Tech News
-
Epox 8RDA+ Review @ 3dXtreme
Published: Thursday, February 27, 2003 | By: DennisThe nForce2 platform is really the top of the line when it comes to Athlon performance, and Epox pulled out the stops when it comes to available bios options making this board an overclockers dream.
"The Epox 8RDA+ at stock speed performed very well however it was during the overclocked testing that the Epox 8RDA+ really shined. I have been running this motherboard with the front side bus set at 200 mhz for about 2 weeks now and with 100% stability."
Sounds a little like the Soltek nForce2 board with the sweet spot being more in the 195Mhz range. This of course was with the 1.2bios revision, things got better when the 1.3bios was released.
-
March Mobo Sales Prospects Optimistic
Published: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 | By: Dennis"Previously, motherboard makers had predicted that business would turn weaker in February and March, as many of their clients had asked for pre-holiday shipments before Chinese New Year and overall demand may be dampened in advance of the CeBIT show. However, with specifications of Intel’s new Springdale platform being published before the tradeshow, the suspended buying sentiment is expected to be much lessened."
-
Disk Pirates Nabbed in Singapore
Published: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 | By: Dennis" Singapore police netted their biggest-ever haul of pirated software and music CDs in an islandwide raid, arresting 17 people and seizing almost $1 million worth of goods, authorities said Wednesday.
Police in the strictly controlled city-state confiscated more than 124,000 pirated compact discs containing games, software and music Tuesday in a three-hour raid on 10 shops and an apartment. Police also said that more arrests were expected. "
Its about time something was done. -
Corsair Corsair TWINX512 Review @ 3Dvelocity
Published: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 | By: DennisWith the introduction of dual channel ddr there is an inherent need to find memory modules with similar SPD ratings. Corsair has taken the guesswork out of this process with their latest memory offering, TWINX.
"So do you need TWINX? Well, to be honest no you don't. For the AMD platform it's a product before its time and only those able to hit a FSB of 200MHz on their CPU are going to see any benefits from TWINX over the regular XMS product."
Here is our review for comparison. -
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. -
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.
