Tech News

  • Spring Fever: Yet too much work

    Published: Monday, March 15, 2004 | By: Dennis

    Spring is right over the horizon and it shows. Good reviews and hardware news is becoming harder to find, Hardware mfgs are busy working on their new product lines, and hardly anybody viewed the Chaintech Apogee AA5700U review. Its almost like everyone is taking a nap waiting for something interesting to happen.

  • Unused space on hard drives recovered?

    Published: Thursday, March 11, 2004 | By: Dennis

    AllHardwareZone dives into the theory based on some information contained in this Inquirer article. The article goes on to talk about how you can recover empty unused space from your HDD, and also claims that they won't be trying it out for themselves.
    "I would also doubt that it would have any tangable affects on any other hard drives, since it appears that Ghost merely creates another partition overlapping the original partition on the drive. The best way to go about recovering lost space, should there be any, would be a firmware hack."
    Hax are fun! big grin smile

  • Intel offers 2.4GHz Prescott processor to motherboard makers

    Published: Thursday, March 11, 2004 | By: Dennis

    Aside from the bigger cache I don't see much use in having a Prescott 2.4"A". Then again the proc might have some huge headroom for overclocking.
    "Intel has informed Taiwan’s motherboard makers that it will add a 2.4GHz model to its desktop-use 90nm Prescott lineup at the end of March, according to sources at local board makers. The availability of the 2.4GHz processor was first reported by several websites in the fourth week of February.

    The 2.4GHz Prescott was not included in Intel’s original roadmap and comes after the chip giant launched its 2.8GHz Prescott in early February. The new processor runs on a 533MHz front-side bus (FSB)."

  • ABIT KV8-MAX3 Review @ Extreme Overclocking

    Published: Wednesday, March 10, 2004 | By: Dennis

    "The last complaint we have about the layout of the board is the AGP slot with respect to the DIMM slots. They are to close together to be able to remove memory without also removing the video card. Our 9700 was just shy of the first DIMM slot but a longer card such as the NVIDIA 5900 will cover a few of the DIMMs. This is a common mistake to many motherboards but can be easily avoided."
    Memory and video card conflicts have been a common problem with motherboards for quite some time now. Though I think the KV8 board layout could have used a little more work.

  • NL: Review Block - Video Cards. again...

    Published: Wednesday, March 10, 2004 | By: Dennis

    Video cards are what enable you to see stuff on screen but they do so much more than that..
    - Soltek SL-5900-FD @ EnvyNews This isn't a card you see reviewed very often but see pictures of all the time.
    - PowerColor 9800XT @ MadShrips
    - HIS Excalibur 9600XT Turbo @ HardwareHell
    - HIS Excalibur 9600 XT Turbo @ ViperLair
    Blah de blah ba. tongue smile

  • Gigabyte FX5700 Ultra Review @ GruntvillE

    Published: Tuesday, March 9, 2004 | By: Dennis

    "I tested different combinations and found that the highest this card would overclock with my system and remain stable is; Core clock 535MHz and Memory Clock 1000MHz. Anything greater then this caused multiple artifacts. They would not show up immediately, but after running an intense benchmark program for 30minutes, I would start to see the artifacts. So for this card and my current system specs, 535MHz & 1000MHz is the limit."
    Its really hit or miss on how much you can or can't overclock a video card. The Chaintech Apogee AA5700U that we recently reviewed ran flawless at 546 and 1041. happy smile

  • TwinX XMS4400 Review @ Hard Extreme

    Published: Tuesday, March 9, 2004 | By: Dennis

    Running ram synchronous to the FSB is still the best way to run your overclocked system. Just remember that at default speeds the programmed SPD settings will actually hurt performance unless you manually adjust them in the BIOS.
    "I’ve seen recent batches of the P4 2.4, 2.8, 3.2 GHz chips reach bus speeds of up to 250 MHz, and I have read that people have gotten them to hit 300 MHz. To do this you need a very overclockable motherboard and a decent Northbridge cooling system."

  • Valve System Survey

    Published: Tuesday, March 9, 2004 | By: Dennis

    "In Wednesday's update, Steam introduced the "Half-Life 2 Hardware Survey". This mostly automated survey collects information about Steam users' computer hardware (and some software). Valve plans to use this information to tune the performance of Half-Life 2. In three days, the survey has so far collected information from almost half a million respondents."
    Check out how many people are still using 16bit color to play games. tongue smile Tons of good stuff here, check it out for a good chuckle.

  • nForce 3 250Gb Pre-view @ ModFathers

    Published: Tuesday, March 9, 2004 | By: Dennis

    Rumors have been floating around at the actual release date of the nForce3 250 but nothing solid to go by. I think this will be the case for a little while but pre-view events are always fun to hear about.
    "Now just so we don't get ahead of ourselves. This is a pre-view and we really will not know for sure how this motherboard is until we have a chance to test it. Secondly I will be looking at this mainly with regards to how it will impact upon the area that most of us at The Modfathers use our systems for, and that's gaming."
    Don't forget that DFI has already shown a "pre-view" of their next LanParty board based on the nF3-250 chipset; sadly the demo board was that crappy gold/brown color.

  • XFX 5700 Ultra goes DDR3

    Published: Tuesday, March 9, 2004 | By: Dennis

    Here is a snip from the press release that we got.
    "XFX HAS DONE IT AGAIN!
    A New high powered weapon is here to turn the tide in the fight against poor gaming performance. The XFX GeForce FX 5700 Ultra with DDR3 is the perfect addition to the plethora of powerful video cards in our arsenal. Through its use of DDR3 Memory and GeForce FX 5700 Ultra GPU, this card has just what you'll need to transform your games into a smooth action packed experience.

    Don't put up with low FPS, XFX is here to defend your right to the best gaming experience available."