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May 2001 |
QGL is this weekend. Two solid days of cs lan action. Looks pretty damn good. I must give a big thanks to wildfire who has sent me 3 emails with at least 10 suggestions for ridding half-life of bad surface extents messages. Thanks alot for that :)
OCWorkbench have a pretty inconclusive photo of Intel's latest i845 board, a DDR/SDR platform for the P4 (?) on their news page (scroll down). You need to use a bit of imagination to figure out that it's sort of a top-on 3/4 view of the board.. but look at all the space around the socket!
Icrontic have checked out a $950USD set of computer speakers - the eminent lft-11's. Pretty damn hardcore, four speakers (not center channel which is a bit suprising for the price) and two amps.
Hmm, just as DDR is getting bedded down electic have info about Infineon and Micron developing a new type of DRAM. Unlike DDR ram where the goal was to increase bandwith, the idea of this RAM is to reduce latency, hence the name RS DRAM.
Incrontic have updated their KT133 faq.. bit of a big update with over 75 new sections, most notable being info on that wcpset fix to lower idle temps for a7v boards. Just what I was looking for!
IANAG have a "exclusive" athlon benchmark up - a Sandra CPU jobbie. Odd how a pair of P3's have beaten it at ALU. And how the Athlons are only at 1.08GHz.. I thought palomino's came much higher than that. Hmm. Lots of salt with this one.
Manaz pointed out this site that makes sandblasted plexi glass windows.. as apposed to stick-on appliques. Benefit of sand blasting is that it looks better and can be personalised easier. I can't really see the difference in their example tho, so hrrrm. Unless it's just the bottom left sharp hook-lookin thing that's been sandblasted, in which case I can, and it looks alright.
One of GideonTech's aussie readers has written up a guide to how he overclocked his socket-a AMD cpu without changing any settings on his motherboard. If you're crafty enough you can change the mult and cpu voltage on the cpu's bridges. Of course, FSB overclocking isn't possible, but it's still nifty nonetheless - especially for people that got their mobo before they got their overclocking obsession.
Agg sent in this article on how to change the LED in your floppy drive to a new one. In this case one of those hi-intesity blue jobbies. Well and good. Note it's hosted at alchemyzone.com? heh. rad.
Anandtech has reviewed another set of hardcore computer/gaming speakers - this time the Klipsch ProMedia 2.1's. As the name suggests, they are a 2.1 2 sattelite/1 sub system. These ones are also THX auth-ed, which means they are good. Lucasfilm/Star wars good.
Tech-Report has an in-depth look at the real world performance benefits of IDE raid. Lots of mobo's with IDE RAID ports nowadays, more people using IDE RAID as well.. but not as many as you'd think.
ClubOC is giving away a 256Mb Infineon-chipped stick of PC133 CL=2 memory. Sure, ram prices nowadays are cheap - but it's not free. Yet. HEH. I live in hope.
3DSpotlight have a pretty handy article up comparing the performance difference between all the new det drivers. The official 6.50's go up against some 7.x's and some 1x.x's. Good to see which ones are more "beta" than the others.
TheTechZone has reviewed an AMK 19" ATX case. They reckon it's AlienWare. I'm not sure why. But it's big.
Finally tonight, FutureLooks have a guide to building the ultimate entertainment PC. I generally don't like guides on how to build PCs, I prefer to read all the reviews of hardware on my shortlist and make my own mind up. That's also what I generally tell people who ask me should-I-buy-this? If you make your own mind up you'll be alot happier I'm sure. But anyway, that link is for the lazy. Enjoy, and stop buggin me!
Reviews:
Tt VolcanoII on PhearFactory.UK
Vantec FCE 6030D hs/f on ExtremeOC.
FrontX Multimedia Ports on SystemLogic, our review here.
PCDB Benchmark Changes
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Thursday, 31-May-2001 11:10:12 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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MWP let me know that (after much demand) he has updated the PCDB to contain 3DMark2001 and Sandra2001 benchmarks instead of the old 2000 versions. To accomodate this he has removed all the existing benchmark numbers, so you'll need to test your machine with the current benchmarks and enter your results! Remember, you can step through your entry leaving everything the same until you get to the benchmark figures and just update those, no need to re-enter everything about your PC.
To get Sandra2001, visit SiSoftware's page. 3DMark2001 is a bit larger, so grab it from our mirror here.
If you're after inspiration, check out the Gallery sorted (as voted by you guys) by Overall Rating.. some amazing machines on the first few pages there. :)
Thursday Morning
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Thursday, 31-May-2001 10:32:05 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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I've been having some problems with my Primus ADSL for a little while now and every time I ring up the support people 'coz I can't fix it (3 times now) the techie guy has explained that the Enternet300 software they provide is "very buggy under win2k".. so last night I set out to find and use something better. Turns out "something better" is raspppoe, which was designed for Win2K from the start. What a revelation! Simple install procedure, lightning-fast login, no more system pausing before - and after - login, no more randomly-not-being-assigned-an-address, no more waiting 30 seconds before being able to resolve names.. etc etc. It just works. Good stuff. Primus can't support it and neither can I, but if you're having trouble all I can say is it works 100% for me.
VIAHW have some info on the 686b SouthBridge Bug, with some suggested fixes.
Dean sent in this Gangsta Rap Star Wars thing, pretty funny in places.. :)
AthlonOC have a guide to tweaking the AMD760 chipset, thanks Elvis.
There's an older guide to putting a thermistor under your slug on benchtest.com, similar to the ProCooling one from yesterday but doesn't involve attacking your socket with a dremel, thanks Jason.
Owen the cyber-sleuth points out a global conspiracy.. the cases used by SGI and Dell for their new Itanium systems are pretty much identical. My theory is that there are special (heatsink mounting like P4?) requirements and that not many OEM manufacturers have started making Itanium-ready cases that are sexy enough for Dell and SGI to use, so they happened to choose the same ones. Maybe.
This is the kind of thing we like to see, NVNews have a guide to using a rear-window demister fixing kit to unlock the bridges on your SocketA CPU. :)
Happy 18th Birthday Ice-Boy!
Reviews:
MicroBus fan-splitter thingy on IANAG.
Elsa Gladiac 2 Ultra video card on JSI.
Epox 8K7A AMD 760-based DDR SocketA motherboard on AMDMB.
3D Prophet II MX PCI video card on Guru3D.
KingMax PC150 SDRAM on CHW.. our reviews here and here.
SULFNBK.EXE Virus - HOAX
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Thursday, 31-May-2001 10:21:38 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Ok, three people have asked me about this in the last 2 days so I figure it must be news! Apparently there's an email going around saying that SULFNBK.EXE is a virus that none of the virus programs can detect blah blah, the usual drill. Well, it's a hoax according to SARC, here's their info page on it. You can probably delete the file anyway as it's a fairly obscure utility that you might not even miss, but the fact that you have the file on your system does NOT mean you have the virus. Anyway, full instructions and info on the SARC page linked above.
Of course, if you receive any mysterious files via email you never execute them, do you? And OF COURSE you have virus protection software installed and kept up to date..
Wednesday night and all's well... erm... I think.
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Wednesday, 30-May-2001 22:15:42 (GMT +10) - by Sciby
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Well, I'm back doing news, so... er... yeah. News. Here it is.
First up, a press release from ABIT, introducing the new KG7-RAID motherboard. Looks very sweet. Just another thing I want to own. Thanks to Rickbisho. (via Alchemy :)
ATI TRUEFORM Technology: Apparently the curve is the beautiful distance between two points. Well, whatever bakes your brownies I guess. Interesting arcticle about the maths behind 3D graphics relating to the TRUEFORM technology, but straight over my head. Maths and I don't get along. Some more TRUEFORM information for yas. Thanks Agg, you wonderful person you. *ahem*
Still on ATI, they've opened up a full range of their technologies to high-volume board makers, so says this email in front of me.
Itanium's aren't out yet, but it seems that Dell is ready to sell them. 64 bit. My nipples are tingling already...
...and they've just gone into overload as SGI launches their new 64-bit workstation. Yummy.
Sick of using both your hands while typing? Tired of having to respond with both hands to your cybersex partner? Well now you can can do it all with the wonderous new Matias Half Keyboard! This actually looks rather interesting, I'd give it a go, although it wouldn't be as satisfying to bash away on while you're flaming someone. It'd be like trying to slam the phone down on a mobile.
More neat stuff to buy: (like all the stuff we EVER talk about), a 16 hour laptop battery. Doesn't make me breathless, but still, that's pretty neat.
How to run a temp probe under the core of your cpu. With the help of a Dremel. Of course.
Here's a neat little converter program, that covers a whole range of categories, including volume, temperature and thermal conductivity. Could be useful to someone, thanks to Imitation.
Trident *shudder* and ALi are going to be producing the world's first DDR/SDR based "Integrated 3D Graphics Core Logic Notebook Solution", good for them. Thanks to Wokket.
With phrases like "fast-paced intercity and commuter rail action" and "...brings the power and excitement of some of the world's most famous trains to your PC...", I can't really take Microsoft Train Simulation seriously at all, I keep getting the giggles thinking about it. Looks pretty though, and that's all that matters. Oh, anyway, it's gone gold, so look for it in stores soon. *snigger*
According to this article in The Inquirer, Microsoft is going to stop certain versions of Windows XP from running with multiple CPU's. AMD will be releasing a cheap SMP solution nearer to the end of the year, but if MS doesn't play nice and give us what we want for cheap, looks like we'll all have to go to an OS that does. :) Thanks to Sniper770 for the info.
Reviews:
OCZ Monster 3 Socket A Cooler - at GideonTech.Com.
Lian Li PC70 case - at Bit-Tech.Net
Memory Man 256mb PC133/CL2 SDRAM memory - at ClubOC.
Wednesday Evening
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Wednesday, 30-May-2001 18:34:32 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Bill noticed that TomsHardware has reviewed the Senfu watercooling kit. I checked this gear out in some detail a while ago now, the full kit gets a going-over here on all sorts of CPU's. I also checked out their Single-Fan Radiator here and their naked-athlon mounts here. It's not a bad bit of kit, but these days I'd recommend something with larger tubing, get some higher flow-rate happening.
What's the new craze in distributed computing? Furby Clustering.. riiight, thanks James. :)
Tim sends word that deskmod.com, one of the oldest desktop customisation sites around, is closing down. It's never good to see a popular site die.
TheHeatsinkGuide have a rant about copper shims. Go Tillman! I've never been a big fan of shims either, and not just because I've killed 2 CPU's with them.
Apparently some insurance companies will insure you against hackers - but one of the original companies to offer this service has raised premiums for companies that use Windows NT..
Andy's given all his PC's away, so stop emailing him! :)
Wednesday Afternoon
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Wednesday, 30-May-2001 13:41:36 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Today's excuse is that I couldn't get onto the net, big dramas with my ADSL connection. Seems to be ok now.. shame I had to pull my 2nd network card out to fix it. Grr! I hate computers.. expect this site to be renamed "Landscape Gardeners Australia" soon. :)
Why is it always the little reviews that attract the most attention? :) The server is chugging away today.. a couple of people pointed out that you can buy pre-made fan RPM/power splitter cables (as described in Wolfy's article from last night).. but where's the fun in that?
Who wants to win a broken Radeon? Not me.
Dan's compared two socket370 motherboards that are almost completely dissimilar. DDR vs SDR and all that..
Been thinking about getting your own communications company? Soc pointed out that there's one going for a song on Ebay.. :)
I thought the "Creative Labs 3DBlaster GeForce2 Ultra 64MB" we reviewed had a long name.. Digit-Life have posted a Gainward CARDEXpert GeForce2 MX400 Golden Sample VIVO TwinView (head explodes) .. review. It's a video card.
We linked this VP6 review earlier but Chris Nolan noted it in a little more detail: A good review. I never thought the VP6 could reach 160MHz with all the talk of instability at high FSB speeds in the 2CPU forums. He has very good CPU's though (almost perfectly batch-matched SL4CH's). Wasn't tieing (I think) Vid[3] to Vss discovered in our own sadly missing forums (either P3V4X or CUSL2, I don't remember exactly). Hmm, not sure. A lot of good stuff came out of those two forums, tho.
According to a friendly newsmonkey at Icrontic, Intel's Itanium was launched today. Hmm, I thought we'd already seen a launch for it.. too many product launches to keep up with these days. Anyway, info here on Intel's site, here on ZDNet and here on CNet. SGI are first to announce an SMP Itanium workstation.. Icrontic have an article of their own on the technology.
Reviews:
ThermalRight SK6 socket cooler on ClubOC.
IceMat mousing surface / cheese platter on CHW.
Seagate Barracuda 180GB drive on xbitlabs.
JustCooler FA-100 Fan Check on TacoNuts.
AVGS System Cooler on RipNet.
Fan RPM + power splitter
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Tuesday, 29-May-2001 23:59:20 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Wolfy sent in a guide to splitting your 3-pin fan connector so you can run power-sucking fans off a molex plug while still being able to monitor the fan RPM. A simple idea but very useful..
Click for the article!
BTW, 8 updates to the news page in 24 hours? That's gotta be some kinda record. :)
Assignments are done, man. I had to engage in a last-ditch red bull fueled all-nighter to get em both finished, but they got done. And handed in. After not sleeping for nigh 40hrs you get some really really weird hallucinations. Bus trip to uni? Nah mate.. sitting in a 60km/hr cage filled with people. And a button that makes a dinging sound. Very strange. Thanks to everyone that sent in encouragement - and to people that offered to find me a "pre-done" assignment. Not that they could. It didn't seem anyone had ever written about "the effect of land use intesification on the biophysical systems of moreton bay". And I imagine that is the last time I'll ever write that sentence again as well.. off to obscurity you stupid topic. All assignments for this semester are now done - all I've got are exams which don't seem too hard. Then 5 whole weeks of holidays. Yum. Anyway, now that I've caught up on sleep heres the news..
Over at IANAG it seems they have discovered the speed cheat issue in windows that we had an article on quite some time ago. Well, it's either that or Sandra has decided to blow chunks. Either way.
They have also reviewed a Samsung DVD/CD-RW drive that goes for a nice price.. $126USD. Anyone seen any AU pricing?
Echelon is real, man. A report into it's existance has been presented and New Scientist have a small summary of it. Basic recomendations include all european nations steer clear of "security by obscurity" based software and head for open source.
Not overclocking related at all, but some food for thought. Dicey sent in this article questioning the "Big Bang" theory of evolution. Apparently there has to be a "Big Crunch" to follow it or something. Sounds like a chocolate bar.
Electic have a small blurb up about nVidia's upcomming chipset for the Athlon platform. Apparently it's going to be on show at Computex, so it'll be a nice year to go. It sounds good, but it'll also be nVidias first (afaik) attempt at a chipset. So I guess we'll see how it goes.
CPUreview have reviewed the Gigabyte i850 P4 mobo. Something to note - even with P4 prices dropping to be almost equivilent of Athlons, the current P4 platform is only a temporary one. Intel intends to replace not only the chipset, but the socket too in an upgrade to come soon. A few people seem to of forgotten that, and it's just something to keep in mind for potential P4 buyers.
ChillBlast have an guide to preparing your Socket-A CPU core for use. Sure, I bet there are alot of old-timers baulking at this thinking "where's the guide for doing up your shoelaces?", but equally I'm sure there are quite a few newbies thankfull for it as well.
Neoseeker have a review of the AOpen AK73-1394, a KT133 (non-a) board with firewire support. Interstingly enough, I was in Harvey Norman today trying to get my MS mouse replaced (no luck, even tho it's buggered) and noticed a large wall of Firewire cards for your PC. Interesting to note the difference between the mass-retail channels (lots of firewire cards) and the smaller cheaper channels (not many).
sniper770 posted this Inq article in IRC about AMD SMP. It appears the the Via KT266 chipset is SMP compatible, just like it's Intel cousin.. so expect to see Via DDR AMD mobos on the market sometime in the far future. At a much nicer price than the AMD ones. Incidently, 760MP boards at a cheaper price point are also being developed.
Well, thats it. I still need more sleep. G'Night.
Tuesday Evening #2
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Tuesday, 29-May-2001 22:22:13 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Apparently between 2am and 5am tomorrow Brisbane Optus@Home users may experience lack of connectivity while they do some network maintenance.
TheRegister say Intel hinted at 2GHz P4's in Q3.
This must be "International Video Chipset Review Day":- ChicksHardware have posted their analysis of Matrox's upcoming G550 graphics chipset.
- In a similar vein, Hexus have a 29-page article on the GeForce3..
- Not to be outdone, HardOCP checked out the GeForce2 MX400, three cards based on this chipset.
- Finally, AnandTech focus on ATI's Truform technology, which will apparently power the next line of Radeon products.
The NVIDIA Crush chipset is checked out here on EBN and on AcesHW's front page. This is a new chipset from NVIDIA - not just graphics though, it's a core logic chipset for the Athlon 4 mobile. Of course, it has integrated graphics..
Apparently Asus are giving away a HEAP of stuff at Computex. Sounds like you don't have to be there tho, just go to the website and do the quiz.
Dicey points out an interesting (if lengthy) article on what Microsoft is doing now. What's happening with the court-ordered split of the company, I wonder..
TacoNuts have some more pics in their case gallery. You can see the new entries in the PCDB by following the modification date link - usually new entries on a daily basis.
CoolHardWarez compared the ThermalRight SK6 and Thermaltake Volcano II, 2 socket coolers.
Redback says: AWL, everyones favorite border lan party will not be held on the first saturday of the month as usual, due to venue issues, instead it is being held on the 9th and 10th of June.
Exploding CD Theories
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Tuesday, 29-May-2001 20:13:27 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Well, 27 people offered suggestions. :) Pretty much everyone had experienced it first-hand. A couple of people thought that at high speed the disk may wobble on the spindle until it hits a stationary part of the drive.. hmm, seems unlikely to me, or unlikely to make the disk explode, anyway. A lot of people mentioned stickers, paint, printed labels etc unbalancing the disk and even the possibility of cheap disks being unevenly weighted or having the hole not properly centred, resulting in catastrophic vibration. A couple of people suggested that there's a "natural vibration" and at certain RPM's the cd might resonate (like the old "soldiers marching over a bridge" thing) and disintegrate. Rick suggested cold weather making them brittle - Manaz and Daniel both say they've seen it when CD's are cold, as when kept in a server room, then put into a CDROM drive that heats them rapidly - some suggested the heat from sustained use as in a long installation could be to blame. Similarly, some suggested "plastic fatigue" caused by flexing or banging/dropping the CD. Memphis noted some special CD carriers place too much stress on the hole in the CD. Ian says old CD's often have hairline cracks near the spindle which could be an indication of fatigue due to age or stress.
Several people mentioned that Sony CDROM drives (certain 48 and 52 speed ones at least) have a sticker (picture linked below, thanks Greg) which warns that under certain conditions disks may break at high speed rotation:
Click to enlarge (26kb)
Wilhelm rigged one up to his Dremel to see how fast it could spin: Starting off slow at around 5000 RPM nothing happened but around 8000-14000 RPM the thing just completely shattered and bits were scattered all over my dorm room. It scared the hell out of my roommate too.
Kurama notes it can be quite serious: There was a class action court case in Taiwan last year over exploding CDs. The CDrom manufaturer was sued (can't remember which one) and they settled out of court with some compensation.
Anyway! What does it all mean? :) Clearly exploding CD's are uncommon but not exactly rare. The central theory seems to be this: the plastic disks seem prone to microfractures due to poor production, age or physical stress. A damaged or prone-to-damage CD in a high-speed CDROM drive can suffer a catastrophic failure which, as it happens while rotating at speed, can have very energetic and spectacular results. The secret to avoiding it, I guess, is to not stress the CD's (no bending, stressing the spindle hole, dropping or rapid temperature changes), don't use old CD's or just use slow CDROM drives.
Much more practical I think is to use high-quality CD's and make sure, as with ANY media, that you never have only one copy of important data.. and certainly not stored long-term on a CD you intend to use in a fast drive. What do you expect for media that costs you $1. :)
If you've got a need for some old PC's, Andy is giving some away to a good home:
20 486 PC's, more or less complete, mini desktop cases (AT)
11 other PC cases, some mini desktop, some mini tower (AT), with various componentry in (all pre pentium)
The above have keyboards, a few have monitors, some network cards, but no software, OS, mice etc. Those that are incomplete have had parts scavenged from them. I would guess you could make maybe 15-20 working PC's from the lot. Of course they'd still be 486's.............
They are at my office in William Street, Sydney, and are free to a good (or bad, for that matter) home. I would prefer to have them taken as a single lot, and I don't want to waste too much time - yes, I'm trying to avoid having to rent a skip to put them in!
If you can take them off his hands, drop Andy a note!
UPDATE: All gone! Stop mailing him please. :)
A few people mentioned there's a "Hacker Documentary" on SBS at 8:30 tonight, might be worth checking out.
This came via 2600.org.au's mailing list - an analysis of some worrisome cookie-based behaviour in MS IE.
Yet another cooler roundup is up, this 15-unit one on SpodesAbode. Looks like we really caught the front of the wave with our 21-cooler roundup from a few weeks ago now.
From Manaz: Apparently there's a listing on Pricewatch for a Tyan Thunder dual Athlon motherboards, USD$575...
I don't know if it's dual Athlon4 (Palomino) or Thunderbird (or perhaps both), but that translates to about AUD$1200 landed here...
Hopefully some of the other manufacturers will have a go at a dual Athlon board, without all the server stuff (the Tyan board will more than likely come with onboard LAN, SCSI and video, and the ability to run more RAM than most users would know what to do with), but I can still see a dual Athlon setup's most expensive piece being its motherboard...
We need a BP6 equivalent! Still, it's early days for the technology. Do we know if 2 CPU's is the limit for the K7 platform? Or will we see quad Palomino workstations? Now -there's- some serious power suckage. Anyway, Electic have a link to the Pricewatch page in question. Wonder if it'll get yanked.
More to come..
Tuesday Afternoon
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Tuesday, 29-May-2001 14:43:29 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Right! My A7V-based machine died the final death this morning, refusing to boot. It's had IDE problems (on both the southbridge ports and the onboard promise controller) for a fair while now but I've been working around them, trying to find a solution, trying everything everyone suggests.. but today was the final straw! I think it's a faulty unit sadly.. anyway, I'm now back on the trusty P3V4X with a P3-550E @ 733MHz (basically a 733EB) after a full reinstall of Win2K. So that's my excuse for no news this morning. :) Let's start with a quick buncha reviews..
Happy 22nd birthday to Kermie btw!
Reviews:
Yamaha CRW2100E 16X10X40X CDRW on 8balls.
Intel Pentium 4 processor on Hexus.
Antec SX1030/40B file server on G3D.
FrontX Multimedia Ports on CoolHardWarez, our review here.
Exonion MP3 CD Player on AcidHW.
Abit VP6 dual Socket370 (apollo pro 133a-based) motherboard on ExtremeOC.
Windtunnell II case on OCOnline.
Taisol 760 socket cooler on BlargOC.
VisionTek GeForce3 video card on HotHardware.
The Core heatsink on FrostyTech.
This from Robotmort:
A software explosion indeed. I recently picked up a copy of Redhat 7.1 from a cover CD from a certain Aus. computer mag.
You beauty I thought, time to test how much of a geek I am.... So I chucked the disc into my 52X CD ROM and things were going well until about 20 minutes into the install a loud crash came from the drive. The obligatory WTF ensued and the install progress indicator stopped. I tried to open the tray but Linux had locked it, forcing a reboot to unlock it. I was particularly annoyed as I had just spent the previous 45 min sifting through the stuff I did not want to install.
click to enlarge..
You can see from the photo what had happended to the CD. Some of it rode out on the tray but most of the debri had collected inside the drive.
I used the highly technical and skillfull method of shaking the open drive around to get the remains out. Heh is was quicker than pulling the drive apart and in any case I fully expected the laser to have been destroyed. So with everything crossed I refitted the drive and rebooted, amazingly the damn thing still worked.
I'm not sure if this is some kind of conspiricy from M$ or divine intervention from Our Lord Bill for daring to deviate from Windoze or just plain bad luck. Worst of it all I had to go buy the mag a second time just to replace the disc that exploded. So much for CD's being a safe backup medium !!
Thanks to Scatman for the pic.
We had a similar thing at work a few months ago with an NT4 CD. Halfway through the install there was a loud bang, the machine froze and bits of broken CD had to be shaken out of the drive. Very weird - anyone got any theories? Let me know.
OCCafe have an article claiming that cable rounding doesn't do a thing for your system. That certainly goes against what we've seen elsewhere.. anyway, if you're wanting to make your own rounded cables, follow our guide.
Daniel sends word of the iGun, the first internet-ready handgun.
OverclockedPC have a guide to using WCPREDIT to set a BIOS register which can cool your socketa cpu apparently.. hmm, I think we've seen this before..
Scams? On the Internet? Surely not! Well, the FBI has come to town and there's a few less scammers on the net now, thanks Ice-Boy.
Reviews:
Radeon VE video card on IANAG.
Transcend TS-ALR4 Ali Magick DDR SocketA motherboard on AMDMB.
Franklin eBookMan, a new PDA on FutureLooks.
Promise ATA-100 RAID controller on TheTechZone.
WindTunnel II case on IANAG.
Extech Digital Thermometer on ProCooling.
KingWin socket coolers on ClubOC.
Cyber Cooler HC-250 HDD cooler on MikhailTech.
CrashDummy's Waterblock
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Monday, 28-May-2001 17:36:00 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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I mentioned CrashDummy's PC from the PCDB a few days ago. He sent in a little more info on what he's got in store for it, including a cool waterblock:
It would be running watercooled as we speak but the waterblock broke it's top. I've inclosed a pic of it to give you a idea of it:
click to enlarge..
There were cracks around one of the bolts and both of the fittings. I'm guessing the cracks formed from the pressure from the fittings being screwed in the way they were. So now i've gotta either make a new plexiglass top and find a tap & die or get a metal top and a tap & die again...... Which i don't have!
Info about the block: $9 worth of metal on it (aluminimum) and CNC milled by a friends friends friend with my design. The block was originally designed to take 3/8in fittings but i scrapped that when i tested the waterflow with 1/2in fittings :)
I'm gonna have another attempt at making it. I want watercooling, but at the moment i'm running at 1ghz and i'm able to generally keep the cpu temp below 40.C while keeping the whole PC quiet. (Thank god) But i'm gonna keep working on it.
Anyone else stay up late watching the Superbikes last night? That was some good racing.. :)
Yet another modified HX/HQ08 system in the PCDB - Rick's watercooled machine. Love the BIOS logo. :)
TheHeatsinkGuide have a great plain-english article on calculating your CPU's power usage.. useful for deciding on cooling.
Neill points out another article on those cyborg eels we heard about a few months ago.
This from Manaz: I was at the North Rocks computer markets yesterday - 128MB PC-133 (Kingmax): $66 And I didn't buy any. With my main gaming machine having only 128MB in it. I think I must be crazy :P Also saw a nice 8 port 10/100 autosensing switch (Motech I think) for anything from $130 to $180. I think I might be picking one of those up in the next few weeks... Mototech, probably - they're good for the price, there's been an 8-port one holding the AggCave together for over a year now.. I'd be checking the PCB version of that kingmax too.
A few people have recently sent word of this (hopefully) satirical weapons site, BirdMan.org, where you can pick up such goodies as homeboy sights for your pistol and a mountain dew shotgun.
Over in TheTechZone's forums there's some loony cooling pictures, mostly borrowed from u-san.net and Bunny's Workshop, our favourite mad lad from Japan. A 2.1GHz tbird is impressive stuff, but their methods are not very practical for long-term use..
All-Games point out that violence was around before video games. Makes a few interesting points..
TechCentral.de have a guide to installing an Ali Magick chipset board. Unfortunately it's auto-translated into English from German.. which means it's almost indecipherable. Who has placed up to now on a chip sentence from the house Via, one knows now and then some hours(lessons) must spend to install this really correctly. This is considered(applies) particularly when no particularly useful manual lies to the hand which describes the exact installation. .. hmm, I guess you can work out what they mean.
TacoNuts have some feedback about their changing-mouse-LED article. Interesting stuff from some (apparently) knowledgeable readers about why the tracking suffers..
Tim mentioned these cool silver IDE cables.. neato and not cheap.
More bizzarre stuff on ZZZ Online..
Reviews:
Fan Adapters on Hexus.. our review here.
Crucial PC133 CAS2 SDRAM on BlargOC.
Ramsinks and Arctic Silver Adhesive on HWDaily.
FrontX Multimedia Ports on JSI.. our review here.
Gigabyte GA-6XVD7 dual Socket370 apollo pro 133A motherboard on AnandTech.
Late Sunday Night
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Monday, 28-May-2001 00:43:38 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Monday morning, back in the cube? Try a little kick-ups (flash game) to take your mind off it. My record is 12, it helps to use the walls. :) Thanks Eddie.
Here's a neat little filing cabinet server project, thanks Pitstop.
x86-secret.com have some guides - video card bios modding and i815 tweaking. In that last one they say the CUSL2 does strange things when you overclock it, turning AGP4X off if more than a 5MHz overclock etc. Not heard about that kind of thing before, hmm. Anyway, they also have a bunch of NVIDIA reference BIOS files for download if you're into that kinda thing.
OCMOD have a guide to making an inline temp probe for water-cooling, similar to another we saw earlier in the week.
GameSpot have a huge E3 coverage article posted. Lots of new games etc there.. hmm, Star Trek Bridge Commander..
Epoch points out this interesting recipe on everything2. Be warned: Everything2 is addictive and has been known to cause severe time-suckage.
We've seen these before but they're pretty cool.. amazing computer desks. From memory they're mind-wobblingly expensive, too, thanks Kamal.
Bah, some Primus user is abusing the oz.org irc network and hence they've had to lock out *syd.primus.net.au (ie, me) from using irc. Slow news day as per usual for Sunday..
What would Sunday morning be without a little bizarre flash animation.. in the long-dead tradition of All Your Base, thanks IPFreely.
There's a new MBM out.. MBM is, of course, Motherboard Monitor, useful for keeping an eye on your temperatures, voltages and fan speeds.
Joshua has a guide to flushing your bios.. no that's not a typo. Silly person. :)
HardOCP are giving away cool stuff again - remember, an Aussie won their last comp! Update: It's actually Hypothermia who are running the comp. My widdle bwain is easily confused on a Sunday.
GideonTech want to tell you how to unlock your SocketA chip..
Reviews:
Copper Orb socket cooler on 8balls.
QuickCam Traveller webcam on AllTechBox.
12X Lite-On LTD-122 DVD-ROM on RojakPot.
Epox 8KTA3 kt133a-based socketA motherboard on AMDWorld.
Hmm.. fairly quiet at the moment - and to be expected, it's 2.30AM. Just put the finishing touches on an assignment, still have to finish another one. I'm getting there. Be nice if it wasn't so freakin cold, but you get that. Especially when you can't afford a heater ;)
The Duke of URL has a massive roundup of Linux Distros.. it also contains a bit of a stark reminder of the recent tech-industry bust with a few distros on the not-being-officially-updated list. Most notable are Corel Linux and Gentus Linux (the one Abit created). Oh well - it's GNU, it'll never truly die.
Hexus have reviewed a pre-modded case from CoolCaseMods.com - and built a blue system around its blue neon. A blue KT7E goes with a blue Herc GF3. They could also hunt down a blue network card, add a Herc Game Theater XP and your almost all blue. Just find a blue CPUfx cooler like the one in our cooler guide and some blue rounded cables and you're done. Da ba dee.
Thermaltake now make DDR RAM, if you where not already aware. Club OC have a review of a 128Mb stick.. and naturally it comes with cooling options :)
TacoNuts has reviewed the PCTote - sort of like the CaseAce GearGrip Pro's we saw a heap of reviews about a while back. Interestingly there is now also a GearGrip Pro for your monitor - supporting CRT's up to 21" in size. I'd like to see an average LANner carry a 21" monitor in one hand tho, handle or not.
I found this article over on Speedguide.net demystifying the mysteries of uncapping your cable modem. The speed cap that is.. and the short and curlies is it's not possible. At least on all of Optus and most of Telstra.. pretty decent explanation of the way the DOCIS standard works - and DOCIS won't allow you to change your own settings. Oh well, at least now we know :)
351W Enermax PSU reviewed on JSi Hardware. Prices for these in aus are dropping as they become more common.
It seems everyone is trying to play catch up with Wolfy's massive cooler roundup. Including Dan. He has reviewed QUITE (his caps not mine) a few coolers, with 22 air coolers, 2 radiators and two waterblocks all with "calibrated-heater ambient-temperature-compensated realistic-contact-patch thermal resistance figures". And all on one page. Go Dan.
And in proper mIRCStats style, Real Reviews tried to look cool and reviewed 5 air coolers.
WildAndyC has taken a look at SOI CPU manufacturing processes and explain how AMD is going to use them to make killer processors soon. At 3AM I'm not about to find out what SOI stands for, so do it yaself. G'night.
Saturday Afternoon
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Saturday, 26-May-2001 16:36:56 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Spent the morning hammering around Mt White before heading over to Eastern Creek to check out the ride day and some stalls etc there.. not a bad way to spend the day.
VR-Zone have a guide to voltage-modding the A7A266 and A7M266. We have a guide to multiplier-modding the A7M266 here.
InsaneWB have a teeny-tiny waterblock.. only as big as the cpu core. Not sure what the advantage of that is.
Those who persist in saying Linux is not ready for prime time should note that a major oil&gas company just bought a linux-based 256-node supercomputer for pre-drilling seismic imaging..
Reviews:
Visiontek Geforce 3 video card on Icrontic.
ThermoEngine socket cooler on DangerousDog.
Fan grill filters on OCAddiction.
Blizzard 360 case on TheTechZone.
SIS735 chipset on Digit-Life.
Gigabyte GA-1280 GF2MX400-based video card on Digit-Life.
Samsung SyncMaster 800TFT 18.1" LCD display on PCStats.
Just updated the site template to get rid of the DoubleClick code now they're no longer handling our ads (they left the Australian market). I took the opportunity to update the drop-down boxes at the top of the page with some more recent stuff. Also, we have a new advertiser, GlobalMultipass (bottom left button) - quite an interesting concept, a global ISP. If anyone else is interested in advertising on OCAU, drop me a note!
We've seen some crazy home PC setups but this hi-fi listening room would have to pretty much take the cake, thanks Denis.
Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel and originator of "Moore's Law" (which is not really a law, more an observation and prediction) has retired from Intel's board.
While wandering around I spotted this thread which lists a zillion Case-Mod Galleries (including the PCDB, of course) .. worth a look if you're after inspiration.
I think Monster's PC was #1500 in the PC DataBase. Thanks again to MWP for creating and maintaining this very cool part of the site. We have a stats tracker running on the PCDB and I can see in forums all over the world, people have PCDB links in their signatures..
Electronic Frontiers Australia have an analysis of the Australian Broadcasting Authority's application of the Internet Co-Regulatory Scheme (aka, the Oz Net Censorship Bill). They not only think, as I do, that it's unworkable and a waste of money, but they point out some much more scary aspects of it..
The cooler roundups keep on coming, HardOCP has a 15-cooler one. They found (as we did in our roundup) that the temperature spread across the coolers is not as big as you might think.
Fellow Aussie site AcidHW is giving away some pretty cool stuff.
Here's some interesting technical info on fan technology, thanks Andrew. I've actually seen this before, and I remember this document in particular, which suggests the old "ball-bearing fans are better than sleeve-bearing" saying is not always true..
TheInquirer keeps hinting that all is not well in DDR land.. hmm, thanks Morjo.
VIAHW have a new AGP Driver from VIA..
ModdingZone have a guide to making a temperature probe to sample the water temp in an inline water-cooling system.
This is pretty old but for those who missed it or want to see it again, SomethingAwful have an overclocking guide by JeffK, thanks FlameHead. :)
Iamnotageek.com are having some DNS probs, but you can still find them at ianag.com if you're worried.
Reviews:
Matrox G450eTV video card on NeoSeeker.
Delta Force socket cooler on ChillBlast.
Taisol CGK 742092 socket cooler on OCTools.
iButton ThermoChron little thermometer clock thing on Icrontic.
I'll start tonight with a few more rants.. If you don't care about the possible performance benefits of PCI/AGP bus overclocking, or about KT133E then skip these two big paragraphs.
First is about the AGP/PCI overclocking performance increases I asked for feedback on a few days ago. I've got some really decent emails from a few of you, so thanks to everyone that emailed! I've basically come to a few conclusions. Increasing the BUS speed is not at all similar to overclocking the core/ram settings of a video card. The closest performance difference between a standard and an overclocked AGP bus is best compared to the difference between AGP 2X and AGP 4X settings. The different AGP X ratings are im theory similar to what we know as DDR ram and the Quad Pumped FSB the P4 uses. AGP 1X is normal one-transfer-per-clock speed, 2X AGP is similar to DDR transfer speeds and 4X agp is double-DDR, or QDR. So now that you know what it means, how is it related to an overclocked AGP bus? Well, 4X AGP is "effectivley" 4x66. So if you up the AGP bus, it'll have the same effect as going from 2X AGP to 4X AGP, except on a smaller scale. Most of us should already know that going from 2X AGP to 4X AGP is a negligable performance increase - even though it ~theoretically~ doubles the available bandwith for the AGP card to exchange data with the CPU/RAM subsystems. So an overclocked AGP bus won't bring much of a performance benefit because there isn't bottleneck. If textures become massive, then maybe it will. But for now the only benefit an overclocked AGP bus possibly brings is the tandem affect of an overclocked RAM bus. That solves that.
Next, KT133E. I havn't seen any tech info on what this chipset is, and it's had me confused for a while. I think I've got it figured out now. Basically, it's the exact same chipset used in mobile Athlons/Durons. I take this assumption from the PowerNow! support. The good overclockability of the chipset I simply attribute to Via getting better at making KT133 chips. Newer KT133A's overclock better than old ones, as do newer thunderbird chips (AXIA? pfft.. AZIA baby!), so thats possibly why it has no qualms running at fairly out of spec speeds. But why are they selling KT133E's when KT133A does effectively the same thing? Two theories.. the first is that it's uneconomical just to make the small number of chipsets demanded by the laptop market, so they make a large amount and palm the leftover ones off to the desktop market. Nothing wrong with that. The other theory is that the chipsets going into laptops are sort of like GF2U chip's.. ie: binsorted high quality ones. Except they're not looking for overclockability, they're looking for low power consumption and low heat output. That would explain the low cost. So what does this mean? KT133E is effectivley the hot running or power hungry chips that wouldn't cut it in a laptop. No problem with that. It also ~possibly~ means that with the right BIOS you could ~forseeably~ FSB overclock a laptop. Heat limitations not withstanding. That'd be pretty cool.
I promise the rest of the news won't be so long winded. If rants like that totally bore the bejesus out of you, let me know. Likewise if you're interested in what I've got to say, let me know. here. Oh, and thanks to everyone who gave me motivation for uni. It helped alot. Dosn't mean the assignments finished yet tho :/
Manaz, man of the long email disclaimer, pointed out this fairly comprehensive timeline showing the development of Unix and other *n?x type OS's. If nothing else, you can at least read it and know where Linux came from. Also on Unix news from Manaz.. check out this page, hosted on a Microsoft Server no less. Ummah.. look who is NOT respecting their competition.
The US government is throwing heaps of money at students studying computer science and other IT-type degrees on the agreement that they come work for them once they're done. The have finally figured out that they don't have as many IT security heads as they should.. I wonder until Mr.Alston figures that out. Thanks to Dan Cooper for the link.
Rizenet has been busy behind the scenes, but has finally come back to the foreground and updated their CaseMod gallery. I dun reckon it's up to PCDB standards tho.. what do you reckon? NOT you MWP :D
2CPU have some info up about support for Via chipsets under Win2K with SP2. To cut their short story even shorter, they conclude that Win2K SP1+4in1's = SP2. In other words, SP2 finally brings decent Via support to the Win2K codebase. For SMP Pro133A boards at least. No word on KT133 boards or 686B though.
Icrontic has taken a squiz at Version2 of CPUfx's Core cooler. It's a pretty pricey thing, especially for an aliminium air cooler. At least it comes with a tube of Artic SilverII.. even tho, is it worth the price?
Another hs/f review, this time the OCZ MonsterII on TacoNuts.
Final hs/f review on PCExtremes.. an ADDA B53. Whatever it is, I dont know. It's big tho.
Tech Report have a new writer, and the new writer has a new article about hardware T&L. A pretty decent point is made - has T&L been worth it? nVidia made lots of noise about T&L being the Next Big Thing, but I havent seen much of it. I dont really feel we're all that much better off because of it. In the day of GHz+ CPU clocks is hardware T&L anything more than a marketing ploy?
The rounded cable craze is spreading.. ClubOC have reviewed a pre-rounded 68-pin SCSI cable.
Thursday Morning
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Thursday, 24-May-2001 11:42:08 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Asetek have some benchmarks of a 2.27GHz P4, using their Vapochill system.
Dean from OCCafe points out this interesting guide here to the sound factor of various fans. They have sound samples of the fans running and measure the sound in dBA. The samples are really clear, you can easily hear the differences between the various fans. Fan noise is becoming a major issue now and I wonder when we're going to start seeing fancy blade designs and venturi systems etc as people attempt to boost airflow with lower noise.
BlueSmoke have updated their case mods gallery - some very cool PC's in there, definitely worth checking out. I notice our own PCDB is in the approaching-a-big-milestone phase where nobody puts any entries in while they wait to be #1500 - I bet it jumps to 1520 or so one evening soon. :)
Wolfy (a Microsoft drone of the highest order :) ) points out this free seminar on OfficeXP, not WindowsXP.
Reviews:
56k modems (two different ones) on 8balls.
IWill KD266 ALI M1649-based SocketA board on VIAHW. KT133A killer?
ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon video card with the lot on GU.
Early Thursday Morning
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Thursday, 24-May-2001 01:17:09 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Seems an Aussie, one Vu Pham of Brisbane, won a GeForce3 card over on HardOCP. Congrats!
Sniper770 points out a quick note on TheInquirer, which claims that there's empty space on the die of AMD's "ClawHammer" processor - reserved for some serious future SMP technology.
On the other side of the barbed-wire fence, Intel's new Xeons are based on the P4 core. AnandTech reviewed the 1.7GHz part of this new line and even checked out a dual system. 17 pages in this one, some interesting stuff for sure, thanks leperMessiah.
Cary sent over some interesting info in response to our Chipset Cooler Roundup from a little while ago now - if you remember, the MOS Cu Extreme was the best and had a strange thermal pad included. He says: MOS may be way out in front on this one .... some metallic carbons and carbon fibers have a W/mk of around 2000 ... or ~six times better than silver and copper. One of the best is Pyrograph ... absolutely fantastic as a thermal interface material and goes for about $3 US / pound.
Here's a couple of silly pics for you, one from Bren, one from Tigger. :)
 
Reviews:
AOpen CRW1232 CDRW on OCWB. Our review here.
SiS 735 chipset preview on VR-Zone.
Asus V8200 Deluxe GeForce3 with the lot on DansData.
Radeon LE 32MB budget video card (cheaper than GF2MX?!) on AnandTech, thanks Morjo.
Wednesday Night Procrastination
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Wednesday, 23-May-2001 20:07:39 (GMT +10) - by alchemy
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Hmmm.. I'm having mass amounts of trouble trying to start a uni assignment. It's 2000 words, worth over 50% and due on monday. I'm just not motivated at all. Things like this are bad, especially this close to a deadline. I'm hoping writing the news might give me some direction. Maybe.. anyway, continuing somewhat of a trend that I started last post, if you've got any ideas (serious ones) on how I can get motivated, mail me.. heh :)
Styles from over at TweakTown let me know of this, shall we say "abnormality" in the seek.com.au job database.. it appears that an ex-employee of a recruitment company has had his/her revenge! Heh, pretty amusing (read the descriptions for 'Technician' and 'Avionics Technician')
Agg pointed out this picture over on HardOCP.. some hooligans have turned a P4 billboard into an Athlon4 billboard with a little bit of guerilla marketing. Amusing. Also on HardOCP is this pic of a burnt out p3.. I wonder how they managed that. Disturbingly as well is this pic of a remarked Thunderbird.. you'd have to be game to go remarking on the actual die. I'm not overly sure what it was remarked from either.. but still, not a reasurring trend.
Electic has info about Dell readying their Intel Itanium IA-64 based servers for the market. Even Intel themselves have said this won't be a big hit.. they're placing the success bids on the Itanium's follow up. Staying on the big-server trend is this IBM offer to let you loose on one of their mainframe servers loaded with Linux.. featuring 3Gb of RAM, Terabytes of disk space and no less than 10 processors! There are all sorts of limitations on it, and it'll only be for a limited time.. but still. All you need is a Telnet/SSH client. Too easy. Contary to whats been written elsewhere, this has been done before, by Digital/Compaq who offered a wide range of machines with a wide range of distros. Pretty cool way of marketing. Can anyone say RC5?
Wireless D-Link DSL/Router thing-o with ethernet ports on G3D. Has anyone actually got a use for one of these? I mean, is actually sitting at home with their DSL connection and a few computers (including a laptop with a wireless LAN card) thinking gee.. that's what I really need. Hmm. Didn't think so, at least not in Australia.
Tim has let us know of these ~AMD~ case badges over on e-bay. Pretty amusing.
OCworkbench has on their news page what I consider to be a pretty bold statement.. They reckon mainboard manufacturers like Asus, Gigabyte and MSI are going to halt development of DDR boards because there is not a market for 'em. They attribute that to the falling prices of PC133 Ram, the increasing maturity of PC133 solutions and of P4 platforms, and of the lack of performance DDR brings so far. Just give it another month is my expectation.. at the moment DDR prices have just fallen to PC133 levels and the boards are only new to market.
Anandtech has reviewed the ATi Raedon LE 32Mb.. sort of like the GeForce2 MX cards with DDR ram, except with a catch.. you can mod it up to fullscale GeForce2 GTS-type performance.. nice. Still on Raedons, PCStats has reviewed a 64Mb Raedon VIVO retail boxed card. Apparently they are pretty common in the US, but I've yet to see an ATi Retail Card sitting on the shelf of a computer store in aus.
Right. This is pretty much it. Cooling is getting out of hand now. I've heard of heatsinks on SBlive cards, and that's just stupid. Heatsinks on modems also goes down as another oddity. Sure, sometimes there are good reasons for it.. but a Monitor Cooler? Shouldn't the manufacturer just design the monitor so it dosn't get hot (ie: give it cooling vents). In the day of fanless-iMac's, overheating monitors just seems stupid. Stilll, I suppose there is a product to fill every market.
EverythingUSB has a bit of news regarding a first from Panasonic.. an external DVD-RAM drive utilising a USB 2.0 drive. You'd be pretty tricked out having one of those in your system.
It's nice to dream, and thats precisley what FutureLooks has been doing. They've sat down and figured out what computer to buy if you won the lottery. It's a pretty hard question too - with things the way they are, there isn't thaaat much totally cutting edge. I spoze at the moment there is actually GeForce3, Dual Palomino's and a Plasma screen. Hmm. That would rock.
Wednesday Morning
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Wednesday, 23-May-2001 11:35:09 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Primus seem to be back up to speed again today, hurrah.
I was pretty chuffed to have a 21-way SocketA Cooler Roundup here on OCAU, but TomsHardware thumbs their nose at us with their new 46-way Cooler Roundup! I will say though, they don't look at each cooler in nearly as much detail as we did. Still, interesting stuff of course, a few coolers I've never even heard of..
Not to be left out entirely, A1Electronics have a 12-way Cooler Roundup happening too. Kinda weird navigation system in that review, mebbe it's just me.
This sounds cool, according to ZDNet, next week IBM are making one of their 10-processor zSeries mainframe computers available via the Internet for access by people interested in working with the Linux operating system. More info on IBM's page here.
TE have a little E3 4U, OK?
If you want a PK-OCK7 Overclocking Device, you might be able to buy one soon from Radeonic. I'm guessing that's one of those socketA adapters that adds multiplier and voltage adjustment to boards that lack it.
Daniel points out that down the bottom of this LockerGnome page they have a comparison of Microsoft Technical Support and the Psychic Friends Network, and how useful each is for resolving problems with Microsoft products. Pretty funny but more interestingly an insight into the MS tech support machine..
Intel admit the first Itanium will most likely not be a mammoth success. You just wait until McKinley though, they say.
Ye Gods, I found something interesting by clicking an ad! Here's a timeline showing development of the internet in comparison to other world events.
CDRInfo have a review of the new SONY CRX200E IDE DDCDR-W drive.. DDCDR-W? It's a new standard for 1.3GB CDRW's.. cool.
Mr Bill sent in this page with new PDA's and handhelds at an expo in Japan..
Finally, a little article on Linus.
Reviews:
IWill BD133 i815EP-based socket370 motherboard on OCOnline.
Zalman Cooler on CoolHardWarez. I cringe every time I type that site name.
Logitech Cordless Desktop on ModdingZone.
Abit SA6-RAID i815EP-based socket370 motherboard on PCHardware.
LifeFX Facemail on PCMonkey. "Are there Agents?" "Yes." Well, avatars, anyway.
Thermalright SK6 socket cooler on DangerousDog.
Hercules Game Theatre XP sound card on HotHardware.
512MB NCP PC133 SDRAM on ClubOC.
Hmm, a few ranty things to say tonight.. and the first concerns the o@h problems alot of us have been experiencing.. they're fixed! (for now) Optus has decided to suspend the trial of FTP caching until they can fix all the problems users have been experiencing. Which is good. I'm all for a FTP proxy, 600k/s speeds are niiice. But it has to work. So thanks to optus for fixing the problem so speedily. Iceman let me know of a Whirlpool article about it, and I noticed the news in a post to the usenet group athome.announce.
Other ranty thing.. a new version of SecureCRT has been out for a while.. and it brings a neat little minimize-to-tray and tray activator thing-o. It's neat. I like it.
Final ranty thing.. I went to a computer auction today, and it was an interesting experience. At least 200 Pentium 100-200 systems w/monitors lined up on a table. Kind of like a lan in a way.. most of the popular things went for what I'd deem exhoribtant prices ($300 for a P200/48/3.2/15"), but then there where some bargains on stuff nobody wanted as well. Of note was an IBM Rack-Mount Server housing that me and a mate where seriously considering buying to use as a wadrobe.. only problem was getting it home. And a $16,000 2yo Digital Copier that went for $100. Insane. I solved my printer dilema and picked up an old laser for $30. It works, and I expect that when it ceases to work I'll bin it and get another one. My room definitley looks nerdy now. Lots of computer hardware. Yay or nay for me. Anyway, enuff of a rant, here is the news..
ViaHardware has cobbled together a custom bios for the KT7 series of boards. The ZT bios with the new Highpoint BIOS blended in, with ACPI disabling function to boot. One note of interest, the ACPI function is actually a part of the BIOS, but you need to modify the bios.bin file to enable selection. Often there are other tricky settings like this included in bios.bin files, but the option left out. Using a program like modbin6.exe you can have a look around and possibly enable selection of some hidden settings. Do all at your own risk however.
LittleWhiteDog is giving away a heap of AMD merchandise.. nothing terribly flash (no good hardware), just posters and stickers - that sort of thing. Cool if you're an AMD fan. Lucky for them it's just a send-us-an-email comp.
Matt has been doing a little bit of cooler testing on his own.. all pretty common units - a mini copper orb, fop32, Tt V2 and a cooler master jobbie.
FrostyTech has reviewed a Blizzard S370 Copper heatsink.. a bit out of the ordinary to see a review of a cooler designed for Socket 370 these days.. lots of AMD and not much Intel lately. Which is pretty fair.. Intel pretty much hit the core limit with the P3 series, so there isnt much more overclocking to be had. Tualatin however.. I'll be interested to see what it's like.
Neoseeker has reviewed a SMP P3 mobo with the works.. the IWill DVD266-R.. a Via DDR/Vlink board. Their site seems to be down right now tho.. so mmmmm.
CPUreview has taken an in-depth look at the Athlon 1.33GHz @ 133MHz FSB. It's pretty much what you'd expect of an Athlon. At 1.33GHz. With a 133MHz FSB. CPU reviews are pretty boring these days when the only thing that has changed is the clock speed.
Apparently someone was spreading rumors about FutureLooks being dead. I didn't see them. So I've got no idea. If you did see the rumors, they want you to know that they are not true, and they've reviewed an Epson Inkjet printer to prove it.
CaseJunkiez has reviewed a case. And it's about time.. I think this is their first one! It's just a cheap weird-name-brand one, but it has a few nifty features for the $65AUD pricetag.
Dan has an article up explaining which internet connection tweaks actually do something, and which actually do nothing. Some may even be *gasp* noticeable, which is pretty uncommon for connection tweaks. Probably worth the read if you're a games nut, or are trying to squeeze an extra few kb out of your modem.
AlexJ sent in this handy guide to upgrading your PC. With a shotgun. I'm sure there are a lot of us out there contemplating a little bit of shotgun therapy for PC's giving you the runs.. lucky for us we have totally restrictive gun laws preventing us from doing so!
RojakPot is definitley cutting edge. They've found out a way to overclock the Casio E-125 calcu.. PDA (thanks for letting me know). Overclocking a PDA.. madness. I wonder if you can overclock a cable modem. I know that you can unlock one.. hmm. That reminds me of another question I've had floating around for a while too. Does running an AGP/PCI card above it's rated bus speed bring any performance increase? This commonly happens by FSB overclocking and the lack of suitable AGP/PCI dividers. In some cases the AGP card can be running at 88MHz and above, thats 22MHz above spec, or a 33% overclock. Is there any performance difference? I don't know. And it'd be damn hard to quantify as well.. as a side effect of FSB overclocking is an increase in memory speed as well, which blurrs the performance increases. Maybe if you had a motherboard where you could manually select AGP/PCI dividers.. Hmm. Anyone know the answer? mail me.
BlargOC has looked at the Cybercooler P5500, a fairly seriously looked shrouded copper-dipped cooler with a heatpipe. Extremely serious looking in fact. Reminds me of another question that's been milling in my head as well.. where and for how much can you obtain those Kendon coolers commonly seen strapped to yet another extremely hardcore japanese overclock? Once again, if you know the answer, mail me.
Finally tonight, GamingIn3D have reviewed some fighting robots.. and they've also issued a challange to dan. I don't reckon they've got much of a chance.. compared to Dan's beasts, these little fellahs definitley look consumerish. Nothing up to the level of battlebots tho..
Anyone else out there on Primus ADSL finding it slow over the last couple of days?
There's also a fair bit of grumpy mail about the (sudden?) appearance of a transparent FTP proxy on the Optus@Home service. A lot of it is unrepeatable here :) but rest assured if you're having trouble FTP'ing from O@H, it's not just you. Hopefully Optus are rethinking their config now and will change/fix it soon.
More E3 coverage - here on TheTechZone (and as usual, they devote a disproportionate amount of their article to booth babe pics :) ) here on 3DRetreat and here on Max3D. IPKonfig drop the pretense completely and have an article devoted solely to the booth babes. I have to say, that was one aspect sorely lacking from the Sydney PC Show.
VyW reviewed the SkyHawks Eagle aluminium case. It's got a different faceplate but otherwise seems very similar to the SkyHawks ATX4388+C I reviewed a couple of weeks ago. Their feelings are similar to mine.
Hardware-One have a shootout between 5 ELSA video cards..
Normally we don't link to vendor stuff (gotta maintain our impartiality, o'course), but this is newsworthy - an Oz company offering pre-orders on a dual palomino workstation? Fad and VooDoo pointed this one out almost simultaneously..
Digit-Life have an article on how data-storage on HDD's works.
TheHeatsinkGuide have some musings on using peltiers.. click the top link on that page, it's a framed site, grr.
Alchemy points out this amazing screenshot from the still-upcoming "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" game.
I added a local mirror of N-Bench here if you're having trouble getting it.
Shinglor says, re: Soltek SL-75KAV-X: The bus ratio select (JP17) is not undocumented, it says on Page 20 of the manual right next to where it tells you the DIP settings for various multipliers.. okey dokey. UPDATE: Ahh, Mike and Pooky both pointed out there are (at least) 2 revisions of the manual, one with jumper listed and one without. Well, we can all sleep peacefully now. :)
Reviews:
Cybercooler P5500 socket cooler on BlargOC.. looks good, performs bad, apparently.
Multifunction Rack for hdd cooling on MikhailTech.
Mouse Skatez on CoolHardWareZ.
Elan Vital T10 case on PCStats.. they hate it.
Soltek SL-75KAV on Hexus.
Cold Cathode case light kit on PCPowerZone.
Having lots of fun with the Optus@Home service tonight.. they've decided to impliment a transperant FTP proxy, similar to the transperant HTTP proxy they implimented some time ago. However, like the HTTP proxy, it has it's issues. Like.. it gives everyone effectivley the same IP adress. Which means servers which only allow one connection per ip are difficult to use. And there are even problems with using sites that you can actually get access to. I suppose they are all teething problems that will (hopefully) be sorted out quickly. I read somewhere that it takes 3yrs for Optus to make back their money from a customer that only subscribes to the cable service. So I 'spose they have their reasons.
If you're keen on the see-thru acrylic look for your PC, it seems a company, ClearPC, is going to make you one. Soon. They just have pics of a prototype up for now, expect finished product pics soon. And apparently they have an aus distributor as well. Look pretty shmick, not ~overly~ sure about the products utility, but I'm sure we'll find out soon.
If you're a win2k user, 3dspotlight have a guide on optomising the operating system for gaming tasks. Alot of people swear by Win2K, of the opinion that WinME is crap.. but configured correctly (ie. system restore disabled) it's pretty decent. Sure, the stability isn't there, but the speed is. And the simplicity. That's what matters to me.
If you are a hardcore user of 3D-Studio MAX, X-Bit Labs have a pretty neat guide up on choosing the right hardware to build an ultimate 3DSM machine. I'm sure there are a few of you out there, overclocking is not just for games and 3DSM is always hungry for more MHz.
Still on performance, Guru3D have a guide to benchmarking.. and no matter if you're using it to brag, or to actually determine your systems strengths (and weaknesses), being able to benchmark properly is a pretty handy skill in the overclocking world. More FSB or more CPU MHz? The Benchmarks have The Answers.
Well, there are a few decent LAN events comming up soon.. first of all is the Darwin BioHazard LAN, set to be the biggest event the top end has seen. For people a little further away from the equator is QGL being held at ANZ Stadium (Brisbane) over two days on the 2nd->3rd June. Rego's are filling fast, with half the spots already taken and it's only been 5 or so hours since they opened. Of note is that you can stay overnight at this event, good if you can't get enough fragging action, can't get home, or don't want to pack up twice or leave your gear unattended. Quite a few OCAU people are going, so you might see some of us there. Look for the [OCAU] tags in cstrike games.
Overclockers Melbourne have reviewed the CPUfx DTS440 Socket-A shim. The little bugger is not only blue, but anodized as well.. so it's non conductive. So it makes it harder to fry your processor, something ~someone~ around here is almost an old hand at ;) Nice and cheap too, especially when compared to the purchase-a-new-cpu alternative.
AcidHardware have some info up on their news page about a new Gigabyte "Blue Thunder" i815EP mobo supporting Tualatin. Looks pretty sweet, that blue ZIF socket is a bit odd tho.
More Gigabyte motherboard, this time a 7DXR AMD 760-based board reviewed on AMDmb. And speaking of 760-based boards I've yet to see any official about the A7M266, what some consider to be a pretty decent DDR board, being discontinued. I've seen all sorts of anecdotal comments around, but nothing official. Anyone got any *solid* evidence for me?.
If you've got a laptop, chances are better than average of you having a few PCMCIA Cards, or PC Cards as they are more commonly referred to nowadays. Icrontic has reviewed a PCI device that will allow you to read the cards in your desktop PC as well.
Well, it seems the Intel vs AMD war is really starting to hot up with some solid competition from both sides. Following the release of Palomino, not only has Intel attacked AMD on the laptop front with Tualatin, they're also going to take them on in the server front with the P4 Xeon, to be referred to as "Intel Xeon". Anandtech has a review here. The thing that catches me out is that if you want a SMP Intel system now, it's going to have to be a Xeon. That's right, no SMP Pentium 4.
GazG pointed out this quite amusing MS KnowledgeBase article about little icons getting grey hair from too many users. Heh, more proof that some MS programmers have a sense of humor. I hope.
Tigger also pointed out this amusing Salon article about iMacs and.. iHats, to match? oookkk..
Finally, Agg has pointed out this fairly beasty P3 system.. it uses the same case as VooDoo's BorgII case, so it looks like he's got some competition. Still.. I don't think a P3@1GHz is up to the same levels of performance as his current Dual P3's, and not that close to his planned Dual Palominos.. madness..
A few people have sent info in about N-Bench. Apparently in Japan, when you buy an AMD CPU, you get it as a throw-in on CD. It's a benchmarking utility that is apparently "serious material", according to Chainbolt - not sure if he means it looks good or is just hard work for your system or (more likely) both. Anyway, it's now available for download here, all 40MB of it. I'm not sure of the license of it, but I'm presuming it's free for people with AMD CPU's. I've not checked it out yet but there's a quick article on it here on Radeonic.
Update: Hmm, that download site seems to be dead now. There's another one here.
Update: Graargh, that one's dead too. Ok. Sim sent in this page with 2 mirrors on it, I have also mirrored it right here on OCAU's server.
The PCDB was pretty busy while I was away. Some recent cool stuff: Boris's cool ducts, marky_boy's great cow PC :), blah's huge wooden crate.. some generally tricked-out machines from eTiMaGo, CrashDummy and gbm13.
A couple of others we've seen before but deserve another mention: DrR0M's awesome supercooled sleeper and I note Randy2 has bumped his speed again, close to a 100% overclock from an Athlon650.
Digit-Life have a big AMD-760 Motherboard Roundup .. oh, how we long for those magical letters "MP"..
Speaking of which, someone over at 2CPU.com is teasing us with a dual athlon board. There's a pic.. I really hope that the back of that mobo is somehow insulated from the case it's resting on.. that'd be an embarrassing thing to have to explain to the vendor. :)
OCMod have made a flow indicator.. useful for those of you lucky enough to have silent pumps in your watercooling rig. :)
Take a deep breath, Rex - I think you've been taking the whole fan adapter thing a little too far..
InsaneWB got their AXIA Tbird 1GHz to 1.7GHz.. not too shabby, but 2.5v core voltage is insane alright.
..while Rauf got his P3 866EB to 1.2GHz.. 185MHz FSB!
A new beta of PowerStrip lets you overclock your GeForce3 apparently..
Another silly note in the MS KnowledgeBase, thanks YYK.
Tarrasque points out this amazing home setup.. hope it doesn't fall on you. :)
Apparently IE6 will have some new security features, thanks Mike.
An interesting (if kinda tongue-in-cheek) look at quantum computing on Nature.com, thanks Tigger.
RuneScape is apparently an online RPG written in Java.. sounds like a serious time-sucker, thanks Shannon.
Lujan says: Thought you might want to know that after installing SP2 from the link on overclockers, My Computer is a lot more stable, with a lot less random crashing. To Stress test it, I played three games I couldnt before, Oni, NFS5 and Diablo II. All run flawlessly now. Cool. Is SP2 out now or still beta? Musta missed that one.
Froodogs says: seems soltek's SL-75KAV-X board wasn't as 'overclocker friendly' as they suggested it to be, since there's a little jumper on the mobo that isn't even shown in the manual as being on the board, which is to turn on the mobo's multiplier adjustment feature. it's completely undocumented by soltek, and it took a bit of poking around to find it... i thought i was just completely incompetent at unlocking cpus... so now it's all sweet
Reviews:
Alpha PEP66 socket cooler on TacoNuts.
Philips HP150 headphones on 8balls.
Non-conductive shim on ExtremeOC.
DigiDoc5 thermal monitor/fan controller on AMDMB. Our review here.
Vantec FCE-6030D socket cooler on FrostyTech.
ELSA GLADIAC 920 GeForce3-based video card on Ripnet.
Zalman Heatsinks on MikhailTech.
Pelican Laptop Case on FutureLooks (down?).
Epox 8K7A+ socketA motherboard on TecCentral (german).
Mouse Bungee on BSOD.. our review here.
Fan Adapters on Max3D, our similar review here, thanks 9mm.
OCZ Gladiator socketA cooler on GideonTech.
Daniel sends word that Douglas Adams, the brilliant mind behind The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective radio plays and books among others, has passed on. This is a real shame, THHGTTG was one of the major forces shaping my sense of humour as I grew up and I thank Adams for cultivating my taste for the intelligently absurd. Binary Freedom is organising Towel Day on May 25, a day of mourning where you can symbolise your grief by carrying a towel around all day - fans of the Guide will understand. Douglas Adams, 1952-2001, RIP.
A few people have asked for a reminder of the banking details to contribute to OCAU's legal costs, so I've put them into a separate page:
http://www.overclockers.com.au/money.shtml
I'll be checking the balance of the account tomorrow (no net banking on it yet) but the response via mail has been pretty good which I really appreciate. I hope to have some more news about this whole drama by the end of the week. Thanks guys!
Some stuff on E3, big entertainment convention in the US.. info on GU, day 1 on Max3D, xbox crashing on Electic.
ClubOC have a shootout between two IDE HDD's.. IBM DeskStar 60GXP vs Quantum Fireball Plus AS.
Tarrasque pointed out this Cursor Rallye game.. good for killing a few minutes, testing your fine motor skills. :)
Check out this closet subwoofer, thanks Gary_J.
VW Beetle supercar? Sound like an oxymoron? Apparently not, thanks ReaX.
TweakMax have an article about choosing a webhost.. when you have monster bandwidth requirements it's not a lot of fun, I can tell you.
4overclockers are makin' keychains..
Steve notes someone who should probably spend more time at the racetrack..
IPKonfig checked out the OCZ MicroBGA PC150 memory.. more readily available here in Oz is KingMax PC150, which we reviewed here and the 256MB stick here.
Apparently Seti@Home is down due to a problem with a RAID controller.. thanks Brenton.
Reviews:
GigaByte GB-GF3000 GeForce3-based video card on AcidHW.
Supermicro PIIIDR3 dual socket370 motherboard on Icrontic.
I'm back! After a very pleasant week swimming with whale sharks and SCUBA diving in Exmouth, Western Australia.. well, I'm tired to be honest. :) I'm sunburned, I ache in muscles I didn't know I had before, I have a whopping bruise on my arm from smacking into the back of the boat in full SCUBA gear at one point (gotta love those big swells) and I have bad "sea legs", so walking around I feel like the room is gently rocking back and forth. However, I do feel recharged and refreshed, quite a bit less stressed-out than I was before heading off. Hopefully my photos came out well - if so I'll put some up on the news page.
Thanks to Alchemy and Manaz for handling the news side of things while I was away! Looking forward to going back through the news archive and catching up - after I've polished off the several hundred emails waiting for me, that is.. :)
A mystery Aussie won 54 million dollars in a British lottery on Monday, thanks Brian.
I haven't read it in detail, but Manaz sent in the link to this article on organic LED's, which seem to be the Next Big Thing in display technology. You might want to also read this one which is linked from and seems to precede the other.
9mm mentioned this Sony PC that records TV shows.. more info here.
He also points out a file-sharing system that's perhaps less legally problematic than Napster, created by RealNetworks.
Speaking of which, Tech-Report have an editorial about some issues behind music-sharing programs.
If you missed the whole GeForce3 launch media extravaganza, System-Logic have updated their guide which links to a few explanatory articles and examines pretty much all the cards out there at the moment.. that should get you up to speed.
In a bizarre accident involving a time-machine and a HTML editor, TechnoYard have a comparo of Slot1 Celeron Coolers.. I think the best way to cool a 333MHz-or-below Celeron these days is to take it out of your PC and use it as a paperweight. Having said that tho, this entire website is powered by a couple of PPGA Celeron 366's at 550MHz, so I shouldn't be too harsh.
OCShoot added some new coolers to their cooler guide. If you're after more comparative info check out the CaseJunkiez CoolerBase or some of the comparos in the "Air Cooling" section of our Archive - the most recent being a 21-way SocketA Cooler Roundup.
Plenty of news still to come, more in a bit..
Archive Updated..
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Sunday, 20-May-2001 02:20:53 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Updated the archive with some recent content:
Wolfy's monster SocketA Cooler Roundup.
My SkyHawks ATX4388+C aluminum case review.
My KingMax PC150 256MB stick'o'sdram review.
VooDoo's Hercules Prophet III video card mini-review.
Rick Bishop's Black&Decker Wizard rotary tool review.
My Transcend TS-ASL3 i815e motherboard review.
Tom Simpson's Slowing Fans article.
David's Blue Orb Lapping article.
S'pose I should update those drop-down boxes one day too. :)
Late Saturday Night
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Sunday, 20-May-2001 01:16:04 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Hey! Quick buncha reviews for ya:
Abit KT7E KT133E-based motherboard on [H]ard|OCP.
GigaByte GA-GF3000 GeForce3-based video card on HotHardware.
Thermaltake Case Fans (?) on RizeNet.
Infineon 256mb PC133 SDRAM on ClubOC.
MSI K7T Turbo Limited KT133A motherboard on VIAHW.
Copper Heatsinks (4-way comparo) on AwareMag.
Abit KT7E KT133E-based motherboard on Hexus.
Coolermaster ATCS 201 aluminium case on Chillblast.
EPoX 8KTA3+ KT133A-based motherboard on OCOnline.
Serious Sam game on Guru3D.
Teac CD-516EB 16x10x40 IDE CDRW drive on CDRInfo.
AVIA 1GHz Athlon socketA CPU on ClubOC.
Well, this is the last official day of my holidays - I'm back to work on Monday - I'm sure you're all crying on my behalf. Anyway, here's the news.
Iroquois wrote in to let us know that the Windows XP beta program isn't going according to plan, at least for those "unofficial" beta testers who managed to dowload it with a leaked username & password.
Dan's at it again - and following yesterday's comments that he doesn't love us any more, he's let us know about it this time. :) What's he done this time you ask? How does taking photos of jelly-beans, of all things, sound? There's actually a good reason for this though, it helps to illustrate a point in his review of the Eclipse Computer Light.
Electic Tech are carrying a (very short) report claiming that Via will have a 1GHz C3 processor by the end of this year.
Mortin, from Icrontic, has put together a rather large, and apparently in-depth look at RISC, CISC and the new EPIC CPU architectures. It's well worth a read if you're at all interested in how CPUs actually works internally.
WildAndyC has put together a little report on the differences between the Thunderbird and Palomino Athlon processors.
Reviews:
VIAHardware have reviewed the AOpen AX3S Plus and AX3SP-1394 motherboards. The 1394 in the name of the 2nd board refers IEEE-1394, otherwise known as Firewire...
BSOD have had a look at the Microsoft Optical Explorer mouse.
AMDMB.com have taken a look at the Swiftech MC-462A Rev1 HSF.
Overclockers.Club have reviewed some Arctic Silver II.
Jsi Hardware have had a look at Kustom PC's rounded IDE cables.
I'm yet to grow bored of counter-strike, which is pretty impressive. Half-Life was released *ages* ago, and counter-strike quite a while ago as well, yet it's still as addictive as it was when I started playing. It's really weird. Anyway.. cashing in on that are two new counter-strike games in the works.. the Counter-Strike: Condition Zero one that was mentioned a few posts ago, and Counter-Strike 2. CS:CZ is basically going to be a mission pack for the existing cs/hl engine so great gameplay, same graphics. Counter-Strike 2 is going to be based on the TF2 engine, so much better graphics, yet to know about the gameplay. Hope the actual game physics stay ~ the same. Getting back to the overclocking news..
A reader who we will refer to as *G* has written in to inform us of this. I strongly hope it's just a prank.. the thought of a pixelated Britney Spears running across my screen scares me. And why do we refer to him as *G*? He dosn't want to be associated with it :P
Iceman has written in to tell us that Dan of DansData is keeping quiet of late. He hasn't been sending out his usual "I've got a review up, link to it before I send my tank around" type emails. And he's got more than A review up.. he's got several. He's reviewed some shiny input devices.. namely an Ortek keyboard and mouse that are, well, shiny. He's also looked at an Aten USB Docking Station for your laptop, and finally a Hercules Game TheaterXP. AAAnd, he, like most producers of internet content, is feeling the pinch.
Review-Zone are rubbing the crystal ball and taking a look into the future to see what the tech scene is going to present us with. I havn't read it yet, but umm, not much would be my guess. GeForce3, Pentium4, Tualatin, Athlon4/Palomino are all with us now.. better go read it and see if I'll have anything to write about soon ;)
FiringSquad have taken a squiz at the Asus A7A266, ALi DDR-based mobo. And they reckon it's a pretty good alternative to AMD760-based boards like it's cousin the A7M266.. except it's commonly outperformed by KT133A boards with the once-cheaper-but-now-about-the-same-price PC133 modules. And speaking of that, DDR board prices are also starting to fall. Seems like now's the time, all you need is the cash. Which.. I.. Don't.. Have.
Thanks to Peter for sending this in.. a US release date for the X-box! I'm not overly excited about the whole platform myself, but alternative uses for the hardware.. that's interesting ;)
The Det's just keep on getting higher, now up to 12.40, and thanks to Julian for the link.
Many thanks to Daniel who sent in this little non-overclocking article. Apparently, a laptop running Linux is a bomb. No joke, it don't boot windows, it must'nt be a laptop. Hmm.. *looks under desk*.. *rests foot on bomb thats redirecting my packets* pretty smart bomb. Maybe that's the problem?!?!
Cheers to mr_9mm who msg-ed me on irc with this article. Pretty interesting, talks about Intel's upcomming Tualatin (TWO-ala-tin) processor.. It's not going to be cutting egde, buuut, I wonder how well it'll overclock? You'll need a new motherboard to find out, so I dont expect for it to be that much of a hit, unless of course it o/c's like a champion.
Futurelooks has reviewed a PCcard that works as a fingerprint ID device, the Ethentica MS3000. It dosn't authenticate, it Ethenticates. Yes, very modern. Remember tho, a system is only as strong as it's weakest link, so if you're running Win9x.. goodbye.
Electic have a press release up from AMD that basically gloats that the Athlon CPU is being used in Supercomputers ar various educational and research institutions around the world.. and good on 'em, they deserve to gloat.
ChunkyHardware have reviewed a Simtech self-powered USB hub that sits in a floppy drive bay. :D
Finally tonight, Lesley Clark has sent in a quick note saying that he's seen some benchies run on a Dell Inspiron 8000, a P3 laptop with a 32Mb GF2Go chipset.. 4400 3Dmarks.. 3dmark 2000 that is, not 2001. Still, fairly snappy for a laptop, definatley up to Duron/GF2MX standards.
Reviews:
OCZ Glacier-II hs/f with copper inserts on ipKonfig.
DLink DWL-650 Wireless LAN card on SystemLogic.
Samsung SW-12 12/8/32 CD-RW on EXhardware.
MinionS Colorcases on Inside-Hardware.
Another day, another news post. Things seem a *bit* busier this morning than they have been for the last few days, but not overly so...
Casper wrote in to tell us that Microsoft have officially (as in it's linked from their front page, or you can go here) released Service Pack 2 for Windows 2000.
Adrian's Rojak Pot have once again updated their BIOS Optimisation Guide.
Digit-Life are reporting that ATI have demonstrated the Nintendo Gamecube graphics technology in the Nintendo booth at E3 this year.
Electic Tech are reporting that Compaq will be the first to offer Athlon4 based Notebook computers, running at speeds of up to 1GHz. They are also carrying a story about Crucial Technologies offering PC2100 DDR-RAM at the same price as their PC133 SDRAM.
Icrontic have an article on Case Temperature Research, basically meaning that they've spent some time working out the best fan configuration in a computer case, testing against commonly held ideas about where fans should be placed in a case, and which direction they should blow...
Modding Zone are running a story about a girl/woman spraypainting her system to look like a cow - a Gateway-esque cow at that. The end result does look quite good though (if you're into black-and-white randomly-spotted computer cases).
OCWorkBench are reporting that Chaintech appear to be the first motherboard manufacturer to be adopting the SiS735 DDR chipset. They are releasing the 7SID motherboard. Incidently, if you check out the OCWorkBench site, you'll see that they discovered something interesting on their SiS735 reference board - a couple of mosfets attached underneath the motherboard.
Reviews:
RipNet-UK have had a look at the Chieftech Dragon mid-tower case.
Guru3D have reviewed the Gigabyte GF-2010D GeForce2 Pro video card.
Hardware One have taken a look at the Elsa Gladiac 920 GeForce3 video card.
There's a GlobalWin CAK38 review on Computer Chaos.
Hardware Daily have had a look at the RumbleFX Headphones, made by Evergreen Technologies.
OCPrices.com have reviewed the ATI Radeon 64MB VIVO video card.
ClubOverclocker took a look at the OCZ Monster III Heatsink/Fan.
Hmm, it's still quiet. I don't know what it is about Agg being away and quiet news.. maybe we need to do less news posts? Nahhhhr.. can't have that.
Moonchild has directed us over to interpol, not because I've been bad (which is to be disputed), but to have a look at their IT security. Pretty interesting read I must say. Most of it is pretty obvious, but it's suprisingly honest. So.. off you go.
PCStats has looked at a 15" Hitachi CML151XW TFT Screen. It's flat. Real flat.
AustralianIT, a little bit quiet since downsizing a while ago reckon that Nintendo is conkering the adult market. And NO, that is NOT my typo. It's theirs. For once. Anyway, big battle against Sony I'd say.
zzsstt wrote in to say that the OCAU Folding@Home team is running 57th in the world! Pretty impressive, this is Distributed Computing for those that want to do something constructive with their CPU cycles.. Sure, finding aliens has the possibility to be constructive.. but has it the possibility to save your life?
Digit-Life has a review of a Acer ScanWit 2720S Film Scanner.. I 'spose if you've got a use for it... yes. All of you people with a need for a film scanner.. ummm. Yep.
More overclocking related is info on their news page about a Gigabyte "Blue-Thunder" motherboard.. also if you hunt around there is info about Asus TUSL2, the new revision of the CUSL2 that brings Tulatin support, hence the same change. Also a blurb about an A7V133 - the low cost no-raid version of the A7V133. Finally, a Toshiba Laptop with the nVidia GeForce2Go chipset. Be even better with an Athlon4 ;)
EverythingUSB has taken a look at the Diamond (now Sonic Blue) Rio 800 MP3 player with 128Mb memory that you can no longer obtain easily within Australia. So yay. Definatley a quiet news night.
Now that Athlon4/Palomino is out there's a gap in the AMD roadmap, and WildAndyC reckon they've got it covered, with info as to what's going to be the next future core from AMD.
ClubOC has looked at a HD Cooler with a really silly sounding name.. Icy Tank. I'm not overly sure how it gets too icy with it's plastic construction either, but they reckon it works really well, and thats what matters really.
Another HDD cooler is reviewed over on MikhailTech, this time it's the CyberCooler HC-160. It must be really quite in the tech scene at the moment.. it sure feels it.
Finally tonight, Chris Nolan wrote in with this page from TomsHardware's review of the Athlon4/Palomino core.. and apparently Tom has ~untested~ data suggesting that the Mobile Athlon4 will not work in a desktop board. Unless Tom dosn't have an Athlon4 laptop to play around with, I wonder what's stopping him from testing the theory out.
Hmm, still pretty quiet.. nothing that exciting it seems this morning.
AMDmb have compared three hs/f's, the hedgehog, GW cak-38 and the OCZ Gladiator.. all pretty small when compared to wolfy's massive cooler roundup.
HardOCP really want to give away that VisionTek GF3 they saw get made.. it's a signature edition, so, um, yeah. Signatures make it go faster. You've got until Saturday in the US to enter.
Apparently sales of the Intel Pentium4 chip are falling well below expected levels, a wall street analyst has said. The answer why is pretty obvious when you pull up a price list for CPU's.. the Athlons are much much cheaper.
8Balls have reviewed a stick of Apacer PC150 SD-RAM. The sticks use the BGA packaging, similar to Kingmax RAM, and I've seen them around on a few shop pricelists.. while I'm unsure of the performance ('spose the article will answer that), for under $100 it seems alright.
Frostytech has reviewed a massive all-copper heatsink, the Neng Tyi SN03.. it looks a bit like a PEP66 on steroids. At a listed weight of 666g tho, best watch your socket tabs before it eats them.
Icrontic have taken a look at the Tt Mini Copper Orb.. and they like it.
Well, afaik there arn't Dell AMD desktop systems, but there are now going to be Dell AMD laptops.. can't really argue with the performance. It's basically a KT133A system with clock throttling and a rather.. limited.. video card.
A few people emailed in and informed me that the Palomino launch was just of the Laptop chip, not the desktop variety.. however, I've had a bit of a search around and can't find much difference between the two, except that the Laptop chips are lower clocked and use lower voltages.. they do, however, all use socket462.. so ~theoretically~ it would be possible to crack open the laptop and remove the palomino processor, and put it in a desktop computer and run a few benchies. It dosn't need any new chipsets to function, works fine on KT133A. Sooo.. who do you reckon will do it first?
Dual Athlon boards are now on sale in Germany, according to The Inq, so that means that we will be seeing them ~sometime~ soon.. no idea how soon, but soon. Can't wait to see the benchies!! :)
According to this little bit of scoopage on AMDmb, Athlon4 is only the name for the mobile version of the chip.. apparently the server version will be named Athlon Pro, and for the desktop version? They don't know.. Thanks to furfle for the last two links.
Hexus have all the info about the Athlon4 launch in the UK.. they reckon a 15% performance over a similary clocked Thunderbird core.. and thats a pretty decent performance increase.
This comes as a total suprise to me.. ATi is the number one supplier of retail video cards in the US. Fwoar.. go the raedon. Must be making much more of a splash over there than it is here..
It seems VIA may of been hiding some info about an upcomming video chipset that might take it to ATi and nVidia.. cheers to Micheal for the last two links.
Finally today, not a news link but a question. I'm trying to hunt down a cheap laser printer for printing out assignments, course notes and things like that for uni.. I'm on a bit of a budget, so I'm probably looking for something that's been reco-ed.. if anyone knows of some really decent places to buy reco printers, or even if you've got an old-ish laser printer in decent condition that you'd like to sell me, please mail me and let me know.. I live around Milton in Brisbane, so somewhere local ~would~ be a bonus, but is not nessesary.
Hmm.. not really much to say this evening.. except cleaning is bad, and uni makes you realise sometimes the strangest things are actually quite interesting. I could elaborate, but I'd embarass myself, so I'll be quiet and get on with the news.
G3D has reviewed some Trios Hard Drive Thing.. (not real name), but it's basically a hard drive switch. Or something. It took them four paragraphs to explain in the email. Sounds interesting, go read it if you're bored.
IANAG has reviewed a cooler guys memory cooling kit.. basically a few ramsinks, a tube of artic silver adhesive and an instruction sheet.
TheTechReport has a little more up about that funky DIMM they bought as a cheapie.. they've discovered that apparently that flashing led is a suckage detector, lighting up to indicate that the DIMM, well, sucks.
FutureLooks has, umm, looked at a peice of wire that's supposed to stop your notebook getting stolen. And they've written two pages about it.. it'd be good if you're leaving your laptop in one place, out of it's bag, for a while tho.
Anandtech has taken a very technical look at some of the new features of the GeForce3.. and whilst I'd probably think of myself of being ~fairly~ technical minded, this just went straight over the top of my head.
According to Matt, stomped was apparently hacked, but I went over there and didn't find anything about it. I did, however, find a magazine cover detailing an upcomming counter-strike based game - Counter-Strike: Condition Zero.
Lewie reckons that this is old news, even tho it's new to him, and me. Apparently the Palm Vx can now play back full motion video.. It's not exactly IMAX with the size and inherent quality limitations of the screen, but still.. IMAX dosn't fit in your shirt pocket.
ClubOC has taken a look at some of those really weird looking Power Cooler heatsinks that've been doing the 'rounds recently. Not to be confused with Power Color however, the maker of cheap but ok video cards.
Matex wrote in to say that the Via 4in1's posted earlier today by Manaz via VooDoo are actually FINAL, not Beta.. so all you holding off an update, hold off no longer. They apparently have killer IDE performance, if the regulars in #overclockers are to be beleived.
And finally tonight, Fraser has pointed out some valid, but depressing facts about that Pioneer Do-It-All drive.. first, it can't be used to copy or even backup DVD movies (but divx is still ok!), so no pirating for j00.. the other thing is that DVD-RAM is a caddy-based format (to allow it to write on BOTH sides of the disc), so it's a little bit propietry. To say the least.. anyway. G'night.
Reviews:
Tt Volcano II on ipKonfig.
Sometime close to midday on Tueday.
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Tuesday, 15-May-2001 12:22:34 (GMT +10) - by Manaz
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Today's post is a little smaller than yesterdays - I promise! :)
VIAHardware are hosting a beta copy of the new Via 4.31 4-in-1 drivers, which includes the fix for the 686B bug. Be aware that they're not offically released, though VIAHardware does list them as final. Thanks for VooDoo for pointing this one out to us.
Andypoo wrote in to let us know that the Pioneer DVD-R*2, DVD-RW, CD-R, CD-RW drive is actually listed on Pioneer Australia's website, and has actually been there for some time apparently. Estimated price is around AUD$1925 or so, though you may find cheaper if you shop around.
ClubOC are giving away an Iwill KK266 motherboard. And you don't have to join their forums, or post in their forums to enter! Just fill out a form, answer a simple question (based on information from one of their sponsors) and you're in with a chance!
Electic Tech are reporting that someone leaked the password to the Windows XP beta download site.
WildAndyC have updated their Mini Copper Orb Fan Assisted Waterblock article.
Reviews:
The Tech Zone have reviewed the ACT Labs Force RS Steering Wheel.
OCworkbench have a look at the SiS735 DDR chipset, and compare it to the other DDR chipsets currnetly available for Athlon systems.
ChillBlast have reviewed the Thermalright SK-06 heatsink.
Mikhailtech have had a look at the Lian-Li PC-60 aluminium computer case. Quite some time ago, we had a look at the Lian-Li PC-10, which is basically the same, but with a beige finish rather than the brushed aluminium look of the PC-60.
Hardware Daily have had a look at the Logitech Soundman Xtrusio DSR-100 speaker system.
BSOD have checked out the Icemat mousing surface.
Adrian's Rojak Pot just posted a short review of the Ratpadz Mousing Surface.
PCStats have reviewed 256MB Apacer PC-100 RAM. PC-100 you say? Why PC-100? Well, they found that the Apacer PC-100 was using the same DRAM as Mushkin Rev.3 PC-150 uses...
CDR-Info have posted a review of the TDK Vortex 121032 CD-R/W drive. They've also had a look at the Yamaha 2100ix (Firewire) CD-R/W drive.
Rizenet have had a look at the PCMods Baybus Kit.
I'm sorry about the news not being done of the weekend.. with my exam and mother's day sucking up commitments, there just wasn't time. Anyway.. mother's day is over, and so is my exam, so there shouldn't be any more distractions..
First big news tonight is the lifting of the NDA surrounding the Palomino core revision, or Athlon4 if you're big on marketing names. Unfortunatley it's just the desktop version for now, and Anandtech has the scoop here and HardOCP has the Press Release.. hmm, seems a few of the other über-sites are yet to update.
IRC regulars Sacrafice and Matex have put together a guide and automated installer for the Moo.DLL status script for mIRC. Well and good.. but *please* refrain from using it in the main #overclockers channel.. with around 100 regulars it is highly annoying when one person sets off a chain of 25 my-processor-is-this-fast-and-i-have-this-much-ram-free multi-line messages. If you want to do it make another channel like #moodll and do it there.. alot of channel admin's patience has run dry with moo.dll scripts.
Hexus have reviewed the Swiftech 462A hs/f unit.. and it's finally good to see a hs/f with a numbered-name that means something (462 is the same amount of pins as on a socket-a processor)
Maximum3D have taken a look at the HiSpeedPC 60->80mm fan adaptor. I've got one of these sitting on my desk right now, so expect a review to pop up after Agg returns from his well-deserved break.
OCWorkbench has made a custom BIOS for the MSI KT266 Via DDR board.. alot of go-fast options in it, but I'd be very careful around non-factory BIOS-es. It's up to you.. or, at least, up to the small number of people who have privatley imported this not-available-in-aus-yet board. Or our overseas readers, it's up to you as well.
More rants on the Asus drivers that allow you to remove surface textures.. this time from PCMonkey.. Also, a reader nicknamed Crash Dummy emailed me saying he tried to use the 11.01 drivers on his herc prophet II MX, and there was no option in the control panel to enable this "features".. maybe it's a for-asus-boards-only feature? Hrrm..
As an update to what was posted in a previous, ah, post.. PC Case Gear will no longer be importing the Koolance cases from the US for domestic sale.. they advise you import the cases yourself. Maybe an omen, as HardOCP are reporting on their news page that there have been product recalls of certain Koolance systems due to coolant reacting with metals in the system.
Now this looks pretty neat.. a do-it-all optical media drive from Pioneer.. writes to CD-R media at 8x, CD-RW media at 4x, DVD-R media at 2x and DVD-RW media at 1x. And naturally reads DVD and CD based formats. I've got a question tho.. what's the difference between DVD-RW and DVD-RAM? They seem to be (theoretically) the same to me.. thanks to Mort for the link. UPDATE: Difference basically boils down to.. DVD-RW works like a CD-RW (you need to format to regain free space), DVD-RAM works like a Hard Drive (you don't need to format to regain free space). Also, certain DVD-RAM formats are large than DVD-RW. And DVD-RAM has a cooler name.
If you wonder why RAM prices vary so much, well.. heres one reason.. you can't really make RAM when your offices have been burnt out. Acer is the tech business to suffer in that article..
John Apps of IANAG reckon it won't be long until TFT flat-panel screens become the standard monitor type, as apposed to today's CRT's. I reckon it'll be a while yet, but if you want to be a super-early adopter, they have a review of a cheap-ISH 15" model, the AOC LM-500.
ClubOC have reviewed some Thermaltake PC2100 DDR RAM. They remark that it's odd Tt have moved into RAM, and I must admit to being suprised about it as well.. they're not exactly Micron yet tho.. they're buying Samsung chips to put on the PCB's.
When the P4 came out half of the criticism of it revolved around "what good is SMD if it's not used".. which was fair at the time. Well, now according to Tech-Report there are P4-optimised versions of Adobe Photoshop.. Tom's Hardware also has a look at the possible increased performance on offer from the new 12.xx dets.
Wolfy, the genius or madman behind the massive socket-a cooler roundup has found after trying to obtain a Diamond/Rio MP3 player that there is no longer a distribution network for the units in Australia.. or at least the present network is changing. Bit of a shame, the Rio players where one of the first AND one of the best.
Reviews:
GlobalWin CAK38 hs/f on FrostyTech.
AMK33336t Custom Mid-Tower Case on PCStats.
Mushkin Rev3 PC133 SD-RAM on KT133A at OCAddiction.
I've got a mid-semester exam tommorrow. At 6pm. I'd like to meet the person who decided that 6pm Saturday was a good time for an exam. The Saturday preceeding mothers day when countless people have to go home to suck up. Anyway, I doubt doing the news when I should be studying is a good idea either, and that clubbing until 5am this morning was the best thing as well. HEH. Here's the news.
Hardcoreware are having a bit of a bitch about things, more specefically about the new Asus driver set that allows you to remove textures from walls, letting you see through them. I can understand why they are a bit upset.. because the driver set would assumably work for all nVidia chipset-based video cards.
Stewart from ComputerAlliance grabbed me on IRC to inform me of the software amnesty that is running at the moment.. basically, if your business is using illegal, or pirate, copies of software you have until 30 June 2001 to pay for your software and avoid legal action. So what, you say? Well, apparently Stewart received a card in the mail from Microsoft, stating that during the amnesty, so long as you a purchase a peice of hardware you can also buy an OEM copy of Microsoft operating systems. Which will cost you significantly less than a proper retail version. Like, half the price almost on a copy of WinME. And as an added benefit, a floppy cable, weighing in at a hefty $5, is considered a peice of hardware. So unless you want the BSAA on your case, now is definitely a good time to pay for what you're using.
LeesEmpire sent in this article on ZDnet, who reckon that we are slowly but surely running out of IP adresses. Another interesting thing I noticed on a mailing list from Phil, is this page which lists the owners of some top level subnets.. I bet they're valuable.
FutureLooks have reviewed a very beasty notebook. 1Ghz and 15" of screen beasty. The most suprising fact of it all is that the manufacturer, Eurocom, actually encourage you to upgrade it. Of course there are downsides.. like upgrading isnt as easy as with a desktop computer.. and with all that beastiness comes a fair swag of heftiness. But.. one of these with a GF2GO might make a pretty decent lan rig.. or, ah, corperate workstation *cough*.
Simon has sent in this site which has been floating around HardOCP for the past few weeks. I'm pretty sure that they CAN'T be serious, but still.. it's amusing none the less. I was browsing the news archives a few days ago looking for an article when I came across this, which is also quite amusing. Top Aussie ;)
HardcoreWare are giving away half a gig of your choice of either PC2100 or PC133 SD-RAM. Sorry, no RD-RAM for you, come back later. You don't have to spam their forum, just join their mailing list. Bit of a concession, but eh, less effort than forum spamming, and you can always unsubscribe. I hope.
On the subject of DDR Ram, the prices for Crucial DDR SD-RAM PC2100/CL=2.5 modules are now exactly the same as the prices for PC133/CL=3 modules. Great stuff.. $89.99US+Shipping for a 256Mb stick. So now all that's holding us off DDR is a motherboard. And, as always, a lack of funds.
Still on RAM, Tech-Report has ordered some horribly cheap SD-RAM modules and found out that they got what they paid for. Double Height (as in, twice as high as normal memory) DIMM's that glow in the dark. And flash like a strobe. Fuuuun. Who would expect so much fun from a $US40 256Mb stick?
OCAddiction has decided to see how the Global-Win series of coolers fair against each other, and put them together for a bit of Family Fued. Hmm.. I wonder what the survey says? ;)
If you're looking to get the best of both worlds, OCMelbourne has a guide to Dual Booting Win2k with Win9x/Me.
There are a few reviews of the Soyo SY-7VDA Via Apollo Pro266 s370 board.. first one into the box was from NeoSeeker, followed directly after it by ViaHardware.
Finally tonight, HardOCP has paid a very interesting visit to the factories of VisionTek to see how the GeForce3 boards are being made. And not content to tell you about it, they're also giving away a VisionTek GF3 board to boot.
I'm going to go.. umm, study? No, something else starting with S. Sleep.
Reviews:
KT7A-Raid on Rizenet.
128Mb OCZ PC150 stick of MicroBGA RAM on Technoyard.
Lian-Li PC60 case AND FREE STUFF~! on ClubOC.
Iomega USB CD-RW roundup on Digit-Life.
Keyspan USB 2.0 card is now shipping, according to EverythingUSB.
Samsung SyncMaster 570V 15" TFT Screen on PCStats.
Just one more day until the weekend - which doesn't really matter to me, because I'm on holidays. Now that you all hate me, I'll start with the news....
Firstly, some not-necessarily related to computing (or overclocking) news. Raven sent in a link to a website promoting a digital replacement for film - the trick is, it works in regular SLR cameras, stores 24 pictures at a time, can be used time and time again - and best of all, features a resolution of 1280x1024 - which is pretty damned decent. It looks like affordable , high quality digital photography might actually be becoming a reality.
This news is definately computing/Internet related (at least if you're in Australia). Devient has reported that the Southern Cross Cable's available bandwidth is being increased from 20Gbit/s to 60Gb/s - that's a *serious* upgrade. Details available here, on the Whirlpool website.
Bort wrote in to say that the Overclockers Australia RC5 team has now clocked up 1000 days, 100 members, and is currently placed 392 overall. Our SETI@Home team isn't doing too badly either - 233 members, 83 years of processor time, and ranked 705 under the "Clubs" section. There are links on the left side of this page to both the RC5 and SETI@Home team pages.
Sniper770 reports that AMD's next Athlon processor won't be called the Athlon 2, or Athlon 3, but rather the Athlon 4".
Ice-Boy sent this link in - it's a Virtual Reality Engine that works in Visual Basic. While I wouldn't consider VB to be a serious programming language for such complex tasks as writing 3D gaming engines, I'm sure this could be a useful tool for people with VB programming experience who want to have a play with creating a 3D gaming environment. Definately cool.
Mort wrote in to let us know that there could be bad news for people who use warez copies of Microsoft Office XP. Not that any of you would do such a thing, of course. Pirating software is bad. You've been warned.
Speaking of warnings, here's another one. The guys at CyberWizards (this isn't an endosement, I just believe in giving credit for any news we receive) wrote to let us know that there's a new computer virus floating around. Now, before you all say "Not *another* fake virus warning message", be aware that Symantec have listed this virus as real, in the wild, and widely distributed.
CaseEtc are running a competition - they're giving away around USD$600 worth of stuff. It's not one of those "register in our forums and post a message" cometitions either. However, Cole does ask some pretty damned "A HREF="http://www.caseetc.com/cgi-bin/caseetc/contest.html" target="_blank"> difficult questions. There's no reference to it only being open to US/Canadian residents either, so if you're keen, and think you can get the answers right, go for it!
VR-Zone have managed to get a 1.33MHz AXIA Athlon running at 2.2GHz. That's a pretty serious overclock, though they've gone to some extreme measures to get it there....
DangerousDog (what is it lately with hardware sites taking on strange names?) have posted a Chipset Cooler Shootout. I can see that they've included the Zalman "Flower" heatsink, as featured in Wolfy's recent Socket-A Cooler Roundup.
AcidHardware are reporting that Gigabyte have released an updated BIOS for their GeForce3 video cards. If you go to the AcidHardware website and scroll down a bit, the news story is entitled "GeForce 3 BIOS".
Electic Tech is reporting that Semiconductor International Magazine has named AMD's Dresden Fab 30 plant as "Fab of the Year".
Monster SocketA Cooler Roundup!
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Friday, 11-May-2001 08:44:28 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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I've been throwing coolers at Wolfy for a little while now, he foolishly volunteered to do a SocketA roundup a couple of months or so ago. I mentioned I'd like to get it finished and posted before I go on holidays (flying out at noon today!). Well, he got it finished - and it's massive. 21 coolers (27 configurations tested), 12 pages, over 100 photos.. it's a monster!
Click for the full roundup!
Many thanks to Wolfy for his efforts in organising and writing up this article. You probably don't realise what a huge effort it is - I'm sure he didn't. :)
Early Friday Morning
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Friday, 11-May-2001 00:34:51 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Wow, lotsa reviews in the box tonight.. just got back from "Edge City", a fashion parade at the Enmore Theatre for alternative clothing designers including my girlfriend's shop, Gallery Serpentine. Some amazing stuff on show..
Rass pointed out this thread in the HardOCP forums with an unusual comment about my last review. :)
Reviews:
CaseEtc Window Etching Kit on IPKonfig.
AVGS aluminium case on Ripnet UK.
Enermax 350W PSU on ClubOC.
ATEN IC-1394 FireWire PCI card on NeoSeeker.
Seagate Barracuda III 40GB HDD on Overclocking.DK.
Powercooler PCH 075 socket cooler on ChillBlast.
Asus L8400B notebook PC on TheTechZone.
Swiftech MC-370 heatsink on MikhailTech.
IBM Deskstar 60GXP HDD on x-bit.
Plextor 16/10/40A CDRW drive on OCOnline.
Leadtek WinFast GeForce3 video card on Digit-Life.
Sky Hawks ATX4388+C Review!
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Thursday, 10-May-2001 14:50:40 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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You might remember this case from the Sydney PC Show 2001 coverage I put up. It certainly catches the eye and it's got a range of unusual features.. but is it something you want to wrap around your high-performance goodies?
Click for the full review!
Thursday, Midday edition
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Thursday, 10-May-2001 12:26:30 (GMT +10) - by Manaz
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Two news posts in two days - I think I'd better sit down, all this activity is giving me headspins....
Firstly, some news that I think a lot of people will consider to be good. RAMBUS have been found guilty of fraud - reports however, seem to vary - some saying that RAMBUS is in trouble for not disclosing it's patents to the JEDEC consortium (and here's another), others saying that RAMBUS was actually cleared, in a seperate hearing, on the charges of hiding information from JEDEC. EIther way (another report can be found here), it seems that RAMBUS is starting to look less and less likely to be able to demand royalties on any RAM type other than RDRAM, which should hopefully lead to lower prices for other RAM types. Quite a few people spotted this one, thanks for letting us know.
Rass has pointed this out, a 1U, dual Socket462 (Athlon) server, using the AMD760 chipset. Yes, you read correctly - it's only 1U high - fits into a standard 19" rack system, and comes ready for clustering. Now, that's drool-worthy....
Electic Tech have posted news about a rather large hard drive. How large? Would you consider it large if it were, say 180GB in size?
3DSpotlight have updated their Soundcard Tweak and Speaker Setup Guide.
Just when you thought you'd seen everything that could be turned into a water block, well, turned into a water block, WildAndyC comes along with this.
Check this out. Funny for us, though I doubt the house or car owners found it particularly amusing. It does, however, serve as a warning to all of us to make sure we don't do stupid things behind the wheel of a car....
Reviews:
ClubOC have reviewed the PCMods.com RheoBus.
VR-Zone have had a look at the Global Win CAK38 heatsink/fan combo.
Icrontic.com have reviewed the new 80GB Maxtor hard drive.
x-bit labs have had a look at the MSI K7T266 Pro motherboard.
Dan's Data have reviewed something that "looks like a Vorlon hand grenade". It's actually a Logitech Cordless Mouseman Optical, and it doesn't eat batteries the way Dan's cat (who's name *could* be Thomas), eats biscuits - I'm assuming Dan's cat's a hungry critter, but the mouse isn't. Anyway, the review is here. And yes, Dan said all that stuff - I didn't make it up.
Early Thursday Morning
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Thursday, 10-May-2001 01:07:19 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Hmm, quite a bit of the old offtopic-but-interesting stuff today.. if all goes well, there should be 2 OCAU reviews up for you today. :)
Dan's checked out some wireless spy stuff! For use as a baby monitor or watching nocturnal wildlife, he says. Suuuure, Dan.
Icrontic have sent a breathlessly excited message saying they've updated their KT133 FAQ. A fair bit of info there, I wouldn't say tonnes.. but if you're having a prob with your motherboard it might be worth checking out.
FireMoth sent in this funny pic. Not very politically correct I'm afraid, but jeez.. how embarrassing. :)
If you've got steady hands but a slow SocketA CPU, consider soldering the bridges as per overclockers.com's guide.
If you haven't got steady hands, consider becoming a cyborg. Currently only available if you're a tiny eel.. and then of course you wouldn't have hands anyway. Sorry. :)
CPUReview.com have an interesting moving to Linux article.
Seems CD-R prices will increase according to PCWorld, thanks alchemy.
Hypothermia have an interview with one of the brains behind the game "Giants".
My favourite digicam-review site, DPreview.com, have reviewed the Nikon CP995 digital camera. This is the successor to the CP990 which I've had for nearly a year now and have used extensively on this site. One of my other photographic interests is macrophotography, the technique of magnifying things using a camera - making the image larger than the actual object. The Nikon is excellent for this and it's one of the reasons I bought it. I took some photos of a (dead) spider I found on my bookshelf a few months ago and I don't think I've put them up on here yet.. so now seems as good a time as any. Be warned, if you have a spider or bug phobia, you WON'T like these pictures so move along. :) I'm not a bug freak but it seemed a good subject. Spidey1 is a wide shot showing a 20c coin for scale. Spidey2 is a front-on closeup (aww, what a cutie, not!). Spidey3 is a closeup of his eyes, looking down from the top and is colour-corrected.
Reviews:
Sennheiser HD570 headphones on GameSurge.. our review here.
AOpen HQ08 fulltower case on IPKonfig. This is the same as the popular HX08 but with a different faceplate.
Logitech Cordless Optical mouse on NeoSeeker.
Mushkin Revision 3 PC133 SDRAM on SystemLogic.
Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 Kyro-II based video card on Digit-Life.
Swiftech MC462-A monster socket cooler on FrostyTech.
The legal stuff is still going on in the background. There's not much more to report at the moment. I've received a lot of emails of support about the site/forums and quite a few people have offered financial assistance with the legal costs. In the past I have been reluctant to accept "donations" to the site and to be honest I'm still not 100% comfortable with it, but in this current situation I can't really afford to be pig-headed about it. My current legal costs are several thousand dollars and if the community wants to help cover that then of course I should accept it.
So, if you're in a position to help cover the legal costs and you want to, I've got details below for how you can send a few bucks along. If you can't afford it or don't want to, that's fine, I appreciate your position - this is mainly for the people who have already expressed that they want to send a little something along. I will keep a record of who has contributed but I won't publish it (yet? we can discuss that later I guess). Please don't think of this as "buying the forums back" (forums are not down for financial reasons) or as "taking them to court" (we may not end up going to court). It's just covering the cost of legal advice to this point. If there's any extra money left over it will go towards server bills past & future.
I've made a separate bank account to make tracking OCAU finances easier and you can direct deposit into that if you like:
Bank: Westpac
Branch/BSB: 032349
Account No: 175029
Account Name: Overclockers Australia
Or you can send money orders or cheques (made out to "Overclockers Australia") to:
PO BOX 207
ENMORE
NSW 2042
AUSTRALIA
I'm heading off on holidays this Thursday (eek, tomorrow night) and will be back on the 20th or so. I doubt I'll be able to get my email while I'm away, but contact manaz@overclockers.com.au if you have any questions about the site. If you want to discuss it in the meantime drop me a note at agg@overclockers.com.au - I can't provide any details about the legal side of things of course.
Thanks for your patience and support.
Wednesday, Late Morning Edition (delivered early afternoon)
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Wednesday, 9-May-2001 12:20:30 (GMT +10) - by Manaz
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Greetings all. I've been away for a few weeks, on a driving holiday around the eastern half of Australia, so I haven't had the opportunity to do the news for a while. I offered to do it this morning, but alchemy had beaten me to the punch - or so it seemed. He then realised he had 25 minutes to get to Uni, so I've been brought on as a replacement. Enough of the mindless banter, and on with the news (the first 3 items of which alchemy actually wrote, so they may contain weird references to activities such as study)....
Apparently there is new Palm Pilot out, called the M505, and PCScoop have compared it to the Handspring Visor Prism, which I also didn't know existed. I'm still using the tried-and-failed scribble-it-in-the-back-of-a-lecture-pad method. It always fails, but at least it has character. Or thats what I keep telling myself.
Dennis_B reckons that this is funny. So I went and looked at it, and yeah, isn't bad. That euro dance guy is pretty amusing, I must say.
STORMBRINGER (his caps, not mine) has pointed out this platform independant "PCI bus performance monitoring kit". Looks kind of like an iPanel, except more industrious. Pretty cool being able to see how congested the PCI bus and that are as well.. temp monitoring, however, is sorely missed. Stiil, it looks elite. Distributors anyone?
Klif wrote in to let us know that Via have released a stunning Quake3Arena map, designed to *really* test even high-end systems, such as those running the faster Athlon processors and GeForce3-based video cards. There's also a timedemo included with the map, which you can download from VIAHardware.
ExtremeCooling.org have posted an interactive PC troubleshooting guide - you can find it here. They have also recently updated their site's layout and overall look & feel, so if you haven't visited for a while, some things have changed....
Electic Tech have reported that Intel have produced the world's first public demonstration of 64-bit Itanium processors, running in a Unisys e-@ction Enterprise ES7000 Server, running a beta copy of the 64-bit version of Microsoft's Windows 2000 Server Operating System. There's a fair bit more infomation in Electic Tech's report - which you can read here. Electic Tech are also reporting a virus which infects Solaris machines, and then uses them to attack Microsoft IIS servers. While I'm relatively sure that this doesn't affect a lot of readers here, it does bring into doubt the comments that many Unix people make about Unix (and it's variants) being practically immune from virus attack....
Reviews:
AcidHardware have reviewed the Yuan MP-300 Flash Memory MP3 player.
PCStats have reviewed the Addtronic W8500 Workstation Case, a rather large case which conforms with the WTX standard (which is downward compatible with ATX).
OcPrices.com have posted a review of the KT133A based Iwill KK266-R motherboard.
Radeonic have posted a review of Crucial PC-133 SDRAM, should be an interesting read along with the Corsair review at ClubOC from yesterday....
TweakMax have reviewed a PCI Safety Card - briefly reading the first page of the review, it looks like it could be *very* useful....
Adrian's Rojak Pot have reviewed the Casio Cassiopeia E-125 Pocket PC.
ComputerChaos have reviewed the GlobalWin WBK68 heatsink/fan combo.
I figured I'd start tongights news with a typo. But anyway, I really meant to start tonight where I left off with my last post.. DrR0M. Yes, not content with a plain-old GeForce3 with big shiny ramsinks and a active (fan) cooling, he decided to add a waterblock. And now, he's decided to add a peltier. That, my friends, is truly mad. Keep up the nice work DrR0M ;)
CDRinfo have reviewed the 20X burner that we posted a pic of from akiba a few weeks back. 20X burning speed is pretty quick.. that's a full 74min cd of data in 3mins 42secs.. of course you've still got the time it takes to close the session and all that, but THREE MINUTES FORTY TWO.. thats psycho. Usually it was your cable connection keeping your burner busy, now it looks like you'd need multiple cable connections to keep that one busy.
AMDmb have had a look at three different fandaptors and found them to decrease temperatures, unlike the HardOCP article found. Then there is our original original fandaptor review by chainbolt for you to think about. None of the solutions are easily available in aus yet tho, so you've still got a while to think yet.
PCNewsCenter has some info about a Transcend USB card reader thing-o, that can read all types of portable storage media like compact flash and that. Good if you've got multiple storage thing-a-me's. And don't want to buy multiple thing-a-me readers.. Dan of dansdata also pointed out to me that those sony card-reader mice would be good for people tight on space like roadwarriors.. having one less peripheral to carry around is always good for them.
Riznet has a roundup of socket-a coolers happening, with all the big names making a showing. Whislt Gamingin3D have looked at some copper ramsinks from tweak master to keep your ram cool as well.
If you're a newbie to linux, LWD has a newbie guide to installing/using mandrake linux. Of course, alot of people will tell you to find a real distro, or one without a sissy package system. Or you could just get a linux thats not linux. Please yourself!
TechExtreme has a preview of the upcomming OfficeXP. Of course, if you live on the streets of Beijing it's not upcomming, its already been released, and at a very economic $3US a copy. I don't really see the need for ANOTHER upgrade.. what's so bad about Office2000 already?
John reckons that there is space for one more hardware site somewhere, so he's started rated pc and reviewed an OCZ Gladiator to boot.
AwareMag has previewed the SOLDAM Supremo MT-PRO1100. Yes, that sounds familar. ~not~. It's actually a pretty swanky looking mid-tower case, so there you have it.
EverythingUSB has reviewed the Logitech I-Feel mouse, the mouse that I keep on getting confused for a USB vibrator.. well it is, I suppose. In a way. A very dirty, seedy way.
IPKonfig have decided to push their Creative GeForce2 as far as it will go. And by looking at that picture, they do mean far. That blue orb looks pretty overwhelmed.. hehe. I suppose now's the time for it, GF3 and all.
NeoSeeker has reviewed the Samsung 955DF 19" monitor.. pretty spiffy. Alot of OCAU people have the predecessor to this and like em alot. Can this one follow the trend?
If you're new to the whole hardware scene you're probably a bit overwhelmed by the huge number of chipsets.. I mean, just for socket-a from Via is the KT133/A/E/KM133/KT266 range. OCWorkbench has a bit of a rant/explanation for why so many, and why manufacturers release boards based on each chipset. Might explain a few things to you newbies.
That's about it for tonight. I'd just like to say how weird it is speaking to people online that not only live in your area, but go to your uni, and went to your school or one near yours. It's happened alot to me recently. It's weird. This post was brought to you by the yet-to-be-released Basement Jaxx album named Rooty.
Reviews:
Leadtek GeForce3 on Tweak3D. Yep, GeForce3's are down here now. I can't think of anything more to say.
Inno3D 64Mb GF2MX on EXHardware.
HardOCP have embarked on a bit of a benchmark-fest, comparing the P4 1.7GHz to the Athlon 1.33GHz. Of course, they overclock them and compare them at loony speeds too. Interesting stuff.
Mikhailtech have a P4 Heatsink Roundup happening.
Electic send word that Toshiba have announced a 512MB CompactFlash Card.. lemme see, in my camera that would fit 320 photos at max quality/resolution.. or 10,400 at lowest quality/resolution. That should last for a holiday or two. :)
Interesting one from Spectral - a method of drilling that doesn't leave any metal filings around.. handy for case-modders, but I dunno how easy it is to get ahold of the tools.
Another thing for case-modders - Ice points out this flexy neon stuff meant for cars but probably ideal for cases if you're into that kind of thing. The bottom sample pic is just a tad over the top IMHO. :)
Reviews:
PowerCooler PCH113 (funky!) new socket cooler on ChillBlast.
Iwill KD266 ALi-based SDR SocketA motherboard on OCWB.
Mini Copper Orb on WildAndyC.
Non-conductive SocketA shim on ClubOC.
Corsair PC133 CAS2 256MB on ClubOC.. my review of the 128MB stick here.
ThermalTake Memory Cooling Kit (also!) on ClubOC. Busy guys.
OCZ Monster 2 and Glacier 2 socket coolers on JSI.
Creative BlasterKeys midi keyboard on Digit-Life.
KingMax PC150 256MB SDRAM Review!
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Monday, 7-May-2001 20:39:53 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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..and it's not a reader-submitted review, it's by me for a change. :)
I checked out KingMax's new 256MB stick of PC150 SDRAM. This uses the "new" v1.0 PCB that has caused some confusion. Why the strange numbering? Why is it different to the 128MB PC150 stick I checked out earlier? It's all in the review..
Click for the full review!
Hmm.. boredom sets in.. it's a public holiday in Qld today, and I've got tommorrow off uni, and I didn't go friday.. so this makes it a five day weekend. And I'm bored. So here's the news.
StratosFear has written in to let us know that the PSX Controller mod thing-o won't work under Windows 2000.. which he fondly remembers discovering AFTER he'd built it. So he dosn't want you to have the same memories. Sharing is caring.. If you're slack tho, or you just couldn't handle a trip back to the win9x kernel, he says he picked up a USB adaptor for $30.
Jasper has told me that he's modded his Taisol 742092 (he actually wrote Haisol.. but I think that's a typo!?) heatsink to add another 7k Delta black label to it.. it dropped the temps on his AXIA 1000@1460,1.9V down 4deg to 42deg under load. Not too shabby at all.. air cooled AXIA's are definatley the rage. He didn't say anything about the noise TWO delta's make tho..
Strange1 has found a sony mouse with a built in memory card slot inside it. Umm, yeah, spoze it'd be alright if you're out of USB ports or something. I'm not sure.. interesting how it says its an Infrared mouse, but you can clearly see a cable in the picture.
If you've still got some USB ports left over, Digit-Life have reviewed the Iomega USB Zip 250 drive.
Tech-Extreme have reviewed the Afreey (how do you pronounce that? Aye-Free-ee?) 12X DVD Player.. and whilst not cutting edge in terms of speed or features or anything like that, they are a pretty decent drive that you can easily find in au at a nice price.
PCMech is back and kicking with a guide to securing your broadband connection. If you're a little bit more inclined you might want to look at some real protection, or maybe just some perfectly alright protection. They've also found a few software easter eggs.
Somehow this post has been designed to fill up your USB ports.. EverythingUSB has reviewed a 32Mb Flash USB (duh) drive.. one of those little thumb sized ones. They're really cool IMO, make a neat-o replacement for floppy drives, if only they'd stick USB ports on the front of the uni computers.
[H]ard|OCP has stopped prancing 'round nancy style with the Pentium4 vs Athlon comparisons, and overclocked the two CPU's and thrown a huge host of benchmarks at them. Finally someone getting right to the point.. and with the P4@2.1GHz, and the K7@1.55GHz they're playing with some serious speed.
CPUReview has uh, reviewed an AMI MegaRAID IDE 100. It's a PCI IDE Raid controller.. so if you're feeling left out of the onboard raid boat, here's your chance to join the procession.
Andrew sent in this amusing add he found in the paper.. if you're worried about giving your 5yo kid a life-size Volvo, maybe you can give him that little remote controlled one.. it run's at a fire breathing 40 MHZ MANNNN.. might be giving him an early start to overclocking? Overclock his volvo? heh.
ProCooling have pretty much finished building their water cooling rig.. and props definatley go to them, cuz it looks damn smooth. No 2L cereal containers around there ;) It's shiiiny.. Interested to see them using brass bolts in the four holes surrounded the socket-a cpu, up until now all I've seen used are nylon ones.
FutureLooks are reporting that Investment.com is up for sale, so if you reckon that you can outbid Microsoft, then you can possibly own it. If it's possible to outbid Microsoft, that is.
CaseJunkiez has an article up about ways to kill dust. Just remember.. your brand new shiny PC will soon start looking like an obsolote old dustbucket in no time if you dont clean it. Is that, however, a pair of pantyhose I see in one of those photo's Junkz? Where'd you get one of those? :D
Agg has had a look around the PCDB and found a few interesting looking additions. First of all is Draxx' absolutley massive server case.. looks damn cool, those BIOS mods are pretty tricky too. Interesting how his case is almost bigger than his desk.. LancePT has a nice and clean looking window added to his case, along with some super-bright blue LED's. Shado has gone blue as well, with a blue neon and a whole heap of fans, and finally VooDoo has put up some pics of his BorgII case, which is just a monster. That case is seriously as big as a decent sized Bar Fridge.. it'll be haenous when he gets a pair of palamino's into it.
Finally today, is this pic of DrR0M's new GeForce3. Yes, not content to have just a plain old (heh) GeForce3, he's going to have a watercooled one. Madness :)
HotHardware have a bunch of GeForce3 screenshots taken within Dronez and AquaNox, two new gaming engines which presumably have been written to take advantage of that new graphics chip.
PCScoop have a cooler roundup. This isn't super-new but it's fairly interesting, thanks Paul.
VooDoo points out that Microsoft have shelved the subscription model for OfficeXP, in the US anyway.
Digit-Life have a video card comparison, but not the usual screaming-3d-benchmarks kind. This time they are seeing how offerings from the big 4 fare in 3D Studio Max, a rendering program which has very different requirements to 3D gaming.
Apparently Philips will be selling a DVD Video Recorder in Australia by the end of the year, thanks Gary_J.
Bob wanted to show off his water-cooling project, nice home-made system, he spent some time experimenting with oil as a coolant too.
OCAddiction have a guide to lapping chipsets.. an unusual technique here. Compare my celly sanding article from aeons ago here.
Monday morning here means Sunday night in Russia which means another issue of ZZZ Online.. bring on the flying cars!
VIA have sent more info around on their promotional Q3 map. We got the file last night but were told not to distribute it yet. However TweakTown have some screenshots and AcidHW have a demo of it posted. Anyway, impressive looking for sure but it's a monster apparently, bringing all but the most firebreathing systems to their knees!
Reviews:
X-Micro Impact 4 Pro 64 GeForce2 Pro-based video card on PCInsight.
128MB Thermaltake PC2100 DDR RAM on OCPrices.
Cold Cathode Light kit on BSOD.
Deluxe PC Toolkit from CardCooler on ChicksHW.
MacPower DigiDoc5 thermal monitor / fan controller on ChicksHW - our review here.
Cooler Master ATC-310 server tower case (also!) on ChicksHardware.
Apple Titanium Powerbook G4 on Icrontic.. I know, it's a Mac, but it's sexy.
MS Windows XP on Cole3D.
Wacom Graphire Art Tablet input device on FutureLooks.
This from Morgan:
Opening up a dead psu i found this fan and noticed the a panaflo fan, however on close inspection it was a take off - a ponyflo !?!... wierd, but thought someone might find it funny...
click to enlarge
We've seen this before but it's pretty cool.. go the Pizza Server.. thanks Anarki.
Erkle sent in a pretty funny comic about WinXP.. :)
FullOn3D have an article on Full-Screen Anti-Aliasing, one of the buzzwords in the graphics market at the moment. Interesting stuff..
Icrontic have compared a couple of alpha socket coolers.. PEP66 vs PAL6035.
Digit-Life have a network card buyers guide posted.
Reviews:
ASUS CUSI-M SIS 630E-based Socket370 motherboard on VCD.
Radeon cooling kit on VYW.
Leadtek GeForce3 on Tweak3D.
ELSA GLADIAC GeForce 2 MX video card on Ripnet.
Hercules Prophet III Mini-Review
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Sunday, 6-May-2001 21:32:45 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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VooDoo has written up his impressions of this new GeForce3 card from Hercules. This is no 20-page monstrosity, it's a quick overview from a gamer's perspective.
click for mini-review!
First off this morning is this.. Drempels! If any of you remember the giess plugin for WinAmp.. then this is just psycho. If you don't, then it's sort of a psychadelic screensaver trippy colors thing. It'll actually work as your desktop wallpaper, which can possibly be A Bad Idea.. anyway, it's definitely cool for now.
If you read the review of the B&D dremel-type tool and are keen on getting one for yourself, StratosFear has written in to say that he saw them at Bunnings Warehouse (Hardware Superstore) for 68.85.. quite a price difference. Of course, you could always go to BBC HardwareHouse, we're they'll beat competitors prices by 10% and get it for $61.95.
eski has sent in some prototype pics of an upcomming socket-a waterblock from silverprop.. looks to be pretty nifty, concentrating only on the cpu die to possibly decrease resistance and allow a higher flow rate.. and using the holes around the socket to aid in the retention mechanism.
AllTechBox have a pretty decent guide to making a converter so you can plug a playstation joypad into your PC.. it's a D.I.Y. type job, so it dosn't work out to be that expensive.. you might actually learn something.. pace282 also let me know on IRC about guide that's been around for a while longer.. might be easier to digest because it's all on one page.
BlueSmoke has looked at a software solution to making on-screen images appear in 3D. Named Wicked3D eyeSCREAM Light, it simply renders two overlapping images on your screen, and you put on a pair of red/blue filter glasses to make it "jump out at you". Only problem is it'll drop your frame rates to around 1/3rd of their original state.
If you're AMD obsessed, and I'm sure that alot of you are.. Antony sent in this AMD Skin for PowerDVD. And a quick look found me this AMD WinAmp skin. And I'm sure there's some decent AMD wallpaper out there as well. Crazy.
Umm.. ModdingZone are a bunch of self-confessed girls, and what better way to prove your gender preference than by making your case look, well, girly. With glow-in-the-dark stars. Yesssss.
BlargOC has compared the new Det 12.10's to a huuuge host of other less-higher-numbered sets of dets in wide range of benchmarks. Unfortunatley (for arguments sake), he's using a t-bird system, so his tests don't show if the new drivers bring higher performance to P4-based systems.
LiamC gets the big props for dropping us a note from The Inq. - "Dual Athlon to arrive June 4th". I'm sure alot of you have been eagerly waiting.. but sadly, it dosn't seem like it will be anything like BP6-esque revolionary.. for starters it needs a minimum 450W PSU with a special 8-pin extra plug to keep those cpu's well fed.. The Inq. is also reporting that it requires registered DDR memory, which normally only comes with ECC memory. So I'll be suprised if it's SMP for the masses, but it's most likely going to be fairly speedy.
OverclockersOnline has tested a whole swag of coolers in a big cooler-shootout.
RojakPot has updated their Win2k Hints 'n Tips Guide.
Finally today, DangerousDog has reviewed one of those Zalman Flower heatsinks.. and they reckon it's damn quiet.. mmm.. quiet.
Saturday Afternoon
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Saturday, 5-May-2001 16:26:07 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Headed over to Fairfield Markets today. You forget how many people there are out there until you go to a big place like that and see them all milling around.. picked up some new boots, some airhorns for my bike (heh heh) and some other stuff. Not a bad way to spend the morning..
An important thing going on at the moment is the FireFighters Strike. One of my good friends is a firefighter and as he explained his situation (and that of his wife) to me it's pretty grim. For such a high-risk job, for there to be any doubt about death or disability benefits is just crazy. Plenty of info on that page.
OCWB have a screenshot gallery from "AMD N-Bench". Not sure what that is, although it rings a bell.. I'm guessing a new benchmark from AMD. :) Looks good.
VR-Zone found that their GF3 overclocked better on a P4 system than a Thunderbird system. A score of 7619 in 3DMark2001 is mind-wobbling.
LostUniverse have a step-by-step guide to fixing the sound cutoff bug experienced by Vortex2 soundcards run under Windows2000 (especially on a VIA chipset motherboard).
FiringSquad have a 4000-word Windows XP Preview. MicroSoft are saying XP is a fundamental change, it's as big a deal as Win95 was over Win3.1. But guys, we're only just getting used to Win2K! :)
Daily Radar, gaming news site has gone, another victim of (as they put it) the collapse of the Internet souffle. Diablo2.com are temporarily down according to their page, but if you believe the Wednesday post on BAMF it's more than just a simple redesign. I really wonder what the net will be like in a year or so now, all controlled by BigCorp's with lotsa money and lotsa lawyers? Certainly doesn't seem to be much fun for the little guys at the moment..
Seems Intel and AMD are not totally at war despite competing pretty vigorously for market space - they've renewed their agreement to exchange technology for at least the next 10 years. In 10 years time I expect to be floating in a vat with a high-speed net connection directly into my brain. Brings new meaning to the terms virus, reboot, blue screen of death etc tho..
Along those lines (well, maybe not), GU wonder if technology is moving too fast. I'm sure there are people out there who NEED 1.7GHz PC's, but this Duron 700MHz seems plenty fast enough for everything I do. So much so that I've not even gotten around to overclocking it yet.. oh, the shame. :)
Kyrre from Norway sent word of his watercooling project. Quite a neat little system..
Speaking of which, OCMOD have a guide to increasing flow rate in your watercooled rig. I found that the radiator can make a massive difference in my cool-computers radiator review.
VIAHW have a 7-way SocketA motherboard shootout happening.
MicroSoft have attacked open source again, saying it's insecure and a threat to the economy. Riiiight.
PCStats checked out the AOpen HX08 Fulltower case. These things have been around forever and are still really popular. I bought mine 2 years ago and you still see them being the basis of many a case mod. In the PC Database a quick search by case for HX-08 or HX08 reveals nearly 100.. some tricked-out ones by dmband, under-the-influence and of course DrR0M.
Reviews:
Asus V7700 Pure GeForce2 GTS video card on VCD.
Hercules 3D Prophet II MX and GTS video cards on Digit-Life.
Thermaltake Chrome Orb socket cooler on Electic, thanks KyocEr@~*.
QDrive USB HDD on IPKonfig.
Video Excel GeForce2 MX video card on PCFaction.
PixelView GeForce3 video card on DansData.
ThermalTake Volcano II socket cooler on TweakTown.
Neng Tyi KA01 socket cooler on Cool HardWarez.
Adam sent a link to the world's greatest shave, an Australian fundraising initiative for the Lukaemia Foundation. Get sponsored, shave your head, maybe save a life.
The ThermoEngine flames continue to blaze, but I think they're dying down now. HardOCP compared the hollow and solid models and found very little difference between them, as did (in a little more detail) FrostyTech. Seems to have been a lot of noise about not much difference.
Tech-Report take a look at some privacy concerns to do with Windows XP registration and activation scheme.
ExtremeOC have a copper heatsink comparison posted..
..while ViaHW have a socketA shootout of their own.
Mek from Melbourne sent word of his homepage which has some cooler reviews etc on it..
VoiD pointed out an unusual side of MicroSoft, their research division.. working on a range of things including wavelet compression and cryptography etc.
Reviews:
Hercules Game Theatre XP sound card/bay on LostUniverse.
Asus CUSL2C Black Pearl Socket370 i815 motherboard on digit-life.
Leufken water-cooling kit on 3DSpotlight.
Crucial DDR SDRAM on Chillblast.
Black&Decker Wizard
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Friday, 4-May-2001 21:52:56 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Another reader review! This time Rick Bishop has checked out a Dremel alternative, the Black&Decker Wizard Rotary Tool. It's a good bit cheaper than a Dremel, but how does it stack up..?
Click for the review!
Still trickling in..
Xixys sends word of a new Matrix game on the way! It's (possibly only) for the Xbox tho and it seems MicroSoft have more than a passing interest in the game..
Mr Bill sends word of another funny MS knowledgebase article with the comment "and you thought your BOFH were bad"..
Rizenet have a thread with pics and info on the current "is it hollow or is it solid" ThermoEngine issue. Another thread on CUSL2C.com has the official word from the manufacturer, while Overclockers UK actually tested the 2 versions side-by-side and got identical results. Hmm! I guess we'll see what happens from here..
Dan's reviewed another tank. A little one, this time.
Reviews:
ATI Radeon video card (& driver comparo) on PCTalk.
Maxtor DiamondMax VL 40GB HDD on TechnoYard.
MSI K7 Master DDR SocketA AMD760-based motherboard on TweakTown.
DFI AK75-EC SocketA KT133A-based motherboard on JSI.
Whoops - we had some server problems last night that took out the site until about 20 minutes ago. Everything seems to be back up and alive again now tho (thanks to Gary @ Zip!). Because the server was down there's nothing in the news mailbox, but it should trickle in over the next little while, should be able to get some lunchtime news happening for you. :)
VooDoo points out this cool thermal monitoring using game port. Very cool idea..
DansData has a practical peltiering guide. Another comfy-chair extravaganza from Dan the Man.
IPKonfig have a Detonator comparo.. the 7.58 against the new 12.00 final.
Heh, funny parody of that computer-behind-wall thing from last month. On ZeroCredit, they found a student behind a wall too. :)
CaseModdersOz checked out the GlobalWin WBK38 socket cooler - they reckon it's pretty good. Don't forget about their CoolerBase review database either..
Reviews:
MSI K7T266 SocketA DDR motherboard on HardOCP.
GlobalWin's CAK38 socket cooler on ClubOC.
SoundsGood MP3 player on SystemLogic.
DLink DFE-910 network in a box on TheTechZone.
Samsung SD-612 DVD-ROM drive on NeoSeeker.
LED Case on PCExtremes.
Raytek non-contact thermometer on AcidHW.
ArcticSilver II thermal paste on Tech-Planet.
Magnet's made of Iron, Lobster's made of MEAT!
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Thursday, 3-May-2001 11:11:13 (GMT +10) - by alchemy
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Hmm.. still procrastinating. One mid-sem exam, and three assignments. And I'm doing the news. Arnt I good.. anyway.
Nothing really jumps out at me from the news box this morning. Except for this. I found myself muttering the words yesterday and getting sprung. Lobster made of what? Man, lay of the drugs before class. Indeed.
Jason sent in this site about the paperclip in office 2000.. apparently he is being ditched. If it wasn't for powerpup tho, I wouldn't pass any of my assignments. Can someone say 'spelling?'
Burt sent in this page of silly windows errors to use when the news gets slow. Like it is now.
MikhailTech has reviewed a 128Mb stick of Crucial HSDRAM PC133. SDRAM is dying.
OcPrices have reviewed one of the new breed.. a 256Mb Stick of Crucial PC2100 DDR RAM.
More time wasting thanks to Keith, this time you're killing ship. I wonder if lobster sticks to sheep?
Something slightly ON topic, IANAG has reviewed a Bay Cooler 2. Which even they say isn't exciting.
ViaHardware have some info about Via denying that the 686B/SBLive compatability problem is an issue. They admit that there is a problem with AMD/686B/SBLive combos, but they say it's not an issue. Um, confusing. BIOS updates soon however.
Digit-Life have reviewed the Asus GeForce3 Card, the V8200 Deluxe.
If you're looking at doing, say, the A7M266 mult mod you might want to know how to solder. AllTechBox want to show you how, if you don't already know. I reckon that if you don't already know, maybe you should learn a bit more before you go sticking your iron on a $350+ motherboard.
3D Spotlight have a page with all sorts of windows updates.. umm, sounds to me like an un-automated version of windowsupdate. Anyway, if you're bored maybe you can go and do that until the news picks up.
Possibly the newest and most interesting peice of news today comes from Dr.Kildare.. who reckons that PowerColor are producing a new card based on the 3DFX VSA-100 chipset.. ie: a Voodoo4500-type card. Maybe 3DFX isn't dead, even tho it is?
Well, I told you it was slow. Sorry. Just remember. Lob ster sticks to mag net.
PS: come.to/kewn!!!!!!!!
Wednesday Night Procrastination
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Wednesday, 2-May-2001 22:39:58 (GMT +10) - by alchemy
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Hmmm.. Agg's ran off and left us alllll alone in the OCAU house.. ehehe, actually, I don't know where he is, and I'm bored.. (actually, I'm just procrastinating.. 'sif I want to write 4000 words of uni assignment) so here's the news.
First of all tonight, The-TechZone is giving away a GeForce3. But it's mine. Sorry. I just thought i'd let you all know before you waste your time entering a contest I've already been pre-determined to win.
AMDMB have reviewed the Taisol Copper Bottom. Sounds like something you'd use in the bathroom.. but it's actually a heatsink with a copper insert in the base. I see why they called it a Copper Bottom tho.. the official name for it is "CGK7600092" riiiight. Anyway, interesting to see all the lower-priced coolers following the trend Alpha started many years ago.
Umm, I'm sure many a flightsim fan of you knows the name ThrustMaster. Well, they've been bought out and restructured and corperatised and all big finacial wordasized. Techextreme has reviewed one of their new products, a Dual Power force-feedback gamepad. Seems the big word fad is catching on at ThrustMaster, now Firestorm.
More FREE STUFF! over on SystemLogic.. this time it's your choice of 2 128Mb sticks of either PC133 SDRAM or PC2100 DDR RAM.. your choice! And it is your choice, because I havn't won this one.. unlike the GeForce3. Which I have already won.
There is a big kerfuffle going on about the Thermosonic ThermoEngine heatsinks. Apparently, the first revision of the heatsink that was reviewed by alot of sites featured a hollow core. Thermosonic has, however, supposedly released a new revision of the hs/f featuring a solid core.. which is leading to temperature increases of between 4 and 10 degrees.. which is quite alot. News about it here, here and here.
Neoseeker have reviewed a AVC 112680, and I now know why the orbs have been so popular.. you can actually remember the name. That, and an orb of some sort performs better than the AVC thing in their tests.
Brad has noted that the new Det 12 drivers for nVidia cards are boosting the performance of P4 systems by up to 50% in some instances. So for all you three readers that have bought a P4 system, you might wanna check it out. More info on AcesHardware.
PCStats have written an article about when you should upgrade your BIOS. And I'll answer that in two sentences: When a new BIOS offers a significant performance or compatibility upgrade. Or when you're feeling bored.
If your netstats are looking low, Mort reckons you should check out this movie. Mine are high, so I havn't checked it out. It seems to be large-ish tho, so probably only for the most dedicated of modem users.
It seems all the buildup to WindowsXP has been a anti-climax, as it could quite possibly of been delayed, at least according to the above-linked ZDnet article. It's Microsoft Software.. what do you expect? Look at their past release history.
Umm, apparently there is a new version of WinAmp out, 2.75. But its not on winamp.com.. soooo, you might want to proceed with caution. I must take this moment to say tho, MP3 is probably THE technology that has had a huge effect on me over the last 5 years. The Internet, eh, little bit harder to define. But MP3 - easy to define, and big effect.. and the whole time it's been WinAmp churning out the tunes. I love ya man! *hug*
I wonder how long it's going to be until people realise that "internet enabled" does not mean sales anymore. It barely even means hype, I'm only linking to this because I think it's stupid. AOL (ok, and scary too) have teamed up with Swatch to make an internet enabled watch. I hate using a 15" monitor. Using a watch to read ocau? *ahem*
Andrew sent in this article about an upcomming speed increase in wireless LAN technology.. taking it from 11mbit to 54mbit. That'd pretty much solve the problem QGL went through recently about time spent rolling out cables.
Other news on the interface front is that a USB 2.0 driver is near completion. Apparently the MacOS X driver has already been written, and the Win2k/Me/9x drivers are in the beta stages. Not XP tho, MS has decided that USB 2.0 Is Not For Them.. and so, not for their l^Husers either.
Reviews:
Prolink PixelView2 GF2MX 32MB Card on TweakTown.
Linksys LNE100TX "Linux Compatible!" PCI Network Card on Rizenet.
FrontX Multimedia Ports on HotHardware.. our review here.
Kodak DC3800 svelte digi-cam on FutureLooks.
Globalwin WBK38 on TweakTown.
ATi TV Wonder USB USB TV-Card on GlideUnderground.
Hmm, not really that much in the newsbox this morning.. but I said I'd do the news, so here's the *ahem* news..
Top of the 'box today is a Globalwin FNP-50 review on ChunkyHardware. We've linked to it a bit late, because apparently the first 'revision' of the article had alot more mistakes in it.. Oh well, read the comments. Pretty amusing stuff.
DeeM@N has pointed me at Counter-Strike: The Movie.. and before you dismiss it another crap-but-amusing flash animation with sticks for characters, go over and watch the trailer. It's using real people in true-to-the-game costumes and all that.. looks awesome to me. Be even better if they could build a set around a popular cs map.
Overclocker's Online has looked at the Overclockers Hideout "Reactor" waterblock.. and the thing looks pretty damn 'borg.. it's got two fans on it, which um, blow air. At some really small heatsink fins.. really small. They *do* however, increase the borg look of the thing.
Eurogamer have Yet Another GeForce3 Review™.. but I don't seem to be able to get to it at the moment. Maybe everyones dying to get their 23rd review of the GF3? *shrug* I'm not sure. It's the Elsa Gladiac 920 card btw..
Chris Nolan has a bit of an update regarding the ide=>scsi converters in the previous post.. I'd like to point out that these protocol adaters only work in PIO or MW-DMA2 modes (< 16.6MB/s) on the IDE side, and only up to Ultra (20MB/s) on the SCSI side, so their application is a little limited. It seems to me that they'd only be useful if you've got an ALL scsi system with no PCI slots to add an IDE adaptor, and theres some data on an IDE drive that you simply -must- get at. They are pretty expensive too.. thanks for that Chris.
ComputerChaos has thrown a delta fan at the TT VolcanoII heatsink and updated their review.. Naturally it does drop the temperatures, but is it worth the noise for the temp drop? The graph they have just makes it harder to comprehend IMHO.
Finally, BennyK has let me know that a few aus retailers have already started passing on the yet-to-be-offically-announced AMD price cuts. Good to see.. Just a side note, I'm not going to link to the specefic retailer because it could easily lead to other retailers wanting us to post their price cuts as well.. and this isn't a Guess-Who-Just-Had-A-Price-Cut page.. so go find out who it is yourself. You might learn a few things :)
The RAMBUS-vs-Infineon trial has taken a sudden turn away from RAMBUS's favour (awww) - as reported on TheEnquirer and TheRegister, the presiding Judge has dismissed all but 3 of the 57 claimed patent infringements, thanks Sniper770.
VooDoo points out this interesing RAM info page by Mushkin - check especially the "Why is my computer unstable?" section. Another useful page is here at Realtime Systems.
Japanese mad lad Bunny has been hard at work, posting today his Athlon 1333 @ 2175MHz (click the centre-top link, "(English)" on that page). Of course, this is no air-cooled namby-pamby project, this is a stonking great bucket of liquid nitrogen. Like to see you dragging THAT along to a LAN party. :)
In a similar vein, VR-Zone have a gallery of AXIA overclocks. Some impressive WCPUID shots for sure, but since the Speed Cheet Affects Benchmarks article I'm finding it hard to get excited about these kinda things.. hmm.
If you're after a different kind of grunt, consider the Unisys E7000 server - info here and here. 32-processor Xeon box with 32GB of ram and 88 available PCI slots.. that should run Linux nicely. :) Thanks Ben.
Kinda offtopic but an interesting article, TE interviewed some flightsim guys who converted to CS. I used to be a big Falcon 3.0 player on the Amiga and found that the mechanics of a close "turning fight" dogfight are very similar to a deathmatch-type battle of the Doom/Duke or Quake1 era. One less dimension in Doom/Duke of course and more interaction with your environment, but in many ways you're solving the same problems of maintaining the advantage over your opponent, predicting his maneuvres etc. Interesting to read in this interview how they found the teamwork/strategy applies across the different games as well.
Eddie went along to the Consumer Electronics Show in Sydney recently and put up a few pics of the event. He says it was "ok".. :)
Eski points out these IDE to SCSI converters which allow the integration of IDE storage devices into a SCSI environment.. neato.
VIAHardware have an article on Windows XP Hardware Compatability. Also, hardware detection has become much more intelligent, with the majority of driver installation happening in the background. Users who perform a motherboard swap will be simply amazed, as XP boots up and installs the proper drivers without any intervention, or any real interference with the user's computing.
Reviews:
Sanyo CRD-BP1500P 24x10x40x CDRW on CDRInfo.
Rounded ATA-100 Cables on OCAddiction.. our cheapy version here.
Philips Acoustic Edge soundcard on VYW.
AOpen AK73 Pro (A) KT133A socketA mobo on BlueSmoke.
Taisol CGK 742092 socket cooler on ChillBlast.
Gigabyte GF3000 GeForce3 video card on Electic.
Siemens ID Mouse thumbprint-reading mouse on PCStats.
Wayne sent in this Unreal II sneak-peek page. Looks pretty tasty!
He also notes that AMD are delaying their "Hammer" processors by six months. AMD representatives said the company decided to wait in order to align the Hammer family of chips--which feature the ability to process data in 64-bit chunks--with a new chip manufacturing technology, called Silicon on Insulator (SOI). At the same time, the company plans to extend its Athlon processors well into 2003, instead of tapering them off earlier.
AcidHardware have their own forums now..
There's an interesting optus@home stats page showing the current health of their network as measured from 12 nodes.. thanks MegaBaz.
I think we've seen this before.. but anyway, TweakHardware have a guide to converting the A7V onboard ATA-100 controller to RAID.. without touching a soldering iron.
Digit-Life have their April 2001 Hardware Roundup posted. Usually an interesting if lengthy read..
Xenofex have a guide to making a linux firewall for dialup users.
Guru3D have an explanation of Detonators.. what's what, what you've got, what you should have.
If you've got the most suitable Detonator but still aren't happy with it, NVMax may help you tweak a little more out of it, thanks Iroquois.
xbit have been overclocking their GF3.. as you do.
I thought this was a joke at first, but apparently it's not. FrostyTech have reviewed the Globalwin CPM25603-16 socket cooler. So what, you say? Well, that cooler (superceded by the CPM25603-32) was the one I used to sell with the original lot of C366's overclocked to 550MHz, way back when this site first started.. nearly 2 years ago! Anyway, interesting to see how old-school sinks compare to current ones on small-die CPU's.. in a word: sucky.
Apparently NASA have re-established contact with Pioneer 10. This is the famous probe with the gold plaque showing a map of the solar system and diagrams of a man and a woman. It was launched in 1972 and is now 11.74 billion kilometres from earth, well outside the Solar System - the second-furthest-away man-made object ever (after Voyager 1 which was launched later but travels faster). It's travelling away from the Sun at 12.24 kilometres per second (!) and will pass by a star in the Taurus constellation in about 2 million years.
Reviews:
ThermoSonic ThermoEngine socket cooler on OverWear.
DFI's AK75-EC socketA KT133A motherboard on Radeonic.
Addtronics 7896A server case on RizeNet.
Lian-Li PC60 aluminium case on G3D.
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