Tech News

  • Intel Achieves Major Milestones In EUV Lithography Program

    Published: Tuesday, August 3, 2004 | By: Dennis

    "Lithography is the technology used to print circuits onto computer chips. In order to pack more and more transistors onto a chip, semiconductor manufacturers must print ever-smaller features. EUV lithography is being developed because current chip-printing technology is expected to reach its limits in the next few years. Intel is targeting this technology for high- volume manufacturing in 2009."

  • MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR Review @ Tech-Arena

    Published: Tuesday, August 3, 2004 | By: Dennis

    "As I said when I first received this board I was all ready to go, as I had used an MSI board in the past, so I knew that I would have a nice simple installation with no hassle at all, I was right."
    I recently bought this very board for a server I was building and I will agree, the installation and setup went very smoothly with no problems. That is until a few bios modifications (aka overclocking) caused the bios to corrupt.

    BIOS corruption on nForce2 motherboards is a fairly common occurrence and provided you have the equipment, is fairly easy to fix. In some instances you can remove the BIOS chip, reset the CMOS, re-install the BIOS chip, and away you go. Unfortunately for this MSI board it required that I "Hot Flash" a new image on the chip. If any of you need some pointers on how this was done, pose the question in the Ninjalane Message Forum and I will elaborate.

    The only sad part of this whole news posting is that my comments for this news post are longer than the actual review. tongue smile

  • Toxic X800 Pro @ Rage3D

    Published: Monday, August 2, 2004 | By: Dennis

    This is that funky card from Sapphire with the huge aftermarket cooler on it. Move over FX5900, here comes something meatier.
    "Framerate is still everything (anyone who says differently is full of it), so the most obvious option for an AIB looking to grab some extra attention is to modify the videocard BIOS to increase the usually conservative core and/or memory speeds set by their IHV guidelines. The problem there is that the two big IHVs don't like their AIB partners messing around with the BIOS as any potential instability introduced there is usually looked at as the fault of the IHV and usually not the AIB. If the AIB ignores the IHV guidelines and goes ahead and factory overclocks the card anyway then they can expect to lose their IHV warranty and support. Obviously that's not something any AIB would want to risk."
    Gotta love that “framerate is everything” quote. big grin smile It would seem that most everyone thinks this way except for the [H]. I say if you got the framerate start turning up the details until you achive a good mix of speed and visual quality.

    As for overclocking, I don't mind a good factory overclock and since many companies are doing this either in drivers or BIOS you can't really do much about it, unless the card melts down. wink smile

  • PC Chips takes over Soyo

    Published: Monday, August 2, 2004 | By: Dennis

    "As second-tier motherboard makers continue to lose money, they are expected to increasingly fall prey to takeovers by investors or be forced out of the market in the second half of the year, as seen by the recent takeover of Soyo Computer by members of the Taiwan-based PC Chips Group, according to sources at the makers."
    What do you think, hostile takeover or will PC Chips allow them to clean out their desks first?

  • Asetek WaterChill Antarctica @ Hexus

    Published: Monday, August 2, 2004 | By: Dennis

    "To test the noise side of things I used my good old ears. To limit the affects of ambient noise in my wholly unscientific listening tests, I equipped the system with a Gainward SilentFX graphics card and a very quiet Tagan power supply. The SK8V comes without a discrete fan on the K8T800 bridge so things were eerily quiet."
    The WaterChill is a very solid kit that comes with everything you need to get started. Be sure to check out our review of a similar kit from asetek.

  • Another Day, Another Birthday Past

    Published: Monday, August 2, 2004 | By: Dennis

    My, how the time flies. Yes its true another birthday has past and not a party was thrown.

    -- The End --

    Tune in later today when the 101(F) degree weather becomes a slight chance of isolated thundershowers.

  • Albatron Px915g Pro @ Red and Blackness

    Published: Friday, July 30, 2004 | By: Dennis

    As you may have guessed this is a i915 Intel board using the new 775 pin Prescott processor. Aside from the i865PR and i875P hybrid boards this will be the only chipset to support the 775 Prescott, AGP graphics, and DDR1.
    "The cpu is mounted very easily in this new socket system. Just pull up the clip and open it up; and after that you can just push the processor into the socket and push the clip down. The north and southbridge are covered by these heatsinks so we should see some overclocking later on in this review."
    Actually you never want to push a 775 processor into the new socket, that is a sure fire way to bend the pins and ruin your mobo. The processor just sets into place quite nicely with no extra force needed.

  • NL: Review Block - 6800 Ultra

    Published: Friday, July 30, 2004 | By: Dennis

    the 6800 Ultra is just about the hottest card on the market, in more ways than one. wink smile

    - Gigabyte GeForce 6800 Ultra @ HardwareZoom
    - Sparkle GeForce 6800 Ultra @ accelenation

    Be sure to check back again for more reviews here at...

  • PCI-E - but not really - Video Block-0

    Published: Friday, July 30, 2004 | By: Dennis

    Yep with enough bridges you can attach just about anything. You can also blow up a bunch of stuff by making soap but that’s a different story. big grin smile

    Some of the first PCI-Express video cards are actually AGP cards with a bridge to convert it to PCI-E. HDD companies have been doing the same thing with their Serial ATA products, I guess its cheaper than developing a new controller for a slow HDD.

    - Gigabyte GV-NX57128D @ PCStats
    - MSI PCX5750-TD128 @ PCStats
    - Gigabyte GV-RX60X128V @ PCStats

    This kind of turned into a PCStats review block but that’s how the ball bounces.

  • OMG Look At The Time

    Published: Thursday, July 29, 2004 | By: Dennis

    Sorry for the apparent lack of news posting but things have been pretty hectic around here. Deadlines are coming up and the summer heat has really played a number on test bench overclocking. Sit tight there should be a Review Block online sometime later today to cover any losses in review postings. I know how you all love to read reviews. happy smile

    I've been reading some interesting things about what people are doing to get prepared for Doom 3. Some are making shopping lists for new hardware while others are just having fun looking back at the history of id game engine releases. Did you realize that id is one of the main reasons gamers upgrade their systems??