Tue - 07-Mar-2000
AMD announced their 1GHz Athlon, codenamed 'Magnolia', yesterday (today USA time). This is an air-cooled part, conventionally packaged. It's NOT the new Thunderbird .18u stepping and it still uses off-die L2 cache. However, they have boosted the voltage to 1.80v - doesn't sound like there's much headroom for us overclockers. More information here on Anandtech (reviews the 900 and 950MHz parts too), SharkyExtreme (1GHz review), AMDZone (press release thingy) and pretty much everywhere else you look..

There's a water-cooled Athlon here, actually. First one I've seen, I think. They get a bit evangelical, so be warned.

Kyle from HardOCP checked out the Soyo SY-6VBA-133. This board has been around for a while, I've had one for months and liked it, then hated it, and now I love it again. If you read my "Adventures with Apollo" article you'll know why.. :) In fact, the dog-slow performance of the board in his review leads me to think he hasn't read my article..

This is one of the nicest water-cooled rigs I've ever seen. Check out the twin radiators! Actually a lot of good info there, it's a NZ site I've linked to before.

Coupla serious dust-sucking cases here. They have the AOpen HX-08 fulltower and have added an extra 7 case fans, I dunno, looks like overkill - the guy lives in Iceland, not Darwin. :) I'm working on my HX-08 fulltower at the moment, I've got a coupla Sunon 80mm's to exhaust out the rear panel, just trying to figure out a nice way to mount a 120mm intake on the front panel.. hmm.

Sandra2000 is out! The big news for me is (limited) Win2K support and SMP benchmarking.. mmm, downloading now to see how the dual 572 box stacks up.

InsaneHardware (another Aussie site) needs a new logo and is willing to swap you a FreeSpeedPro GFD Athlon-overclocking thingy for one.

More Oz goodness from TweakTown, who are having trouble deciding whether ISA or PCI modems are the best. Easy one, guys - external modems are best 'coz you get to see the flashing lights. And, you can turn the stupid suckers off and on when they forget their own name and where they live etc.

An amazing revelation from Cold-Wired! Seems those young whippersnappers have found something called a Celeron 366, and discovered that you can run it at 550! This is amazing! They call it "overclocking" .. heh, young people of today.. actually, some interesting info there, even if nothing revolutionary.

More Oz stuff - pull up the comfy chair and check out Dan's review of Asus's P3V boards (the P3V4X and P3V133), with a little dash of Alpha for flavour. A long read but a good one.

Interesting stuff on some Crusoe-based Webpads (net terminals) here. You remember Crusoe, Transmeta's chip? Amazing how quickly stuff dips in and out of the limelight in this game.

Specific info on the Crusoe chip's thermal issues here.

IXBT have a low-end video card roundup here. Interesting stuff from the Russian lads.

You can win some stuff from MadOnion (makers of 3DMark2000) by bragging about your BX-based AGP overclock on overclockers.com. Thanks to Aaron for letting us know.

Modified temperature probe here, interesting.

Sun - 05-Mar-2000
I put the finishing touches on a new article last night, I've been working on this one for a few days so go check it out. Titled "Adventures with Apollo", it was prompted by some of the activity in the forums and details my experiences with different BIOS and VIA 4-in-1 drivers on the Asus P3V4X and Soyo SY-6VBA-133. Certainly some cheap speed to be had if you make the right decisions. I also benchmarked the boards against each other with their newfound speed..

Perhaps this is somehow related to some of the more silly computer/internet laws coming out of the US lately.

The Promise FastTrack66 hack seems to be a real one, in case you missed it in the forums there are a couple of threads here and here where people in Oz have gotten it to work. RAID0 (striping) makes a definite difference to speed and if you can do it in hardware it's even better. I'm very sorely tempted to get one of these cards and keep it aside for when I can afford a couple of decent drives to hang off it. I don't imagine these units will be sitting around on shelves for long when the word gets around. Update: It was on Slashdot a day or so ago, quite a few people reporting success now.

Interesting stuff on Primus's ADSL service here. Apparently they will limit downloads to 300MB/month to avoid "gutting the industry overnight".. 300MB PER MONTH??!??!!? Most of us probably do that with our freakin' 56k modems NOW! Thanks to a coupla folks for pointing it out in the forums.

Please sign this petition about Amazon. It's important - this kind of patent-office idiocy has to be stopped.

And, if you're in a petition-signing mood, you might be interested in this one which wants to prolong the life of Socket7.

Speaking of stupid patents, Intel are trying to patent a fan which is driven by a remote motor.. gosh, what will those whacky engineers think up next? Remind anyone of anything? Fanbelt in your car, pehaps? Oh noooo, this is inside a computer, so it's completely different..

HardOCP have some interesting stuff, firstly info on how to spot the new stepping Coppermines (here on intel's site) and an air-cooled Slot1 Coppermine 550 (old stepping) with the standard HSF hitting 825MHz!

Some info on old Sun boxes here. I sometimes get offered old Sun boxes but don't know much about them. Solaris is apparently pretty sexy, but you can always load up Linux on most of them.

Info on building switches to set your fans between 12V and 17V here.. kinda like a turbo fan mode for those hot days.

More fuel for your anti-mac drunken rants down at the pub here, comparing them pricewise.

Anyway, it's my woman's birthday today so we're heading off to the Blue Mountains for a few days.. back tuesdayish..

Mon - 28-Feb-2000
Don't forget to enter the competition! See yesterday's news entry for details.

I checked out some odd little bits of kit from Senfu today, the Super Box is a little slide-out drawer for keeping stuff inside your case and the Overclocking DIY House is a kit for building a frame for your PC, kinda like a case without walls. I dunno, I just review 'em. :)

Found this wandering around the web, an Aussie with some pretty serious air-cooling in his case.

This is very interesting, a bookmark for sure. IXBT have done a historical review of the entire x86 series of chips, all of Intel's offerings plus Cyrix, AMD, Rise, you name it. Thanks to InsaneHardware for the link.

AkibaPC have got some interesting stuff up. Yeah, it's in japanese, but scroll down a bit and check out the pic of the dual slot1 apollo pro 133a motherboard! That could be a very sweet board - from Tyan though, not famed for their friendliness towards overclocking but usually rock-stable.

Sat - 26-Feb-2000 - Update #2
Ok, here's your chance to win something again. I've got 10 polo shirts from Acer Peripherals to give away, they are apparently very nice, 190g and according to my Acer contact "very good for golf" .. I'll take his word for that. :) All ya gotta do is email me with your answers to the following questions:

Have you purchased any Acer Peripherals in the past?
What is your perception of their quality?

You don't have to suck up to win - be honest, that's the point. I'll draw 10 winners randomly from the emails. Entries close 12 March so make it snappy!

In case you're on the hunt for .18 micron Athlons, PCIndex and Eyo Technologies both have 'em in Oz. PCIndex also have the NinjaMicro FreeSpeed Pro GFD device for overclocking your Athlon. I don't know of anyone else bringing GFD's into Aust at the moment.

PCIndex also have a 4-way Athlon cooler comparo here.

VRZone have reviewed the Gigabyte GA-71XE. It's an Athlon board based on the old AMD 751 chipset. Dunno why you'd buy one, what with KX133-based boards like the Epox EP-7KXA available now.

Interesting article on Quantum Computers (no, not the HDD people) on 3DWars. Fairly fluffy and not as technical as I would've hoped, but it stops your head from exploding I guess.

The Ars-Masters have taken a look at DDR vs SDR on GeForce video cards, how much is hype and how much is real performance, interesting stuff.

Tomato has his Athlon 550 at 925MHz air-cooled..

Pics of Transmeta's Crusoe chip here.

Interesting article on the Apollo Pro 133A chipset here. Quite in-depth, they also show the speed penalty for the AC97 sound.

Sat - 26-Feb-2000 - Update #1
Gonna spend today wading through my email and sorting out all the stuff I've forgotten about so expect some strange links today. :)

CHUK have taken a look at the Razor Boomslang. I still prefer the sexymouse. :)

This is pretty cool. Apparently the Promise Ultra66 is almost identical to the Promise FastTrack66 and if you know what you're doing, with a bit of soldering and a BIOS flash you can convert the former into the latter. Why is this cool? Well, the Ultra66 is a fairly bogstandard UDMA/66 card while the FastTrack66 is a UDMA/66 RAID card, which does hardware striping (very sexy), mirroring, the works. There's a page in german (translated into English by a machine so some of the phrasing's a bit odd) which tells you exactly what to do here. This was actually brought up in the forums here and nobody believed the original poster.. (I have to admit, the www.whathaveyoubeensmoking.com line made me laugh) .. just shows that 'mazing stuff can happen, do your research before nay-saying! Of course, if you blow your card up, it's your own silly fault.

On the other hand, sometimes nay-saying is good. I like to give most people the benefit of the doubt, but this one threw me. Ever considered paying a psychic to talk to your dog and tell you what they think about stuff? Quote: I'd give her a question to ask my dog and sit in silence while she telepathically communicated the question and received the answer. Then I'd listen to her explanation of what my dog had said. How fascinating, with my dog it'd be "FOOD FOOD FOOD THROW THE BALL FOOD FOOD FOOD"..

Ars-Technica have taken a look at a PC Power & Cooling Case. Looks pretty funky..

3DWars checked out an Athlon overclocking combo (case, mobo, chip). Obviously we Aussies would build something from scratch rather than buy this particular kit but it's interesting reading anyway - interestingly, the CPU is sold pre-overclocked.. isn't this what AMD are jumping up and down about at the moment?

InsaneHardware have the scoopage on the ASUS P3V4X.. says a few interesting things about it. My review of that board coming soon.

Seagate have announced their 15,000 RPM hard drive.. imagine a couple of those spinning up in your box, sheesh!

HardOCP have taken a look at Abit's VA6. My review is here for comparison.

Over on ClubOverclocker they have some info on certain batches of Micron memory sticks not liking overclocking with coppermines.. just particular batches, it seems. Worth checking out.

Interesting stuff on EETimes about a new material that's very peltier-like but much more effective. Could turn into something big..

Part 2 of FiringSquad's Intel Developer Forum coverage is up now. Serial ATA (hmm), USB, RDRAM etc.

There is a very interesting article on NVNews.net about 3d imagery, how to present an image with depth to the human eye - goes into many examples and even has ones you can look at (crossing your eyes and whatnot). Quite a long article but I read it end-to-end which is pretty rare for me. Check it out here.

I don't know if this'll do any good, but maybe if enough of us sign up at this Pizza Hut page we will be able to order online! Woo.

Dominic sent in this info he found on AMD's site. Very interesting! They don't mention the last character's value - it's 'C' for .25 Micron and 'A' for .18.

More stuff later this arvo probably..

Tue - 22-Feb-2000
Excuse any typos, I'm using a crappy IBM keyboard that seems to be dropping characters..

Ever get the urge to stick your PC to the wall? Me too.

Some debate going on in the forums about the news on this site. I'd appreciate your input here.

If you just can't get enough of the international media phenomenon that is the webmaster of this site, ie, me, then read an interview with me here. Look Mum, I'm famous! Surprisingly enough, I tended to wander off from the topic of the questions and rant from time to time.

Possibly useful thing about decoding the K7 serial number to work out stuff about it here. Nothing too amazing but interesting, C's and A's and all that. Actually that whole site is a new Athlon-specific one. Thanks to David for the link!

Some water-cooled stuff here on 3DWars.. nice radiator.

I'm a neanderthal when it comes to sound cards - both my main systems have ISA cards in them [hangs head in shame]. I quite like the look of the SBLive but it's getting a little dated, I wonder what will be next. Anyway, the SBLive! X-Gamer is reviewed here.

Mmmm, gold thermal paste available now from OverclockersHideout.

More thermal paste action here, a 5-way comparo on ClubOverclocker.

There's a page on modifying the VOS-32 to fit your K7M etc here on heatsinkguide.com. You can read our world premiere review (I love saying that) on the VOS-32 here.

Info on a new 140GB CD standard here. Obviously I need to work on my MP3 collection some more. Seriously, some very interesting stuff on clear 3d memory towards the end of the article. Thanks to Malcolm for the link.

A couple of new Aussie hardware sites have popped up, check 'em out - Insane Hardware, run by Jai Ketteridge who frequents our forums and has written a review here and TechWatch.com.au which is the resurrection of Steve's Corner of the WWW. Techwatch is giving away a couple of Acer scanners, so go nab one for yourself!

Interesting article about Intel, Athlons and the general state of the market by the Ars-Masters here.

Review of Outlaw's retail water-cooling kit here. The page colour scheme reminds me of some Amiga game I can't remember..

There's a new Aussie shop up, dedicated to PC cooling stuff - called BelowZero, here. I dunno if they're any good yet but the website looks pretty nice (not that that means anything).

FiringSquad have a review of the Athlon 850 up here. Amazingly enough, it's just like all the other Athlons but a little bit faster. Please form an orderly queue in front of the cash register.

Good news for me, nVidia have released their Win2K drivers for TNT2, GeForce etc. Woo! Get 'em here.

An 11-way RAM roundup here on Overclockin.com. Interesting stuff, would you believe they have a stick that does 160MHz at CAS2?

Lotsa nice big looking fans on this site. Thanks Tom!

Tech-junkie.com visited an Australian games developer's office and talked to them about their new driving simulation and some other stuff.

Aussie site from a regular visitor here, talking about his water-cooled machine (looks pretty cool, dual waterjacket for BP6). Be warned, there's a lot of ranting about the republic. :)

Interesting Itanium Overview on Insane Hardware. Silly name. (the chip, not the website.. well, actually..)

A report on Intel's recent Developer Forum here. Plans for the new chips etc..

Interesting round-up of a few Athlon GFD overclocking cards here on TechReport. 6 different ones put through their paces.

AussieGamer has info on a probably-huge LAN party in Brisbane soon. 3 days!

Finally, a "LAN Party Case" is checked out here on Overclockin.com!

Mon - 21-Feb-2000
HEY YOU! Do you read the news on this site (such that it is)? If so go here and let me know how you feel about it. Thanks..

..and stop sending me email calling me a slacker. :) I've been busy! Doin what, you say? Well.. there's this review of the Epox EP-7KXA, for starters. It's an Athlon board based on the new KX133 chipset and it's pretty damned sexy.

Also, I took a look at some card coolers from Globalwin.

Mon - 14-Feb-2000
Ok, the competition results are up! If you haven't got a note from me yet then you didn't win. Bummer. :) You can yak about it here in the forums if you like.

News update coming soon. I'm off to bed. :)

Sun - 13-Feb-2000
Valentines day tomorrow, guys. Just so you don't forget and end up in the doghouse. :)

I checked out the 2CoolPC Plus - it's a ducted fan setup for improving your in-case airflow. Seems to work pretty well.

Tue - 08-Feb-2000
Jason King has taken a look at Mandrake Linux 7.0. I know, it's a software review on a hardware site. This one interested me, though, because it seems to finally remove the complexity barrier of entry to setting up Linux. I found the article very interesting, coming from a Debian Linux background (which can be a little obscure at times)..

I have been working my way through the competition results these last few days. Over 70 entries and man, there are some really good ones in there. It's going to be a toughie. Hopefully I will have it all finalised soon and the winners can claim their Cool Stuff!

OK, I got a lot of email about the Optus@Home message they sent out. Thanks to everyone who sent info, I didn't reply to everyone personally. Seems everyone got the same message (basically, "We're ready but not in your area yet"), even people who already have Optus CableTV in their house! People seem to be having better luck by ringing them up (I don't know the numbers) and requesting it. In some cases Optus have rung people. Apparently the install takes 125MB and they will only touch Win95/98/NT4 - Win2K and Linux they won't set up for you. Pricing is as follows (quoted from a reader, quoting from literature, presumably - thanks Graham!):

Optus offers a 12 month contract (better than 18 months mr telstra)
with an initial outlay of $199 and $69.95 / month for unlimited traffic,
5 email addresses (probably virtual or alias addresses) and 5 web
pages of 10Mb each, which through ingenuity can be used to make
a single 50Mb web page.

The other option is no contract, $398 for the Nortel cable modem and
installation and $59.95 / month.

Either at the end of the 12 month contract, or after paying your $398,
you then own the cable modem.

Also at the end of the contract, you go to the $59.95 / month plan.

According to someone who supposedly works for Optus but I can't verify, it is "100Mbps shared link so get in early" .. also, unlimited traffic (for now?) but he doesn't know if static IP's and hosting from home is going to be allowed. From the looks of the site it doesn't seem it will be, which is a bummer for me, I woulda liked to host this site from my own Linux box at home so I have basically no disk space restrictions. Ahh well. Someone tell me what it's like when it's installed.. "Fast!" does not constitute a review. :) All of this info could be bollocks for all I know, just passing it on.

A few folks have mailed in to say they've picked up a Hercules card for a bargain price (see the last few days of news for more details). Grant says he's found them in Sydney, go to Adelong Computers (I think that's the right URL) and they have them there as Skywell of course. Apparently these have a 200MHz default core speed and according to this review are still up for some overclocking action. If you buy one and it's not a Hercules don't come crying to me, I'm just passing info along from the peeps. :)

There's another fan-switch setup here. Good wiring diagrams in case you want to set one up yourself.

This site has pics of a week 52 Athlon 550 cracked open to reveal a 750MHz core and 3.6ns cache ram. 900MHz was a no-brainer air-cooled. Keep an eye out for these monsters for sure..

Pretty in-depth article on graphics technology here. My eyes glaze over while reading this stuff so I don't know if this is actually good info or not.

Similarly, nanotechnology gets checked out here on 3DWars. If you're interested in an excellent sci-fi/cyberpunk read about (among other things) a society where nanotechnolgy has gotten out of hand, I can heartily recommend The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (my 2nd favourite author at the moment). Great book.

Overclockin.com take a look at the Northwind GFD card for overclocking yer Athlon. They also look at the FreeSpeedPro which does pretty much the same thing.

Tech-Junkie have looked at the Creative GeForce Pro. You can compare our recent review here.

If you can read Japanese you'd be able to tell from this page that .18 micron Athlon 550's are now on sale in Japan. This is very cool stuff.

Remember my Senfu review from Friday? ClubOverclocker have the whole kit reviewed here. I have received the kit (and a bunch of other stuff) from Senfu now and am checking it all out, reviewage soonly..

Living proof on an Aussie site that BX and the Coppermine can be a viable solution.

UGHardware have an opinion on the Intellimouse Explorer up. Compare our review here.

Fast-MHz (don't gimme any o' them normal MHz, I just want the fast ones) take a look at the 2CoolPC ducted fan. I have one of these in the test box right now.

Some silver thermal compound info here.

Info on the VapoChill mega-cooler here.

Sleep now.

Fri - 04-Feb-2000
I've been keeping quiet about this one until I had it working properly. I managed to get my hands on one of those funky water-cooling radiators we've seen on the Japanese sites. Check out my review of the Senfu Single-Fan Water-cooling Radiator.

No news tonight, off to the Steve Vai concert! I'm away all weekend, so have a good one and see you all Monday!

Wed - 02-Feb-2000
Ok, the contest is of course closed. There were a total of 70 entries. I will be checking them out in detail over the next few days in order to pick the winners. Unfortunately I'm away from home on Fri/Sat/Sun this week so it will be next week that I announce the winners.. thanks to everyone who entered, and good luck!

Jason King took a good look at the Creative Labs GeForce Pro. That unit is sold in the US as the Annihilator Pro. Get your DDR-GeForce luvin' here.

Jim's rodent fetish struck again - this time the A4Tech 4D+ (model WWW-11) mouse was the object of his attentions.. quite cool - 4 buttons, 2 scroll-wheels (!) and scans at 520dpi.. and a bargain, too!

Ars-Technica have a review of a very funky case up.

Gary from www.overclockin.com says he has scoopage on the new Abit video card site. Well, I can't find the info on his site but I sometimes have odd caching problems here. Go check his site out anyway, lots of good info there.

PCStats.com have a review of a slot-fan up. Looks very similar to a unit we reviewed here.

A review of the ACT RS Shifter here.. it's a gearshift, for you driving-sim heads. Looks pretty cool, I must say.

More info on the Skywell Magic TNT2 cards that seem to be Hercules Dynamite's in disguise (also mentioned last news update) - Kyu Kim says he picked one up (from Melbourne Computer Centre) and it looks exactly like this, which is a pic of the Hercules. The BIOS says it too, but not in the manual or CD. Looks like all the Skywell ones with TV Out are actually Hercules cards. If you're a Melby person looking for a good TNT2 card at a good price, might be worth checking out.

Saw over on the HardOCP that there may be available soon a Socket370 -> FC-PGA converter. This would let you use a coppermine on your socket370 board, in theory.. mmmm.. if they work on the BP6 I will be very happy. I'm going to stay calm until I see a review of one, though, looks almost too cool to be true at the moment.

I like to give the Aussie sites a plug - here's one (run by someone I knew YEARS ago) that does reviews and info on new shareware and freeware software. Interesting page and updated regularly but not many hits, so go check it out..

Tech-junkie.com, another Aussie site, have a case-painting howto posted here. The coolest one is the reader submitted one. :)

Yet another Aussie site, pcindex.com.au, have an overclocked Athlon article up..

A competition to win a Linksys networking kit here. Dunno if non-US people can enter.. you basically have to grovel in their forums and whoever sucks the hardest gets the goods.. err, so to speak.

Did everyone else get that message from Optus@Home? "We're ready but can't do it to your house yet.." ..? Did anyone get a message saying they can do it straight away?

Interesting article here, comparing hardware T&L (a la GeForce) with doing it in software (ie, on the CPU). Benchmarking and stuff.

A review of the card cooler here. Simple but effective.

Sun - 30-Jan-2000
I got the scoop on the new GlobalWin VOS-32 Plus. This is a cooler that can be used on P3's, P2's or Athlons, it's f'n huge and you can read the world premiere review here.

I think Gazza's a little confused about the whole "TNT2 Sandwich" thing..

Tom from pccables.com.au sent info on some videos on Intel's site which show you how to remove the SECC/SECC2 casing on your processors. Cool. Until now I've been recommending this guide on D'Best in the West. I don't have realplayer on my PC so I dunno if the vids are any good or not.

PeterC sent along some very interesting stuff, plastic heatsinks that work as well as aluminium ones, but of course are much lighter and can be made into pretty much any shape you can think of, 'coz they're plastic. I mailed the manufacturer for a review unit a week or so ago but got no response.. their loss.

Zach says if you go to Melbourne Computer Centre and get a Magic TNT2 Ultra card for $279, what you'll actually get is a Hercules Dynamite card - all the manuals, drivers, BIOS etc say Hercules Dynamite TNT2U. These were one of the kickass TNT2U cards, from memory, so they're a real bargain for you south-of-the-border folk. It even has TV out!

Araknid reports that the new nVidia drivers for Win2K give a 15% performance boost when SMP'd. So if you've got a TNT2 / GeForce, 2+ CPU's and Win2K, go here (under downloads) for free speed!

Fysh sent in news of a PC133 memory roundup here.

YYK sent in this link - some interesting products there, big industrial coolers. How does a water-cooler capable of dissipating 100 KILOWATTS of heat sound? Well, it probably sounds like a helicopter taking off, and it's a little big to rest on top of most cases.. but anyway.

Here's a 42-CPU benchmark comparison. Phwoar. Coppermines, Athlons, Celerons, K6's etc etc. SDRAM vs RAMBUS. It's all there. Yes, it's in Japanese, but you can look at the graphs and see what they're talking about.

Anand has an i820 motherboard roundup posted, interesting stuff. I'm waiting for him to review the time-machine that lets him crank out these incredibly detailed reviews while still having time for school. Geez.

Pretty cool article on 3DGameForce, how to make some switches for your fans, with LED's and all. I really like the pro look of this guy's case. I snarfed the link from HardOCP, as you do.

Screaming3D (is it just me or is that site really ugly? Not that I can talk..) have a review of the big plastic scoopy duct thing from 2CoolPC. If you remember I linked to another review of this thing about a week or so ago and said I thought it looked dumb, well the manufacturer liked my comment so much they sent me one for review. :) It's in the queue now, look for it soonish.

ClubOverclocker checked out some Siemens PC133 RAM here. They also check out a water-cooling kit here.

If you had a 1GHz Athlon machine, what O/S would you install? Linux, of course.. or at least, Bill from cpureview would. Check out his results here.

3DWars have a head-to-head between 2 UDMA/66 cards up..

DGENR8 hardware (run by Jai Ketteridge who did the Buddy Virtual PC review for us) has a story about an iBeast up. No, I don't understand it either. :)

I can't believe how many freakin' GeForce reviews there have been. Here's a page listing (hopefully) all of them. Actually there'll be another one on this site soon.. argh! :)

Overclockin.com have taken a look at the Ultimate Hard Drive Cooler. See our review here for comparison.

Nice watercooled P3-450 @ 648 by Komson..

CHUK have an interview with someone from Quantum3D, who make big-momma 3DFX-based cards.

These guys took 3x P3-500E's as high as they could go, interesting.

Offtopic, but this gave me a chuckle. Found it wandering on /..

Lastly, some new sites have come up, 2cold.com, Tech-3D, OCHaven, G3D, Magic Torch Overclocking (??) ..

Thu - 27-Jan-2000
Ok, I lied about the news update. There's a huge pile of links waiting to be put up here now. I'll try and get into it on the weekend. Too many reviews in the queue and they take priority over the news updates..

To keep you busy, here's a review of 6 new SECC1 coolers. These, of course, can be used to cool P2's or Athlons.

I reviewed the Everglide Large Attack Pad a week or so ago but forgot to put it on the news page. Silly me.. check it out here.

REMEMBER: To enter the competition you must MAIL ME a zip of your entry! All the discussion and beta sites etc in the forums is fine but unless you mail it to me it won't count! Competition closes midnight Monday night!

Tue - 25-Jan-2000
I've taken a look at Abit's VA6, based upon VIA's Apollo Pro 133 chipset. This is an in-depth 3-page review in which I compare the motherboard and chipset to a BX board, an i820 one and another Apollo Pro 133 one. Check it out here..

It was my birthday yesterday! :) Proper news update tomorrow.

Tue - 18-Jan-2000
I've finished my review of the Asus P3C2000 motherboard. This is, of course, an i820-based board which uses the Memory Translator Hub to allow you to use normal SDRAM instead of RAMBUS. Is this a good thing? Read it to find out. :)

Roland has reviewed the Skywell TNT2 M64-based video card. These seem to be quite a bargain if you're interested in decent, but not bleeding-edge performance. Check it out here.

There's a general article that kinda covers a few o/c'ing topics here on ughardware.com..

Silly article about overclocking your SBLive! here. Thanks Tom.. :)

If you've run out of ideas for how to blow your PC off the side of your desk, consider the dual slot cooler from TweakTown.. no pics sadly. I still prefer the mega intake-fan from last week - that's good for sucking in pets and small children too.

Some guy in Thailand has his P3-500E at 900MHz.. air-cooled. Bah! Thanks to Rogalski for the link.

Yetanotherheatsinkcomparo here. The FDP-32 wins. Quick, everyone look surprised! :)

Guru3D have a review up of the Guillemot 3D Prophet GeForce 256 vid card..

The latest 3DWar is Slot1 boards vs Slot1+Socket370 ones..

Bill at cpureview.com has part 2 of his 1GHz plaything review up..

If you're interested in Socket370, FC-PGA and the differences between 'em, check out this new site dedicated to just that kinda stuff.. thanks Al.

TargetPC has taken a look at Iwill's Slocket2.. FC-PGA in yer Slot1 mobo.

Tech-Report has info on H.Oda's new Athlon L2 cache control program here.

Fri - 14-Jan-2000
Woah. What a killer flu. I don't ever remember being that sick before. Many thanks to everyone who sent Get Well emails and stuff. I'm pretty much 100% now and I've got some pretty cool stuff happening behind the scenes now - so stay tuned.

Some cool new P3 coolers came my way last week, I checked them out here.

I have updated the contest conditions, nothing major just some clarification of stuff asked in the forums. Still over 2 weeks for you to enter and win the Millennium Edition motherboard or a Palm IIIe or the other cool stuff..

Bill from cpureview.com has taken a look at the Kryotech 1GHz Athlon system..

This is maybe exciting, according to Kryotech their Australian distributor is www.grouppsi.com.au in Arnecliffe, Sydney. Not much on the website so if you're after some frozen 1GHz action you might wanna email them to see what the deal is.. thanks to Cheshire for the info.

Cluboverclocker have taken a look at some strange case coolers here, they look pretty dumb to me but he seems to like them..

MattyD dropped me a note to say that Adrenalin Computers in Hindley St. Adelaide have got the MSI FC-PGA adapter (the 6905 Master) for AUD$26.00. Good news if you're having trouble finding them. Eyo have the IWill SlocketII in stock now.

Another stupid Internet law is working it's way through the US courts. Check it out here, definitely sounds like something we don't want as a precedent for Australia.

Bill Gates hasn't resigned (bloody media) he's just changing his role from management-oriented to technology-oriented.. so everyone just calm down. :)

Vr-zone took a look at the EPoX EP-BX6 Special Edition motherboard. This has an in-built debugging card and a wide range of FSB's.. hmm.

Quite a lot of Peltier info here, including a big list of manufacturers. Thanks to PeterC for the link.

3DWars have compared the Asus V6600 Deluxe with the Elsa Erasor X, some GeForce action for you.

Interesting article on salvaging/making thermistors from old laptop batteries here..

An Aussie Gamers List database is up, they hope to have a list of everyone's email and ICQ so you can hook up for games or send abusive mail to that spotty 12yo who just gave you a pasting.. :)

This guy is quite inspiring. Link stolen from HardOCP, it's a very solid attempt at building a dual watercooled box based on the BP6. This is something I've been idly puzzling over for a while (sealing those two sockets is a bitch) - well thought out, very nicely executed with great results to show for it. Go check it out!

YMC have taken a look at the Alpha P3125, the copper-plate P3 cooler..

Heatsink-Guide have sneak pics of the new Globalwin VOS-32 heatsink with twin 60mm fans. This is a monster and quite neat because it can be used on SECC1 (P2 / Athlon) or SECC2 (P3) processors.

Sun - 9-Jan-2000
Still feeling very wierd so forgive any strangeness in today's news post..

Craig pointed this out in the forums, a really sharp looking 120mm intake fan on an AOpen HX-08 fulltower. Very cool!

Cluboverclocker have taken a look at the RDJD K601 Socket370 cooler here.

Will at cpureview.com is starting a weekly newsletter with news highlights from all the big hardware sites (including this one). If you're interested you can sign up from the front page of his site.

Aussiegamer have reviewed 3DFX's Voodoo3 3500 TV AGP here.

A little off-topic, but Beowulf is something I've been interested in for a while. It's a clustering system for Linux, which lets you use a bunch of Linux machines as a virtual supercomputer. AboutLinux.com have an interesting article here, sent in by one of their readers, about converting a research team's supercomputing facility from SGI/IBM boxes to a Linux/Beowulf cluster.

3DWars are continuing their series of company briefs - this time they look at Intel.

Tech-junkie have reviewed the Abit BP6 motherboard..

Ben Wu sent this in, it's a website of Y2K Mistakes - lots of screenshots of sites with y2k-related errors. Some of them are pretty funny, saying "No Y2K issues!" and being dated 1900 or similar.. :) There's even a shot of SharkyExtreme there..

If you worked over the millennium weekend you will be able to relate to this "Open Letter to the Y2K Bug"..

This is a funny review of the different foods you're likely to eat at LAN parties..

Sat - 8-Jan-2000
In case you're wondering, I'm not dead.. I just wish I was. Got some kind of horrible flu thing and a splitting headache, been asleep pretty much since Friday lunchtime. Hopefully capable of doing the news tomorrow or Monday..

Wed - 05-Jan-2000
Check this out - Jai Ketteridge has reviewed the Buddy B-210 Virtual PC System. This thing is very cool, lets 2 people share 1 PC. Each can run their own games, programs etc, with their own screen, keyboard and mouse.

Tom from pccoolers.com sent word that one of his customers had strapped a Globalwin FDP-32 onto his GeForce.. no, I'm not kidding. Heatsink lunacy here.

Tom also reports he now has loads of those SuperDual Twin-Fan Socket370 coolers in stock. We reviewed one here and it beat the FDP-32 by a degree.

Will over at pcindex.com.au has overclocked his P3-500E to 700MHz..

I've seen this before but Timbo reminded me, using carpet pad to quieten your case - I should set this up on my dual box, unpleasantly loud..

Very cool Athlon Overclocking Page here, diagrams for an overclocking card and other funky stuff..

Comparo info of the Athlon and G3 / G4 performance under Lightwave3D and Photoshop here.

In case you're wondering about the performance info of the above link, Ars-technica have an interesting architectural examination of those two processors here.

Dr Damage has an Athlon 800Mhz overclocked to 900Mhz (hmm, whoopee - actually, that seems to be about the air-cooled limit for the current core)

Overclockin.com have a PPGA Cooler Comparo up. Spot the link back to this site. :)

Kat is selling his water-jacket here in the forum. That is exactly the same unit as I used for my original water-cooling experiment here.

Seems ABIT made some mistakes with their latest BIOS for the BP6. Don't do it, kids - some severe problems with PCI IRQ assignment if you have ACPI enabled, apparently. Abit have pulled the file from their website and recommended everyone flashes back to the previous version. That's presuming your machine still boots. :) This is why I always wait a couple of weeks before trying these things..

Mon - 03-Jan-2000
Well, no major dramas from Y2K, thankfully. I've already seen a few people saying "Haha, what a crock the Y2K bug was, nothing happened" .. nothing happened, morons, because of people like me and my team at work, all over the world, working our arses off for 3 years to check and fix every system so that nothing would happen. It might have been more interesting for you if we didn't, but I for one prefer water when I turn the tap, electricity when I flick a switch, computers to use at work and nuclear power plants that don't explode because they think they haven't even been invented yet. :)

Anyway.. now's your chance to:

That's right, the competition I've been hinting about is finally on! Win yourself some goodies, go check out the details here. If you want to ask questions or discuss the competition please do it here in the forums. Read the thread before posting, maybe someone already asked your question! The cool logo is by flamingtext.com.

Also, I took a look at a couple of hdd coolers recently, including the "Ultimate Hard Drive Cooler", the big blue one.

Next up, Telstra is giving free training on how to alienate an entire customer base. Learn from their years of experience in this field by visiting Whirlpool, an independent site dedicated to the Big Pond Advance community. Very interesting site and you better check it out soon, because thanks to Telstra's insane pricing decision it will be shut down in about a week due to skyrocketing traffic costs. Also, if you're on BPA, a router-head and like playing in-depth with TCP/IP, check out their idea for possibly getting free-ish access. I dunno about you, but I've already registered my interest with Optus@Home..

Got a BP6 and having trouble getting SoftFSB to work? Thanks to Jon in the forums for letting us know that a proggy called BP6FSB is available here. It's a beta, so be careful.

If you're not hip to the whole SMP thing, you can read "SMP Explained" at SysOpt.com.. and kick yourself for not buying a BP6. :)

Interesting water-cooled experimental stuff here, worth a browse if you're thinking of joining the "people with a bucket next to their PC" club. Cool domain name, too. Thanks pOstal for the link..

Scott over at ClubOverclocker has done a review of the Abit BE6-II. He likes it. A lot. Like, maybe Scott and the BE6-II should get a frickin' room or something. :)

Tech-Junkie have a review of the Videologic DigiTheatre Decoder.. external Dolby thingy, for doing surround sound processing if your DVD card doesn't do it.

Nothing really new here, but interesting lapping info anyway. Thanks to Ryemax for the link.

Bah, back to work tomorrow.. no more Y2K.. now it'll be GST.. sigh.. :)

Thu - 30-Dec-99
Tomorrow's the big day! Hope everyone has a blast - and GOOD LUCK to us all, too. I personally think it'll be a bit of a fizzer (catastrophe wise) but that we will be noticing all kinds of little glitches for the next few months. Who knows, though..

Check this out - the ultimate Athlon board - that's right kids, 8-way SMP!!!!
Click the picture for a closer look!

Ok, it's another joke pic.. sorry. :)

Yesterday I took a look at the RDJD K602 Socket370 Cooler. Not a bad little unit for the price and very compact, too.

Gary at overclockin.com has checked out Trinity Micro's golden-finger Athlon overclocking gadget. See what he thought of it here.

3DWars have continued their series on chip companies with some info on Cyrix.

CPUReview have some musings on Intel's lessons learned from RAMBUS and the fact they are now talking to RAM manufacturers about standards instead of trying to lead the market with a proprietary product..

Fast-MHz took a look at some speakers from Boston Accoustics and a case from Apex..

Tue - 28-Dec-99
Well, I hope everyone had a great Christmas! I did.. I have returned to the AggCave stuffed with food, sunburnt and grazed (got hammered a few times while bodysurfing) and very tired.. it's great to get away from PC's and just chill on the beach with family etc sometimes..

On with the news. First up I'd like to officially welcome Servex as our major sponsor (note the banner on this page). You've probably noticed Servex have given us a few goodies over the last few weeks for testing - we've basically formalised that relationship now. Before you say it, yes, I know they're an AOpen distributor and NO, that won't bias us towards AOpen products. I have made it VERY clear that if they send us something that turns out to be junk, we will label it junk just as we would anyone else's products. They are happy with that as they want to know faults so they can do it right the next time. Also, we will, of course, keep checking out other manufacturer's products too. In fact, I have an ASUS P3C-2000 in the testbed right now..

Secondly is something not entirely on-topic and I bet I get flamed for this.. AllAdvantage is now available in Australia, you can download the software and start earning $$$. Now, I'm not going to get into a big debate about whether it's a good idea or not and whether or not webmasters should be promoting it, but the quite simple fact is that this site does NOT pay for itself yet, and if [a] you were thinking of joining AllAdvantage anyway and [b] you want to support the site somehow, this might be a good way to do it. It doesn't affect how much you earn to have me as your referrer anyway. Ok, enough of that. Why do I feel dirty? I've started a topic about this in the Forum, too, go give me your thoughts.

Interesting stuff on Joshua, Cyrix/VIA's it's-gonna-be-here-sometime chip, here.

Useful thing on Freak! about configuring Windows NT to turn off your PC on shutdown the same way Win9x does. I don't think they mention versions, I presume they mean NT4. It involves copying your HAL files around which if you do wrong can leave you in an unbootable state, so be careful. I've not tried it yet as I'm not using NT4 at home anymore. However, my Win2K machine doesn't do it (turn off) either (Abit BP6 mobo) .. hmm.

Speaking of which, I saw over on the HardOCP that there is a new BIOS for the BP6 which fixes a Y2K issue. Nice timing, guys..

CPUReview have some info on Intel's plans to make graphics chips again.

Overclockin.com have a comparison of 7 different sticks of RAM, seeing how high each can be cranked. Interesting stuff.

Interesting history of AMD article on 3DWars..

OverclockedPC have dug around in Overclockers.com's database and worked out, based on that data, which CPU's are hitting the highest average speeds.. I wouldn't use this data to make buying decisions as [a] there's no way to work out what percentage of each chip is overclockable and [b] there's no way to verify the accuracy/stability of the reported speeds. Interesting read anyway.

Speeder is yet another program to magically speed up your PC. These things usually turn out to be bollocks so I haven't looked at it and probably won't, but Overclockers Workbench have, here. Someone tell me if it bumps your frame rates in Q3. :)

Huge guide to Unreal Tournament on Gamespot.

UndergroundHardware have taken a look at sticking a peltier onto your TNT2 card.. GeForce performance? Not quite, but an interesting idea..

Tech-Junkie have taken a look at some Videologic goodies - the Sirocco Crossfire sound system here and the SonicVortex 2 sound card here.

Interesting article on EMBM (environment mapped bump mapping) here on Guru3D. Discusses features vs standards, the eternal debate..

There. That lot oughtta keep you guys busy for a while.. :)

Wed - 22-Dec-99
Not long till Y2K now, kids. A few of you know this already, but for those who don't, my Day Job is Tech Support Manager for a large US bank's Australian branches. So, as you can imagine, I've been pretty busy battening down the hatches over the last few weeks. Also, my hours become really weird soon, including a 12-hour shift over NYE (great) so updates may be a little sporadic for a while. Furthermore, I'm going to see my parents over Christmas, so between this Friday and the next Tuesday there will be no updates and most email will be ignored (actioned on my return) .. I will be reading it with the palmpilot, but composing essay-like replies is annoying on that little keyboard.. not to mention it detracts from my "stuffing myself with fresh prawns while lazing in the sun between scuba-diving sessions" time. :)

Also, from now on the links on this news page will open in a new window, due to a few requests I've had lately (wow, people read this stuff :) ) - non-news links and normal in-site links will stay in the same window..

Kyle at the HardOCP has taken a look at the FC-PGA (flipchip) P3-500E. Seen a few reports of these chips hitting monster speeds now, hmm! Maybe the next big thing. He also has some Top-Secret Intel Roadmaps, so put on your Secret Squirrel cap and check it out. Notably, Intel are moving from Slot1 to FC-PGA almost completely.

Looks like Joe over at overclockers.com heard my curses at the Soyo SY-6VBA-133 motherboard recently. He's got one for review too and has been having similar problems to me. He's obviously smarter than me, though, he got his readers to solve his problems for him. Some common issues and solutions here.

Jim dropped a note to say that Leadman have changed the price on the 400W PSU he reviewed for us here. So stop hassling them for the price we quoted in the review, things change. I updated the review to reflect this..

Dan Rutter (another Aussie) at DansData has a review of the AOpen AX6BC Pro II Millennium Edition (shorter names from now on please Mr AOpen) here. Interesting stuff, you can compare my world premiere review (cough *modest* cough) here. One thing jumped up and smacked me from Dan's review, though, he says: "But a C-366 is fairly unlikely to be able to manage 550MHz - well, not without voltage goosing and hefty extra cooling, anyway".. hmm, what a silly thing to say given the huge (and very easy) overclocking successes people have had with that chip.

Tom over at www.pccables.com.au has finally gotten a more sensible URL for himself. In case you don't know, he brings in a lot of Globalwin and Vantek coolers, cooling fans etc. All kinds of goodies for your overworked PC, not just cables. So he's now at www.pccoolers.com .. still an Aussie site, despite no .au.

At least one happy person from that FIC SD-11 fix we brought you on Monday, according to this thread on arstechnica..

A new site under construction, hwlinks.co.uk. Not a whole lot there now - hopefully will become a proper catalog of sites so I can just redirect my "links" page to it. :) I had to mention it, though, as we're the only site listed under "Overclocking Sites".. :)

Saw Austin Powers 2 again last nite (it's on video now). Heather Graham is awesome. That's all for tonight!

Mon - 20-Dec-99
Good news for any FIC SD-11 Athlon motherboard owners who are in a world of spontaneous reboots at the moment. It's not just you, it's a known fault with the board. I was contacted by John Gatt, Australian Sales & Marketing Manager for FIC who provided full details of the problem and what to do about it.

Interesting article on 3DWars - an interview with Eric Boeing, marketing dude for Abit. A few good questions there, like "Why is ABIT building graphics cards suddenly, and not making any Athlon boards?" .. something I have wondered myself. Check it out here.

Tech-report have been playing with an 800MHz Athlon, lucky sods.

Overclockin' reviewed the Alpha P3125 - this is the big P3 monster cooler with the copper heat spreader plate, worth a look. Before you ask, no, I don't know anyone bringing Alphas into Australia.. so just drool quietly or buy some from the US over the 'net.

TargetPC takes a look at R2D2, C3PO and a couple of ewoks. Errr, no! Sorry, they take a look at the RDJD K701 Athlon cooler..

Bill from Cpureview.com has compiled what he knows about Intel's new "high-end" chipset, i840, into an article..

nVnews have a thingy up on tweaking Q3's graphics settings for quality vs performance (all pretty obvious, but interesting screenshots showing the differences)

Just got an EverGlide pad in the mail from AusPCMarket, hmm, smoothy smoothy.. kinda gives me a weird urge to chop up some carrots on it, though. Review soon.

Sad stuff - Saw over on slashdot that Desmond Llewelyn, who (among other things) played Q in all but 2 of the Bond films, died yesterday in a car crash. Q was a true geek hero - I was very sad to see him farewelled in the latest Bond flick.. it's a tragedy that he's gone for good now. Actually, quite bizarrely, I was probably watching a Bond video at the time - last night I had a quiet one at home with the girly, watching "Octopussy".

Fri - 17-Dec-99
Slow news day yesterday. It happens. Seems to be happening a lot lately, actually. Anyway, gives me more time to work on fun stuff like reviews..

To prove my point, I took a look at a quite funky (do I use that word too much? ahh, funk off. :) ) dual-fan socket370 cooler. You too can enjoy the sound of a dual machine without all the problems of actually having 2 cpu's.. (like, having more clock cycles than you know what to do with). Actually, this unit is quite fu.. err, neat. Works well and looks good, too! Stick it in your clear perspex case with the Millennium Edition motherboard..

SystemLogic have taken a look at the Soyo SY-6VBA-133. I have one here and it's a very useful board, but I haven't written a review of it yet because I've been having so much freaking trouble getting it to work with various sticks of RAM and HDD's.. some compatability issues there for sure. When it works it's pretty cool, though..

Hardware-One take a look at the DDR GeForce-powered Creative Annihilator. This would have to be THE kickass vid card to have now. Apparently it's coming here soonish.. thanks to Brett for the link.

Deeztech have a Socket370 Cooler Shootout up now, 5 units including the Alpha..

Kyle over at the HardOCP has some cool mousemats..

Cpureview have some semi-interesting info on Athlon boards, in the form of email from their readers..

A little Danish dual watercooling action with a fridge.. not enuff pics for my liking, but there you are.

A quick look at the DFI PA61 motherboard, another Apollo Pro 133 based one here.

Wed - 14-Dec-99
Ok, a few days worth of news now, so go get a coffee and do some mouse-hand stretching and flexing first..

AOpen are certainly pumping out the funky hardware lately. Their latest video card, the PA3030, is a TNT2U card (with SGRAM, mmm) which has "Open BIOS" on it.. what's that? It's a BIOS setup program, you know, just like your motherboard, that lets you adjust the core and memory speed, core voltage, i/o voltage etc.. check the screenshot:

click for big pic

As long as this BIOS utility lets you crank the card as high as the programs like TNTCLK and PowerStrip let you, this should be pretty cool.. (unless you make your living from writing those programs). More info on this card and this technology in 2 Word documents, here and here.

AussieGamer.com have a review of the AX6BC Pro II Millennium Edition up now, too. Check out my review from yesterday for comparison..

Shannon from NZ has updated his page, more info on his C400 at 744MHz, watercooled with peltiers etc.. now if only he'd realise that HTML frames are eeeevil.. :)

Saw over on OverclockedPC that the funky radiators I've seen offered for sale in Japan and Taiwan are now available in Canada.. ok, it's not Australia, but at least it's an English-speaking country.. I emailed the manufacturer in Taiwan and distributor in Japan but they never mailed me back..

Suck.com have a parody of Slashdot.org up.. hehehehe.

3DWars have taken a look at a few mice. I'm not going to make a balls joke. :) They cover 3 models, including the Intellimouse Explorer (sexy+) which we reviewed a few weeks ago..

www.Fast-MHz.com have a new look now, pretty cool and it only cost them a C300A. :) Actually some good stuff on that site, worth digging around on if you're stuck for summat to do..

This is interesting, despite not being entirely relevant to Aussies, I'm sure it happens here too. TheChipTesters have taken a look at the ripoff prices some places charge for shipping (the old "our prices are cheap but we make it up in shipping" scam). Check it out here..

My PalmIII died the final death yesterday, I was very sad. It's about 18 months old I think, so I was fully expecting to have to pay to have it fixed, or buy another one, or something.. rang 3Com Australia, they said "No worries, post it to us and we'll send you a replacement free of charge.." .. cool!

Tue - 13-Dec-99
I've spent the last 2 (very late) nights working on a review of the AOpen AX6BC Pro II Millennium Edition. I used an unlocked P2 to see how high I could get it to run stably, in comparison to the normal Pro we reviewed a few weeks ago.. with quite surprising results.

That's all for tonight, sleep now..

Mon - 12-Dec-99
Unlimited Hardware have a competition now, one lucky person will win a Soyo M/B, a P3-450 that does 600MHz and an Alpha cooler.. all for telling John why you want it. Simple. :) I asked John if the contest was open to international visitors and he replied "Absolutely"..

Some funky stuff on HardOCP today, a very sexy looking Athlon-adjuster-card-thingy, probably the tidiest looking of the many floating around at the moment.. and a neat kit for cooling yer GeForce..

Impressive pics on www.overclockin.com of a Coppermine 650 at 890MHz.. Intel are hitting the big MHz but the Athlon just blows them away in the Sandra stakes still..

..and while I'm stealing links, over on arstechnica I spotted the sexymouse.. you can sod your ergonomics, we want mice with tits.

Wow, it's finally happened - a computer on your wrist!

cpureview have some info on a cheapie DVD drive by Cicero .. anyone seen this stuff here?

Saw on Club Overclocker that overclockers hideout have a funky water-cooling block up..

Hey, would anyone be interested in a yourname@overclockers.com.au email address? It'd be a web-based thing, kinda like Hotmail I guess.. if enough ppl are interested I will set it up.. mail me.. actually, post your answer here in the forum.

Sat - 11-Dec-99
Jeff McLuckie has taken a look at the Aureal Vortex 2 SQ2500 Quad PCI sound sard for us. Jeff's pretty keen so we'll probably be seeing more reviews from him soon..

Cpureview have more info on RAMBUS and it's future direction here..

Interesting one here - a review of a Gigabyte card using Matrox's G400 chipset.. hmm. It only works with Gigabyte motherboards.. good one, guys.

Tech-Report have taken a look at Trinity Micro's adapter-adjuster-thingy for the Athlon's golden finger connection..

TweakTown is trying to get a benchmarking database of Sisoft Sandra results up, you can add your own results there.

TargetPC have a comparison of HDD coolers up..

There's an interesting thread running here, about the stability of the BP6. Certianly seem to be a lot of unhappy people, but I'm not one.. I wuv my BP6 (aww)..

..and on our own forums, there's been some sleuthing regarding who's making who's power supplies here. Interesting stuff!

Fri - 10-Dec-99
This guy has some ideas on how Microsoft can finally work out the Y2K-compliance issues with Office 2000.. :)

BIll at cpureview.com has gazed into his silicon ball and given us a preview of VIA's upcoming KX133 Athlon chipset..

Tech-junkie now have a review of Quake III up. This has replaced Driver as my standard burning-in and stress-testing program.. :)

Steve Hardy let me know that the Tyan VIA 133A board is here in Aus finally, the distributor is here, there's a review here and Tyan's info page here.

Overclocker's Workbench have some pics of the new Abit VA6 posted..

Joe over at overclockers.com has been playing with the Coppermine P3-500E and he thinks it's the next big thing in overclocking. How big? Well, he can't exactly tell, because he maxed out his board at 776MHz and the chip seemed unconcerned.. no change in voltage. Passive cooling only. Woah!

Still no RAMBUS for me. Boo-hoo. Saw over on the HardOCP that ASUS have a Dimmverter that will let you use SDRAM DIMMS in your RAMBUS motherboard. A couple of readers have told me that Eyo have these in Oz.. hmm, kinda defeats the purpose.. but if nobody comes through with any RAMBUS I guess I'll have to!

Thu - 09-Dec-99
I took a look at 2 slot-type case coolers today, you can read all about 'em here.

Bill at cpureview.com has sent his Celeron SMP Petition off to Intel. Basically he wants them to NOT disable SMP on the die of future Celeron and other "low-end" chips, so that hobbyists and normal humans who can't afford dual P3 boxes can still enjoy dual processing.. I am typing this on a dual Celeron box and you can bet my name is on that petition, along with 16,000+ others. You can add yours here if you like, even though it's been sent off to Intel already, more names can't hurt..

3DMark2000, which will pretty much become an instant benchmarking standard and videocard showing-off tool, was released in final form by MadOnion.com today. I've not downloaded it yet, but from the screenshots they are much much better at writing benchmarking software than choosing domain names, which is a very good thing.

Tech-junkie have managed to pull off some bizarre time-warp thing and have written up a review of 3DMark2000 already.. remember, they're another Aussie site, go check 'em out.

Link spotted on www.overclockin.com, this air-cooled Athlon 500 at 884MHz!

Dr Damage has put up a pretty cool Athlon Overclocking FAQ. As you'd expect it's full of good stuff including a question I've been wondering myself, about the whole Athlon 200Mhz or 100Mhz bus thing..

Office Christmas party tomorrow.. must not get drunk.. must not dance like an idiot.. must not voice opinion of co-workers.. must not destroy career. Mmm, free booze..

Tue - 07-Dec-99
Hey Guys - if any of you know a supplier who can loan (or donate) some RAMBUS memory to the site, please let me know! I've got an AX6C arriving here soon and it's going to be tricky to test without any RAM for it.. "this is the board.. umm, it's green.. smells like plastic.."

Speaking of RAMBUS, 3DWars have a comparison of PC133 and RAMBUS memory. They don't have their hands on any either, this is a technical theory type of comparison.. interesting stuff about the relative timing of the chips etc.

Fast-MHz have finished their competition now - if you entered, head on over and see if you won a C300A..

Dimension-X have some news on the new Athlon coolers from ComputerNerd. They've put some serious thought into cooling CPU's on the K7M, getting around the dreaded power connector, and come up with some pretty funky stuff..

Some info on the new Abit VA6 on OWB.. looks like another "We're afraid of Intel, don't tell them we made this board, we'll just tell everyone in the universe and try to keep it a secret anyway" thing like the K7M. I bet this is all just some big marketing thing.. don't believe the hype! :)

Check out this Aussie site's review of Unreal Tournament.. still haven't seen that one myself, actually. Too busy playing WITH my PC's to actually play ON them..

Big Willy Henning over at CPUReview has dug around again and discovered that the Athlon+FIC mainboard is cheaper than P3+BE6 at every clock speed.. US pricing, of course. I could tell you if it's true for Oz too, but I can't be bothered digging through the Trading Post for that long. :)

Speaking of Trading Post, there is now a forum for buying and selling stuff on this site. I noticed a lot of this kinda stuff going on in the other forums, may as well give it a proper home. Check it out here. While I had the admin program open, I thought I'd create the talk-about-anything-you-want forum people have been asking for, too. That's here, called The Pub.. I'm accepting suggestions for a better name. :)

I normally hate these pseudo-inspirational things, but my sister just sent this and it's pretty cool:

> in the words of George Carlin:
>
> "The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends.
> I mean, life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time.
> What do you get at the end of it? A death.
> What's that, a bonus?
> I think the life cycle is all backwards.
> You should die first, get it out of the way.
> Then you live in an old age home.
> You get kicked out when you're too young,
> you get a gold watch, you go to work.
> You work forty years until you're young
> enough to enjoy your retirement.
> You do drugs, alcohol, you party,
> you get ready for high school.
> You go to grade school,
> you become a kid, you play,
> you have no responsibilities,
> you become a little baby,
> you go back into the womb,
> you spend your last nine months floating...
> you finish off as an orgasm."

hehe :)

Mon - 06-Dec-99
Servex, the Australian distributor for AOpen, have announced they are "phasing in" 2 new i820-based boards. The AX6C and AX6C-L - the only difference I can see is the number of RDRAM slots. Strange, the ones on the -L look almost like SDRAM slots.. the notches are wrong, I guess, and according to the docs they're 2 RDRAM slots. Is this related to the 3-RIMM problem with the i820? I thought that was fixed? Why make 2 identical boards except for the number of memory slots?? I'll try to get an answer on it tomorrow. They look pretty damned tasty anyway.. should have an AX6C here by this weekend. Look for a review soon! Here's some pics to keep you calm in the meantime, click for bigger ones:

AOpen AX6C (3x RAMBUS)

AOpen AX6C-L (2x RAMBUS)

The AX6C will be in Oz on the 13th of this month for a RRP of $349. No ETA on the AX6C-L, but the RRP is $329.. if you want to compare the layout of these two with the AX6BC-Pro, there's our review of it here, and our sneak-peek of the Millennium Edition here.

Akiba Hotline has pics of the AX6BC-Pro II Millennium Edition on sale in Japan. Remember you saw it here first, kids.

Some very funny stuff here - Computer Stupidities.. some of these are absolute classics if you've ever worked in support. :)

Wow. The Chinese have upheld a death sentence for a guy who hacked into a bank.. I know, geek purists will say "He's a cracker not a hacker" .. whatever. Too late, guys (for him, too).

Got informed of my working hours over the New Year today.. a 12-hour shift from 18:00 on 31-Dec until 06:00 on 1st Jan.. f'n great.

Sat - 04-Dec-99
I've taken a look at the Macase K10 Sunrise Mid-Tower ATX Case - quite a neat unit, with a few features more commonly found in full-tower cases.

Apparently the AX6BC-Pro II Millennium Edition (sneak-previewed here on Tuesday) will be in Australia in a couple of weeks. RRP will be $349.00.. and then you have to buy a nice transparent case to put it into. :)

If you know anyone selling an Amiga 4000 (within Australia or international - must be revision 11 socketed Buster) send this person an email as he's looking to buy one.

Woah! This one isn't fake, but it's huge.. check out this card, the "Mercury", from Quantum3D:

I got the link/pic from this Jailbreak conversation - the manufacturer's info is here. I hope they give away free card coolers with those monsters.. :)

Hardware-One aren't quoting their sources, but apparently there will be an FCPGA adapter for the BP6.. yes please!

HardOCP is 3DFXgamers site of the week.. funny interview here.

GamePC has taken a look at a bunch of full-tower cases.. they don't have my current box, the AOpen HX-08, nor the only thing I'd replace it with, the Supermicro 750A.. still, they look at 5 different models, worth a look if you're in the market.

ClubOverclocker has put up part 2 of their Overclocking Journey.. some useful links and info there.

If you're looking for a spanish-language overclocking site, the new "Overclockers Chile" may be useful to you.. not much there at the moment but it's still new.

Fri - 03-Dec-99
Woo. We are "Extreme Site of the Week" over at Club Overclocker and according to them, one of the top 5 hardware sites of all time. Hmm. :) I don't quite know about that, but hey, we must be doing something right.

This is pretty funny. News from Battlax in Japan - FIC are demonstrating an Apollo Pro 133A-based board, the KA11, which has replaced the powerup diagnostic beeps with a female voice telling you the problem. "Warning, processor not detected", "Warning, hard disk failure" .. "You just turned me on" .. "I'm getting all hot inside now" .. eerrr! Ok, I made those last two up. :) Anyway, check it out and listen to an example sample (a sample sample?) here.

You've seen these before, but they're still really really cool. I want one. Lots. Does anyone have any idea where to get things like this in Oz? I have emailed the manufacturer in Taiwan. Might have to get someone at work to do the translating for me.

There's all kinds of goodies on this page. Japanese text, but check out the pics.. note the external USB DVD-RAM drive.. mmm. Also a funky little thumb-type keyboard for palmpilots. Obviously don't have thumbs as big as mine..

Overclockers Workbench spotted that the new Intel board has diagnostic LED's that you can see from outside the case.. neato.

EYO have the Asus V6600 Deluxe GeForce (as reviewed yesterday here) in stock now, $635 for probably the most kick-arse card you can get in Oz at the moment. There's some GeForce info from Asus (fairly generic marketing waffle, but interesting in places) here .. it's a zipped .pdf.

In case your head hasn't quite exploded with GeForce stuff yet, try PlanetGeForce.com..

SGI are giving away a remanufactured O2 box. If you click here, you'll be able to enter the competition to win it, and you'll also give me an extra chance (some kind of referral thing, I dunno. Dunno what I'd do with it, either - put it in the pile with all the other poota bits).

Overclocking.telefragged.com has a review of the Soyo SY-6BA+IV up..

Thanks to James for answering my Genlock question from yesterday in the forums..

Stuck on what to buy people for christmas? This site has some cool stuff (and some shite).. I'd love a life-size (7 and a half feet tall) Darth Vader statue for my computer room.. :) and check out the "Truth Quest" phone!

Hmm, 2 parking tickets in 2 days..

Thu - 02-Dec-99
I managed to get my hands on a pre-release unit of the ASUS AGP-V6600 Deluxe GeForce 256 video card and shipped it off to Dean Claxton, our resident video fetishist, for a quick preview. His idea of a "quick preview" is a 4-page in-depth review including benchmarking comparisons to a TNT2 and playing with the video in/out features of the card. This card looks seriously nice, and has some amazing features - get this, the drivers can be set to AUTOMATICALLY OVERCLOCK the card depending on what you're doing and how hot it's running, the voltage stability of the AGP slot etc! It has a winbond hardware monitor onboard the card which checks the fan RPM's and chipset temps etc. This is amazing! Imagine this technology extended ot the motherboard - it's not that big a jump - some kind of automatic SoftFSB for your machine that speeds it up when you're playing games.. oooh, I'm off to have a rant in the forums now. Come give me your ideas about this. :)

For another side of it, check out Thresh's review of the card which also went up today. I note they don't bother clocking the card higher than the included utility allows.. bah, amateurs. :)

If that wasn't enough GeForce action to satisfy you, check out this page, which has (apparently) links to every GeForce-related article ever published. Lots, anyway.

Digital-clips have an article on Overclocking the Athlon, they take a 500Mhz unit to 650Mhz..

If you're looking for files, there's a new Australian site, Iwarp Downloads, which may be worth a bookmark. Some of the files look a little dubious on the legal side to me.. :)

Another good place to get overclocking-related files is here, they have new betas of SoftFSB and WCPUID up now, apparently.

Cpureview took a look at the Hauppage WinTV-Go card.. hey, whatever happened to the term "Genlock" from the Amiga days? When you wanted to capture video from your TV or VCR into your Amiga, you needed a Genlock. Now they're called video capture cards (ok, more intuitive naming is good) but what did Genlock mean, anyway? Was it just a brand?

OC'ers Workbench have some pics of an AMR modem, in case you were wondering what they look like. Lots of new mobo's have the AMR riser slot in them now.. actually, I think EYO have some AMR modems now, in case you wanted to buy one in Oz.

ClubOverclocker (which used to be Club Celery) have some interesting findings from playing with copper-based thermal paste.. remember, this stuff is electrically conductive as well as thermally, so you can't just slop it around like you do with the silicone-based stuff.

A newish site is OverclockedPC, run by Aram who's something of a regular in the forums here.

Tue - 30-Nov-99
Just a quickie today, but big news. AOpen have announced what looks like a truly awesome board, the "AX6BC-Pro II Millennium Edition". They have pulled out all the stops for this one - here's the press release:

..and here's a picture - click for a bigger one:

As you'd know if you'd read my review of the original AX6BC-Pro, this line of motherboards has been my favourite of the single-slot1 BX boards for a long time. I imagine this will be the last of a very prestigious family. Expect a review on this site very soon!

Mon - 29-Nov-99
Fast-MHz.com have a competition up, win yourself a Celeron C300A by designing a new logo for them. Actually there will be a competition here very soon, and my prizes are much cooler than that. :)

Man, the Japanese get all the cool stuff! I want one of these kits.. actually, I just want the funky radiator. Link stolen from HardOCP.

Interesting site here with an emphasis on video - drivers, troubleshooting, chipset info etc.

Plycon.com have a great article on what monster coolers do and don't fit on the K7M (here's a hint: none do)

Cool article on what various chips look like on the inside on arstechnica.com.

Sun - 28-Nov-99
TargetPC have an interesting couple of articles up - Troubleshooting Overclocking Problems, part 1 and part 2. These should be required reading for newbies! :)

From 2CPU.com, a link to this conversation about possibly breaking the multiplier lock.. no, no magical solution, but interesting reading.

I know this isn't a gaming site, but look at this anyway - a 3D shooter (and a damned impressive looking one) done completely by one guy.. engine, textures, models, the lot. Wrote his own level-design tools for the job, too. Wonder how long it'll be before someone snaps him up with a bucketload of money.. anyway, I think I stole the link from the shack.

Sat - 27-Nov-99
Jim has sent along part 2 of his "Building a Stable Athlon System" saga. In this one he examines the difference an AMD-approved power supply can make..

He also has a review of the PSU itself, the Leadman Model LP-6100 400 Watt Power Supply.

Harley posted an interesting message in the forum here in response to the Athlon article, which lists some messages he saved from other forums out there (doesn't say where) - some Athlon owners talking about their RAM issues and experiences..

Some Aussie guys going hard, water-cooled peltiers on a C300 and C400 - check it out here. Way to go, guys!

Ever wondered how they make CPU's? There's an interesting article here on cpusite.

Andy at BXBoards has a beta BIOS for the BE6-II / BF6 which apparently lets you get your AGP video stable at really high FSB's.. one guy says he has his V770U running at 150Mhz FSB. Yeeghs. Be careful..

If you were much better at planning and designing your overclocking projects than me, and didn't just bodge things together from what you have lying around the house.. you'd be like Kendon, who has put some amazing effort into his system. Really nicely done - it's in Japanese but has loads of pics. Go through the menu on the left hand side of his page for some of his other overclocking projects, too..

If you're thinking of getting into overclocking, reading "An Overclocking Journey" might be a good idea - see how 'DivideBy0' did it, and what he would do differently next time.. interesting read.

Fri - 26-Nov-99
You've probably seen it already but Arstechnica have uncovered some underhanded marketing from a vendor - quite an interesting read. Check it out here. Don't go getting all evangelical about it, though, this kind of thing probably happens all the time..

Bill from cpureview spoke to some Cyrix and VIA folks and got some interesting info on the up-coming Joshua chip..

Overclockers.com have an Athlon 500 o/c to 800 system..

Non-english link of the day is Forum3D.de - a German site with daily hardware news etc..

Thu - 25-Nov-99
Heh, caused a bit of a stir on some of the other sites with that pic yesterday. :)

If you've got (or you know someone who has) skills in the roles of Chemical Engineer, Chemist or Microelectronics Engineer, check out this "Engineering Staff Wanted" ad in the forums.

Gary at www.overclockin.com has some tasty Copper Heatsinks - for some reason called "CoolWhip" - they must be running low on good ones in the name factory at the moment.

Guru3D have taken a look at the ASUS GeForce V6600.. mmm.. geforce..

That's all. Going for a ride. :)

Wed - 24-Nov-99
Check out this new card from 3DFX! The Voodoo5 9000 AGP - those guys are not kidding anymore:

click for (much) bigger pic!

You may need to cut a hole in your case so it can stick out the back a bit.. oh alright, it's a fake. :) You can thank Dean Claxton for the heart-start. :)

Tom's Hardware has a pretty funky article on making your own Athlon controller card for connecting to the gold-finger connector on the Athlon, so you can conveniently adjust voltage, multiplier etc.. I heard that ZD-Radio interview with Tom the other day.. I have to say.. he did sound pretty dorky. :)

This should be a great motherboard - AOpen's new AX6C - based on the i820 chipset, so Rambus and UDMA/66 support etc. Hopefully it follows in the footsteps of their excellent AX6BC line (read our review of the 'Pro' model here). If anyone from AOpen is reading I would love a demo unit. :)

Gary from www.overclockin.com has a P3-450 that does 648MHz with conventional cooling. Bastard. :)

Our man in Japan, Battlax, was quick to point out that the Gigabyte GA-6RD7 dual socket370-Slot1 converter (in Sunday's news post, picture below) is reputed to work on ANY slot1 board (presumably BX and above). I'll have one of those for testing too, please. :)

FPS3D have taken a look at 3DCool's Athlon Freezer - no, it's not a peltier-based system as the name suggests, just a socking great heatsink+twin-fan unit. They'll be stuck for a name when they DO bring out a peltier-based unit. :)

Andy from BXBoards has been playing with a FCPGA Coppermine, he has some interesting comments on overclocking/cooling them..

I got one of those funky Intellimouse Explorers today (read Jim's review here) (for $85 from CX Computers on Pitt Street in Sydney - having a sale, probably run out soon).. it's very cool. Oddly light but very smooth and the LED is peaking out the cool-o-meter..

Wow, this site is getting so hot I need to add extra cooling!

Sorry. :)

Sun - 21-Nov-99
Good news for you K7M owners, Mr ASUS has finally admitted to being the father. Here's their official site, and here's where you should look for BIOS updates etc from now on. Here's my earlier review of the board if you've no idea what I'm talking about. Thanks to HardOCP for the pointer.

This is interesting - Gigabyte have made a dual Socket370 to Slot1 converter card.

click for bigger pic

I know nothing about this thing because all the info is in Japanese. QIC made one ages ago, but it needed a special motherboard to work, which made it useless - you may as well buy a dual motherboard instead. If this works in any BX motherboard it will be big news. There's nothing on Gigabyte's site[s] that I could find. Here's the link (on a Japanese news site - it's down the bottom of the page) - if any japanese-reading people could let me know what the deal is that would be cool..

For all you flightsim freaks, TargetPC have taken a look at Jane's USAF. Must be time for me to dust the Flightstick Pro off again..

Abit have announced 2 new Camino boards.. thanks to Trev for the link.

Redback let me know that Oatley Electronics have some great prices on peltiers at the moment: "42W for $25, 60W for $27.5, and 75W for $30 the site says that they all do DT 65°". They sell all kinds of funky stuff from that site, actually..

More cool stuff in Japan. Thanks again to Battlax - check out the official box for the K7M, a cool modified Athlon (with dipswitches and peltiers) and a bunch of new mobo's here.

Bill from cpureview has his comdex first looks up.. basically a big bunch of photos. Interesting to compare, for those of you who went, to Networld+Interop in Sydney..

Thu - 18-Nov-99
I like to give the Aussie sites a plug - here's another, www.tech-junkie.com .. (damn, another cool domain name I didn't think of first). Despite the .com domain, it's run by Leo from Adelaide..

Will over at cpureview.com has updated his P3 vs Athlon price guide again, to include the 650 and 700MHz parts.

Overclockers.co.uk have a pretty cool article up on cracking your Athlon open (so you can attack it with your soldering iron).

Some Japanese info on Comdex here (shush, just look at the pics). Thanks to Battlax for the pointers - check here, here and here.

Also from Battlax (but worthy of a line by itself) - AOpen have announced their i820 boards with (count 'em) 3 Rambus slots! Also, RIoWorks have a similar board out now. Looks like Intel have the whole 3-slot thing fixed now..

HardOCP have some promising news.. a possible hardware hack to allow Coppermines to work in a normal PPGA (Socket370) motherboard. Can you say "Dual Coppermines on a BP6"? Maybe not yet, but it's a good sign that some clever taiwanese guy will be able to bring out a socket-socket convertor or something..

Overclockin.com have some Twin-Turbo and Super-Duper Slot Fan action happening..

HardwareHQ is a new site based in New Zealand, believe it or not. Their latest article - how to overclock your shears and do 2 sheep at once! Sorry guys.. :) (actually I'm just baiting my NZ-born GF)

Speaking of NZ'ers, Shannon has updated his C400 @ 744MHz page to show more detail of his water-cooler.. nice rig.

I think "Fester" would have to be the stupidest name for a motherboard reference model ever. I mean, really, AMD.. (no link, just a rant)

Mon - 15-Nov-99
Dean has reviewed the REALmagic Remote Control - lets you use your DVD-capable multimedia PC from the comfort of your armchair - perfect for those of you who can't decide if you're geeks or couch potatoes. :)

Did some cosmetic stuff on the site this weekend, the "Aussie Systems" bit is now merged into the Articles section, also some behind-the-scenes stuff to make it a bit easier to update. I'm working on changing the articles menu to subject-sorted rather than date-sorted. Added some stuff to the links page too.

Gary from www.overclockin.com has a quick Athlon 500 -> 800MHz article up.

A review of the Socket370 Alpha cooler here.

Al from Desktop Creations is doing some news reporting for targetpc.com - a Canadian site, I haven't really checked it out yet but looks ok.

Check out PC Power and Cooling for loads of cooling and power-supply goodies, they're in the US so it's a bit expensive though..

Fri - 12-Nov-99
If you're considering an Athlon, then this article, "Building a stable Athlon system", is an absolute must-read. Jim details his experiences of the last few weeks with various combinations of motherboards, RAM and power supplies in the quest for stability..

CPUReview has taken a look at the AirBoard Wireless Keyboard..

This is old, but still pretty funny. The old "stick the computer in the fridge" thing. Take it with a large grain of salt. :)

FastMHz have taken a look at the Sunon 120mm case fan. Doubles as a blender.

Completely off-topic but pretty damn funny stuff here..

Not exactly super-new news but a review of the FEP-32 cooler here.. I use 'em on my BP6, they're the biz.

Overclockers.com has an interesting article up, "Poor Man's Overclocking" - part 1 and part 2.

Adrian's dropped an article on tweaking your AGP Sidebanding into his Rojak Pot..

Wed - 10-Nov-99
We now have a review of the Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer up, thanks to Jim. An entertaining look at quite a funky piece of hardware..

Tim sent in his idea for re-using your stock P3 cooler (after you've ripped it off and put a real cooler on the chip) to cool a Voodoo3..

Kyle at the HardOCP has taken a look at the Soyo SY-6BA+IV.. look for a review of the SY-6VBA-133 here soon.

One guy's approach to building a ducted BP6 system here, interesting site.

Falcon40 has some interesting case cooling happening too..

TheTechZone have taken a look at the Ultimate Hard Drive Cooler..

Tue - 09-Nov-99
Ok, big update today because I finally got my main home machine sorted out. ATI make the worst video drivers in the world, I swear. Finally rebuilt the machine and I figured instead of installing NT4 again I'd go for Win2K RC2. Seems pretty funky so far - if anyone's interested I will do an article on my impressions of it after a few weeks. In the meantime..

Look at these awesome banners! Al from Desktop Creations sent them along. He's just given his site a major overhaul too, so check it out for the coolest wallpaper around for your overclocked PC. Feel free to use these banners if you want to link to us!

PeterC has written up some peltier musings - interesting reading for those of you who are thinking of taking the peltier plunge. If you find that article useful check out a previous one that looks at it from a slightly different angle by Ken Peter.

If your P3-450 doesn't have the magic Toshiba cache chips on it, just rip off your slower ones and solder some Toshi parts on! "Errr, right", I hear you say. Well, Nick the Mad British Overclocker has done it, check out the details here.. maybe I'm getting old, but I'd just sell mine in the trading post and try for a better chip next time..

The news from Battlax, our man in Japan - a new slocket which allows "force to 166MHz FSB" .. just the thing for melting your AGP card - Coppermines on sale in Japanese shops, damn they always get the good stuff first, some tasty pics there - pre-orders for the new Sanyo 12X CD-R burner being taken now there also - some cases that only the country that brought you "Hello Kitty" could create..

Actually, surfing around from that link above got me to what has to be the ultimate Linux case! Hehehehe..

Bunny (another Japanese loony) has gotten a P3-600E to 1018MHz (6x 170MHz), apparently with liquid nitrogen cooling but I can't find much information apart from a screenshot, wish I could read Japanese. While surfing the rest of his site I found an article on changing the Athlon's golden finger connections.. here's the warning from that page (I guess he translated it himself):

I know, I shouldn't laugh at this stuff. His English is way better than my Japanese.. :)

Ok, the last non-English link for today - this Danish site has some water-cooled action on it. Click the "Celeron 300" link for pics of the system.

Shannon, a New Zealander, has gotten 744MHz from a C400 with a serious setup.. (normally at this point I would make a joke about NZ not being an english-speaking country either, but my NZ-born GF is in the next room and she can detect a sheep joke from 200 metres)

Those of you who got MBM v4.11 when it came out a week or so ago should rush and get v4.12 now because it apparently fixes a memory leak problem in the old version. Still definitely the best of the motherboard monitor type programs..

Interesting look at whether the pentium-optimized Mandrake Linux is better than RedHat for your Athlon-based Linux system here..

Not super-new news but cpureview have taken a look at the Diamond Viper V770U. I have this card in my games machine and it's pretty tasty..

Overclockin.com has been redesigned with a whole new look, check it out, some good info there..

Fri - 05-Nov-99
Those Japanese guys with the silly name have done it again, cranking their P3-450 to 740MHz.. that's a 165MHz FSB. Not much in the way of details but info here, thanks Battlax.

Here's a coppermine at 1GHz.. original article in French, translation to English, thanks Trev.

Asus K7M BIOS update here.. spookily enough, it's actually on an Asus site.

This is what we wanna see - some water-cooled Athlon action. No peltiers, but 727MHz from a 500 unit.. mmm.

CPUReview.com shows that the Athlon is cheaper than the P3 at all MHz's.. US$ prices of course, but interesting.

FPS3D has a review of the Abit BF6 posted..

Tillman from the heatsink-guide has a HDD cooler comparison posted.

Thu - 04-Nov-99
Dean Claxton has updated his review of the REALMagic Hollywood Plus DVD card to reflect the new drivers which fix a few problems with the card. This is an excellent card and this review has been very well received by the DVD community. Check out the review here or jump direct to the new page here.

Thanks to everyone who sent in the Hercules drivers! Stop sending them now please. :)

A site called Fast-MHz.com (gee, all this time I've just been using normal MHz) has an interesting "how we made a fast BP6-based dual C366 @ 583 machine" article here.

Battlax sent in this - pics of the IWill Slocket II for sale in Japan. This lets you use FC-PGA (socket-type Coppermine) in a Slot-1 board. Japanese text but pics are good - check out the jumper for PPGA or FC-PGA.. pretty cool. Also notice the "Intel/Cyrix" jumper.. Joshua support??

Interesting interview with representatives from 5 major motherboard manufacturers here. Quite a good read and arranged so you can compare the answers from each manufacturer. Good stuff.

More political stuff here, FIC's response to Intel's lawsuit against VIA.

Matthew Pace sent in an interesting link.. how to mount a front-facing 120mm fan in your PC. I like the way they have no finger guards on this monster, good for sucking pets and small children into it.

Tue - 02-Nov-99
Matthew Stribling sent in an interesting idea - use a dead slocket (like if you snapped a lug off the socket, or killed it trying to cut traces etc) with the capacitors removed as a jig when sanding your CPU slugs.. hmm, might try it with that one I killed during the original peltier experiment. Someone else (from Finland, but I lost your email!) says that he rinses the CPU's with water then uses a hairdryer to dry them afterwards.. hmm, ok.. :)

FPS3D.com have taken a look at some Sunon case fans..

Regarding the recent Athlon board review, a few people suggested lowering the core voltage, flashing with the latest BIOS etc (thanks to all who sent the BIOS btw).. I tried it, no difference.

Now I'm using the case for building my new water-cooled machine (details soon) around my new Soyo SY-6VBA-133 (review soon :) ) but am having some trouble with the new board.. if you've got one and feel like answering some basic questions, please drop me a note.. thanks.

Gary at www.overclockin.com has been doing some cool stuff lately, has one of those Trinity-Micro modified Athlons (dipswitches for setting everything), some SL35D action etc.. check it out.

Interesting overview-type article on the whole Athlon/Coppermine thing at www.cpureview.com. Not really anything new but a good recap and summary. I'm really interested to see how this whole Athlon/Coppermine thing will work out over the next few months.. especially after February, when the BX chipset is apparently slated to stop being produced - which will remove some of Intel's leverage over people to stop making Athlon boards. Maybe. Imagine a dual Athlon board that's got AGP-4X, UDMA/66, some funky ram technology and is overclocking friendly.. aargh, drooling on the keyboard again.

Will from cpureview.com also has some info on Intel's legal actions against VIA for allegedly violating technology licensing agreements with their APOLLO PRO chipset. I dunno.. I try not to get involved in the political side of the technology game but it does seem that Intel's being a bit Microsoft about this.

If anyone has the drivers for the Hercules Dynamite TNT2 cards, please let me know. Kinda hard to get them now that Hercules has gone bust and their website is apparently gone too.

This is pretty amazing - a chromed case! Perfect for all those times when you have to do your hair and play quake at the same time.

The forums are officially open now, had some minor problems but fixed 'em, nobody seemed to notice or sent me any complaints so I take it they're working fine! Certainly some interesting conversations going on in there. :) Check 'em out. Still need to do some work on the HTML side of them, I think.. maybe this weekend.

If you've sent info in and I haven't put it up yet, don't panic. So much email, so little time. :)

Fri - 29-Oct-99
Another cool hardware hack from Slartibartfast. All you guys with motherboards that only have a motherboard temp sensor which is miles from the CPU and gives you a completely useless temperature reading - despair not. Here's how to convert that sensor to a remote temp probe you can use for CPU temps or whatever you like..

Les Tutt sent in some great pictures to go with his article from a couple of weeks ago. You remember - he's got a water-cooled rig using a radiator from a late-model Holden Commodore - check it out here.

All you NT freaks - this pic from Bill Mitchell should get your pulse racing:

click for (much) bigger pic

Hmm, how about if I told you each of those CPU's was a Xeon 500Mhz with 2MB of cache? Strange, I didn't think there was a 500MHz Xeon. Anyway - notice the 32GB of ram. Needless to say, this is not someone's desktop system. So, in case any of you were wondering what to get me for Christmas, now you know.

Unlimitedhardware.com has a comparison of thermal pastes up.

Hey, can anyone remember where that K7M bios update was? I saw it somewhere, didn't download it and now I can't find it. Dang! Please let me know.

Tue - 26-Oct-99
Ok, ok.. I've been a bit slack with updates over the last few days. Wanna hear my excuse? How does some Australian Athlon Action sound? (hmm, pretty corny actually) .. well, check out my review of the K7M Athlon board anyway. :)

Also, I'm using that article as a test launch of the new Overclockers Australia Forums! That's right - you guys asked for it so I've spent a couple of weeks fiddling around with PHP3 and a great set of scripts called Phorum.. you can see them at http://www.overclockers.com.au/forums - be aware that they are still in BETA, so some odd things might happen. Hopefully not! As always I welcome ALL comments, I just threw them onto the site tonight (it's 2am and I have to get to work at 7.. urgh) so let me know how you feel about the colours/feel of it, if there should be more forum topics, whatever. I just stuck the standard header and footer for the site on there but on reflection I guess I'll change that.. have a cleaner look than the rest of the site maybe. Basically they're for discussion of the various articles on the site, but you can ask general questions there too, I guess.

Sleep now. :)

Sat - 23-Oct-99
Slartibartfast (he of the slot-1 voltage hack) has whipped up a homemade water-cooling jacket. It looks fairly.. homemade.. :) but does the job well! Check it out here.

Subside from NZ has sent in some pics of his ducting from a few days ago, using a plastic bottle to get air out of the case. The updated article is here.

Ogier has done some cool case mods to his BP6 system including ducting the dual CPU's straight out of the case.

If you're in New Zealand and looking for GlobalWin coolers such as the FEP-32 etc, give www.cool-it.co.nz a go. I've not dealt with them myself obviously but Gav, a reader, recommends them..

A couple of other Australian hardware-oriented sites: check out Wilmot's Website which has some technical info, some tweaking guides etc. Also Tech Corner which has some interesting cooling info.

Battlax sent some info about a new GL benchmark using "5000 line hair move" .. uh-huh. Get it here.

Al Nairn sent in word that AOpen have quietly released the latest in their excellent AX6BC motherboard line - the Pro II. We reviewed the Pro standard not long ago, this new one seems to be the Gold version without ISA slots. Sadly, it doesn't have any more intermediate FSB settings than the original Pro, which is probably the major downside of the board.

SystemLogic are doing a series of interviews with webmasters. The latest is with Kyle of the HardOCP..

Silly site on overclocking using frozen vegetables. No, I'm not kidding.

Very interesting/funny interview with members of the Cult Of The Dead Cow here.

Wed - 20-Oct-99
English people are mad. I can make sweeping statements like that because I was born in Sheffield (Yorkshire, UK) and grew up in an English household. Still don't believe me? Ok, check out Nick Arrowsmith. Sure, he's managed to get his P2 running with a 140MHz FSB, but he's also got really strange desk lighting.. :)

Someone has started a petition about Intel's supposed anti-competitive practises involving the supply of BX chipsets to Athlon motherboard manufacturers. Now, obviously, none of us really have any idea what's going on there. So I don't have an opinion either way. But you can check it out for yourself. The petition is here, there's a discussion about it here, and a copy of the response from the US Department of Justice here.

Looks like Alista got a lucky P3-450. It's an SL37C (which is the retail version of the much-talked-about SL35D) doing 650MHz..

John from www.unlimitedhardware.com has a fridge-assisted machine posted on his site.. one pic, anyway. Similar idea to the one we showed a few days ago.

Romio from BBD Wholesale (no overclocking pics) has an interesting idea for cooling PPGA chips. Leave them raised 1 or 2 mm in the socket so air can get underneath them - maybe even use a side-blowing fan. Yeah, sounds kinda dodgy to me too, but he says he's seen a 2C drop in temp and increased stability on a BP6. Something to consider when you're right on the edge of stability..

Gary at www.overclockin.com has taken a good look at the Alpha P125 cooler, including the usual question of whether to suck or blow [ahem]. These heatsink/fans have been around for a while but they're still the ultimate in Slot1 Celeron passive cooling. Gary and I have been swapping mail a bit over the last few days, actually - turns out he has the same kind of motorcycle as me, a blue+white Yamaha YZF-R6 (the blue ones look really crap on the website, they look awesome in real life). Mine has a go-faster exhaust system on it, though, which is kinda overclocking I guess.. :)

Interesting look at the Via Apollo Pro 133A chipset here. Battlax let me know that Asus have a GeForce card out now, their page here. I dunno, but this whole "world's first GPU" thing seems like a big marketing wank to me. I mean, is it really that different a concept to the previous generation of video chipsets, offloading stuff from the CPU, working within their own memory space, etc..?

Sun - 17-Oct-99
What is the fricking story with saving missions in Driver? I'm at the point now where I've played 4 missions in a row (ending with the first San Francisco one) and I've not been presented with the option to save the game. So when I get sick of trying to finish the SanFran one, I quit and then I have to play the first 3 all over again the next time I feel like playing... aargh! Is this deliberate? Is there some secret way to get to the room that lets you save the game? What am I missing?!

Drew sent in this link - pretty funny. I think I've got one of these cards lying around somewhere actually, I could sell it to these guys and make a bunch!

FPS3D has a review of the twin-turbo case cooler up. 80cfm will blast that hot air out of your case in no time.

Just read over on The Register that the copper .18 Athlons should be starting production next week. Can't wait to see what those babies are capable of.

Nils from OverclockersShootout has taken a look at the VapoChill system. What's that? A freon-based cooler which looks pretty damn tasty and costs much less than a comparable Kryotech unit. For some reason he's split the review into 3 bits, so check it out here, here and here. :)

My "Agg's Lamer of the Week Award" goes to driverguide.com for their "real time driver search guide" which claims to be a real-time-updated snapshot of what people are searching for on their site. You can see the search terms come whizzing up and it looks very impressive, must be lots of people using their site, right? Bollocks. Look at the page source. It's just a javascript array with static values that they display values from at random. There's even a comment in there, for the logic they use to not display a value twice. Just in case they WERE dynamically generating the list, I checked it once, saved the source, then came back a few hours later, flushed my cache and checked it again. Identical. Checked it with netscape instead of IE5. Identical. Maybe that's going a bit far to prove someone a fraud but this kind of thing pisses me off. Check out the blatant lies here.

Hmm, I've got a bunch of stuff to put up still.. but I'm going to go to the pub, drink Guinness and play some pool instead. That's what Sunday nights are for. Seeya. :)

Sat - 16-Oct-99
ZerO just sent in some Coppermine benchmarks! The chip is only mildly overclocked (a paltry 805MHz..) because of dodgy cooling. That is still one beast of a chip.

Just put the finishing touches on our review of the AOpen AX6BC Pro motherboard. This board has been out for a few months now but is still widely respected and a popular choice due to it's excellent stability.

Plenty happening on www.hardocp.com today. Check out a few home systems and an Athlon pre-pre-preview here. Also, some Athlon tweakage here, dipswitches for multiplier etc. They'll even do it to your Athlon for a price.. good to see it's all happening with the Athlon now. There was a period where it looked like it would be a bitch to overclock.

The techzone has some silly stuff going on, check out the 4-way and 8-way BP6 mods.. no, they're not real, someone's been playing with Photoshop. Got my pulse racing for a second though. :)

Subside from NZ sent in an ingenious, simple and cheap ducting idea for getting heat out of your case.

Les sent in some info on his water-cooled K6-2/450 using a Holden transmission radiator.. :)

Fri - 15-Oct-99
A czech site has expanded upon the "any voltage on any slot1 board" article I posted on Wednesday by listing the table of pin settings you'd need for the full range of voltages, taken from Intel's specs I guess. Check it out here. Umm, if you can read Czech. Ok, just look at the table..

Got my facts completely wrong about frostyfox.com yesterday. But check it out anyway, it's impressive. 2600+ in Sandra CPU benchmark, yeeghs.

The records are falling like flies - these guys have an Athlon 650 at 900MHz! "Tomato Overclockers".. silly name, serious speed. Damn I wish I could read Japanese. No Sandra screenshots either :( .

Zip[LOC] has his BP6 doing 2x C366A @ 560 with the help of 2 peltiers+alphas. Some serious case mods, too. Read about it here.

A great watercooling site here - this guy is pretty extreme, made most of the gear himself and has a C366 at 708MHz..

Damn, my C366 @ 682 just doesn't do it for me anymore. But guess what arrived in the post today? My 72W Melcor peltier (thanks Michael!) and my Soyo SY-6VBA133 (thanks Nikol!). Now, if only I wasn't [a] building a PC for my GF [b] working large chunks of the weekend [c] addicted to Driver, I'd get the watercooled rig happening again and smash that 700MHz barrier..

Thu - 14-Oct-99
That didn't take long. Kyle's overclocked Coppermine (see yesterdays news) had my record for the highest Sandra scores - now www.frostyfox.com has overclocked an Athlon 600 to 800MHz - which beats a P3-800 any day - watercooled, but no peltiers. That's right - room temperature 800MHz. Check it out here. Actually, hmm, seems to not be there. It was there before! Maybe I'm getting an old version of the page at home or something. Hmm.. maybe I'm just losing it.

Speaking of Athlons, I saw this link over on www.overclockers.com - a really good fact-filled article on the Athlon. Also, they will apparently hit 1GHz in 2000.

Noticed a review of the Quantum Fireball +KA hard drive on www.fps3d.com. I can say from experience that these drives are really tolerant of overclocked PCI buses. I've run my 13.6GB unit at the dreaded 83MHz FSB, and right up to 124MHz FSB too. No problems at all. It's not the quietest drive ever made, though.. in fact, mine has an annoying high-pitched whine.. anyone got any amazing ideas about quietening HDD's while keeping them cool? (and don't say "turn it off" :) )

Not only do Aopen make great motherboards, they also have a titty site up. Well, they DID..

All these rumours of P3-450's being rebadged P3-600's are laid open with facts here..

A few people have sent stuff in and I haven't put it up yet. I'd like to say I'm too busy working hard at something of my own, but the basic truth is I've been playing Driver. :) Look for a big update this weekend!

Wed - 13-Oct-99
A proper update later today but this is so cool I had to get this out to you guys - Slartibartfast has sent in some amazing news - a simple hardware hack which he says lets you select up to 3.5v on ANY slot-1 motherboard! Even those that don't let you change the voltage at all normally! This could be what a lot of you guys have been looking for.. but be careful! I'm not responsible if you smoke your board. :)

Well, the general concensus seems to be that that hardware hack mentioned above is do-able. I guess it's all that slockets like the MSI 6905 v1.1 are doing anyway. Still, an ingenious way to do it. Be warned, though, that your motherboard is EXTREMELY sensitive to heat, so if you're soldering pins on the back you could easily damage one of the many layers inside the board. Use some kind of tiny-tipped, low-power soldering iron. Or get the MSI slocket. :) One guy even let me know he's working on a similar thing for the Athlon, but with FSB and multiplier too..

HardOCP.com have gotten their hands on a Coppermine P3-700 and cranked it to 800. There's a new record for the highest Sandra scores I've seen now. :)

This is pretty similar to a site I pointed out a few days ago, but check it out anyway - Deeztech has de-capped a K6..

Right. I'm off to play Driver. :)

Tue - 12-Oct-99
Wow, anyone else affected by the power outage in Sydney today? How can that kind of thing happen in a major city? Sheesh. We were without power for about 4 hours. Pretty eerie when you're in a high-rise building and suddenly the lights go out and the aircon stops..

What's the final step in building your overclocked system? Why, putting some funky wallpaper on your desktop. The coolest cpu-specific wallpaper I know of is at Jetfuel's page. A regular contributor to the newsgroup, Al has started cranking out the wallpapers lately and some of them are really fantastic. He's just updated his site so check it out by going here, smile at the baby photo then click "wallpaper" on the left menu.

Ken Peter has completely rewritten his great article on peltier power and cooling considerations. Worth a look before you hand over the cash.

I notice frostyfox has finally gotten himself an Athlon. Can't wait to see what he gets out of that beastie. From there I found a link to a Japanese watercooling page - 760MHz [!!!] from a P3-550. I've already mailed him asking for some Sandra screenshots. :)

Mon - 11-Oct-99
Ledg dropped me a note to say he has created an IRC channel for Aussie Overclockers. Point your IRC client at au.austnet.org and join #overclockers. I'm not really big on the whole chat thing (too much of a time-sucker) but I might drop in from time to time..

Well, a lot of people suggested it for my water-cooler - but someone's actually done it. Putting the reservoir inside a fridge is a sure way to keep it cold!

Kaj pointed out that Teo's setup (from yesterday's news) uses Meccano to hold the fan on. You know, that kids assembly-toy thing. He says it's a great way to string stuff up inside your case.. and cheap! .. if you know a kid you can 'borrow' some from.. :) A few people wrote in to say their C366's also do 605MHz with only passive cooling.. all I can say is "aww shaddup".. :) Seems my magic 583 chips aren't so magic after all!

I'd seen this before but Tim Brown reminded me of it. They seem to be using some unlocked chips (note the changing multiplier in the screenshots) but a dual 1GHz system (that's 1GHz per chip, not 2x 500MHz'ers) is not something you see every day..

Sun - 10-Oct-99
Teo sent in some info on his C366 which does 605MHz with passive cooling. Now I'm jealous. :)

Brian let me know that he is now selling water-cooling rigs from the US. He's put some serious work into the internal design of the water-block (shame there's no photo of the internals yet) giving it over 12 square inches of copper exposed to water apparently. He's sending me a unit to check out, so look for a review soon. The whole setup looks pretty good, if all goes well I will start distributing them here so you guys can save on shipping from the US. Check out the AquaStealth here.

Ken Peter sent in some info about choosing the right peltier for your overcooked Celery..

Back to work tomorrow, so updates may be less frequent. A few interesting reviews coming up, though, got some hardware on the way from a few people..

Sat - 09-Oct-99
Got the water-cooled C366 box to 682MHz last night. I had to set the ram to 3/3/3 and set the HDD to mode 3, no UDMA. Hmm. I need some PC133 ram, I guess, but damned if I'm going to pay today's prices for it.. the HDD I already knew has problems with high overclocks, but I need the good drive in my main machine. Here's some pics anyway. The memory benchmark is not shown 'coz it was slower than at 643MHz due to the 3/3/3 delays..

I rebuilt the assembly to include a cold plate that I made out of an aluminium bar - there's been some discussion on the newsgroup about using cold plates with peltiers lately and I thought I'd give it a whirl. A cold plate is basically a peice of very thermally conductive metal you use to spread the heat load from the slug across the whole peltier surface. I'll add a page to the water-cooled article about it when I rebuild the rig properly. While I was at it I sanded the water-block to a mirror finish, too. I hadn't re-sealed the whole assembly yet, just testing the chip at 682.. I could see little spiky ice crystals growing before my eyes along the top ridge of the CPU.. seriously. Not good. Needless to say I didn't play with it very long. I don't think the cold plate made much difference - I think the ram and hdd were the bottleneck before. I'm getting a 72W peltier next week sometime and I will seal the assembly around that one instead of the current 40W one. With more power comes more cold, more condensation and more problems.. but also, of course, more SPEED! :) I really want to crack the 700MHz barrier now..

Here's a kinda sad story of how not to do the peltier thing. Overclockers.com has a review of the new Soyo SY-6BA +IV up. Is it just me, or do Soyo have the most confusing naming scheme for their boards? I get 'em all confused. They also look at a Tennmax BX chipset cooler - you BP6 guys out there should know how important cooling that is..Fri - 08-Oct-99
Ok - throw away your card cooler, your slot cooler, your drive-bay coolers and all that other rubbish. Drew sent in his much better idea. You guys are going to crack up when you see this. :)

A few people have asked about how to get the little metal plate off the top of the K6 processor. I guess it's the AMD equivalent of slug-sanding. Well check out this link, and don't blame me if you end up in smokeville. To make it more exciting I think the site is in Finnish. :)

Here's another great watercooling setup. Condensation problem solved pretty well, a really clever way of mounting the assembly together (using little springs) and awesome results to show for it! 775MHz from a P2-450? I'm not kidding. The highest Sandra scores I've ever seen. Again, it's not in english - you guys who keep telling me to stick to Australian content, send me some and I will. :) I'll try to stick to english-language pages. But these pics are good.

Hmm, some mainframe overclocking gone horribly wrong? Who can say.. anyway, one Cray C90 is toast. An expensive toy to break.

HEY! This is big news. An Athlon board that lets you overclock without having to get out your soldering iron! That just made the whole Athlon thing WAAY more appealing to me. Check it out here on bxboards.com!

Sorry for the woosy update yesterday. I'm working on getting a discussion group program happening on the site and having some technical difficulties..

Thu - 07-Oct-99
Hey, drop me a note and let me know how you think the site's going. Should I concentrate on daily news? Forget the daily updates and just go with hardware reviews? Forget reviews and just do more extreme stuff with water-cooling etc? (well, I'm going to do more extreme stuff no matter what you say :) ) .. or what? Want a discussion board? Think I should get more people to help with the daily news? Whatever, let me know.

Wed - 06-Oct-99
I'm back! 3000km's hunched over a motorcycle's fuel tank is a great way to spend your holiday - no, really. :) Thanks to all who wished me a safe and enjoyable trip - it was both. Fingers crossed that I don't get any speeding fines in the mail over the next couple of weeks - PC's aren't the only things I like revving up. :)

I'm still working my way through the emails I received while I was away - however, got word of a great Australian site - www.dansdata.com - lots of hardware reviews, well-written info and some silly stuff too. It's run by Dan Rutter, who's done a lot of work with print magazines in Australia. Lots of great info - check out his latest reviews: Just Cooler's Fan Alarm System and 5 Just Cooler units for HDD's and case cooling. John at www.unlimitedhardware.com has done a review of the Swiftech MC1000 mega-peltier cooler. Man, I wish I could get my hands on one of those things.

James Collins sent in some more info on his water-cooled system so I added that to the page.

Tue - 28-Sep-99
James Collins sent in some pics of his water-cooled system. A really professional-looking unit! Gary from www.overclockin.com sent word that he has some C300A's that do 600MHz with an FDP-32 on them.. that's impressive. I would love to see one of those in an active cooling system.. Viper sent along some info about his experiences with the AMD K6-II 400.. Dugedug sent a link to another watercooling project. Geez, the water-cooling freaks are all coming out of the woodwork now. :) Great to see!

That's it for me for a week or so. I look forward to wading through a huge pile of email when I get back. :) Take it easy on the long weekend, guys!

Mon - 27-Sep-99
Posted the readers comments page for the watercooling article here. Loads of info there! Yet another overclocking how-to here - this one is quite detailed in some areas, but a bit vague in others - still, worth a read. Interesting comparison of the Intel BX chipset vs the VIA Apollo Pro here.

There'll be no updates to this site (and no responses to email) from this coming Wednesday to the next. I'm taking my girlfriend and my bike to Melbourne for the 500CC Grand Prix at Phillip Island. We're going to mosey along the coast, stop at whatever looks interesting, make a week of it and basically not think about computers. I recommend you take some time to do the same. :)

Sat - 25-Sep-99
3M in the US are supposedly getting their Australian office to drop me an email soon regarding the Thermal Transfer Tape. Thanks to everyone who sent along info about it! I will post a message here if I find anything out.

Finally finished the write-up of my Water-Cooling Experiment! It took so long because I kept getting distracted and playing Sports Car GT on my Celeron 366 at 643MHz. :)

Whoah! Check this out, an Athlon at 1GHz (bet you wish you could read Japanese)! Thanks to Overclockers Workbench for the heads-up! Here's some proof that DirectX 7 is faster than DirectX 6.1 - but be careful, I've seen a few reports of DirectX 7 stopping systems from being able to boot. AGNHardware has an "Applying Thermal Paste How-To" up now. An interesting read - they use a roller and all kinds of crazy techniques to get the perfect heat transfer. Here's my version: [a] stick a small blob on the slug [b] smooth it over the whole slug with your finger [c] squoosh the excess out by pressing the heatsink onto the slug and wriggling it a bit. I've never had any complaints. :)

Added a bunch more links to the links page. Damn, my cursor just turned into the box thing again. I guess the BP6's BIOS update doesn't fix that one.

Thu - 23-Sep-99
The new(ish) BIOS for the AOpen AX6BC-Pro apparently supports the FM3540. Whassat? I thought that might be some kind of temperature sensor but it's not shown in MBM.. mail me if you know what it is.

Next question - anyone know where to get thermal tape, similar to hardocp's FragTape, in Oz? Mail me if you know that too. :)

Gary from www.overclockin.com has done a Cooler Comparo. 9 units in total, check it out. Not much in the Socket370 department, but of course you can always read our comparo for those.. :)

While I've got one of my magic C366's in the watercooling rig, I filled the empty space on my BP6 with my spare C466. Having different-speed CPU's in a dual system screams "Really Bad Idea" to me, but it seems stable enough. Here's a pic from NT's diags (not overclocked at the moment):

Don't ask why my PC's called Ragnarok. :) All my PC's are named after events or people in Norse mythology - the watercooled box is, of course, Odin, my main linux box is Loki, etc.. hey, it beats naming them after characters from the Simpsons!

Speaking of things Norse, I found some cool Danish sites today. (.dk is Denmark, right?) .. check out ACDC (no, not the band), overclocking.dk and hardinfo.dk. Don't speak Danish? Me neither - but you can look at the pictures and kinda work out what they're talking about - check out this cool rig, for example. Health Warning: Stop reading when you start talking like the Chef from the Muppets.

Oh, and DirectX 7 is officially out now. But you knew that.

Wed - 22-Sep-99
Chris sent in a good tip: In my case i have installed a 120 mm fan i pulled ort of an old 286 powersupply. The whole thing cost me 10 bucks - very quiet compared to some of the new ones and the airflows great - also cost less too!

The readers comments page for Dean's review of the REALmagic Hollywood Plus DVD Decoder Card is now up. Lots of useful info there - thanks guys!

Earl at www.digital-clips.com is working on a water-cooling project, too. See the work in progress at the site.

What do you get if you stick a huge 8-cm fan on top of an FDP-32? You get the 3DfxCool BigMofo-REX as reviewed here by unlimitedhardware.com.

Frank developed a dislike for all the boring beige boxes on his desk and did something about it. Check it out here.

There. I think I've finally caught up on my email..

Tue - 21-Sep-99
Just got word of a major earthquake (7.6 Richter) in Taiwan. Obviously I'm concerned for the people there and I hope this doesn't affect them as badly as Turkey was hit recently. Hopefully the damage will not be as severe and there will be less suffering and loss of life. Having said that, I also wonder what effect this will have on the hardware industry as Taiwan is a major focal point for production. Don't flame me for being callous.

Check out www.tweak3d.net - very interesting site on settings and optimization for your PC. Their latest offering is a Win-9x System Startup Tweak Guide.

David Alvarado has been tweaking the airflow inside the case of his BP6-based machine. Those dual-cpu boxes can be hell to cool, especially if you're trying to do it quietly.. check out the info here. One future project of mine (on a very long list) is to get some ducting happening on my BP6 box - it's way too loud with 2 FEP-32's, an intake fan and a huge exhaust fan. Still, 2x 583MHz is hard to argue with. Or maybe a dual watercooling system. Hmm!

As pointed out on www.hardocp.com today, there's yet another new hardware site up (now mine is nearly 2 months old, do I qualify as an old hand? :) ) .. called overclockingextreme.com. Now, seriously, I wish them the best of luck. I think they need to work on the name, though, especially as they're posting stories about people getting their C366's all the way to 412MHz. Whoah baby - that's extreme! Better strap on your 5-point safety harness and check it out. :)

Mon - 20-Sep-99
We have sold out of everything except the CPM25603-32's.. got 2 left at $22.00 plus shipping. Everything else is gone! If you haven't been told your order is shipping yet - then you've missed out. If you haven't deposited yet but think you're supposed to, check with me before you do - I have not been holding things based on people saying they're going to deposit because lots of people never get back to me and never deposit - I'm not going to tell people I'm out of stock in the hope that someone who mailed me a week ago gets around to putting the deposit in.. :)

The good news is that this leaves me with a lot more time to work on the site - it's amazing how much time selling stuff takes up. It really isn't worth it - so we'll not be selling stuff for a while now.. maybe some more chips in the future. Maybe.

Check out this site - does reviews of review sites. Interesting idea. There's a great watercooling setup (with a home-made copper cpu block, no less) here on www.benchtest.com. Another extreme guy (watercooled C366 at 683MHz) here. An interesting (if dated) article on Myths about Overclocking on arstechnica - good ammo for those pro-overclocking rants you no doubt have at work (if you're anything like me :) ).

We're sold out of everything now actually, the last 2 CPM25603-32's just went. Yay. Selling stuff is a pain in the ass. :) The products page has been deleted.

Dean's great review of the REALmagic Hollywood Plus DVD Decoder Card has been updated to include info on a freeware region selector and some problems with NTSC to PAL conversion. Thanks for the many comments on that review - there will be a reader's comments page added to it soon.

Just waiting for the icecubes to freeze so I can try to get my C366 to 670MHz with the watercooler. :)Sun - 19-Sep-99
Interesting article on supercooling here. There seems to be a lot more info at www.frostyfox.com since I last went there - check it out, it's a great site. Also, poit from the newsgroup has some good info on his page.

A couple of people have complained about the FEP/FDP not working too well with the "blue thermal pad" on it.. hmm, that's because the blue bit is a plastic cover for the white thermal pad, guys - I'm not surprised they're heating up your machines something chronic. Actually, I have to confess I did the same when I first put the FEP's on the BP6 machine. :) But as we all know from our Socket370 Cooler Comparison, the best idea is to lose the pad entirely and get some thermal paste - go to Tandy and ask for "Radio Shack Silicone-Based Heatsink Compound", part # 276-1372 - a little white tube. Used to be a little blue tube. It's better than the Unick stuff you get at Dick Smith or Jaycar because it's less runny.

Spent much of today playing with the water-cooler. I'm working on a proper writeup at the moment but I can give you a teaser for now - basically by itself the water-cooler is ok. With the peltier underneath it it's awesome. How does 643MHz (from a C366) sound? Check out these pics:

..and it was rock-solid at that speed - I only turned it off because my condensation paranoia was going into overdrive. :) Actually it would boot to the Win98 login screen at 670 but locked up at 2.2v. I may try 2.3v tomorrow.. :)

Sat - 18-Sep-99
Spent most of this morning going through old emails. People have sent in lots of information which has been filed (but not forgotten!) - I've put some of it up on the site now (in Tech Stuff, back-dated). David Alvarado (he of the many C366's and BP6's) sent some more info on keeping his dual-cpu boxes cool. I can relate to that - our BP6 testbed here is annoyingly loud due to 2 FEP-32's and a big case fan. David's info here and here. Mick got his P3-500@620 to 667 by swapping the AGP video for a PCI. Zach from Victoria sent along a simple idea for getting rid of condensation with Peltiers.

Damn, my cursor just turned into the little box again. I got confirmation from a reader that he experiences it too with the BP6 and Viper 770U - anyone else getting it with only one of those units in their machine? Trying to track it down. Maybe the new (beta) BP6 bios will help. Get it from www.bp6.com - a pretty good website for all you BP6 owners, btw - not HEAPS of information, but some. Couldn't find any of my problems answered there, though. Will try the new BIOS later today.

Dugedug just sent me some pictures of his watercooling setup - fairly similar in concept to my own.

Thu - 16-Sep-99
Here's some pics of the water cooler. Sorry about the quality of the pics - they're not mine. The screw mechanism is so you can adjust the height of the unit under the mounting clip - so you can still clamp it firmly if you have a peltier underneath it. Hopefully I'll get time to play with it this weekend, need to get a fishtank pump and some tubing I guess..

Wed - 15-Sep-99
Dean Claxton sent in a great in-depth review (6 pages!) of the REALmagic Hollywood Plus DVD Decoder Card - looks like a fantastic peice of kit. I have a spare P166 here that I'm now seriously considering putting next to the TV..

Mick wanted to brag about his P3-500 at 620MHz (I'd brag too). Check out the details here.

My water cooling jacket finally arrived! Pics and stuff tomorrow. This weekend I'm going in search of water pumps and tubing etc.. oh, and a bucket to put the ice-cubes in. :) Before you mail me, no, I can't get any more in yet - I don't even know who made it. I got it from a friend who got it from somewhere in Taiwan - I'm looking at having them made locally. Anyone know anyone who's good at metal (preferably copper or aluminium) fabrication?

Oh, and does anyone know anything about overclocking the Casio Cassiopeia E-100? It's powered by a MIPS R4000 at 131MHz. I got one from work today. Looks pretty snazzy, and that's coming from a die-hard palmpilot user. Should get the multimedia kit soon, which lets it play MP3's and full-motion video.. it's just such a shame it's got CE on it..

Mon - 13-Sep-99
Ok - got the BP6 driver disk now so don't send any more! Thanks Kurt!

Found some great info on peltiers while surfing today, so I made a new section on the links page for cooling, peltiers etc. BXBoards have a beta bios for the BP6 online. They say it adds MPS 1.4 and 1.1 selection in the bios.. but my BP6 shipped with that in the bios? No idea what's going on there. Good ram info here. I saw a link today for a guy in Japan with his Athlon at 850MHz? Or similar. Lost the link though. The new Soyo SY6BA+III looks pretty good. I think the next testbed here will be a Soyo - they seem to be the biz at >100MHz FSB. Unless someone buys me an Athlon system, o'course.. :)

Oh, if you use Netscape you might've had some strange things going on with this site over the last 24 hours.. they're fixed now. :) Thanks to Frodo and Brad for the alert.

Sun - 12-Sep-99
The site re-design is finally finished. Probably doesn't look all that different to you but from my perspective it's much easier to maintain now. All the pages are built on the fly from a config file so if I want to change the header or anything I change one little file and every page on the site changes. (For those who care, I got rid of the frames (and their associated problems) and now load the table structure using an SSI include in every page). Please let me know if you find any broken links or other oddities.

I've put a lot of the mail I received about the Slug Sanding How-To into a Readers Comments page. Also, can a BP6 owner please mail me a zip of the UDMA drivers disk? I've lost mine.. thanks.

Check out these great wallpapers from Al in Canada. He's done a few others that aren't on the site yet - keep checking back. Overclockers.com has been digging around and found a lot of interesting stuff - if you're looking to kill some time follow the links from there. There's a review of the new Abit BF6 on the High-Performance PC Guide.

Fri - 10-Sep-99
Anandtech has a HUGE cpu comparison up. All the x86 cpu's you can think of - 3 weeks in the making, 40 pages. Very impressive. Someone read it and give me the Reader's Digest Condensed version. :) Thetechzone has an interesting article on tweaking your BIOS settings. They also recently got a P3-550 to 682Mhz. IMHO, I think this is a better BIOS guide, though. UnlimitedHardware.com has some info on moving the fan on the big GlobalWin coolers so you don't block ram slots on your motherboard - a simple but good idea. They also have a PPGA cooler shootout up now. Sysopsolutions.com has info on liquid cooling your p3 with quite a sexy rig. That lot should keep you busy for a while. Original content soon, I promise. :)

Thanks to the zillions of people sending me mail (if you haven't got a reply yet - you will tomorrow!). Lots of people have sent info on peltiers and things, will be adding that to the peltier experiment page tomorrow. Might get around to doing a re-design of the site tomorrow too, I had forgotten how evil frames are - now I remember..

I have arranged to get a water-cooling jacket from Taiwan - it should arrive next week. I am looking into getting them fabricated locally. I am meeting with some professional cooling engineers in the next week or so to discuss small-scale peltiers and trying to address the condensation and power-supply concerns. My ultimate goal is to get these two C366's that I know can do 616 peltiered, together on the BP6 with water cooling. I'll keep you posted.

Anyone else having trouble with the serial ports on their BP6? CRC errors and stuff - mail me if you are. And does your HDD LED stay on all the time the first time you boot, until you reset the machine? And does your cursor turn into a wierd little square thing occasionally? This is with a Viper 770U in it. Sheesh! :)

Mon - 06-Sep-99
Remember kids - peltiers are fun, but condensation is not. The peltier we had here was on loan, so after about 36 hours of 616MHz bliss I pulled the Aopen machine apart so I could put the chip, with it's other 616-capable twin, back into the BP6 box. I'd been checking very carefully for condensation, shining my little torch in to check the sides of the peltier etc.. but when I cracked the assembly open to get the chip out, what did I see? This:

The thick white stuff is thermal paste. The clearish white stuff is ice. The clear runny stuff is water. The greenish stuff in the top right is corrosion from the tops of the pins.. eek! Anyway, the chip is fine and back in the BP6 after a thorough scrubbing. Of course, the water that condenses is very pure and hence doesn't actually conduct all that well. Obviously though, you need to pay attention and stop the hot air from contacting the super-cold peltier. I'll be looking into some of that spray sealant stuff for next time, that's for sure..

Someone with a lot more sense about these things is www.frostyfox.com - this has to be the best-looking, best thought-out extreme rig I've seen - and he has the results to show for it. 735MHz from a C366? I'm not kidding, and he seems to have stopped only because he's hit the FSB limit of his motherboard..

Sun - 05-Sep-99
Happy father's day. :) Well, I've had a pretty amazing day. Peltiers, cpu sanding, the works. The end result? How does 616MHz sound to you? :) Check out the updated Peltier Experiment #1 and our new Slug Sanding How-To. The tech stuff page is arranged a bit more sensibly now. Thanks to everyone who's dropped me a note about the site - it's great to know people are interested.

Sat - 04-Sep-99
A more detailed explanation of our Peltier Experiment #1 is now up. Also, information on the coolers etc we have in stock is now on the Products page.

Version 2.6 "Official" of WCPUID is out. Tells you all kinds of useful stuff about your CPU. Get it here.

Fri - 03-Sep-99
Well, John at www.unlimitedhardware.com has been busy with Alphas today - check out his P3125S assembly guide and PFH6035 install guide.

I now know what to do if I want to get piles of email - just mention the word "Peltier" on this site. :) Whoops, did it again. No, I'm not selling them, no, I don't know where to buy them in Australia (yet).. I can tell you how I mounted it on the cpu, though.. Ok, ok, I'll do a full write-up tomorrow. I think I'll try sanding that CPU, too, so I might get the digicam out and get something of a "Slug-Sanding How-To" happening. Also, the GlobalWin coolers (FDP/FEP) arrived today so I'll put them on the products page tomorrow. Should be a big day. :)

Thu - 02-Sep-99
I've seen this before but forgot about it. Ogier reminded me. It's funny and deserves more hits. :) There is some truly strange stuff here - not for the easily offended, but more the really bored surfer.. and this picture is very very cool. :)

Ok, slightly more on topic, got the peltier + FDP-32 happening on my best C366 today, got it to boot fully into W98 at 616MHz but locked up pretty soon thereafter at 2.2v, at any higher volts it won't finish booting, at any lower volts it won't either.. wouldn't even POST without the peltier. Hmm. The 466 failed to even POST at 700 with the peltier on and 2.6V. What a surprise. :) This is a 40x40mm 40W Frost-74 (the russian one) BTW.

Should have a bunch of FEP-32 and FDP-32's to sell from here next week. Keep an eye on the products page. If you're on the mailing list you'll get mail about it.

Wed - 01-Sep-99
A couple more people have sent in info for Tech Stuff. Must find a way to organise that page better. Very interesting article on UDMA/33 vs UDMA/66 here - link stolen from UnlimitedHardware.com. Read that, or pick almost any other hardware webpage in the universe to read about nVidia's NV10 launch. Talk about hype!

We've got a few GlobalWin CPM25603-32's left over from our pretested chip thing. Read about them in our Socket370 Cooler Comparo. We just want to get them out of our hair so they're $22.00 - www.eyo.com.au have them for $28, www.computermarket.com.au for $25. Mail me if you want one.

Found something weird today - in NT4, go to the Screen Saver properties, choose "3D Text (OpenGL)", settings, put "Volcano" as the text string, hit preview. Lots of different words come up! From a couple of the entries (St Helens, etc) I'm guessing they're all famous volcanos. I vaguely recall NT4's development name being Volcano? Or something like that. Anyway, I noticed this on one of the machines at the training place today. Maybe it's old news. I saw this on NT4 server with SP3. Can't check on my NTW machine as it's in the middle of a peltier experiment and not too stable at the moment. :)

Damn, I said this site wasn't going to be updated daily! Expect a shift to a weekly "digest"-type newspage soon. Hi to all the people coming here from www.hardocp.com. :)

Tue - 31-Aug-99
MBM 4.10 is out! This fixes the problems 4.09 had with the BP6, amongst other things. What is it? The best motherboard monitor (fans, temps, volts etc) proggy around - get it here.

I noticed www.overclockers.com mention putting a cooler onto the green heatsink on their BP6 today. I did a similar thing a month or so ago (read alt.comp.hardware.overclocking for the exact date) - screwed a few hex-spacers into the heatsink then stuck an old 486 fan on it. I wasn't expecting much but my dual C366 box which was only "mostly" stable at 572 is now rock-stable at 572, and will boot into NT at 583 and run fine - I won't say it never locks up, but it wouldn't even finish loading NT before. A few people replied to my newsgroup post - nobody else had quite the change I saw, but a couple reported their machines getting further into the boot before crashing.. maybe something to try and it's cheap if you've got an old fan lying around gathering dust anyway. :) One of these days I'll rip the board out and put some heatsink paste under that green sink.. Here's a pic:

You can also accept this as proof that the FEP-32's fit on the BP6. :) Damn, gotta put the cover back on now, this machine is just TOO loud..

Mon - 30-Aug-99
Well, I spent today doing day 1 of my 5-day "Accelerated Windows NT Enterprise Technologies and TCP/IP" course. According to the instructor it's 2 5-day courses crammed into 5 days. So my brain is full to exploding after today AND I've got 2 hours of homework to do for it. Grrrrrreat.

Thanks again to Alan G - he sent along a great link from www.eyo.com.au - a table listing GlobalWin coolers fitting or not fitting on various motherboards. I have to say, though, that the FEP-32 fits fine on my BP6 (2 of them) without any modification - and I have the metal-handled BP6 which is more obstructive than the plastic-handled one. Maybe they only really mean the FDP-32 (which doesn't fit on my BP6). Hmm.

We're officially out of pre-tested chips now. The yield on this last batch has been pretty terrible. If you are on the mailing list you will have gotten an email about it. Hopefully you'll have better luck if you're still chasing 550Mhz!

The wierdest thing I've seen in a while is www.rammatters.com - lots of Flash animations and pretty graphics basically telling you RAM is good, RAM is fun, everyone needs more RAM, buy more RAM etc etc.. really strange until you dig deeper into it and discover it's organised by "The Council on Computing Power" .. who? Dig further.. it's Hyundai, Fujitsu, Samsung and (the company that used to be called) Siemens.. gee, how impartial. I mean, the 4 biggest RAM makers in the world are hardly going to say "Naah, you'll be right with 64MB - you don't need to buy any more" ..

Thanks to Jason E. who sent me info on "Afterburner", for overclocking the Palm Pilot. Might have to stick a FDP-32 on the back of my PalmIII soon. I'll look into it. :)

Sun - 29-Aug-99
Socket-370 cooler comparo now online. Now you know what we've been doing with our weekends. :) Comments welcome - I will actually update it a little more with links to some other comparisons and some more "usability" tips. Right now I'm washing all this damned thermal paste off myself and going to bed. :)

Sat - 28-Aug-99
Tom's Hardware has a full guide to overclocking the Athlon. Pretty damn hardcore.. a free mousepad to the first person to send me their Athlon to experiment on. :)

Fri - 27-Aug-99
Like the new look? We're changing the site to be more info-oriented than sales-oriented from now on. All our overclocked C366A combos are reserved now and we're not doing any more chip sales for a while. So we'll have a few reviews, some user systems (keep sending them in!), some how-to guides, etc. We'll still be selling coolers and other interesting goodies, though..

This will not be a daily-updated news-of-the-world site. There are some excellent sites out there doing that already (try www.hardocp.com or www.arstechnica.com) and they must have way more spare time than we do 'coz they do a great job of keeping up to date. For australian-oriented news try www.aussiegamer.com and www.bigkid.com.au.

Mostly, we'll be chronicling our own overclocking experiences and experiments. We figure we're going to be doing it anyway, so we may as well take a few snaps with the digicam and put them on the site. That way everyone learns from our mistakes. :)

Feel free to contribute - if you've got pictures of your own extreme cooling setup, feel like writing a review of something you own, you've discovered how to break the Celeron's multiplier lock :) or just feel like saying hello, let us know. We also welcome any relevant (preferably Australian) sites for the links page.

Thu - 26-Aug-99
Kat sent along some pictures of his setup. This is another entrant in the "computer most likely to blow itself off the desk" stakes. :) Check it out in the aussie systems area.

Alan G. from Adelaide dropped me a note to say the GlobalWin CPM25603-32 blocks the first ram slot on his MSI 6163. Pretty common for those big Socket370 coolers to block access to RAM on Slot1 boards - on my Aopen AX6BC-Pro the GlobalWin CPM25603-16/32 don't block any slots, but the FDP/FEP-32's do block 1 slot off completely. Something to keep in mind when planning a system. Not sure where to put this info, I'll put it in the Tech Stuff area for now.

Wed - 25-Aug-99
Kurt sent along some info about his AMD overclocking experiences. His first question was bascially "Do you only like Intel stuff?" .. hehe, we're not CPU nazi's here. Were interested in 'em all! When I overclock my palmpilot you can bet I'll let you all know. :) Details in Tech Stuff.