Tech News

• Corsair PC3500 C2 Review @ bit-tech

  Published: Friday, February 21, 2003 | By: Dennis

  "The memory does what it says on the box. It runs perfectly at 217MHz, (434MHz DDR), with aggressive timings. This makes it one of the fastest modules currently available."
  Just keep in mind you need to have the processor bandwidth behind the ram to see the full benefits, aka Overclock!

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• Sneak Peek Prescott

  Published: Thursday, February 20, 2003 | By: Dennis

  "Intel Corp. engineers gave a sneak peek at Prescott, the company's next-generation Pentium 4 processor, at the Intel Developer Forum here Wednesday (Feb 19). Intel said the 90-nm processor due for release late this year will sport process and design improvements that will help Intel crank the Pentium up to a 5-GHz frequency."
  

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• Soltek SL-75FRN-L Review @ Lost Circuits

  Published: Thursday, February 20, 2003 | By: Dennis

  Lost Circuits really does a good job with their reviews and uncovered some voltage inconsistencies while they were overclocking along with an over-volt condition in the memory controller.
  "What we did not like were the voltage fluctuations we observed, especially after increasing the core voltage, that is, at e.g. the 1.725V setting, the monitored V core bounced between 1.69 and 1.72 V which is a bit too much fluctuation for my taste."
  The board does beat out the Asus nForce2 but didn't overclock as well as they would have liked.
  "We won't give the SL-75FRN L an editor's choice award but a "Golden Flame" Award might be appropriate. "
  That is pretty funny.

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• Soltek SL-75FRN-L Review @ Envy News

  Published: Thursday, February 20, 2003 | By: Dennis

  This board has really become quite popular in the past couple months and it has good reason to be. What gets me is how this review made it into one of Soltek's email press releases. Envy News does a good job and covers all of the bases though seems to have skipped over any overclocking aspects.

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• DDR400 Memory Validation Tests - Intel

  Published: Thursday, February 20, 2003 | By: Dennis

  "Samsung Electronics, Hynix Semiconductor and Infineon Technologies announced on Wednesday their 256Mbit DDR400 have each passed Intel’s verification for use with its new Springdale chipsets and are available in sample and volume quantities."
  More Springdale goodness, I don't believe there is a JEDEC spec for these modules yet, though I imagine it will happen rather quickly now.

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• Intel Announcements

  Published: Thursday, February 20, 2003 | By: Dennis

  Details on Centrino, Springdale, Canterwood and Prescott.
  "According to Intel, the higher-end Canterwood chipset will support Hyper-Threading Technology and have new features such as dual-channel DDR400 memory support, an 800MHz system bus, AGP 8x and integrated Serial ATA/RAID. The Springdale chipsets’ features include Intel’s next-generation integrated graphics, soft RAID, a new architecture designed to increase Gigabit Ethernet networking performance, dual-channel DDR400 memory and Intel Stable Driver Technology. Both chipsets are scheduled to be launched in the second quarter."
  w00t!! Check out the Digitimes post for more details.

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• qBIC 2000 Series Cubes Available

  Published: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 | By: Dennis

  I just got an email from one of our advertisers saying that the qBIC cases are available for purchase and at a very reasonable price. If you need some more information on what the qBIC series 2000 has to offer check out this Ninjalane Message Forum thread. Otherwise head on over to MisrCorps for current pricing and availability.

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• MSI K7N2G-ILSR Review @ PCStats

  Published: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 | By: Dennis

  This is what I call a "full-featured" motherboard and comes with everything under the sun. Though personally I don't like using onboard sound and video on my motherboards the other items like RAID and Ethernet are quite welcome.
  " It would be nice if MSI would release a BIOS that unlocks the processor by default because we could not manipulate the multiplier in this case. Overclocking was done via FSB adjustments which can be cumbersome. In any case we began to raise the FSB slowly and started to see stability problems around the 173 MHz FSB mark. "
  The lack of BIOS level multiplier unlocking would appear to be more of a common occurrence than rare exception with the nForce2 boards that we are seeing now, the Soltek SL-75FRN-L was the same way.

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• Raptor Geforce 4 Ti 4200 Review @ 3DXtreme

  Published: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 | By: Dennis

  This card has to have one of the longest names in history, "Mad Dog Multimedia Raptor Geforce 4 Ti 4200". This card can be found on the budget shelf at your local CompUSA. I'd be afraid of getting rabies.

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• Abit IT7 Max2 Review @ TweakTown

  Published: Wednesday, February 19, 2003 | By: Dennis

  "For the extreme user who does a lot of swapping of their hardware (such as RAM, video cards and other additional devices) ABIT has placed both a power on button and a reset button on the board itself. This is also useful if you aren’t going to put your computer inside a case, how you have a Power and Reset button on the board."
  Man that's a pretty good idea , and here I am stuck using my needle nose pliers.

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