Tech News
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Gigabyte SINXP1394 Review @ TweakTown
Published: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 | By: DennisSo what is better than a Pentium 4 and DDR?? A Pentium 4 with Dual Channel DDR! The Gigabyte SINXP1394 is a SiS655 enabled motherboard featuring Dual Channel DDR333. It would appear that Gigabyte strayed away from the reference SiS layout and placed the memory banks next to each other, not sure that really matters but something to take note of.
" Overclocking, while limited by some voltage limitations, was still a very good affair. We managed to run a FSB of 163MHz FSB and a max memory speed of 392MHz. Without the addition of memory voltage settings we weren’t able to run the memory above 400MHz."
I do like the fact it comes with Gigabit Ethernet.
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Albatron PX845PE Pro II Review @ Maximum3D
Published: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 | By: DennisThis isn't a bad board and contains a decent set of features.
"The Albatron PX845PE Pro II is quite a full-featured motherboard. It incorporates some of the latest technologies including SATA with a stable and overclocker friendly package. But, the fact remains is that there are so many other boards like it, with greater availability as well." -
VapoChill + Pentium 4 = 800Mhz??
Published: Tuesday, February 25, 2003 | By: DennisTom's Hardware has a fun little article up about their quest to reach 800Mhz FSB using a Pentium 4 2.26Ghz and an Asus P4G8X (Granite Bay) motherboard.
"While our benchmarks should be familiar to you, the results require a little explanation. For starters, we weren't able to reach our goal of stable 800 MHz FSB. The system stopped being more or less stable after 750 MHz. With patience and some crashes in between, we also achieved the performance level at 800 MHz FSB. "
In the cases of extreme overclocking you need a variety of things to be successful. Of those you need a motherboard with the AGP and PCI clocks locked thus removing any out of frequency problems with your expansion cards, and some really good cooling. For the past few months I've had a VapoChill system here in the Ninjalane Labs and recently had a chance to fire it up with a shiny new Pentium 4 2.4Ghz (533Mhz) processor. Core temps remained pretty constant at -10C but the lack of a locked AGP and PCI bus kept overclocking to a minimum yielding only a 400Mhz gain (easily attainable with aircooling).
More on that later. -
The 3DMark03 Controversy
Published: Tuesday, February 25, 2003 | By: DennisI've never really put much faith into 3DMark as a benchmark and it would appear that nVidia feels the same way. When it came time for nVidia to renew their license with FutureMark they opted not to and their reasons were clear. They felt that 3DMark03 didn't accurately represent a gaming environment and it was wasteful to spend development time optimizing drivers for it.
" The impact of NVIDIA's PR push was immediate and impressive. A number of web sites published articles raising questions about 3DMark03—in some cases, unfortunately, repeating NVIDIA's claims about the test without attribution and without critical evaluation of those claims. Since that time, a number of players, including FutureMark themselves, have weighed in with responses to NVIDIA's criticisms. "
Tech-Report dives into the issue and looks at both sides of the story. -
The AMD gift to Intel
Published: Tuesday, February 25, 2003 | By: Dennis"I'll say it simply: AMD has handed Intel the future of x86 computing. Without performance numbers nearly doubling that of a comparably priced Pentium 4, AMD is finished as a top-end competitor to Intel. It'll be pushed back to an extremely distant second place, and will likely hold less than 5% of the global marketshare in the years to come."
These are some pretty harsh words, they do have a point though. -
Intel Price Drops
Published: Monday, February 24, 2003 | By: DennisIntel has issued a price drop on their processors today and in some cases the drops are in excess of 20%. This price drop includes just about all of the current processors that Intel offers. If you are looking to buy a Pentium 4 processor this week will be the best one for you.
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DDR400 Validation Results
Published: Monday, February 24, 2003 | By: DennisMost of the major memory manufactures are represented on this page along with a couple I never heard of.
Make sure to check out the DDR400 addendum that Intel is submitting to JEDEC.
"The intent of this document is to propose a DDR400 specification so as to create a robust, cost effective,
and compatible solution for DDR Memory. This specification complies with the DDRI JEDEC Specification rev. 2.0 and the Intel Spec addenda for DDR333/266/200. However, those parameters listed in here are specific to DDR400 and supercede values for the same parameters of the above-mentioned specifications and addenda.
Features
• VDD = 2.60V ± 0.10V(dc at < 20MHz)
• This specification is for CL = 3 and CL = 2.5"
Not very fast
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The Apocalypse
Published: Monday, February 24, 2003 | By: Dennis"Sir Isaac Newton predicted the world would end in the year 2060, scribbling the date on a piece of paper, according to theories uncovered by academics in Jerusalem."
--snip--
""He spent something like 50 years and wrote 4,500 pages trying to predict when the end of the world was coming. But until now it was not known that he ever wrote down a final figure. He was very reluctant to do so." "
Reluctant?? I think its more like he never actually found it. -
Nigerian Dies Over Spam Scam
Published: Friday, February 21, 2003 | By: DennisThis is pretty funny and really quite sad at the same time.
" The criminals typically make their money by extracting ever-escalating sums of money for bribes, bank fees and the like from their "business partners," that is, the folks they scam. But according to early reports in Nigerian and Czech newspapers, the gunman's bank account was drained after he gave the account number and other personal details to someone posing as a senior Nigerian official. "
Spammers suxX0r more ass than an ass suxX0r on tuesday. -
Bootleg Springdale Benchmarks
Published: Friday, February 21, 2003 | By: DennisFor the non-German speaking crowed you might want to take a translator but their graphs are universal.
" The Intel Developer forum 2003 is in the full course and we had today the opportunity first of memory bench mark on a system with Intels coming Springdale chip set (i865) with dual Channel DDR400 support to accomplish. As processor a Pentium 4 with 3 GHz and FSB800 was used. "
Per Bablefish
