wow, now this is a hardcore mod.. putting perspex in the top of your HDD. I hope this isn't an April Fools thing too. You'd have to be brave to do it to an expensive new drive, but how cool is that? Thanks Tom!
Origin, who made some fantastic games over the years, is no more. Thanks Xixys.
ProCooling have an article on multiplexing PSU's for 24v..
In case you missed it, HardOCP have a new design up.
Reviews:
GlobalWin CAF12 card cooler on VCD. Our review here
GeForce3 MX preview on OC.DK.
New stuff hitting the market in Japan - firstly the Pentium4 1.5GHz retail pack with 256MB RAMBUS, also the Zalan Flower heatsinks we've already seen, a USB 2.0 PCI card and the 1GHz Mobile P3.
Aaron points out this cool page showing lots of SGI equipment converted into fridges and coffee machines etc, interesting projects. :)
GeForceCities have a guide to interpreting GeForce3 core markings.
VideoCardDrivers checked out an interesting 3D-Glasses add-on, compatible with many games.
Some more CeBit coverage, from Overclock.dk..
Reviews:
CardCooler on BSOD, our review here.
Lian-Li PC68 aluminium miditower case on Hexus.
ELSA Gloria III video card (in French) on Puces3D.
Seems reasonably serious, you probably want to download and install the patch. Info and links in this Wired article. Microsoft strongly advises "all customers using Microsoft Internet Explorer to install the patch immediately."
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