Tech News
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MSI 655 Max Reveiw @ Anandtech
Published: Friday, February 7, 2003 | By: DennisThe Anandtech motherboard review gang takes has the SiS655 enabled motherboard from MSI. Incase you don't remember this is a dual channel DDR chipset for the Pentium 4 platform supporting DDR333. So far this is the second board that we've seen with this chipset, could there be more?
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Chaintech 9EJS1 ZENITH Review @ Viper's Lair
Published: Friday, February 7, 2003 | By: Dennis"Chaintech uses a nice gold heatsink and fan combo (as well as the biggest fan grill I've seen on such a small fan) to cool the Northbridge down. The Northbridge doesn't run very warm, but when you're overclocking, any extra cooling will help. In case you're wondering, the fan grill on the Northbridge does not get in the way of heatsink installation."
This is a i845PE enabled motherboard from Chaintech. Even though they claim that it doesn't overclock very well they still got 3Ghz out of their 2.4B. -
Soyo P4I 845PE Review @ Overclockers NZ
Published: Friday, February 7, 2003 | By: DennisIt would appear that the growing trend to integrate and bundle less has hit Soyo, though in this case I don't see it as a bad thing. They have posted some good overclocking and tweaking results but have taken issue with some of their marketing decisions.
" P4I 845PE isn't the ordinary Soyo motherboard. Soyo cuts down the usual heavy loaded accessories and made some improvements on performance and overclocking. The choice of onboard chips is somewhat different from other makers. The overall features offered looks nice at glace but a bit weak when examined in details. 4-Channel sound is below today's standard sound 6-channel sound is the standard feature these days."
This is inspiring me to finish my comments system this weekend.
Now if it happens, that is another story. -
R350 in Mass Production
Published: Thursday, February 6, 2003 | By: DennisThe Inquirer has some good information on the new graphics core from ATI and even claims that we should see it sometime near the end of March.
"We expect the chip to launch at a core clock of 375MHz. It will incorporate DirectX 9.1 features, which is great if you're going to keep the card for at least two years, but don't expect to see any games written for it released for at least a year."
Kind of makes you wonder why you would want to upgrade doesn't it?
On a side note the Radeon 9900 will initially be released with DDRI but also supports DDR2 for even more theoretical bandwidth.
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Adversity makes Nvidia Stronger
Published: Thursday, February 6, 2003 | By: DennisThe question is, after a bunk deal with Microsoft will nVidia be able to come back on top of the graphics market?
"Huang is confident that Nvidia will end up back on top. "Tiger Woods doesn't win every day. We don't deny that ATI has a wonderful product and it took the performance lead from us. But if they think they're going to hold onto it, they're smoking something hallucinogenic."" -
Radeon 9700 Pro Review @ 3dXtreme
Published: Wednesday, February 5, 2003 | By: DennisI actually broke down and bought one of these cards for the test bench and though I won't be doing a review of the card I can tell you that the 9700 Pro is the fastest card I have ever owned.
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AOpen AX45-4D Max Review @ VR-Zone
Published: Wednesday, February 5, 2003 | By: DennisDual Channel DDR is the future when it comes to memory bandwidth and here is the low cost alternative for the Pentium 4 platform, the SiS655. It really appears to be very similar to the SiS648 with the addition of a Dual Channel memory controller.
"For one, it promises Granite Bay performance without the added price tag! To achieve this, SIS has implemented Dual-Channel DDR333 support for this board. Well this would mean that the Memory Bus would be higher than that of the CPU Bus and as such will have very little performance increase in terms of usable bandwidth." -
Latest Soltek Review Award Update
Published: Wednesday, February 5, 2003 | By: DennisI gave it much thought and after consulting with some people and other users I have decided to alter the award that I gave the SL-75FRN-L. Sorry for the mix-up but I will be able to sleep better now.
The review was a 5 of 5 and now will be a 4 of 5. -
Nvidia Options for the Xbox
Published: Wednesday, February 5, 2003 | By: DennisLooking back it would almost seem that working on the Xbox caused more trouble than it was worth.
"The most difficult thing about the Xbox deal was that it forced the company to distract itself from its core market: graphics chips for desktop personal computers."
--snip--
""After the way the first Xbox went, I would view Nvidia's involvement with the next Xbox as a negative," said Joe Osha, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, who does not own Nvidia stock and whose company does not have a banking relationship with Nvidia."
Its good to know you can make comments like this if when your not an investor.
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Gigabyte GA-8PE667 Ultra 2 Review @ x-bit labs
Published: Wednesday, February 5, 2003 | By: Dennis"Gigabyte GA-8PE667 Ultra 2 mainboard offers very attractive and rich features set and demonstrates good reliability and performance. Its overclocking capabilities are far from being ideal, but still meet the demands of most users. It costs not too much, compared to competitor products, and thus can be a good basis for a system of a demanding user. "
I would have to agree though it seems odd for them to include two RAID controllers (Serial ATA150 & ATA133) along with the ATA100 that comes on the Southbridge, but hey the more drives the better I always say.
