Tech News
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Cold beer for hot days
Published: Monday, June 2, 2003 | By: DennisCheck this mod out
" While drinking certain dark beers in the sun, I came to think about how to keep the beer cold until I finished it. Normally this isn't a big problem as I usually finish them before they get warm, but on really hot days this can be a problem. Having some hardware lying around in my apartment, I decided to build something that could keep the beer cool. Read on to see how I made my own PeltierBeer."
Warm beer can be a real problem so do what you can to ensure that it stays cold.
Thank Talon for the news post. -
DFI Lan Party KT400A Review @ The Tech Lounge
Published: Monday, June 2, 2003 | By: Dennis" As the graph shows, both motherboards perform about the same, but I didn’t expect much of a difference. The Lan Party takes the lead in every test except for the CPU Arithmetic FPU test where the Biostar wins by about 12 MFLOPS. Overall, the Lan Party KT400a allows for better CPU usage."
It is too bad they didn't take a good photo of this board under the blacklight, It looks amazing.
More on that later.
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Promise SX-4000 Review @ Maximum OC
Published: Monday, June 2, 2003 | By: DennisThis is one of those RAID cards that all the chix dig.
"When I first saw this particular raid card. I thought to myself, "That thing is long!". Quite an intelligent observation eh? Well yes it is long but there are longer cards."
This is probably one of the better high-end IDE RAID solutions out there and doesn’t' cost an arm and a leg. -
Albatron PX865PE Pro II Review @ HardAvenue
Published: Monday, June 2, 2003 | By: Dennis"However Albatron have jumped on the 865 bandwagon very early, obviously they see this chipset doing well and quite frankly so do we. However it takes more than just a good chipset for a motherboard to do well in the retail market, quality features that set it apart from the rest are a must, which is where Albatron have been known to shine."
I'm a fan of the i865PE. though the floppy connector is still under the last PCI slot, why don't they just not put it on there. Sheesh -
Triplex Radeon 9800 Pro Review @ VR-Zone
Published: Monday, June 2, 2003 | By: DennisWhen I think of Triplex two things come to mind, Alu carrying case and silver PCB. You get neither of these things with the 9800 Pro from Triplex.
"Triplex Radeon 9800 Pro card looks exactly like the reference ATi Radeon 9800 Pro card with its red PCB, similar components layout. The PCB is based on 8 layers design and is slightly longer than the Radeon 9700 Pro card." -
Radeon 9800 Pro Roundup @ NordicHardware
Published: Monday, June 2, 2003 | By: DennisRoundups are fun and what better product to roundup than a video card.
"So it's time to push things to the extreme. Since all boards here are basically identical I'm mostly interested in seeing how Hercules cooling effects the overclocking and if I'll be able to push the 2 ns RAM on PowerColors board any further. Overclocking the DDR-II on the 9800 Pro 256 MB will also be interesting as well. Here are the nominal clockspeeds I could reach without noticing any stability problems or artifacts" -
Abit IS7 Review Update
Published: Saturday, May 31, 2003 | By: DennisI have updated the IS7 review to reflect a recent discovery.
"One of the sharp readers of Ninjalane.com noticed that the chip pictured above is actually a Gigabit controller chip from 3com, (Marvell 940-MV00) so it would appear that despite what the documentation says this version of the IS7 comes with an upgraded Ethernet controller."
I don't know if this will be a permanent change to the standard IS7 or if Abit was just overstocked on the controller chips. Regardless getting something for free is still a nice change. -
Gigabyte 8KNXP I875P Review @ TweakTown
Published: Friday, May 30, 2003 | By: DennisThis board has all of the typical Gigabyte features including dual BIOS, funky colors, dual power option and, a blue PCB. Of the non standard features,... an extra memory bank.
"The dual power system keeps the voltages within specs when running the CPU at higher CPU speeds. The only major disappointment was the voltages. CPU voltage is what we would expect on a budget board rather than an overclockers motherboard as are the DRAM voltages barely able to hold a great overclock. While we had an unlocked Pentium 4 and managed 310MHz out of the FSB, it would be hard to get a 2.4C up to this limit due to lack of CPU voltage."
I need to get me one of them "unlocked" P4's. -
DFI LanParty KT400A Review @ SubZeroTech
Published: Friday, May 30, 2003 | By: DennisThis is an amazing looking motherboard but the overclocking performance isn't really that great.
"I guess one might find a potential ceiling on the FSB, it was limited to 165. The DDR timings were capped at 400 as well. But even with my water-cooling I could not come close to 165 on the FSB. I was getting into windows at 150 but it crashed soon after. This is really my CPU’s fault though, as it is locked and has never hit anything above that. Using a KT333 board I could not even get into POST at 145 if that says anything." -
MSI 875P Neo Review @ Digital-Daily
Published: Friday, May 30, 2003 | By: Dennis"Summing it up, I can say that the overclocking options of MSI 875P are very powerful: the margin for Vcore raise is very high (although with a high increment), with no less memory voltage variation range. As a result, the overclocking success will be in direct dependence on a specific specimen of the cooling system.
The factual overclocking showed that the system was running absolutely stably at FSB =280 MHz, which gave 3.36 GHz for the Pentium4 2.4? being tested. "
Not a bad overclock but they go on to mention that you can only attain these speeds with the older BIOS since the newer one released May 22 pretty much killed the system.
