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September 2001 |
Give Way.. no, really.
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Sunday, 30-September-2001 21:39:42 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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This from Antony: One of our Bulldozers. Being used as an example of why you don't drive cars out around our mud lakes without flashing lights. The car was empty of course, they wanted something to sit next to the warning sign on the in road to the area. They figured that a squashed car wreck would bring the point home nicely.
click to enlarge
Sunday Evening
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Sunday, 30-September-2001 21:11:45 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Happy birthday to Cameron "Mr Tweak" Wilmot of TweakTown.com fame. :)
We've had another burst of PCDB activity - Placenta has some serious video heatsinks happening, note the fan adapter and clockgen heatsink too. Hartware is going into fan overload while Mongy has an unusual window shape and working cigarette lighter! Nicely tricked-out fulltowers from Mardagg and El_Bambino with some smaller boxes from Huron and Demoman.
Larger-sized people who are keen to get OCAU tshirts or the future OCAU polo-shirts should respond to this thread (in there or in email) so that we get a feel for what larger sizes are needed. If your DNS hasn't updated yet (don't think that's anyone anymore) go here instead.
A few people have been playing a virtual stockmarket game based on the USA market. However, McNugget notes there is an Australian version.
Bit-Tech have a guide to DIY Window Etching.
Reviews:
Light Tape on OCIA.
Soyo Dragon socketA motherboard on Accelenation.
Cold Cathode case-modding doo-hickey on JSIHardware.
Sound Blaster Audigy on TomsHardware.
Dominator socket cooler on BlargOC.
Volcano 6Cu+ socket cooler on FrostyTech.
These from John: here are some pics that i took of counter-strike on a 5.5cm pocket tv. i used my tv-out and a vcr to do it. and it turned out pretty funny.
 
 
click images to enlarge
Top news tonight comes care of VooDoo and Iroquois.. Punk Buster will live on.. Erik Johnson of Valve has said "..Working together with the whole Half-Life community on any kind of cheat prevention software just seems like time well spent." Indeed it is.. can't wait to see an even better version of PB soon.
In response to my "there is nothing to rant about" comment in my last post Paul has sent in this link to a rather sweet case featured in our Case Mods forum and PCDB. Love the fan duct :)
Just as well Optus bought out Excite's share of Optus@Home.. Excite@Home just filed for bankruptcy under American law.. it's intended to prevent any disruption to their user's service.. but I don't see how a bankrupt provider can mean anything but.
Matthew pointed out this site that we have no-doubt linked to before, but keeping in the spirit of posting things twice I'm giving it another run. Notice how haphazard the caffeine web is? Heh. *munches on another Viking bar*
VR-Zone has an incredibly short blurb concerning the SiS735 chipset.. a new board for it will be out soon, and unlike the only SiS735 board out atm (by ECS), this new board (by Leadtek) will feature all the OC features you're addicted to.
Rob points out yet another reason not to trust Microsoft.. and we here at OCAU agree whole-heartedly. Windows never, debian forever *pokes out tongue*
Guru3D have released an updated version of their GeForceAASet tool, now at version 1.4
Chris points out this 'Reg article discussing the upcoming release of desktop Palomino's.. or AthlonXP's as they'll be known, Model numbers and all. Yick. Fastest one is 1.53GHz which is rather toasty, but if only they had desktop versions without the stupid name. Not that it makes *thaaat* much difference, but trying to explain to a layman that you overclocked your AthlonXP "Model 1800 Plus" to 1700MHz just doesn't appeal to me.
Apparently there is going to be a new orb out soon.. this time a crystal orb which is designed for chipset cooling, to go with their already-existing Blue and Orange orbs.
Reviews:
IWill KK266+ on SerialAddiction.
Akasa Silver Mountain hs/f on FrostyTech.
Silver Rounded IDE Cables on ClubOC.
Saturday Afternoon
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Saturday, 29-September-2001 13:17:48 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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This is me doing news after a night of no sleep at a LAN party.. so apologies in advance for any weirdness. :)
Wolfy is looking into organising an OCAU Paintball/Skirmish Day. If you're keen, register your interest in that thread. It'll be near Sydney somewhere.
Dan checked out the 800MHz VIA C3 processor. He notes it's not the fastest chip around but that it runs cool so is a good thing to use in a silent PC. I use an earlier 667MHz C3 in my DVD-TVout box in the living room.. nice quiet cooler on it and plenty fast for that.
Wokket notes that an all-new litestep.net is back online, good news for fans of that alternate shell.
Procooling have an article about converting an AT case to ATX.
You can pretty much kiss your weekend goodbye if you click on this GameBoy emulator link.. thanks Scott.
There's been some talk in irc lately about plummeting PS2 prices and Greg offers an explanation.
AcidHardware have a 3-way GeForce3 Roundup posted.
Andrew pointed out a good site debunking WTC myths including a couple of photos doing the rounds at the moment.
Tech-Report have an article posted, where they claim Microsoft are not being entirely scrupulous with their push to get customers to upgrade.
There's an article here explaining how HLTV (Half-Life TV) works and how it can be of use.. thanks Andrew.
RojakPot have updated their BIOS Optimization Guide.
Reviews:
Thermaltake Volcano coolers on OCdCafe.
Maxtor HDD's on NewsForge.
Thermalright SK6 socket cooler on Icrontic.
Lexmark Z43 printer on NeoSeeker.
Abit TH7II-RAID P4 motherboard on VR-Zone.
SOYO SY-K7V Dragon SocketA DDR motherboard on Hardware-Test.
Friday Afternoon
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Friday, 28-September-2001 17:22:24 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Remember people, drive safe this long weekend. In NSW (and probably other states), double points are now in effect even though the weekend hasn't started yet. Midnight last night until midnight Monday night.
Elecplay have reviewed MS's Train Simulator, a much anticipated game offering a thrillingly realistic simulation of the train experience. You can pop into the passenger car and look out the window, which if done enough, helps you achieve a Zen-like state of mind.
BSOD have what they describe as insane SocketA cooling and at first I'm inclined to agree.. but reading the article it is apparently almost silent so perhaps not so crazy after all.
Some people take their passion for hardware a little too far, thanks Tigger.
The first episode of Star Trek: Enterprise aired last night in the US and according to some it didn't totally suck. Can't wait till we start getting it over here.
Reviews:
Silver Pro Gamer case on OCOpolis.
Thermal Integration TI-V77L heatsink on FrostyTech.
256mb Micron DDR RAM on MikhailTech.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein test on HCW.
Iwill KK266+ SocketA SDR (KT133A) motherboard on HotHardware.
Pretested 1.6GHz Athlon on SystemLogic.
Samsung SW-216 16X IDE CDRW on IANAG.
Glowire and Lazer LED's
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Friday, 28-September-2001 12:11:37 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Blake from the USA sent in a quick review of a couple of brightly-coloured case-modding goodies:
Click for the review!
It seems I dropped the ball Sciby threw to me last night. Heh, whoops. *picks it up and starts running*
Rivastation have put the Radeon 7500 head to head against a GF2 Pro and a GeForce3.. I remember a lot of people started liking nVidia because of the monopolistic practices 3dfx was engaging in. Of course, they had a decent product - but there was more to it than that. It'd be hard to say that nVidia is acting in the spirit of pure competition at the moment.. so I wonder how many ATi converts there are? :)
It seems the Radeon 7500 is getting around.. Digit-Life have a review here, as well as some word of upcoming VIA P4 chipsets on their front page.
LoneWolf pointed out this mobo.. a perfect companion to the A7V266 we just reviewed: an A7V266-D. The newsbox email from Agg said "yes please!".. indeed. Yummy stuff.
Just on SMP Athlons, Anandtech have a review of the Tyan Tiger MP.. supposed affordable Athlon SMP for the rest of us. Basically, a highly cut down version of the Tyan Thunder that we previewed a while ago.
RobsGT4 points out that Hitachi are selling refurbished monitors on their Aussie website - not bad prices, but not up to the Gateway prices that we have recently seen. I suppose it's low monitor pricing for the we're-not-going-out-of-business world.
Guru3D have released a RC of version 3.1 of their GeForce Tweak utility.. good for, err, tweaking your GeForce?
AtlantaOC have covered the voltage mod that you can perform on Abit KT7A motherboards.
It'll be Friday soon.. bored at work? Sure you are. This is from Wokket. Not only will it kill your Friday, it'll eat into your weekend as well. Logic based flash games.. Procrastination: not just for students.
It doesn’t really seem like there is much news worth ranting about tonight. Oh well, you'll live I s'pose. If you got hooked to Sciby's what-am-I-listening to, at the moment I'm listening to Regurgitator's new album. I didn't like their last one, but I like this.
Reviews:
Thermaltake Volcano 5 hs/f on 2FastCPU.
IWill KK266+ on OCTools.. mm, fluronert.
Compuvision CV-Chill on Tech-Planet.
FlashDio FDU-100A Flash USB Hard Drive on FutureLooks.
Handspring Visor Prism on NeoSeeker.
SVC Golden Gate 40 vs. Dynatron DC1206BM-0 Socket-A coolers on ClubOC.
Elsa Gladiac 920 on GamersDepot.
EPoX 8KHA KT266 mobo on Proc-Emporium.
VIA C3 733MHz on AcidHardware.
Hercules Fortissimo II sound card on Accelenation.
Vantec CCK-6027D copper hs/f on FrostyTech.
Acer TravelMate 612TXCi Notebook on Hardware-Test.
Thursday Evening
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Thursday, 27-September-2001 22:58:34 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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There's a nasty new virus going around (isn't there always?) .. this one uses the WTC tragedy to try and trick people into running the attachment. Of course, you're not silly enough to run mysterious email attachments, so you don't need to worry. Speaking of which, I seem to be getting a lot of SirCam emails again..
In relation to Afghanistan, US President Bush has said Osama Bin Laden is definitely to blame but there won't be all-out war against Afghanistan, but a concerted effort to overthrow the Taliban and bring harboured terrorists to justice.
g00n pointed out this disturbing news regarding Phil Zimmerman, he who wrote the PGP encryption program that firstly landed him in jail but eventually brought strong encryption to the masses. Some loonies are apparently blaming him for the WTC attacks, saying that without strong encryption the coordination messages would have been spotted earlier. That is just lunacy. Firstly, if the USA's security infrastructure failed to notice an army of terrorists training and learning to fly within their borders, how are they supposed to pick up on a few (no doubt cryptically-worded) emails? That's worse than blaming Boeing for making the aircraft or the petrol companies for making their fuel burn hot enough to structurally weaken buildings. Grasping at straws while griefstricken is one thing, pointing fingers at random is another. Every time you buy something over the net or submit your details securely you have Phil Z to thank for forcing policy regarding strong encryption to change.
Speaking of which, Australian Internet security is getting some attention today. This is kind've a mess of links but you should be able to filter out the good stuff. The National Office for the Information Economy is a Govt department apparently helping Australians create a world-class online economy and society through its work developing, overseeing, and coordinating Commonwealth Government policy on electronic commerce, online services and the Internet. I'm on the Attorney-General's press-release mailing list and today there have been announcements regarding electronic security, new espionage laws and new legislation allowing investigators to intercept telecommunications with regards certain types of investigations. Info on the new cyber-crime laws on AustralianIT.. more info and background on 2600.org.au.
OCrCafe want to tell you all about rheostats. I checked out the sexy Rheobus Fan Controller a little while ago.
Reviews:
Dynatron socket coolers on Case Modders Oz.
Bits Power socket coolers on GideonTech.
Early Thursday Morning
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Thursday, 27-September-2001 02:29:27 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Hehe, ruffled a few geek-feathers with our Storage Area Networks article. Zzapped says: I wish I could get a pic of our Storage Area Network setup for ya from where I work.It currently has 1.6 terabytes of disk space and room for another 3.2 terabytes. Plenty of room for my mp3 collection. while Ben noted Check out this or this - this baby has: effective user cache capacity up to 18 GB. Marry up one of those with a Unisys ES7000 64-way Xeon, then do some O/Cing and see what we can bench. And for something a bit bigger: this. Yup, that's 360TB of nearline storage. No storage envy there, obviously. :)
Aussie site TechWatch are having a review frenzy tonight.. check out their Braided IDE cables, LG 795FT+ 17" flatscreen monitor and Spire Cooler roundup.
Paul noticed this freaky zoo site.. picking up rubbery animated giraffes and throwing them around, weeeird. Kinda cool tho.
Xbit have a Pentium IV chipset comparison article posted.
AMD are closing a couple of manufacturing plants and laying off some staff.. thanks Daniel.
OCMelbourne have a SocketA Cooler Roundup posted.
Reviews:
WindowsXP Professional on OCAddiction. Our review here.
Sound Blaster Audigy sound card on MGON.
MSI MX400 Pro-VT32S video card on PCStats.
Aopen AX37 Plus socket370 motherboard on TweakTown.
Massworks ID-75 controller on SystemLogic.
DTI 2015XLS LCD monitor on OCdCafe.
AOpen AK77Plus SocketA DDR motherboard on TTZ.
ThumbDrive Secure USB storage on BlueSmoke.
Asus A7V266 Review!
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Thursday, 27-September-2001 01:53:18 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Today we've reviewed Asus's A7V266, a SocketA DDR motherboard using VIA's KT266 chipset. This follows in the footsteps of their successful A7M266 board and is very overclocking-friendly as well as including onboard 5.1 sound.
Click here for the full review!
Wednesday night... I've had my Nigella fix for the week. Oooooooh yeeeeah.
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Wednesday, 26-September-2001 21:34:42 (GMT +10) - by Sciby
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She's a fox. For those who care, the ScibyVision tracks for tonight are: "Operator" by Jim Croce, "Scratched" Etienne De Crecy and "Here comes the flood" by Peter Gabriel and Robert Fripp. Right. Now, news.
From Deejay:
Hi guys, I thought the readers might want to know that there is a likelihood of being a bad batch of Boston Acoustics BA735 USB speakers, which was a part of the "Gateway leaving Australia" sale.
If anyone has received a set of these speakers and has had problems with the power adapter not staying in place at the back of the sub and the speakers not having power at all, then they should contact Gateway ASAP 1300 301 672. Also they can contact me via email and I will collate a list of people affected so I can feed this back to Gateway :)
Also there aren't any Windows 2000 drivers listed on the gateway website for these speakers. I had to get these from tech support.
I have a copy of these drivers, and people can email me for them if they want to run these speakers on Windows 2000.
So there you go. If you've got BA735 speakers and they no go, then call that number.
This is rather clever: Designing an Authentication System: a Dialogue in Four Scenes. What witty nerds there are out there. Ta, theDriver.
Microsoft is helping to show the world that New York is still open for business, even with the aftermath of the attacks still ongoing.
OtakuPC has written an article on decent mouse ergonomic toys, such as Mouse Skates and the Cord-Holder-Thingy.
Dual CPU's are nice. We at OCAU, we like dual things. We like this very fast dual setup from Scriion. Me wantee.
This case here would confuse the hell out of any non-l33t, non-case modding techo that had to do any work on it. Check out the PSU. ATX into mATX space.
This bit from JimX, (Hi Jim! *waves*), Suzuki has released a superbike with four wheels. Revs to 10'000 rpm. Again, me wantee.
Sick of people cheating in Counter-strike? Well, sign this petition to help convince Valve Software to work with the makers of Punkbuster to help rid Half-life and CS of damn cheaters. Damn their hides.
More news later. *throws ball to Alchemy*
Wednesday Morning
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Wednesday, 26-September-2001 11:10:57 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Taconuts have updated their case gallery. Remember to check out our own PC Database too.
Digit-Life have a roundup of Dual-channel Ultra ATA/100 RAID Controllers posted.
Reviews:
Vantec Copper Heatsinks on VYW.
Vantec Copper Heatsinks on LWD, too.
Tyan Tiger K7 on IANAG. Our review of the server version here.
CoolerGuys Aluminium Case on OCrCafe.
Shuttle AE25R socket370 motherboard on HotHardware.
MSI K7T266 Pro SocketA DDR motherboard on OCOnline.
TweakMonster Copper Ramsinks on TheColdShop.
Dr Thermal socket cooler on IPKonfig.
Epox 8Kta3+pro socketA motherboard on ExtremeCooling.
Accton Realtek NIC also on ExtremeCooling.
Hercules 3D Prophet III GeForce3-based video card on Digit-Life.
1GHz Duron socketA CPU on Mikhailtech.
SVC Golden Gate 40 copper cooler on 2FastCPU.
Antec SX830 case on G3D.
MegaMite Chipset Cooler on IPKonfig. Our roundup here.
Forum Server
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Wednesday, 26-September-2001 02:12:00 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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With the assistance of Jason from AusGamers we have moved the database driving the forums to a separate server. The web data is still served from the same server, but the disk-intensive stuff has been moved to a box with RAID1, which is hopefully better for constant small writes than the RAID5 on the box we've been using to date. We're hoping that the more suitable disk subsystem and the separation of web and database functions will reduce the sporadic downtime the forums experienced earlier tonight. We'll see how we go.
NEC 1525v LCD Monitor
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Tuesday, 25-September-2001 23:46:17 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Sciby checked out a 15" LCD monitor from NEC. Funnily enough, he felt very similarly about it to how I felt about the Acer one I checked out here over a year ago. Is this something you're going to want taking up (so little) room on your desk?
Click for the full review!
Tuesday Night
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Tuesday, 25-September-2001 21:54:09 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Seems that Telstra and a few other ISP's have finally gotten the new DNS config so people are having more luck accessing the normal forums.overclockers.com.au domain. I notice Primus ADSL has not yet updated, however. Still, there's been a heap of people in the forums all day today, the AusGamers server has been taking quite a beating. We're working behind the scenes to get the machine coping better with the load.
Radeonic reviewed some round cables while Mikhailtech have a do-it-yourself cable rounding guide. We have one of each too: review and how-to.
Reviews:
Koolance uber-cooling system on HardOCP.
nForce 420 reference motherboard on AnandTech.
Visiontek GeForce3 video card on ExtremeOC.
Asus' P4B vx MSI's 850Pro2-R, two i845 P4-with-SDR motherboards on HotHardware.
Return To Castle Wolfenstein game preview on SourceMag.
Promise FastTrack TX4 IDE RAID controller on PCHardware.
AOpen H600A mid-tower case on DansData.
Altec Lansing ADA880 speakers on ClubOC.
Hardcore Storage!
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Tuesday, 25-September-2001 19:51:48 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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BlueSmurf has given us a sneak-peek into the world of enterprise-class storage in the form of Storage Area Networks. If money was no object and you wanted the ultimate HDD system.. this is probably what you'd get:
Click for the full article!
Lots of pics and some serious benchmarks, check it out!
Monday Night #2
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Monday, 24-September-2001 23:46:52 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Over the last few days I've deleted 5 or 6 threads about that WTC bombing Wingdings thing. I can't believe so many people have been sucked in by this one. There's versions going around with 3 or 4 different variations of the alleged flight number! Anyway, Microsoft say it's still a crock, just like it was 10 years ago when someone was first pointed out that NYC in Wingdings is vaguely suggestive of racial hatred. Actually, JimX sent in a really good page that debunks lots of myths (and confirms quite a few as true). The page has recently focussed on stories surrounding the WTC and Pentagon attacks. Go read it, please. :)
Digital-Explosion have some info on DIY copper waterblocks.
Aus3D have benchmarked the Detonator XP 21.81 drivers for NVIDIA-based cards.
The PCDB has been going crazy with updates these last few days! Nice windows from PsychoSmurf and B5Lurker. Two of the most-visited entries have been updated: Frazas's fan-encrusted machine and Mota's amazing custom waterblock mount (clamps behind the motherboard), not to mention the mammoth case and ducted aircon. Prophetek is going for that "hazardous materials" look and Beannie's updated machine turned out very tidy indeed. Mikeamp is in the process of hooking up a PSX game controller to his PC, pics in his PCDB entry and info on his homepage.
Reviews:
WindTunnel III case on Inside-Hardware.
Shuttle AV40R P4X266-based P4 motherboard on Tech-Report.
Arkua ThermoTurbo XC60-4225 socket cooler on AMDMB.
Volcano 6Cu/6Cu+ socket coolers on GideonTech.
Vantec CCK-6027 socket cooler on OCrCafe.
Monday night, where did my weekend go?
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Monday, 24-September-2001 21:08:54 (GMT +10) - by Sciby
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I'm sure it was Friday night just five minutes ago. *sigh* Oh well... anyway, if you want to live life through the eyes of Sciby, the you need to listen to the Fuel - Sunburn album, whilst reading the news, to get the full, Sciby-licious effect.
And on with the news. *air guitar solo*
With the highly, unh, suggestive domain name of http://www.bong.com.au (The Brotherhood Of Network Gamers), we have word of a Lan day, with 80 or so places left... apparently it's close to the Nepean River (which I've never heard of, but *shrug* meh) in/near Sydney, so if you're in that area, the LAN is on the 13th of October. Check out the details.
Dr. Rabbit in the forums has started a thread on how to attach a Slot 1 HSF to a S370 Slocket. Nicely done, looks like it could crush kittens.
Here's Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in Lego, apparently, from YYK via Agg. Dunno if it works, don't have broadband here. Give it a whirl, if it doesn't work, let us know.
Hooooo baby: Pure Rice Goodness. This is from the Auto Salon Show in Brisbane. Personally, I think it's wrong, Daewoo Lanos' are not supposed to look like this. Wrong, very wrong.
These are rather neat, albeit another mod for casemodders to wet themselves over.
It seems that the Smurfs are rather evil. Papa Smurf is a naughty smurf.
Edition #98 of ZZZ Online is out. Full of it's usual weird, yet interesting stuff, including a laser chewing gum scrapper.
Rated PC has put together a quick article on quantum computing. Most exciting stuff.
The CPU and Memory watch has been updated on SystemLogic, note: they be US prices, folks.
As a bit of an armchair fighter pilot myself, this, really bakes my cookies. *dribbles excitedly*
Across the Tasman, to our sheep-frolicking cousins at Overclockers NZ, people have been busy in the forums: A very cool PSU (sexy, thinking about doing this myself), and rounded cables wrapped in heatshrink tubing. Clever shtuff.
Soldier of Fortune 2: Double Helix!!! (Need I say more?? Oh okay, it's just a preview.)
Reviews:
PCMods Reostat at Bit-Tech.
Archos Jukebox Recorder and Player at Rated PC.
Silver Rounded Cables at 2FastCpu.
Soyo SYK7V "Dragon" motherboard at HardOCP.
AMD 1ghz Duron (Morgan) CPU again, at HardOCP.
Franklin e-Bookman Multipurpose PDA at Electric.Com.
HighSpeedPC AGP Airlift at AtlantaOC.
Temporary Forums Fix
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Monday, 24-September-2001 14:09:12 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Remember, if your ISP's DNS hasn't updated yet, try this address as a temporary fix:
http://overclockers.ausgamers.com/vbbStill not sure why the DNS changes are taking so long to get around. There were 160 people in the forums last night so obviously plenty of ISP's are working, but a notable few are not. Everything I know how to check on the DNS side looks good. If you're a DNS whiz feel free to sniff around our domain and let me know if you see anything weird. :)
Dan has added to his already-massive cooler comparo taking the total number of hs/f's to be tested to 59.. This update includes the huge-fanned OCZ Dominator, three Bitspower skived-sink models including an excellent low-profile unit, the Thermaltake Volcano 5 (which is almost as good as the Volcano 6 models), the neat, quiet Glacial Tech Igloo 2300, and a cooler made for the Via C3 which has no fan at all.
This from phattman.. I was an entrant of Brisbane Auto Salon (Rice car heaven) saw a few OCAU shirts and had a yarn to a couple. Best excuse was they were looking for new ideas for case mods! Crappish show - my Civic nearly got the most powerful FWD turbo with only 114Kw at the wheels (only 8psi) while some gay airbrushed thing ran 35psi and got 118kw... Doh. Heh, oh dear. I knew those case modders where secretly rice at heart.
AgentJ pointed out this article over on GameSpy which talks about the effect the September 11 WTC tragedy is having on.. the computer games industry? Of course, anyone who has studied economics (like me!) will know that it's called the multiplier effect, and it's bad. mmmmkay.
Anyone with an ATI card that was experiencing over-flow errors when playing CS 1.3 with the OpenGL API might want to head over to CS.net to grab a patch that will fix that issue.. thanks to XG8 for the heads up. I've been playing a bit of CS 1.3 lately.. it's cool. That voice communication thing is a good/bad tho.. good on semi-private servers because it allows quicker and more efficient communication, bad on public servers because all you hear is 12yo Aaron Carter voices saying "I OWNZ J00!!".
Torana found this page with a whole heap of server-class goodies on it. I know I don't need them.. but I'm sure I could find a use for them, even if it is only desk ricing. Speaking of desks, I'm on the look out for a new chair.. I've had enough of my plastic chair stolen from a dodgy dining table set. If anyone in Brisbane knows of a decent place to buy a good typists/clerical chair for under $160 please let me know. I'd really appreciate it - thanks :)
Kola points out that Creative has a release schedule up for their WindowsXP Sound Blaster drivers.
MMMMmmmm, toys. You lucky man woofer2 :)
Finally, Wokket pointed out this Socio-Political analysis of The Smurfs.. which takes the piss (naturally). Amusing.
Reviews:
Corsair PC150 SDRAM on AtlantaOC, our review of the PC133 here.
AOpen HX08 on TacoNuts, approximately 50,000 (at last count) of these in the PCDB.
Cold Cathode case-light kit on ClubOC.
80mm fan roundup on BSOD.
Rheobus / Case quietening article on Bit-Tech, our RheoBus review here and Digi-Doc here.
DIY Copper Waterblocks on Digital-Explosion. A few waterblocks in our review list.
FrontX Multimedia Ports on SpodesAbode, our review here.
Dual monitors are cool. I was lucky enough to pick up a high-quality 17" screen from a mate who 'indulged' in the Gateway liquidation sale.. so now I have two. I'm yet to obtain a second PCI video card, but lest to say just the appearance of two monitors on my desk is enough. Can't wait until I can actually use the second monitor some something more useful than desk-ricing purposes. Anyway, the news is rather slow tonight.. and so am I. Just started holidays.. which means I had to give the liver a kick-start.
The Ungrateful Ninja pointed out this site where you can obtain a pair of testicles for your vehicular transport. Ahh yes *cough* ahem. Rice? Whole new level :)
For anyone with a PocketPC that utilises the CompactFlash standard of removable storage, RojakPot has a guide up to converting PCMCIA or PCcard's to CompactFlash, allowing you to use them in your PDA. Might come in handy..
Vindaloo points out that they got thoroughly whipped in the battle of the bands compo they competed in last night.. favourites Karnivool managed to take it out. Bad luck guys, but I bet they can't build as-good a bong ( cooler) as you guys.
Duryea pointed out that there are some new SBLive drivers over on SoundBlaster.com for Win2K users.
I told you it was quiet.. go read the forums or browse the PCDB if you are bored.. of course CS 1.3 is now out as well, if you are so inclined.
Reviews:
ABit KG7-RAID on Hexus.
Dr Thermal TI-V77 heatsink preview on OCcafe.
Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 Kyro2 on TheDDRZone.
OCAU Stuff
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Saturday, 22-September-2001 20:12:47 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Still a few of the black shirts available. I'm looking at getting some navy and grey polos (erm, some of each colour, not both colours on one shirt) in a few weeks. When they're printed I'll get some larger sizes of the black shirts made as we ran out of XXL's pretty quick and people were requesting XXXL's. But right now there's still a few L, M and XL's available of these:
 
click pics to enlarge
Anyway, ordering details here! Don't order the polo shirts, they're not available yet. 2nd lot of case badges should be ready soon too, they've already been ordered.
Saturday Morning
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Saturday, 22-September-2001 10:31:01 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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VIAHW have a four-board P4X-based motherboard roundup posted.
Daemon spotted this cool 404 page. A Matrix mod for Max Payne from DeezNutz. I found this RAM Identification Page last night.
Bored with flashy things, Dan is now playing with magnets. Really strong magnets.
I guess blue PC's are where it's at these days, as yet another appears in the PCDB.. not forgetting Beast's earlier effort. Of course, you could always go for no colour at all and make a custom transparent case.
It's been fairly quiet from Wokket lately.. but he's back: A man trying to rob a bank with a can of ravioli, someone stealing a rubber duck collection. Thai kids betting their girlfriends on video games and a site that can show you what big brother knows about your browser. Also, Owen begged me to link his site, so what the hell. It's about donkeys.. and cheese. And radiation. Or something.
Reviews:
Xitel DG2 MDPort MP3 player on NeoSeeker.
Silver Braided Cables on IPConfig.
Battle Lamp keyboard light on ClubOC.
Vantec CCK-6027D socket cooler on Icrontic.
Fortis socket coolers on Icrontic.
CDI InWin Alaska 3 case on HotHardware.
Magic-I Keychain on HWExtreme.
Dr Thermal cooler on OCPrices.
PQI 256MB PC133 SDRAM
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Friday, 21-September-2001 23:51:07 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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I checked out some cheap RAM from PQI. How cheap? How does 256MB for AUD $55 grab you? The big question is: is it also nasty?
Click to find out!
Friday Evening
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Friday, 21-September-2001 22:37:50 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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The net still seems very slow. I am being routed through bbnplanet.net in Seattle in the USA.. to get to some Australian sites! Weird.
Film scanners used to reside in the domain of professional photography labs only, but have been dropping in price consistently for a while. These let you scan the negatives of your photos so you can manipulate or store them digitally. ComputerSource checked out 3 models here.
DesignTechnica have a little preview article about Electronic Ink, an interesting new display technology.
SystemLogic have updated their guide to installing a SocketA cooler. If you're wondering what cooler to use, check out our 21-way roundup from a couple of months or so ago.
The GeForce FAQ grows ever larger and has been updated, thanks XG8. If you want to tweak your TNT or GeForce-based card, RivaTuner has been updated too.
G3D have been LED-modding their keyboard.. as you do.
One case mod I like to see is when people convert big old server cases to house more modern parts. An example was added to the PCDB recently in the form of Destroyer_FF's PC which looks like an old DEC or HP server. Similar is Wildemere's modified AST Manhattan server which won our first case-mod competition at MPU ages ago. A few more case mod pics from MPU in this article. I've still got the Big Kahuna lying around the AggCave but it, along with its big brother are just too huge to be practical. One day I'll build a watercooled dual system into that box. :)
Apparently Below-0 are having some DNS problems (heh, aren't we all) but you can get to their site here while their normal domain isn't working.
Brisbane peeps who want to see high-tech goodies in modified cars should go to Auto Salon 2001 which is on this weekend, says Rasta.
Reviews:
Cyber Cooler P-8000 socket cooler on GideonTech.
Epox 8K7A+ SocketA DDR motherboard on OCPrices.
Thermaltake Volcano coolers on JSIHW.
Hitachi CM821F 21 inch "Flat Face" monitor on PCStats.
Samsung SyncMaster 170T monitor on IANAG.
Hercules GameTheatre XP sound card on HardAvenue.
Gladiator copper socket cooler on EXHardware.
Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 video card on TheDDRZone.
Friday Night Entertainment
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Friday, 21-September-2001 21:19:44 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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D'oh. There was some confusion about news tonight so this is a little late: Me (Vindaloo) and Froodogs, authors of the bong cooler article, are in a band called Dyslexic Fish, which is playing in the WA state final of the National Campus Bands Competition, tonight (friday) at the Globe nightclub, in Murray St, Perth. We'll be playing at about 9 pm, and there are bands such as Karnivool and Heavy Weight Champ also playing. So come along and support your fellow OCAUers!!! Froodogs plays rhythm guitar, and DOESN't have dreds, and I play samples and trombone, and also sing backing vocals.
That's 9PM Perth time of course, so begins a little under 2 hours from now. Good luck in the comp, guys!
Forums still not working?
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Friday, 21-September-2001 16:33:54 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Try this address instead:
http://overclockers.ausgamers.com/vbbTerm suggested it and some people have reported success. Note that the internet in general is slow and with all the game-related releases this week AusGamers are taking a traffic hit at the moment too. So it might be a little slow.. but it seems to be a solution for some.
BTW, I didn't expect this to work because there are some hard-coded links configured in the forum software. However it seems to work fine.. but don't complain if this workaround isn't 100%. :)
I've been having a browse through the PCDB this evening.. can't say that I've ever done that before. It's been rather interesting tho, there is a lot of cool stuff in there.. like this case modded with Chinese insignia cut into the side from ProphetCHRIS, or this Linux gateway machine in a brief case by Burn. Then there are a couple of proprietary machines.. like Radix' Netpliance iOpener, a Sun E450 server or Shintaro's really really cool Allanon BeBox with swanky LEDS on the front showing CPU usage. All up that managed to kill at least a half hour of my time, and I found some really cool shiznit in the process. Recommended :oP
PCStats have some info concerning the upcoming Radeon8500 GPU.. I reckon that it's going to be whooping some serious ass by the time it hits the streets, giving the GF3 a good run for it's money. Another thing that a lot of people who cashed in on the 22" Gateway deal have mentioned to be is how crap nVidia 2D quality is in their humble opinion.. and how much better the ATI quality is. A good all-round card will definitely strike a cord I think.
BSOD has checked out the Everglide range of products.. which we did quite a while ago.. (for those that are a bit slow.. every word there is it's own link)
Kyrocera pointed out that some new Matrox WHQL drivers have just been released.
Hexus is talking about the P4 as a budget platform.. well, a more affordable platform than it once was... which, compared to it's previous status as a prohibitively expensive platform, is probably fair. It's hardly budget tho.. has anyone seen Celeron prices these days? cheep cheep.
G3D have checked out the Chilli Professional solid-aluminium cases.. IMHO they are quite swanky bits of kit that I'd love to get my hands on.. problem is, the manufacturer went broke so I'm guessing they're selling out some old stock.. so the chances of an Australian distributor are very low.
MikhailTech have checked out a few HDD Coolers.. we've done the same here and here. I think I might need to look into some cooling myself.. my pair of Western Digital 300BB's keep my case temp up around 42deg!
Finally, Nemesis pointed out this front-panel drive bay port relocate thingy, not too the ones Agg linked to in the previous post. He says greetings from Spain too btw - G'day Mate ;)
Reviews:
Elsa Gladiac 511 PCI and AGP GF2MX cards on Radeonic.
Samsung ML1561N Laser-Printer on PCStats.
Project Sapphire Pt 2 case-mod project on Bit-Tech.
TweakMonster Purple AMD Shim on AtlantaOC.
80mm Fan Adaptor on PCTools, our reviews here and here.
Just realised how much self-pimpage there is in this news post.. hehehe. S'pose it will keep you busy until the forums come back up :)
Thursday Evening
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Thursday, 20-September-2001 18:38:55 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Well, the Australian internet has slowed to a crawl today with the launch of Counter Strike v1.3. There's a list of mirrors linked from here on the official site and another list here in our forums with an emphasis on Oz mirrors. Speaking of the forums, they're running pretty slow today, no doubt partly because AusGamers who now host them are running a CS1.3 mirror too. Having said that though, the whole net seems sluggish, I'm even getting timeouts trying to get mail from Odin and loading this news page took a while. Some complaints of slow access to overseas sites in the forums too. I wonder if the Nimda virus is chewing up bandwidth too.. UPDATE Ah-ha! K@OS sent this: Began Thursday, 20 September 2001 at 3:39PM EST. We are currently having problems with BigPond . This is affecting customers nationally, they will experience a delay connecting to international sites. the cause is a submarine cable has been cut between China and the USA.Technicians are treating this issue as a priority and are working on the problem Updated at 20/09/01 5:19PM EST.. You can see the effect globally here.. the net is not well.
The (apparently) woeful state of Telstra's network is now being used as a political tool by the Federal Opposition, thanks Sniper1G. Ricoselit noticed this not-too-favourable TheRegister article about Ziggy Switkowsky, Telstra CEO.
H:6 have a newbie guide to installing a socketA CPU. They advocate using a screwdriver to fit the heatsink - that works fine for many heatsinks, but some clips just don't fit screwdrivers or allow the screwdriver to slip off with sometimes disastrous consequences. Take your time and be careful!
A couple of tidy blue boxes from halcorp2001 and Skeg in the PCDB.
Evangelion is trying to organise a Tribes2 server over in Western Australia. He's got the box and everything ready to go, but the ISP says there's not enough interest in Tribes2 in WA to bother putting the server in for them - but perhaps a petition to show some support would help their cause. So, if you think a Tribes2 server in WA is a good idea, go to this petition and sign up.
FelixDaChat had a hunt around for some front access panels with firewire.. and he found some: here, here and here.
Digit-Life have their August 2001 Storage Digest posted. A good site if you're keen to find out about HDD's etc is StorageReview.
Digit-Life have also put up their take on SMP SocketA with benchmarks and heaps of info as per usual from them. Hardware-test also have a review of the Tyan Thunder MP dual SocketA board. Check out our pictorial preview of the Thunder K7 board from back in June.. which was such a popular article it ended up killing our webserver. :)
Haroc sent an email saying simply GLOW TAPE! ..and that's pretty much all I've got to say about it too.
Dmband sent in this article about robo-roaches. Hmm, seems a bit cruel.. but then, I've killed more than my fair share of roaches I guess. Anyway, last night I was cruising around the net with the intent of confirming or dispelling the common "Daddy-Long-Legs spiders are the most toxic in the world" claim. I found this list of Australian Venomous Creatures with info and pics etc.. interesting/useful. It says this about the Daddy-Long-Legs spider: Despite the urban myth regarding its extreme toxicity, little is known of the venom of this spider. This is backed up on this page which essentially says they can't open their mouths wide enough to bite people, so nobody's ever bothered to see if their venom is toxic or not. So, there's no proof to support the claim that they are the most toxic. However, and this interesting fact is noted both on the previous link and on this one, Daddy Long-Legs spiders are one of the primary predators of the very venomous Redback spider. So bear that in mind next time you go to suck one into the vacuum cleaner. :) Some cool super-closeup spider pics I took when experimenting with my Nikon ages ago: 1, 2, 3.
I have to say, the current "finding hidden meaning in every string of numbers related to the WTC attack by converting it to Wingdings font" craze is, well, crazy. Even more stupid than the Nostradamus thing we showed to be a crock a few days ago. :)
Reviews:
Philips Acoustic Edge sound card on OCAddiction.
Promise FastTrak100 TX2 Pro IDE RAID controller on Xbit.
Samsung 16X DVD drive on IANAG.
Abit KG7 socketA DDR motherboard on OCNZ.
AOpen HQ08 fulltower case on PCFusion. There's about a billion modified HQ and HX08's (different front) in the PCDB. :)
Wednesday Night
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Thursday, 20-September-2001 00:02:44 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Over 140 people in the forums as I write this, so obviously the DNS changes are working their way around to people. BigPond customers seem to be unable to connect using a browser even though their PC returns the correct address when pinging the forums subdomain - this may be due to Telstra's proxy doing its own lookups from their (as yet not-updated) DNS. Might be sorted by the morning, but try temporarily turning off proxies if you can - if they're "transparent", ie not set in the browser, then you'll have to wait for your ISP's DNS to update.
Lauhead spotted this AMD Overclocking FAQ over on overclockers.com. Good for the newbies, plenty of info there.
There's a (hopefully) record-breaking LAN happening in Adelaide soon, with 600+ registrations already!
On a sombre note, this from Steffan: A very good friend of mine has been very ill due to cancer. Michelle Eastlake is losing her battle and is in hospital now. She has been incredibly strong and always been a pillar of hope for those around her. She has also been a dedicated overclocker for the last year or so, pushing her p3-650 to the 143fsb envelope via a sweet watercooling outfit. But her time has come to an end and its a great loss for all of us. Our thoughts are with you, Michelle..
Reviews:
Shuttle P4X266 P4 motherboard on HardOCP.
Thermalright SK6 socket cooler on IPKonfig.
Plextor 16x10x40a CDRW on SystemLogic.
Samsung SyncMaster 170MP monitor on IANAG.
Western Digital Caviar WD1000BB 100GB 7200rpm IDE HDD on BlueSmoke.
RumbleFX FF Headphones on AtlantaOC.
Windtunnel III case on OCrCafe.
Enermax CS-A1QX-6 case on ClubOC.
Enermax CS-A1QX-06 case also on CHW.
hosts file
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Wednesday, 19-September-2001 16:17:27 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Ok, seems the whole hostfile modification thing is a bit stressful for peeps. :) Here is a pre-made file which you can save into the appropriate directory on your PC:
WinNT/2K: C:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc
Win95/98/ME: C:\windows
(If you installed windows onto a different drive or into a different directory, change as appropriate.) Right-click on the link above, save as, browse to the directory, put it in there. It might try to save it as a .TXT file - don't let it! Change file type to "All Files" and make sure the filename has NO EXTENSION - put it quotes, "hosts." when you save it and check the dialog box after you save it, make sure it was saved correctly. Then clear your browser cache and close all browser windows. Open your browser and go to the forums URL.
Some PC's may have hosts files already configured with stuff you need to access your own (work, ISP) network. Most don't these days, but in rare cases overwriting the file might break your networking so be careful, maybe back it up first. Update: Norton Antivirus 2001 puts some entries in your host file so will likely break or be confused if you just overwrite with this file. NAV 2000 doesn't have this issue.
Wednesday Afternoon
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Wednesday, 19-September-2001 13:24:25 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Forums are going well on the new server, there's about 60 people in there now and continuing to grow. If you still can't get in and you've tried the suggestions on the old forums page, sit tight, your DNS should update soon.
Daron noticed this warning about a new virus expected to hit Oz shores today.. this is described as a "cocktail" virus, because it was written in the 80's and features Tom Cruise throwing drinks around.. ooorr.. maybe because it has a few separate threats built in. I think Alch already linked this, but better safe than sorry - the 80's were a terrible, terrible time and we should do everything possible to avoid returning to them. More info here on TheReg, here on ZDNet and here on Symantec. Affects Windows boxes only of course.. and mostly only IIS-serving machines, but can also get in through Guest accounts and SMB shares. This page on TechTV reckons it arrives as an email attachment too. Slippery little sucker!
Morpheus noticed an article saying that old computers are better. Picture this: a PC that never crashes, boots instantly, doesn't catch viruses, plugs into your TV set and costs less than $600. While this sounds like the miracle PC of the future, it could actually describe a number of home computers made in the late '70s and early '80s.
We've seen this before but Sciby reminded me of it, the cool Guess The Movie Or TV Show game database thing. It's really quite clever.
The most drastic piece of news this morning seems to be a new IIS worm that is spreading like wildfire.. pasted from TweakMax. "Nimda is the first worm to modify existing web sites to start offering infected files for download. Also it is the first worm to use normal end user machines to scan for vulnerable web sites. This technique enables Nimda to easily reach intranet web sites located behind firewalls - something worms such as Code Red couldn't directly do. EEEp. fix it.
As an alternative to the KVM switch boxes we linked to in the news the other day, Mort points out these swanky things that Compaq sell.. instead of connecting to the usual KVM ports it is a PCI card that you connect to a host via CAT5 cable.. eliminating all the cable clutter. Of course, it takes up a PCI slot, which are at a premium in 1U cases.. and it costs $690US. But hey.. it's an alternative :)
OCworkbench has some more info about that mod you can perform to reference SiS735 boards to boost performance by a whole 5%. Hopefully final shipping boards will come with this mod already in place, because although 5% extra performance is nice, I don't think it's worth voiding the warranty for.
Dan's cooler comparison just keeps on getting bigger and bigger.. he has added some new s478 P4 coolers to the already huge list, as well as another s423 cooler. I think this definitely makes his the biggest cooler roundup on the web now. Go read it if you're thinking of an upgrade.
Kyocera points out that 1.53GHz AthlonMP processors will ship at the start of next month, just ahead of the AthlonXP part.. and they've thankfully left this silly PR stuff for the desktop processors only. He also pointed out that by the end of the month Compaq won't technically exist.. only Hewlett-Packard.
Finally, Lujan pointed out this SMH article saying that Optus has inhaled Excite@Home, their partner in the Optus@Home broadband Internet rollout. What this means is that O@H will be safe despite the troubles of Excite's parent company in the US. Of course, why they even need Excite's help to run a broadband service is beyond me.. I don't think there are many people that actually exclusively read the Excite@Home page..
Reviews:
Leadtek WinFast GeForce3 TDH on TheDDRzone.
IWill KD266 KT266 mobo on RizeNet.
DigiDoc 5 on OtakuPC, our review here.
Fortis Coolers on O2.
Project Sapphire case-mod project on Bit-Tech.
ThermalTake Volcano Heatsinks on OCcafe.
GF2MX hs/f mod guide on MikhailTech.
Seagate U6 80Gb HDD on Hardware-Test.dk
Thermalright CB-6L copper/aluminium cooler on OCprices.
nVidia nForce Preview on AMDmb.
Acer 6406EU 6X USB Burner on MrPCPro.
Forums on AusGamers!
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Wednesday, 19-September-2001 02:12:04 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Ok, I've moved the forums over. There was a period of about 2 minutes where the old forum was up at the same time as the new one.. any message posted to the old forum in that time WON'T appear in the new one. All the existing messages, PM's, avatars, user accounts etc etc should all be in the new forum, though.
If, when you click on the forums link at left, you get a message "THIS IS THE OLD SERVER", it's because the DNS changes have not yet propagated around to your DNS server. This should take a maximum of 48 hours but possibly longer. In many cases the changes will have been almost instantaneous. If you don't want to wait, follow the instructions on that page to access the new forums.
If you can't change that file, then you might have to wait - anything from a couple of hours to a few days - and then you should be able to access the new forums fine - and faster than ever!
If you have any problems, drop me a note.
Many thanks once again to AusGamers for graciously providing space on their servers for the OCAU forums!
Moving forums to AusGamers
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Wednesday, 19-September-2001 00:52:52 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Right. At about 1AM Sydney Time I am going to take the forum system on Odin down and begin the move to the AusGamers server. Taking into account compressing the data file (500mb) and FTP'ing it between the servers I would expect this process to take about an hour. I will provide instructions and info on accessing the servers on the new forums when they are available.
Tuesday Night
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Wednesday, 19-September-2001 00:37:52 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Oh dear. Following in the WindowsXP and DetonatorXP footsteps come AMD, announcing that their much-anticipated desktop Palomino-based Athlon processor will be called: AthlonXP.. or so TheRegister reckon. Thanks Sniper1G.
Scriion noticed the OCAU SETI@HOME Team has passed 100,000 units submitted.. way to go! Thanks to Mort for his contributions to date - he's advised he's going to be slacking off the pace soon, giving the rest of us a shot at the top spot.. eventually. :)
Yamaha announced the details of their 2002 model YZF-R1 1000cc sportbike today.. now there's a sexy bundle of high-tech goodies. :) Motorcycle.com have a preview of it.
Reviews:
Exonion MP3 Player on TechWatch.
Swiftech MCX370-0A socket cooler on IPKonfig.
Abit KG7-RAID socketA DDR motherboard on VYW.
Compex WP11 Wireless Access Point on AMDPower.
1GHz Duron Morgan-cored socketA CPU on IANAG.
Inno3D Tornado GeForce3 video card on EXHardware.
Chilli Pro case on ProCooling.
Arxtech coolers on Icrontic.
AMK Neon Light Rods review on Icrontic.
Lian-Li PC68 USB aluminium case on HWExtreme.
Compex NetPassage15B router on TweakMax.
Ok, with thanks to Les Tutt and a few others for their assistance I have managed to get our normal and reverse DNS working properly. The last change was made a little over 48 hours ago so hopefully by now the vast majority of people will be seeing the latest info.
This is important because a couple of current OCAU projects depend on the DNS working properly - moving the forums.ocau subdomain over to the ausgamers server is one and the proposed mailing list is another.
So anyway, please try and ping lists.overclockers.com.au and let me know, with a copy of the error message, if you CAN'T ping it. Thanks.
Over in the forums yesterday I noticed this thread by lucaz pointing to a linux-style FAQ: How to ask questions the smart way. It's something I reckon almost all of us need to read, because not only will it help you get your answers, it'll make the people giving them to you happier as well. Highly recomended.
Murder1 just right now pointed out to me news that Counter-Strike 1.3 will be released in the US on Wednesday.. which means early Thursday morning for us. They've put out a call for mirrors, because I bet they'll need them ;) Over at files.ausgamers they managed to do 200Gb of traffic yesterday, mostly on the Wolfenstien test.. they're going to do a hell of a lot more on CS, I know it.
Matt pointed out that Wiretapped is hosting an Australian mirror of the popular smoothwall linux distribution. Might be a bit faster :)
Gary points out these rather beefy heatsinks over on Akiba.. the thing that got me tho, he said that he picked one up at a Sunday Computer Market for just $35.. crazy. Be interested to find out what the performance of it is.
ViaHardware has checked out a rather hardcore Dual Tualatin motherboard from IWill.. the DVD266u-RN. Not only does it support two Tualatins, it also supports DDR RAM, and sports on-board Digital 5.1 sound, on-board LAN controller and a Highpoint 370 RAID controller. Add a pair of Tualatin-S CPU's and you have hardcore indeed. Accelenation has done the same.
Farrod pointed out this tool which is not unlike WCPEDIT for windows, except, it's not called WCPEDIT, it's called PowerTweak and it's for Linux. So you can, as he puts it, tweak like a demon.
Finally, you might want to head over to files.ausgamers and download some of the short films that BMW had commisioned for them.. they are seriously cool. If you are bandwidth-challanged then number four is my favourite. Most definitely worthy of part of your download quota.
Counter-Strike 1.3 in a few days! Wooooooo!!!!!
Reviews:
EPoX 8KHA KT266 board on ChillBlast.
Seagate Baracude IV ATA Hard drives on BlueSmoke.
TweakMonster Neon Tape on 2FastCPU.
Socket-A hs/f roundup on AwareMag.
CompDevine InWin Alaska pre-modded case on GideonTech.
2TheMax4B2A P4X266 mobo on OCWorkbench.
Dynatron DY1206BH-638 Copper Cooler on VR-Zone.
DFI AK76-SN AMD761 board on OCPrices.
ABit KG7-Lite on BlargOC.
OCZ QuickSilver Thermal Goop on RizeNet.
TweakMonster Purple AMD Shim also on Rizenet.
CompDevine InWin Alaska pre-modded case on Inside-Hardware.
Monday Night
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Tuesday, 18-September-2001 00:23:48 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Tech-Report have taken a look at a few four-port KVM switches.. standing for Keyboard, Video and Mouse, of course. Useful if you've got a buncha PC's but not the desk or wallet space for several monitors etc. Historically I've always found these things to be really overpriced for what they are - and the cheap ones crap out at high resolutions. It's been a while since I've really looked though, so hopefully TR have dug up some good ones.
If you thought the Code Red virus was bad, wait until Code Blue hits you, thanks V8R. Not a problem if you're running a webserver or operating system that's not massively insecure by default, of course.
Christian noticed our Folding Team has jumped up into 10th place in the world! We'll be 9th soon too. If you want to join up and use your spare CPU cycles, get the info and files here, thanks to Postal.
Accelenation have cooked up a Dual Tualatin with SDR review, courtesy of the Iwill DVD-266u motherboard.
DoDg3's LAN PC is pretty cool.. go the monitor handle. :)
Evangelion noticed this page in Finland devoted to that cultural icon, that bastion of mechanical wizardry.. the Datsun 120Y. Looks kinda red in that photo, but I'm sure it's the lovely orange colour we know and love right here in Oz.
Reviews:
Asus A7A266 socketA DDR & SDR motherboard on 3DSpotlight.
Abit KG7-RAID SocketA DDR motherboard on TTZ.
Purple CPU Shim on AtlantaOC.
HP Jornada 525 PDA on NeoSeeker.
Samsung Yepp MP3 player on PCStats.
Matrox G550 video card on xbit.
Test New Forums!
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Monday, 17-September-2001 14:58:46 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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As forum regulars will no doubt have noticed, our poor server is starting to feel the strain of our continued traffic growth. It's served us well for over a year now but hosting is something I've been paying a lot of attention to for the last couple of months. I'm building a new server for the main site body, but AusGamers have very kindly offered to host our forums for us. Note that this doesn't indicate a merger or official alliance between us, OCAU is still run by me and AusGamers is still run by them, but they are in a position to offer us some hosting and have very generously done so. This will take the strain off our current server and provide us with more room to grow in future.
Anyway, I have set up a test copy of the forums on their server, using data from the 12th of this month. I'd appreciate it if people could give me some feedback on the speed of the new forums or any other comments they have.
Info on how to access the test forums is in this thread - please put feedback in there too, thanks.
Monday Afternoon
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Monday, 17-September-2001 13:47:59 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Here's a couple more mirrors of the Return To Castle Wolfenstein demo: here on Rom-Tech and here on PlanetMirror.
There's an interesting thread here.. a letter from an Afghan-American, giving his perspective on Bin Laden and the Taliban etc. Ben noticed another amazing satellite photo of the WTC area.. huge image, be warned.
OCOpolis have a guide to picking up a secondhand laptop.
From Neo, more on the cyborg eels, a flying robot, underwater robots and a robotic fly. I just tried to find an update on that cyborg eel project but got sidetracked when I found all this other interesting stuff..
More bizarre stuff in the 97th issue of ZZZ Online.
Reviews:
Matrox G550 video card on Bench-House.
MacPower DigiDoc5 thermal controller on BlargOC, our review here.
MSI GF3 Pro-VT64D video card on Digit-Life.
The most interesting thing tonight is most definitely this video over on TomsHardware.de.. it shows footage of testers removing the hs/f assembly from a few PC's running a Q3 loop. A 1.4GHz TBird, a 1.2GHz Palomino, 1.0GHz CUmine and a 2.0GHz P4 socket 423 all cop the treatment, and with very interesting consequences. The Intel CPU's don't get above 38 degrees and survive.. whereas both AMD CPU's head right up to 300 degrees, kill the motherboard and smoke themselves up pretty badly. Which is kind of strange.. I thought the Palomino had a thermal sensor to prevent this kind of thing? Anyway, thanks to Gary for pointing it out.
A new version of smoothwall, the popular linux distribution a lot of people in the forums are using to run internet gateway machines was released today.. it's at version 0.9.9 now.. getting close to that elusive 1.0. They need aussie mirrors, so if you've got a bit of bandwidth to throw around I'm sure they'd love to hear from you.
James points out this funky lookin' rack mount cases.. they are doing things a bit different from the norm and they are bright purple and have all the ports at the front.. It seems good at first, but then you realise that some ports (like the LAN connectors) are best left at the bottom of the box.. another thing that gets me: they have low-profile M64 video cards that'll fit in their cases.. sure, a M64 is underpowered.. but it's waaaay overpowered for a rackmount server.
BlueSmoke have updated their case gallery, meanwhile our PCDB is constantly being updated by the users themselves.. in fact, I'm sure a few of BlueSmoke's entries also feature in the PCDB. It's grown well since MWP put it together a while ago now.
Accelenation have got the scoop of the first production motherboard based on VIA's P4X266 DDR chipset for the P4.. the Shuttle AV40. They're going out on a limb and spiting Intel by doing this, but I reckon it's going to pull off for them.. it'll sell like hotcakes if it has the price/performance ratio down pat.
As a show of compassion towards the victims of the World Trade Centre disaster, CoolerGuys and Thermaltake are going to donate all the proceeds from the sale of 1,000 Tt Volcano 6u+ heatsinks to the Red Cross.. that means that if all of the hs/f's get sold by September 23rd the Red Cross gets $20,000US. Not bad at all..
If you can tell ExplosiveHardware why you think you should win a Vantec 6035D heatsink, and you give them the best answer, they'll give it to you.
Bravo pointed out this guide over on overclockers.com to building a water flow meter for your water cooled system.. it's rather cool, it monitors the flow of water in your system, and should it stop it can flash an LED, sound a peizo alarm or whatever else you can think of wiring it up to. There was also talk in the article of wiring it into a RPM header on a motherboard, from which point it could shut the system down safely with software. Very usefull.
Over in the extreme cooling forum mimi74 has a thread covering his (her?) new Peltier/Water cooled GeForce3.. looks very very good mate, nice work!
Finally tonight, over on an Angelfire site there are some screen grabs from the upcomming Unreal 2. Of course, most of you should of picked up from the URL that this is to be taken with extreme doses of salt, but nevertheless.
Reviews:
Abit Siluro GF3 ViVo on Digit-Life.
1GHz AHYJA Athlon on AtlantaOC.
Thermalright SK-6 on 8Balls.
Seagate Baracude IV ATA/100 Hard-Drive on BlargOC.
AVGS Cyber Mirror mini server case on RipNet.
EPoX 8KHA KT266 on TweakTown.
ECS K75SA SiS735 board also on TweakTown.
EPoX 8K7A AMD760 board on MikhailTech.
Return To Wolfenstein, beta demo now out
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Sunday, 16-September-2001 15:59:07 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Get it here from AusGamers. Let me know if you find any more mirrors out there as their server is taking a bit of a beating at the moment. :) Good luck finding any empty multiplayer servers too..
Saturday Night
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Saturday, 15-September-2001 23:33:05 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Happy birthday ReaX!
There seems to be large chunks of the Oz internet not working properly at the moment, so if these links don't work when you try them, maybe try them again a bit later.. maybe a dead router somewhere.
If you use a shared PC to access the OCAU Forums, such as one at TAFE, Uni or a Net Cafe, make sure you LOG OUT when you're finished! Otherwise the next person to use that PC might be able to log into the forums as you due to the wonders of cookies. A malicious user could then change your password, post messages as you or change your UserCP settings to something unpleasant - as happened to a forum user recently. Remember: shared PC, log out!
GameSpot have a preview of the Return To Castle Wolfenstein multiplayer beta test which is due out soon and will no doubt suck away all our spare time over the next few weeks.. they also note that Microsoft have removed the World Trade Center from Flight Simulator.
MWP noticed this article on Slashdot explaining how their servers coped with the load of traffic related to the terrorist attacks in the US, when many high-profile sites such as CNN and MSNBC went down. LWD have an article written by someone who survived the attacks despite being caught in an elevator in one of the WTC towers.
Stuart noticed these pictures of the upcoming Gigabyte dual SocketA motherboard.. Jeremy noticed it here on AkibaPC.
A few more people have complained of having their Optus@Home cable access suspended for running servers.. which they felt was unjustified. In one instance a basic install of Win2K Server had IIS running, open port 80, goodbye 2 weeks of cable access. Leo mentioned he thought it was only for servers which showed themselves to be compromised by virii (by trying to contact other servers) but the other stories I'm hearing seem to contradict that. Regardless, if you're on Optus@Home, make sure you don't have any ports open - it's a good idea from a security perspective regardless.
I went and checked out my Yamaha R6 today, in bits after I blew up the motor about a month ago.. posted some sad pics of it in bits in the Motoring forum.
Apparently SiS's 735 chipset, which already looks pretty attractive, will support the upcoming 333Mhz FSB Athlons, thanks Dennis_B.
There's been quite a lot of activity in the PCDB lately.. nothing that really grabbed my eye but you can check out the recent entries to the gallery here.
From Danny: I am writing to you to advise you of possible fraud in process. There are number of people selling ASUS GeForce3 Deluxe cards on eBay.com.au, but after the money is transferred into their account, person and that email address ( @bigpond.net.au ) disappear. I have transferred $1000 into account of (someone)@bigpond.net.au on Monday 10/09/2001, but after a couple of days when I tried to e-mail that person, message came back saying that account does not exists any more! The latest auction for the same cards appeared yesterday, this time the address is (someone else)@bigpond.net.au. In fact, that auction has now been closed prematurely by eBay. I believe there are more victims as this persons are "selling" cards for a half price ($450). I have advised Internet Police and BigPond, but I urge you to warn Australian (overclocking) public of this scam. Sigh, I hate this kinda stuff. As always, caveat emptor, but especially so on the net where some people hide behind the (relative) anonymity it provides.
Reviews:
Vantec CCK-6027D socket cooler on ClubOC.
OCZ Titan III GeForce3-based video card on Guru3D.
More Random Pics..
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Saturday, 15-September-2001 22:56:17 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Been digging in my "stuff to be posted" folder:
Left is from MegaBaz: This is my copper heatsink for my cpu. This is what happens if you don't clean out your case and use filter. The airflow to the cooler was reduced heaps because of this! Eeew. Centre is from VooDoo, a pic from Computex of a board used to test north bridge chips.. swap in, swap out, pretty cool. Right is from Nigel: Hmm u don't find too many of these around, a lucky find i think an original box!! Mmm, 8MHz of blistering FPU power.. there's a reason why there's not many of these around. :)
  
News has been a little slow lately.. as you can imagine. Everyone is a little saddened by the whole WTC thing, I noticed Hard|OCP had their page down today in respect to the day of mourning. It's all very depressing.. but getting your mind off things helps.. so see if this does the trick :)
GideonTech have checked out the Super Power Zephyr, a fairly average looking case that I'm sure I've seen at a swap meet or two.
Kyocera pointed out another only-im-America.. a Palm Pilot VIIx made from 50 pounds of butter.. heh. Not really a top pocket job I'd say.
Digit-Life have posted part one of their socket-478 i845 roundup. Some people have been declaring the i845 chipset the 'new i440BX' chipset that we all grew to love.. well, maybe it is.. but not in the PC133 SDRAM configuration. I'll hold final judgement until it's been released, but right now i845 motherboards sort of seem like a 1.3L 4cyl motor for your shiny new Ferrari.
Accelenation have been to ECTS2001 in London.. which I'm guessing is one of those local industry fairs.. sort of like Comdex on a smaller scale.
Remember the song 'video killed the radio star' ? Well.. Freaek points out internet killed the video star.. hehehe. It's your turn video - die! *smack*
HWExtreme have checked out the Wahoo Viper, a rather weird name for a rather expensive modded case.. it works its way up from a Lian Li PC60.
FoderMe points out that the OCAU Seti@Home team is getting very close to the 100,000 units milestone.. all Seti users might want to head over to the Team OCAU forum to celebrate.
SysOpt have checked out the ECS AG315T, a video card based on the new 315 chipset from SiS.. it's rather swish with all the latest T&L features and a full 32bit pipelined 3D graphics core. SiS seems to be bringing out some decent performing gear of late.. I'll be heading over to SysOpt for a read to see how it goes. Good for those on a budget :)
RojakPot has a bit of news up concerning Abit's upcoming Intel and AMD motherboards based on pretty much all of the available chipsets. They've yet to release another KT7-esque board, even tho the KG7 seems pretty strong it hasn't experienced the mass popularity of KT7. I s'pose we'll soon find out.
Luke points out that over on OzQuake.com you can buy 3Gb Caps.. hehehe, rather amusing.. The message on the front reads I signed with Tel$tra for unlimited internet but all I got was this lousy 3Gb Cap!
Finally tonight, XG8 points out that the rather popular TweakFiles site will be following 3Dfiles and closing their doors.. due to decreasing add revenue their hosts C|Net and Gamespot have pulled their hosting as of today. Not too friendly.. but I suppose you get that. Sorry to see you go guys.. you had a good run.
Reviews:
Nanotherm Thermal Paste on ClubOC.
Swiftech MC462B-A on BSOD.
Just Cooler P-8000 on OCPlus.
Random pics..
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Saturday, 15-September-2001 19:21:02 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Some pics that people have sent in over the last few weeks..
Left is from Zach: went to interact (big computer conference in Melb) yesterday and made the girl put something mildly amusing on my visitor card. She had no idea what it meant and I kept telling her it was just to do with computer security. Center is from Nix: I had been asked by the manager at work to redirect an unused E-Mail account to another staff member. After completing the operation I went to that user's machine and checked for new mail. Here is the happy snap from that PC. Check the unread E-mails at bottom left of capture. Then look at how many are left to retrieve. This opperation took around 14 hours to complete. During this time many other users complained of poor system performance. naturally being a well trained IT professional, I blamed someone else :) Right is from Sciby: remember that 486 I smashed and scanned? Well, that's it, with a bug glued to it.
  
VIA launch 866MHz CPU
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Saturday, 15-September-2001 01:16:28 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Whoops, nearly missed this one. VIA have announced their 866MHz C3 CPU. From the press-release:
The VIA C3™ is the first processor in the world to be manufactured using leading edge 0.13 and 0.15 micron manufacturing processes, and boasts the world's smallest x86 processor die size. As the coolest running processor on the market today, the VIA C3™ delivers ultra low power consumption and world-class levels of stability. It is fully Socket 370 compatible and is available at speeds of up to 866MHz.
More info here on VIA's site.
Friday Evening
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Friday, 14-September-2001 19:29:35 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Scott pointed out these satellite pics of NYC and the Pentagon. Much clearer images, but be warned, they're massive. From a technical point of view these images are amazing to me - check out their top 10 images showing Sydney Olympic Park, the Pyramids at Giza etc.
IANAG have a socketA cooler roundup..
Reviews:
Acer FP581 LCD screen on Techwatch.
Fujifilm Finepix 2300 digicam on SourceMagazine.
Silicon Window Appliques on Bit-tech.
Windtunnel IV ATX case on OCrCafe.
Purple anodized cpu shim on Mikhailtech.
Dragon Orb 3 cooler on ARP.
Custom fan guards on ClubOC.
Thermoengine socket cooler on ComputerChaos.
Abit KG7-RAID socketA DDR motherboard on OCOnline.
Iwill KK266+ KT133A-based socketa SDR motherboard on OCNZ.
AMD 1.0 GHz Duron socketA CPU on OCrCafe.
From YYK.. printer broken? Here's a simple solution*:
*this won't work. at all. no, really.
Early Friday Morning
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Friday, 14-September-2001 00:52:51 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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AnandTech have an i850 motherboard roundup posted. This chipset is of course Intel's main P4 one, using RAMBUS memory. They also have a review and roundup of Intel's i845 SDRAM-based P4 chipset which was only announced a few days ago.
There's been a lot of discussion about one of Nostradamus's prophecies predicting the World Trade Centre disaster in the USA - there's even a thread here in our new Media & Current Events forum and I've received it in email a few times. However in this other thread, Little_D points out this page which does a good job of debunking the theory. Here's a TheRegister article which debunks more myths about the terrorist activity. On a different but related note, there's a touching message here in the forums from an American reader thanking Australians for their support. Moldy sent this link to pictures from space of the smoke plume from New York.
Kazashi sent word of this teeny-tiny PC..
Here's a funny IBM ad video, thanks Lujan.
Alchemy spotted this TheRegister article saying not everyone is happy with the up-coming Compaq & HP merger.
Interesting thoughts from Isaac.. it's a quiet day on the news front so I'll just quote the whole thing: I thought about this recently, and came up with some figures. These are based on UK prices, but the content is still of interest worldwide. 3 GB/month limit on your broadband connection with Telstra. In the UK you'd pay £40 per month with £150 installation for a 512kbit ADSL line. So, you're paying £40 for 3GB. In the UK, you can get anytime freephone analogue modem access for £13 per month. So far, so normal. However, if you were to leave an analogue modem connected for the entire month, you'd pay £13 for 15GB!!! ie, you'd pay one third as much for five times as much data. If you take the 3GB limit, and divide that by the amount of time in a month (assuming there to be 31 days in a month), you get an average speed of 1.1 KB/sec, as opposed to 5 (conservative estimate) on an analogue modem. The upshot of this of course being, that if you're downloading immense amounts of data, rather ludicrously, you're better off with an analogue modem. And Finally, pity the poor people who signed up in the UK with Kingston Communications. They set a 700MB/month cap.
From Paul, a funny/insightful article about DragonCon, a huge science-fiction convention. Also, Bobby Fischer, mysterious chess grand master, has apparently been playing anonymously on the internet despite being in exile.
Reviews:
Abit KG7-RAID SocketA DDR mobo on PimpRig (?).
Abit TH7-RAID i850-based P4 motherboard on Rolotech.
Thursday night... not much news, gotta keep the mind busy though.
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Thursday, 13-September-2001 20:09:26 (GMT +10) - by Sciby
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Firstly, I don't know about you guys, but after the last few days, I've needed a good laugh, and this did it for me. I had a good belly laugh (and I've got the belly to do it), chuckled for a while and felt much better.
Adaptec are releasing a lovely new connectivity card, called the DuoConnect, it's jammed full of USB 2.0 and FireWire ports. Neat, gimme.
This... unh... kinda looks interesting. It's a Detonator comparison between the new Det. XP and Det 3 v12.41. It's in spanish, so you'll have to use The 'Fish.
Reviews:
ECS K7S5A motherboard - at IamNotAGeek.com. I bet they're lying. Damn geeks.
Here's the same mobo, reviewed by PC Hardware.
WindTunnel IV Extended ATX case - at Thetechzone.com. Lots of fans. Don't like premade casemods. Takes the fun out of it.
We'll dig out some more news later. I'd also just like to state that Agg is currently trying to learn how to BBQ, so if anyone in the Sydney area notices some black smoke, that'll be him.
Exposed Power Supplies - Danger!
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Thursday, 13-September-2001 17:33:36 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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John sent in his thoughts about an increasingly common case mod - the exposed power supply. Removing the cover from the PSU makes it easier to cool and gives you more options for mounting it in your PC, but the case is there for a reason! Inside the PSU and inside your monitor are probably the two most life-threatening places in your PC - very high voltages lurk there, even long after the PC has been turned off. As John says: It only takes a screwdriver slipping into it or a heatsink dropping onto it and the person will get the shock of his/her life.
Tucked-away examples like MWP's are perhaps not as bad, but simply slapping the exposed PSU innards into the bottom of your case as per PS-RagE seems to be inviting disaster. Again from John: This would have to be one of the nicest cases I've seen, shame it's a deathtrap.
The "it won't happen to me" mentality is an absolutely normal way to think, but realistically, we've all had slips, moments of uncoordination or made mistakes that have damaged cases, fried components etc - having an exposed PSU could make the consequences of such a slip much more serious..
Thursday Morning
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Thursday, 13-September-2001 09:39:37 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Gotta rush around today, so making this quick.. not a whole lot going on out there today anyway.
Wokket found a cool tool that tells you how far it is between any two places.
Taking a break from brightly coloured flashy things, Dan has reviewed a book about PC maintenance.
RealWorldtech checked out the Intel P4 + i845 combination. Instead of comparing it to the Athlon, he compares it with the product it is designed to replace, the mid-range PIII. Is it possible that there actually is a market for the i845 chipset? VR-Zone reviewed i845 too.
OCPrices checked out a few thermaltake coolers.
Reviews:
EasyDisk 16MB USB hard drive on DreddNews.
Leadtek WinFast GeForce3 TDH video card on Digit-Life.
ASUS TUA266 ALi Aladdin Pro 5T based Socket370 DDR mobo on Digit-Life.
Intel Pentium III-S 1.13GHz (Tualatin) CPU on xbit.
EPoX 8K7A/8K7A+ socketA DDR motherboard on RealWorldTech.
Olympus DW-90 voice recorder on NeoSeeker.
Motorola Timeport 270c Bluetooth mobile phone on DesignTechnica.
Thermaltake Dragon Orb 3 socket cooler on OCOpolis.
Donations to Disaster Relief
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Wednesday, 12-September-2001 15:51:33 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Ben sent in these links. If you want to send a few bucks to help out the recovery process now going on in New York and Washington, you can donate here on the Red Cross site, here via Paypal and here on Amazon.
Wednesday Afternoon
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Wednesday, 12-September-2001 13:15:09 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Lots of people are sending info in about the terrorist attacks in the US at the moment but I think if you want the latest on that you should be watching CNN or pretty much any other TV station. I'm going to try and keep things on-topic here.
I've made a new Media & Current Events Forum because of the sheer volume of messages about this tragedy in the US in other forums. In the future I guess discussion of movies, TV, music and other world events can go there too.
After 4 years of service to the gaming and hardware community, www.3dfiles.com is shutting down, sad to see them go.
OCMOD have a guide to making a rheobus controller. I reviewed a commercial Rheobus product here a couple of months or so ago.
EXHardware have a project to ultracharge a Thermoengine.. with a fan adapter and additional fan.
Moleman spotted this article that explains very clearly why AMD need to go to a performance rating system if they want to pursuade people their product is as fast as Intel's.
IPKonfig, 3D Spotlight and Guru3D all have articles comparing the new DetonatorXP 21.81 drivers to previous versions.
Maxtor have unveiled a 160GB ATA133 HDD, thanks Mike.
Reviews:
Kanie Hedgehog socket cooler on BSOD.
Tyan Thunder MP dual socketA board on 2CPU.. our review of the server version here.
Task TK-3003 midi tower on Xenofex.
SiS 315 video card on Tweakmax.
GlobalWin CAK38 shrouded socket cooler on OCTools.
Apparent terrorist attacks against the United States of America...
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Wednesday, 12-September-2001 12:22:00 (GMT +10) - by Manaz
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Following the terrible story Agg posted last night, the following details have emerged. I'm sorry for the morbid tone of this post, but this is a particularly morbid event :(
A passenger jet crashed into the north World Trade Centre tower at 8:48am New York time on the 11th of September, 2001. 18 minutes later, another passenger jet crashed into the south WTC tower. Not long after that, another passenger plane crashed into the Pentagon building in Washington DC. A fourth plane has crashed in Pensylvania, apparently missing it's target for reasons that are, as yet, unconfirmed. Approximately one hour after the second WTC tower was struck, it collapsed completely. Less than 30 minutes after that, the north tower completely collapsed as well. Five storeys of the Pentagon are said to have collapsed, with fires spreading through more of that building. Apparently 2 other buildings in the World Trade Centre Plaza have also collapsed - most likely due to damage they received as the two towers fell.
The official death toll as I can tell from the reports I'm getting stands at 200 fire fighters with as many as another 76 missing, 74 police officers, 166 people on the planes (passengers and crew), and an unknown number at the Pentagon. The death toll will rise - estimates from 10,000 to 50,000 are being mentioned - I have heard reports that there were still 10,000 people in the WTC towers when the South tower collapsed - video footage on the various news sites and feeds clearly shows people leaning out of windows (and jumping to certain death rather than being burned alive) just minutes before the north tower collapsed.
The four planes have been confirmed as having been hijacked, presumably by a single, unknown terrorist organisation.
George Bush has made a statement to the nation, saying that those responsible will be found, and justice served. He expressed sorrow and regret at the needless loss of life that has occured, and praise for those who immediately came to the aid of those who needed it.
There's not really a lot more to say - I haven't slept all night, as my father was somewhere in North America, and I didn't find out where, or that he was safe, until late this morning. I'm sure I speak for everyone involved with this site when I offer my sincere and heartfelt condolences to anyone and everyone who has suffered any loss due to this terrible series of events.
Tragedy in New York
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Tuesday, 11-September-2001 23:17:02 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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The details are still sketchy but I'm watching right now on ch10 in Sydney that 2 separate aircraft have crashed into the two towers of the World Trade Centre at about 8:48am in New York, USA. I'll avoid any speculation at this point as to what could be the cause but even the best case scenario from this point on is a massive, terrible tragedy.. our thoughts and best wishes go out to the people and families involved.
Tuesday Afternoon
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Tuesday, 11-September-2001 13:53:02 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Seems to be a lot happening in P4 land today, even disregarding the legal shenanigans between Intel and VIA. Intel announced their i845 chipset today, no big surprises there, it's a P4 chipset supporting SDRAM and used to be codenamed "Brookdale". The manufacturers have announced a heap of new boards based on this chipset today too. OCWB are first up to bat with a 4-way i845 motherboard shootout while ComputerSource reviewed the Asus P4B. AcesHardware and Tech-Report both have more technical analyses of the chipset but I note the big two (Anand and Tom) have no mention of it.. which is odd.
A zillion people noticed that NVIDIA have released their Detonator XP v21.81, formerly known as Detonator 4, drivers for their many GPU products. Detonator XP software provides a 30-to-50% increase in performance for all NVIDIA GPUs in both DirectX and OpenGL Application Programming Interfaces (API). In addition, Detonator XP software exposes new hardware acceleration for Windows XP, enabling new features such as 3D textures and shadow buffers. They are for non-XP flavours of Windows too though. NVIDIA's site seems to be only intermittently available, no doubt due to lots of people downloading.. so there's some mirror sites here, here (win9x only), here, here and here. Gary notes I got a small performance increase in 3DMark 2001. 2858max with the 12.90's under Windows XP to 2955 with the 21.81's using a GF2MX.
Lombers spotted this AthlonMP Tower of Power, very sexy.
OCrCafe have a Goo Revioo.. a thermal paste roundup.
Spodes have a fairly basic guide to overclocking video cards.
From V8R: Intel have also got very tight on pricing.. A P4 1.7Ghz chip costs $8 LESS than a 1Ghz P3, and a P4 1.6Ghz is only $2 more than a 933 P3. That give u an indication of what their strategy is.. These prices are a whole sale comparison, so, u shouldnt see much difference retail wise.
Hexus have sneak pics of Abit's GF3 video card.
Tony thought that readers with long memories might be interested in this article about AmigaDE, aka Amiga OS5.. maybe another emerge-from-the-flames Amiga option. This time the OS is platform independent and the article discusses how it can co-exist with Linux among other things.
Reviews:
Sound Blaster Audigy new sound card on 3DSS, thanks SK.
D-Link DMP-90 MP3 player on 8balls.
Swiftech MCX-370 socket cooler on AMDMB.
Zalman 5000 socket cooler on ChillBlast.
Swiftech MXC-370 0A socket cooler on Radeonic.
Volcano 6cu+ socket cooler on OCPlus.
Vantec CCK-6035D socket cooler on Tweaktown.
V8 Cooler socket cooler.. kinda weird, on MrPCPro.
Late Monday Night
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Tuesday, 11-September-2001 01:21:15 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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I figure everyone will know by now, so I can say this without spoiling the surprise: Congratulations to Troy Bayliss on becoming 2001 World Superbike Champion! Nice work by the lad from Taree, NSW and of course, Ducati. I'm not a big Ducati fan but they are certainly dominating WSB at the moment.
Yesterday I posted about Intel suing VIA for patent infringement - in classic Corporate Poker style, VIA have responded with "we'll see your Patent Infringement, and raise you Anticompetitive Practises and Willful Destruction of Property!". That's right, VIA is suing Intel now because - get this - Intel don't have licenses from VIA for the P4 processor and i845 chipset. No, you didn't read that wrong. Remember when VIA bought SonicBlue, AKA S3? In doing so they got ownership of several patents which Intel used in creating the P4 and i845. Those lawyers, they're a whacky bunch.. and getting richer by the minute. Here's TheRegister's take on it, thanks Sniper1G.
Just noticed this cool entry in the PCDB, from Abadonn. Lots of pics and info, nice setup.
CaseJunkiez have been playing with pantyhose again.. this time their excuse is using it to filter delta fans on heatsinks.. sure guys, whatever floats your boat..
3 people wrote into say they knew of (or were) people who have had their Optus@Home cable internet access suspended for a month due to running services from their PC - but they all say they were unaware or not running "proper" servers. One person for example had IIS (webserver) loaded on his gateway machine but wasn't serving pages or anything.. are Optus pinging boxes and shutting down those that respond on the appropriate ports? Another person had essentially the same complaint, but with an FTP server task. Might be worth checking your net-connected boxes for any open ports - not a bad idea regardless, but especially as Optus seem to be paying more attention to this kind of thing at the moment.
From Vindaloo: In the west australian newspaper today, the title of the newcoming austin powers flick: GOLDMEMBER !!! ah hahahahaha :) Hehe, I hated the Austin Powers films the first time I saw them.. but now I'm a big fan, they really grew on me. Can't wait for the third one!
VIA have posted their chipset roadmap..
HotHardware reviewed the Gainward GF3 Golden Sample, a very overclocking-friendly GeForce3-based video card. Chainbolt, our man in Japan, checked one out for us months ago right here.
New 4-in-1 drivers for those VIA-chipsetted motherboards, version 4.33 official, thanks to a few peeps for pointing those out.
OtakuPC are comparing an iMac with an iFry.. some kind of BBQ.. or something..
Apparently Intel will kill the P3 on 7th Dec, thanks Sniper1G.
JimX sent in this Acts of Gord website, funny tales from the owner of a video-game shop. Beware, severe time-suckage may occur.. it certainly did for me.
Reviews:
Hercules GeForce3 video card on HardOCP.
Compex DS2216 16-Port 10/100 Switch on 2fastCPU.
Thermosonic Thermoengine V60-4210 cooler on EXHardware.
Accton network card on ExtremeCooling.
Samsung DVD-V1000 VCR + DVD player on NeoSeeker.
Intel i845 chipset on Accelenation.
Intel i845 and VIA P4X266 P4 + SDRAM chipsets on Tech-Report.
Seagate Barracuda ATA IV HDD on Xbit.
Intel 2GHz P4 CPU on TweakTown.
Can I see your license Sir..
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Tuesday, 11-September-2001 01:19:59 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Ahh, this is classic. Ben was at the Infringement Processing Bureau's website today (can't imagine why). This is the site that lets you pay parking tickets and speeding fines etc online.. but he got this message instead:
Click to enlarge!
Heard a rather interesting bit of gossip this morning.. a mate is having his Optus@Home service temporarily suspended for two weeks for breaching the AUP.. but not for choking the NetStats, and not for leeching illegal software.. but for running too many services! I'm sure we're all aware that you're not allowed to run any servers on your PC connected to o@h, but it's never stopped anyone before.. It must be said that he was running quite a few services.. but even still. Hope they don't ping anyone for running telnetd/sshd.. let this be a warning - tighten up your boxes!
Top of the box this morning was CaseJunkiez review of some new rounded IDE cables that I've seen around the local PC shops.. they're functionaly the same as all other IDE cables, except they're rounded and then wrapped with braided wire and stuffed into a clear tube with clear boots.. look fairly ricey, but I know that some of you are into that sort of thing.
Dan has checked out a German product with a silly name: NoiseControl NoVibesIII. Good use for it tho, it has rubber rails that you mount your HDD onto designed to reduce vibration noise.. sounds good. I know a lot of us are starting to become obsessed with quiet PC's..
John Gatt from VIA points out that a new VIA technical support site called ViaArena has just gone live.. the idea of it is to get all the Drivers, Technical Support and Knowledge Base info into one central place for all VIA users to take advantage of.. the best part for VIA users is that there are forums that are monitored daily by VIA staff to answer your questions.
Judd pointed out the World Superbike results from last night.. Which you'll have to click through to find out.. because I'm sure there are a few of you that havn't seen it yet and don't want to have their fun spoilt.. countless others have told me that Lleyton Hewitt took out the US Open this morning.. just on bikes, Tony points out the longest motorbike in the world is up for auction on EBay.. Guiness Book of Records certified and all!
In case you wern't aware, today is Monday. That means a new issue of ZZZ Online.
JSIHardware has a quick guide to modding your case to add some wheels.. good if it is so borg that you cant carry it.
Finally this morning, Herbo points out this article showing you how to Voltage mod your shiny new $700 GeForce3 card.
Reviews:
Solarism LM1503 15" LCD Monitor on HWextreme.
Kinyo R-565 and D-565 Active 5.1 Acoustic Systems roundup on Digit-Life.
Miolta DIMAGE 7 also on Digit-Life.
Thermalright SK-6 on ExplosiveHardware.
Dynatron L/625 & Copper 638 Heatsink on Icrontic.
Sunday Night
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Sunday, 9-September-2001 23:15:33 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Richard sent word of a competition where Australians can win a copy of Windows XP.
Intel and VIA have been trading blows for a little while about the legality of VIA's P4X266 chipset - Intel are now obviously taking it fairly seriously, having sued VIA for patent infringement, thanks VooDoo.
Anthony found an article on something I noticed recently and found fairly irritating, the new IE-built-in replacement page for "page not found" errors.
Digit-Life compared a few i850-based Socket432 P4 motherboards - they also have their monthly 3D digest posted for August.
There's a heap of cool new entries in the PCDB.. check out this watercooled monster from Kucho (separate water jackets for GPU and video ram) and SkiDMaN's security door PC. SyntaxPC has an unusual window while Samson_1 has a serious baybus.
CDR-Info checked out a couple of USB 2.0 portable CDRW drives from Teac and Plextor. Digit-life have a similar comparison, with a couple of drives from Acer.
Hehe, I read this news item just as I was strumming my air-guitar to "Sonne" by Rammstein. From McNugget - turns out the new air-guitar world champion was recently crowned - he won himself a real guitar, but I'm not sure what he's supposed to do with that. On that site you can even view his winning performance.. I dunno, I reckon I could do better - I also play air-drumkit and I occasionally try my hand at air-saxaphone.
HardwareQA compared a bunch of 1 or 2RU-compliant CPU coolers, good for those super-thin servers when rackspace == money.
2FastCPU and Computer Chaos both checked out coolers from Thermaltake's Volcano 6Cu line.
From Lujan: I took the XP plunge last night. So far, 12hrs, no hardware problems (it all works), havent tested my cd-burner yet, but my sound card & ata-100 promise card both work, neither of which worked on win2k without third party drivers. I could also immediately put my resolution up to 1600*1200@75Hz, thanks to the fact XP already had a driver for my gf2mx card. Now on to the point of the email. I immediately set about testing the important things under XP. ssh to linux box. yes (I can now do everything except play games) counter-strike. no, no opengl. (long agonising scream) quick check, nope no nvidia drivers for XP immediately visible. Direct3d? 1/4s my framerate. THen I noticed Quake still played perfectly in OpenGL, so did UT, and any UT based game (Deus Ex). wtf was going on. 3dmark. 1878 3dmarks. (yes I know 3dmark is direct3d) w00t, installed latest Nvidia official drivers (12.90) and counter-strike works. 3dmark again, 2303. a marked improvement, and what I used to get under win2k. The moral of this email? Detonators do make a marked difference, to both opengl (quake ran smoother) and Direct3d. (Also, 12.90 dets work under XP, I'll test the 14.20 soonish). Remember we checked out WindowsXP a coupla months ago here.
Buy a t-shirt! You know you want to. :)
Click for info!
Spent most of this evening sitting around with mates trying to figure out a theme for a party we plan on having.. had some good ones like "sober is NOT an option" and "it's spring: you come, you clean" but I'm sure there are some of you out there who can do better.. whaddya reckon? If you've got a killer theme that'd be cheap to pull off and a bunch of spirits-drinking 2nd-year uni students would like.. let me know!
daDude pointed out this article talking about the ratification of the DOCIS 2.0 standard for cable modems.. it's not going to be here for a long while, but it does mean more potential speed for cable users.. only problem is that DOCSIS 2.0 could support 500Mbps for all it wants.. it'll probably be capped at 10Mbps by cable companies to prevent abuse and remove the need for fatter and more expensive upstream pipes.
El_Bambino points out this competition to win Optus@Home free for a year - including installation! All you need is to be in a coverage area and to own a GSM digital phone.. the way it works is they'll SMS you a question at some random time, and the first person to reply with the correct answer wins. Sounds fairly sweet.
Deejay noticed that adds for MS's upcoming console X-Box are starting to run.. get ready to be drowned in advertising - rumours have it that the advertising budget is H-U-G-E.
Dan found this incredibly bizzare KB article.. heh. There is my amusement for the night. For those that need more, you might want to check out this thread in the forums.. sure, the first page is pretty tame.. but it gets a lot better from there. Finally, if you need a super-hero name Linchpin has the generator for you!
Christian and Elvis pointed out that RealBot 1.0 has been released.. and unlike the RealDoll this one learns! Seriously tho, it's a bot for use in CS - good if you're on a modem or have no friends - or even both! And it's probably the best cs bot there is.
SpodesAbode have been comparing the danger den waterblock against a direct die model to see what's what. Also on direct die cooling, I noticed over in the hardforum that Tom Leufkins of peltier-kit fame has been trying some direct die water cooling of his own - no water block!. Interesting results.
BF noticed this rumour article talking about the release of a 2.0GHz AMD processor based on the Hammer core. The more well-read amongst us will know that Hammer is AMD's 64bit CPU, but sports backwards compatibility with 32bit apps unlike Intel's Itanium.. mean that it's damn sexy *rowl*
TweakTown have an article up covering Microsoft's product activation scheme for WindowsXP.
Finally this evening, Wokkett has found a really, really, really awesome flash game.. This place is a fully operation "zoo" - you make ceratures out of 3 things: mass (which are affected by gravity/friction etc), springs (which contract masses back together) and muscles (which push/pull masses). It's a bit slow on dialup, but still, it rocks. I think Agg has a news post comming as well.. when it rains it pours :)
Reviews:
Corsair 512Mb PC150 XMS on Hardware-Test.DK
Vantec 6027D hs/f on IPKonfig.
Rounded IDE Cables on MikhailTech, our review here.
EPoX 8KHA and 8K7A on Benchhouse, our comparo here.
Early Sunday Morning
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Sunday, 9-September-2001 03:07:15 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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McNugget noticed this article on how to (not) prolong the life of CD-ROM disks.
There's a completely unofficial Star Wars II: Send In The Clones (or whatever it's called) trailer here, 5 or 13mb, not looked at it yet myself.. thanks Xeron.
Bit-Tech have a case mod light mod posted.. don't forget to register your interest in OCAU case badges if you want some..
Apparently there's a big black hole in the middle of the Milky Way.. that's gotta suck, thanks Leon.
AnandTech have a socket cooler roundup posted, thanks BLeR.
A few people noted that our earlier thing about Telstra and the ACCC is listed on the ACCC's website.. so seems genuine.
Interesting one from Sciby, a beheaded motorcycling ghost.
Reviews:
Antec SX-1240 fulltower case on NeoSeeker.
Mech Commander 2 game on SourceMag.
Vantec CCK-6035D socket cooler on BSOD.
Dimension Technologies 2015XLS TFT screen on TTZ.
Swiftech MCX370-0A socket cooler on OCOnline.
OCZ Dominator socket cooler on OCPrices.
Asus V8200 Geforce3 Deluxe video card on HardAvenue.
Plextor 24/10/40A CDRW on TweakMax.
Philips Rhythmic Edge sound card on VYW.
CoolerMaster ATC-210 midtower case on Bit-Tech.
CoolerMaster ATCS 210 case on Chillblast.
ThermalTake Volcano 5 socket cooler on GideonTech.
CyberDrive CW038D CDRW on CDRInfo.
Micron 256MB PC133 SDRAM on 8balls.
Doesn’t seem to be much at all happening in the news tonight.. in fact, it's decidedly average. Serves you right for being at home on a Friday night.. go out and do something. I've got an excuse (work early tomorrow), but it doesn’t mean I'm writing this update completely sober either :)
After scrolling through the news box half a dozen times (I told you I wasn't sober) the most exciting thing seems to be this article talking about the ACCC laying down the smack on Telstra for it's uncompetitive DSL pricing which is limiting competition. Well done Dr Fels! Problem is, the URL doesn’t provide much assurance as to the articles accuracy or authenticity..
A new aussie hardware site has just opened their server to the world: pcfusion.com.au is their URL and name, and they've got a few reviews up as well as an Aussie on-line price and retailer guide.. might want to check them out.
Dan has a comparo of 15" LCD screens happening.. the cool thing about LCD's is they have got the naming scheme down pat and a 15" screen has 15" of viewable area putting it up there with a 17" CRT screen.. if you want to spend a little extra for a lot more desk space, then this is the comparo for you!
G3D have a guide up to building your own monitor cooler.. something that I think should be totally unnecessary. A monitor should be well-enough engineered to avoid a requirement for after-market cooling devices.. sure, my monitor gets warm.. but I'd hardly think of putting a cooling device on it. One for the obsessed I s'pose.
Wokkett pointed out this guide to building the world's most advanced laser guided bolt action aluminium spud gun.. hmm, I think anyone who drives down the Western Freeway in Brisbane better watch out after the weekend.. *grin* Also, Yahoo.UK are looking for the world's funniest joke.. Which scientists on nature are looking for as well. (Thanks Craig)
Andy points out that you might want to celebrate the Microsoft decision.
And finalising the off-topic stuff, Ashley has found that German Scientists are finalising a green grenade.. yep, a grenade you can throw without fear of hurting the environment.. the perfect piece of armament for those chained-to-tree's Greenpeace protesters!
Mort points out THG's basic guide to using software RAID.. which is a step down from all the onboard IDE RAID we've seen on motherboards of late.
XOverclocker, the crazy Japanese character has had a chance to test some AXIAR stepping athlons.. unfortunately they are not as good as he'd hoped, but the motherboard is good for 2.3V.. craaaazy Japanese overclockers :)
Finally, Matt points out news on Anandtech of nVidia pressuring third party manufacturers into not producing ATi cards.. you know what that means - the Radeon 8500 must be seriously good. Look what happened with KryoII.. hasn't nVidia's influence castrated that chipset.
Reviews:
Hercules GameTheaterXP on Accelenation.
Nikon CoolPix 995 Digital Camera on SourceMag.
MSI 694T Tualatin S370 board on HotHardware.
Zoltrix Nightingale Pro 6 sound card on Digit-Life.
Tekcase Galileo modded Lian-Li case on OCPrices.
Antec SX-635 mid-tower case on AMDmb.
2.0GHz P4 on GamersDepot.
OCZ Titan 2 Ultra on 3DSpotlight.
Microsoft is NOT being broken up anymore.
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Friday, 7-September-2001 10:26:36 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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This is big news, more info here on Wired.
WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department has abruptly reversed its long-standing attempts to carve Microsoft into two independent companies.
On Thursday, the department's antitrust division told Microsoft's lawyers that they no longer needed to fear a breakup, a prospect that had loomed over the company since a federal district judge ordered it last year.
Instead, the government said, it would seek to impose severe regulations on what the world's largest software company may and may not do in the marketplace.
Early Friday Morning
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Friday, 7-September-2001 01:02:15 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Fad spotted this Intel page describing 3GIO, a serial bus standard that aims to replace PCI.. and quite a bit more.
PCStats have been overclocking the 1.4GHz AHJAR Athlon everyone's talking about.
JWR sent word of a new Sircam variant virus apparently doing the rounds, might be time to update your virus software (again).
AcidHardware have a DDR SDRAM Roundup posted.
Elvis noticed this amazing new technology, big breakthrough, it's revolutionary, we'll have superfast cpu speeds sometime in the future.. (stifles yawn) .. we seem to be getting these stories at about one a week now. Still, this one sounds like it might actually come to something.. and 70GHz is nothing to sniff at. On a similar note, scientists at Oz's own Griffith University have discovered a cool way to fit 1000x more data on hard drives using nanotechnology, thanks Jon. Similarly again, quantum computers may be closer than you think, says Ian.
While on that last site I spotted this 400-disc DVD changer.. fnarr fnarr, now you know what to get me for Christmas. Go on, it's only $1500 USD.
Lawrence wrote in, most annoyed that Motorola are exiting the softmodem business.. they do seem to be dropping people in the deep end with regards drivers, but softmodems are horrible things anyway so I'm finding it hard to get too upset about it. Still, if I owned one I guess I'd feel different.
Some residents in East Yorkshire, UK are feeling the effects of a broadband cap too - and Telstra's cap on its Oz services gets a mention in that article too, thanks Dan.
OCdCafe have a basic water cooling guide posted.. there's a heap of watercooling stuff in our own archive including my original experiment over 2 years ago when I had no idea what I was doing. :)
RatedPC have a basic network security article posted, where they examine a few firewall products.
VIAHW attended the recent VIA Technology Forum and want to tell you all about it.
Bit-tech have a new stealth fan technique they're all hot and bothered about.
The keen observer will have noticed I'm something of a vodka, err, fan.. that is, when I can get to it. Casey has a great idea for what to do with a big empty vodka bottle: put fish in it.
Reviews:
Morpheus GeForce3 video card on Radeonic.
Delta 80mm "focussed flow" fan on Spodes.
Arkua Technology 6158 socket cooler on 2FastCPU.
FujiFilm FinePix 6900Z 3.3MegaPixel digital camera on PCStats.
AMD Duron 1GHz socketA CPU on AMDPower.
Massworks ID-75 USB touchscreen controller on HotHardware.
OCAU Stuff
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Thursday, 6-September-2001 13:43:01 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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I'm trying to gauge if there's sufficient interest in case badges and tshirts to get some more batches made. Also, I want to know if we should do other colours/sizes/styles for the shirts.. so pls give any feedback you have here for case badges and here for tshirts.. thanks!
Over in the PCDB I noticed Stinger16au's box which is purpotedly sporting a celeron 900 @ 1600MHz.. which may or may not be true, I'm not too sure. Some of those new celerons have been overclocking to quite a toasty MHz, and It's definitely within FSB limits of the board.. but SODIMMS of DDR in a desktop board? I don't know..
Also from the PCDB is IRC regular X_Phile's rather tricked out box with a neon'd window and all that jazz. Looks sweet.
decifer pointed out this guide to starting an online clan of wankers.. rather bloody amusing if you've been up against the said clan of wankers during a game of counter strike / q3 / ut / insertyourfavouriteonlinegamehere / etc.
MWP pointed out this rather amusing piss-take on the AMD PR rating debacle.. it suggests they name their processes in the trademarked unit GiggaHertz. It is starting to get a bit stupid, the whole PR thing..
bern points out that nVidia has released some new drivers for Linux.. version 1.0-1512's to be exact.
AllTechBox have updated their guide showing you how to connect a PSX controller to your PC.. quite good, because the PSX controllers are quite common, tough and good.
SushiMOO pointed this article which talks about beta versions of WinXP being tagged with a specific user-id for everyone who downloads it.. meaning they're able to trace back who leaked the beta builds and then remove them from the beta program. Also on XP, David wanted to clarify a few things that I said about XP in Tuesday's post.. he says that the crack for the evaluation version to convert it to the corporate copy isn't really a crack, but a bunch of files from the corporate version that you just copy over the top of the evaluation ones. He also highlights that the product activation scheme is only intended to stop pirating in the sense of people lending their CD's to neighbors.. not the warez-type pirating. Thanks for that David :)
A few people emailed me about linking to their LAN's after I posted a few during last nights news post.. well, I will now - but if you want to find any more LAN's I suggest you check out lans.ausgamers because not only have they put a lot of work into it, but it's pretty damn usefull as well. Shr3dder pointed out the SA WonderLAN, and Jekias the Tasmanian BFG LAN.
Finally this morning, there has been some talk over at AusGamers about possibly merging their Folding@Home team with ours when Version 2.0 of the client is released and the stats are (possibly) reset.. What do you think about this? Head over the Team OCAU forum and read all the AusGamers threads to see what other OCAU peeps think, and then post your own thoughts as well.. it would be really nice taking it to all the big american teams with a bunch of 'clocked aussie boxes.. but maintaining an identity through the merge seems to be the biggest concern of both parties.
Reviews:
MSI 6378 KLE133 integrated socket-a mobo on TechGamer.
ThrustMaster Top Gun AfterBurner Joystick on Tech-Planet.
Noise Control Silverado hs/f on Bit-Tech.
CardXPert MX400 VIVO Golden Sample card on Guru3D.
Zalman hs/f roundup on OCPrices.
CyberDrive 16/12/40 CD-RW on ClubOC.
Leadtek GeForce3 TD on X-Bit Labs.
Compex DS2216 16 port switch on RizeNet.
Finding time for the news right now is like trying to find an excel that can run a 10 second quarter mile.. heh. Anyway, after having some ~fun~ with WindowsXP installations, I'm now back running WinME and much happier for it.. it works! Here's the news..
This is one for all the newbies: how to install / apply thermal interface materials.. which pretty much means Artic Silver or your favourite thermal goop. It's not too hard, but having someone nudge you in the right direction can always help.
MWP pointed out some news over on slashdot concerning Intel's upcomming IA64 cpu.. A couple of neat facts about it: 6Mb of L3 cache (huge!!), an 8 stage pipeline (compared to the P4's 20 stage pipeline. This means it will be a lot faster at lower clocks..), and finally a whopping 130 Watts of power consumption.. That's going to mean about 110W of heat comming of the die.. that is muuuch more than today's toastiest Thunderbirds. MWP says he'll be interested to see what sort of cooling methods are required for this behemoths.. Indeed.
InsaneHardware have a short blurb posted about a resistor hack for SiS735 boards that will give you a whole 3% extra performance.. umm, yay? I suppose it'd be usefull to all of those benchmark junkies wanting to squeeze every single 3D mark out of their system.. but going to your motherboard with a soldering iron for 3% seems a little excessive. They don't have any real info about it either, just a "rework this resistor".. which means nothing to me. Just seems like a load of hype with not much substance. Something that isn't as useless is a new AGP Driver for the SiS735 boards that weighs in at a massive 7Mb!
SpodesAdobe are back after some backend reworking and they've taken a look at the CPL event from London.. quite a large LAN if you ask me.. and with all that corporate backing it's damn shmick too.. Of course Australia has world-class events of it's own in Brisbane's QGL, Sydney's MPU, Melbourne's Shafted and Adelaide's Valhalla.
Viper points out this time machine going under the hammer on eBay.. *ahem*
The PCDB keeps on being updated with some swanky looking boxes.. There is this tidy machine from Sexual Chocolate (?), Lycan has his cow print window box up, and and Peregrine has a sweet lookin mid-tower up as well.
For all the water cooling junkies out there, VyW has a guide to building a circuit that will turn your pump and other water cooling gear on and off with the rest of your system.. cool.
ArsTechnica have a nice article covering the history of PC gaming.. a where we've come from and where we're going type of article.. not a bad read at all.
Finally, Little Erve points out that Version 3.01 of the handy little display utility PowerStrip has been released, supporting all MS operating systems through 95a to XP.
Reviews:
OCZ Titan II MX400SE video card on TweakTown.
NEC Versa UltraLite 600MHz Crusoe-based laptop on TransmetaZone.
ThermalTake Volcano 6u+ on ComputerChaos.
Aron Black MultiFunction Keyboard on MikhailTech.
Zalman CNPS-5000 on ClubOC.
2CoolPC Plus and TurboSystem coolers on LWD, our reviews here, and here.
NanoTherm Thermal Compound on HardAvenue.
Nanotherm Thermal Compound on WebTXT.
Gateway 6400 Server on TacoNuts.
Wednesday Morning
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Wednesday, 5-September-2001 11:05:26 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Right. Fun with DNS continues, but we're definitely making progress. Thanks to the people who offered help with the zone files but for the moment I'm blundering along myself (with dlint, great suggestion Marty). Also, Lujan noticed our latest delegation request was not actioned (but no email telling me this was sent, grr). That's now fixed too. MnM says people using Primus should turn off the proxy setting in IE as that lets him browse the forums fine. Scott suggests Primus people make sure their DNS server settings for their dialup (or ADSL) connection is set to "Server Assigned" as Primus changed their servers in Feb. Anyway, a couple of people have reported success now when it didn't work before, so we'll see..
A few people sent word that Asus are running another Big Giveaway.. that site is very slow for me at the moment.
Check out this Linux Toaster, thanks Jeff.
GideonTech have built a LAN box and want to tell you all about it, while Tech-Report have recommendations for a student PC.
From TheGibbon: Interesting thread in the forums over at StorageReview. Seems the new Seagate Barracuda IV IDE drives (which look like being the new king of the hill in ATA100 drives) have been exhibiting a nasty squealing noise at times, which as you can imagine is not what you want to hear from a new hard disk. It looks like there's now a fix, and it wasn't really anything to your knickers in a knot about.
The Geek Food Forum (that some are saying should be renamed to "Overcookers Australia") has started and is already full of yummy food ideas for those with a lack of time or cooking skills.. I never knew Sciby was such a chef. :)
BBSpot have put their own funny spin on the AMD Performance Ratings frenzy, thanks Tom. AMD announced that it would start rating its processors using the trademarked GiggaHertz unit of measure. AMD did not reveal how to convert GiggaHertz to gigahertz, though leaked internal documents suggest that 1 GiggaHertz equals .5 GHz. AMD also announced immediate availability of a new 2.8 GiggaHertz Athlon.
HWExtreme compared a couple of water-cooling radiators. There's a heap of water-cooling stuff in our own archive.
Interesting thing from Vindaloo, a website that lets you order Pizza online.. from your local pizza shop. I may never leave the house again.
ProCooling have a 4-way heatsink shootout..
Apparently AOL don't like IE.. or maybe they do, thanks John.
PappaSmurf reckons that XP makes the Net faster for him, in our Networking & Internet forum.
Someone made some flashy colourful thingoes.. so Dan reviewed them, of course.
Wokket answers that timeless question: What would happen if Jesus came back as a monster truck? Also a reminder to be careful what you say in email.
Reviews:
Swiftech MC462BA socket cooler on BSOD.
Abit TH7-RAID i850-based P4 motherboard on OCNZ.
Dynatron DC1206BM-P625 cooler on RojakPot.
Dinosaurs Mating
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Tuesday, 4-September-2001 17:52:54 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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This is something of a shock - HP has inhaled Compaq! Or rather, they've "merged" into a "new HP" which will be the 2nd biggest Technology company in the world - after Tyrannosaurus Rex itself of course, IBM. Anyway, Mort spotted it here on Slashdot, Deejay saw it here on CNet, Phil picked up the story here on NYTimes and here on Computerworld and Rodney found the Official Press Release on HP's site. Frank's obviously a CNN reader while Julian found it closer to home in The Melbourne Age. Gaz saw it on ZDNet.AU.
Go the newshounds! :) Funny comment from someone who should probably remain nameless: After we were shafted by Compaq swallowing DEC, then killing NT on the Alpha CPU, our account managers are gonna have to come up with some damn good freebies this time.
Another anonymous comment: As I used to work for HP, I'm interested in this. On the same day as they are sacking local staff, they are announcing a 25 Billion dollar spend on Compaq. Many long term staff in the Melbourne office are getting the axe, and I mean long term as in 10 - 20 years and close to retirement. How's that for a message to loyal employees of a former 'employer of the year'?
There is more online media backing that AMD is going to pursue the Model Naming Scheme ala PR rating after all.. with this ZDNet article from Nemesis throwing more weight behind the rumor on TomsHardware. I can understand their reasons for doing it, because most of us are aware that the P4 is a regressive core design intended to be a clock speed king, rather than a grunty processor regardless of clock. Intel was wise in doing this, as it now appears that a 2GHz Intel processor is 600MHz or or almost 42% faster than AMD's 1.4GHz part, when in truth, it's not. That won't stop me disliking the whole idea of it tho, and I beleive it's going to take some clever marketing to stop this turning into another PR debacle.
Firemoth also pointed out this rumour fest article on The Inq that gives October 9 as the date for the release of the desktop version of the Palomino core, and confirms the model-naming-scheme rumor as well.. albeit not with much assurance. As usual, juicy Inq rumours that may or may not hold true.
AnandTech have their KT266A article up, as do Digit-Life.. and it gives more reason to save up those 5c coins and start waiting for the boards to start arriving on the shelves: KT266A is hot. They also have a new article up about Linux in the corporate world.. and how it's going to go in and save everything. Anyone heard that before?
If you where thinking about doing some professional ricing of your case but don't have the dosh to do so, then Bit-Tech have the competition for you: they are giving away £250 worth of case mods, which is almost $750 aussie dollars worth of case.. rather serious if you ask me.
I know that a lot of you have been waiting for some Kingmax DDR ram to show up on the scene, and last week I noticed it on one of the more lower-priced aussie online retailer's sites and was wondering where the heck a review was.. well, TweakTown have come to the rescue with one right here. The memory follows in the footsteps of their PC133/150/166 parts with a TinyBGA packaging, which sets it away from the pack a bit.
TechWatch have compared to difference between the Leadtek GeForce3 TD and TDH boards.. and what is it? Well, the H stands for Hardware Monitoring, and the TDH board has little LED's on it which will tell you if it's running at AGP 4X, if it's receiving power or if you've managed to cause an Error in your brand new $800 video card. Cool..
VyW has made a case from a subwoofer enclosure.. it's come out looking quite cool, of course they used a very schmick subwoofer enclosure to start with, but nevertheless.. it's neat.
Paul has pointed out that there are cracks that turn the final version of WindowsXP into the corporate edition.. the difference? Well, the corporate edition is minus the activation that we all love so dearly.. so there we go: XP has been cracked. I told you :) Another thing that I predicted was that there would be copies intended specifically for big OEM's like Dell without the activation.. and, there are. Yet another MS scheme intended to curb piracy that does nothing but give warez kiddies something more to laugh about.
Finally today, CaseJunkiez have reviewed the EL Case Badge Kit.. a little product that allows you to create a glowing case badge for your PC - very very cool. We should get Junkz to crank us out some OCAU ones - they ran out really quickly!
Also, thanks to orlock for giving me some help getting to Odin to write the news this morning!
Reviews:
Thermaltake VolcanoII 6u+ on CoolHardWarez.
EPoX 8KTA3+ Pro on TechmoCracy.
Logitech Cordless Mouseman Optical on HardwareOne.
SwiftTech MCX370 hs/f on ExplosiveHardware.
Kanie Hedgehog 294M on Radeonic.
SUMA Platinum KyroII 32Mb board on HardwareTest.
Monday Night
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Monday, 3-September-2001 23:19:24 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Ok, the DNS check was interesting. I'm going to presume the vast majority of people were ok, but a few - notably Primus users - can't get through to any of the newish hostnames (forums, lists, loki etc). I'm not sure why that is, but I'm not ruling out that our DNS setup might be a bit crappy. Anyone with some real-world hardcore reverse DNS or general DNS-configuration experience pls drop me a note if you're willing to spend a little time helping debug my zone files, thanks. Actually I feel a little bad because there's a few people who can't access the forums at all due to this problem, which means the links on the news page that go to the forums are going to be dead for them too.. hmm. Working on it!
Boney has a couple of systems in the PCDB that are both pretty cool, his fire box which is a custom case constructed from fire-retardant MDF and his very tricked out main machine.
Some extreme car-modding going on in the forums.. he'll need a mega alternator just to power all the internal gadgetry if it works..
Also in the forums, Wokket posted some news about the alternate windows shell scene and in particular LiteStep. Sounds like good things are on the way for them.
Digit-Life checked out 3 GF2 cards from ELSA..
Sick of pizza at LAN parties? Lauren points out this handy guide to making spaghetti bolognaise instead. Actually, I've been thinking for a while of having a food.overclockers.com.au subdomain which would contain recipies/reviews for yummy food which is easy for geeks to make. Obviously it'd be mostly reader-submitted as I am a crappy cook myself. Whaddya reckon, is this a stupid idea or the Next Big Thing? Let me know in this thread or if you're one of the forums-not-working peeps drop me a note.
Reviews:
Arkua Technology 6258 socket cooler on 2FastCPU.
Titan 3 GF3-based video card on TheTechZone.
Just seeing if the recent DNS updates have fixed up the problems we've been having. Can you try to ping this host for me:
lists.overclockers.com.au
It should resolve to loki.overclockers.com.au and return pings. If you can't ping it, pls email me and let me know what ISP you use and what city you're in.. thanks!
Monday Afternoon
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Monday, 3-September-2001 14:02:01 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Not a whole lot going on out there today, mostly because it's the Labour Day weekend in the USA so they're all chilling out. :)
Here's a sexy copper case noticed in Japan by JimX.
ARP have updated their BIOS optimization guide.
Jason sent in this funny satirical performance car parts site.
Your weekly dose of the bizarre on ZZZ Online.
Reviews:
Leadtek GeForce3 TD video card on TweakTown.
So-Trick Howler case on OtakuPC.. weeird. :)
Highspeed PC Fan Adapter on Mikhailtech, our review here.
VIA launches KT266A chipset
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Monday, 3-September-2001 12:26:15 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Big news for today: VIA have announced their KT266A chipset. This is the long-rumoured "version 2" of KT266, a SocketA motherboard chipset allowing the use of DDR memory. From the press-release:
The VIA Apollo KT266A is the first chipset from VIA to include Performance Driven Design, which includes tightened timings and deeper queues to greatly increase memory and system bus performance. Supporting DDR200/266 memory and a full range of 200/266MHz Front Side Bus AMD Athlon™ and Duron™ processors, the VIA Apollo KT266A provides lightning fast access to system memory and delivers performance gains of up to 20% over competitors’ products.
The VIA Apollo KT266A is part of the V-MAP (VIA Modular Architecture Platform) family of chipsets, which guarantees pin compatibility across a wide range of VIA DDR products. V-MAP allows motherboard manufacturers, OEMs, and System Integrators to serve different market segments on a single, unified platform design. It can be paired with a choice of VT8233/VT8233C South Bridges, which are connected through the chipset’s high bandwidth V-Link Hub Architecture. Other key features include AGP4X, ATA-100, and PC133 support, as well as integrated six channel advanced audio, six USB ports, LPC bus, and integrated 10/100Mbps Ethernet and Home PNA, AC-97 audio, MC-97 modem, and support for AMD’s second generation PowerNow! Technology.
Some more info here on VIA's site.
Reviews:
here on HardOCP.
here on AMDMB.
here on Accelenation.
here on LegionHardware.
here on VIAHW.
here on OCWB.
here on xbit.
here on TomsHardware.
Still a few tshirts left, especially XL size..
Click for info!
Archive Updated
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Monday, 3-September-2001 01:37:24 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Quite a big month for reader submissions last month.. that's what we like to see. :) I added these recent items to the Archive:
Constructing a Bong Cooler by Vindaloo and Froodogs.
Installing a 120mm Blowhole by LoneWolf.
Modifying VIAMACH.INF to detect all devices by OLDMX.
Asus GF2: a Pro for the price of a GTS? by max223.
Samsung Cyber Beetle Mouse by Lujan.
And a couple from me:
Macas MS-10 Hermannator HDD cooler.
PCCG Rounded IDE and floppy cables.
BTW, OCAU served 3,917,478 pages during August totalling some 124GB of outbound HTTP traffic. Thanks guys!
Early Monday Morning
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Monday, 3-September-2001 01:08:26 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Lujan noticed Scriion's entry as the first dual socketA system in the PCDB. Watercooled, even.. but not overclocked for now. There's a cool briefcase PC too, nicely finished project there and a counterstrike logo cutout in FreakishP3's box.
Sniper noticed this TheInquirer article saying that Asus's A7N266, a motherboard (the first?) based on NVIDIA's Crush (now NForce) chipset, has been spotted in an Italian review. About USD$200 seems pricey, but factor in the on-board GF2MX400 and it's not looking too bad for an intro price.. until you want to upgrade to a GF3, that is.
Dreddnews checked out a system testing suite from AMI, more famous for their BIOS products.
As if that 3D Pong thing from Saturday wasn't bad enough, Wokket sent in this site with a few more addictive flash games on it.
There's another thread about the AMD PR-Rating scheme here from Revolver in the forums. Have we seen anything official from AMD about this yet?
We've seen this before but it's kinda funny, feed in an acronym and get a b-grade robot name back. A.G.G.: Android Generated for Gratification ..hmm, ok.. thanks Feral. :)
Kris sent in a tricky puzzle to further reduce your productivity.
Jeremy sent word of a petition requesting different penalties for those Optus@Home users who stray over the 10x NetStats limit.
Apparently Intel are confused about exactly what their customers want, thanks Nigel.
Reviews:
Laser Bay case-mod goody on TacoNuts.
Dynotron cooler on VP6-Board.
Jetcool cooler onm AMDWorld.
Sunday afternoon quickies...
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Sunday, 2-September-2001 18:53:10 (GMT +10) - by Manaz
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What a weekend it's been. I've spent most of it at Rugby matches, it's been great - especially with Australia retaining the Tri-Nations Cup. On with the news (what little of it there is)...
We've received another report of a new Celeron processor overclocking rather well - this time Bartho, who purchased a 900MHz Celeron (9x100MHz), and has it running at 1200MHz (9x133MHz), at stock voltage with the retail heatsink. Not bad for AUD$139, is it... :)
Ben wrote in with some interesting news - he was (watching?) Catalyst, the ABC science program recently, when they did a report on computer circuit research. It seems that scientists in the US (IBM scientists it seems) have managed to build an inverter (a basic processor building block) on a single molecule, which is a breakthrough in itself - but the molecule wasn't silicon - it was on a carbon "nanotube". A nanotube is a hollow strand of carbon, 10,000 times smaller than traditional silicon transistors. This is a major breakthrough in microprocessor research, and should lead to faster, smaller and cheaper computers within 10-15 years...
If you're confused by ACPI, and what it means for your system, PC Hardware have written a guide to it, giving quite a bit of useful information and some good troubleshooting tips.
Reviews:
Dynatron DY1206BH-638 Copper HSF review on Tech-Planet.
CompuNurse review on webtxt.com.
Laserbay review on TacoNuts.
Chaintech 7VJD motherboard review at The Bench House.
Interesting Forum threads:
Making a Game Theatre XP-style external box for sound card connectivity in the Case Mods & PCDB forum.
What's your current cooling project? in the Extreme Cooling forum.
This thread and this thread, both about AMD's change away from rating their processors by their clock speed.
When rice isn't rice in the Motoring forum.
Danny's C800 @ 1200..
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Sunday, 2-September-2001 16:00:47 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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I am a "casual" overclocker (35 years old) and I have been following your web site for months. I just wanted to let you know that I am running Celeron 800 at 1200MHz (8x150) with "STOCK INTEL HEATSINK & FAN" !!! It is easy for all this guys with all the Orbs, water cooling, 10 case fans, and cases size of a mini fridge !!! I have no other fans in the PC (it is a mini ATX case !!!) and I am using "cheapie" mobo - ASUS CUV4X-C !!! ($150). Idle CPU temperature = 30 degrees! I do use Arctic Silver II.
Click to enlarge..
Not too shabby at all. :)
Saturday Evening
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Saturday, 1-September-2001 18:31:14 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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A billion gazillion people (approx) wrote in to say that Telstra have issued a statement (via email) to the effect that they will not be enforcing the 3GB monthly download limit just yet. "Since June, Telstra has been reviewing Freedom Plan members' feedback in relation to their monthly 3GB allowance and this review is not yet complete. Whilst this review is in progress, Telstra BigPond has decided not to introduce the intended 3GB 'Capping' and 'Additional Usage' options planned for 1 October 2001. Slightly less people sent in a second communication from Telstra, which seems to be saying the limit WILL be there and WILL be enforced, info here. If you're confused maybe this FAQ will help. TooEZ notes they have changed a lot of their call pricing too, in the hope that the ACCC will approve.
More ranting about the rumoured AMD performance-rating scheme here on Tech-Report.
Hexus have a Case Mod Project article posted. There's interesting thread about lack of originality in case-modding in our own Case Mods forum. Some very cool projects linked from there.
Another chapter in the watercooled GF3 saga from BladeRunner.
From Marzi, a very cool 3D Pong shockwave game. Very addictive.. I predict a major drop in productivity this Monday. :)
From Andrew, the recent legalization of medical marijuana in Canada has opened the market for fast-grow dope machines.. bizarre.
Here's some info about a recent tech show in Germany.. in Dutch I think, but you can look at the pictures.
Manaz says I received my Optus@Home bill today, with the following noted on it - "From December 2001 Microsoft will cease supporting the Windows 95 operating system. Consequently, from July 2002 Optus will no longer support this system."
Digit-Life have a huge P4 article covering the new 2GHz part, the new socket, info on a few motherboards and comparisons to AMD's Athlon.
CDRInfo have an article about P-CAV vs. Z-CLV.. which is something to do with cd-burning, no doubt. :)
FutureLooks have checked out the Xitel MD-PORT DG2, a gadget attempting to merge MP3 and MiniDisc technology.
Matex says he uses this nifty windows customising tool and so should you - and there's a new version just out.
ComputerSource have a 15-page article about current 3D graphics technology including chipset info and benchmarks. On a similar note, BeachsideTech have an article about the future of 3D.
If you're into watching DVD's here in Oz, you might be interested in Michael's Region 4 DVD Info Page, thanks Sciby.
In a bold move, Microsoft have apparently put a unique code into a particular version of WindowsXP, presumably to allow tracking of copies back to the original leak.
From Sam: On a sad note, Alan O'Reilly, who ran DNA Computers in Adelaide, died at the age of 19 on Tuesday after overdosing on PMA, an ectasy substitute. Will be missed.
Reviews:
Abit Siluro T400 64MB GeForce 2 MX400 video card on HotHardware.
Cyber Cooler P-5700 copper socket cooler on GideonTech.
Swiftech MC462A socket cooler on ViperLair.
PowerCooler PCH075 socket cooler on 8balls.
Antec SX635 mini-tower case on Icrontic.
Zalman CNPS5000 socket cooler on MikhailTech.
Antec SX 12-40 fulltower case on G3D.
RomTech Trios hard drive selector on RatedPC.
Vindaloo and Froodogs make a Bong Cooler!
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Saturday, 1-September-2001 02:49:34 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Something a little light-hearted for your Saturday morning - two lads with a yen for cooling set out to make an evaporative cooing tower.. didn't go entirely to plan, but an amusing tale..
Click for the full article!
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