Singapore Hardware Zone heeft een review van de Asus V3400TNT AGP. Die naam zegt wel zo'n beetje wat erin zit.

Hier wat over de performance:

D performance is way below par for a TNT but the Canopus Spectra running on the same system scored very much higher, therefore the Asus drivers have to mature further. 3D is on par with the Canopus Spectra TNT and can improve but this is due to the Super-7 motherboard and K6-2 chip used. Using a P2 system of the same speed, you'll see much higher performance. From the results, a super-7 system owner is better off buying a Banshee based card unless one is buying a video-card to keep for sometime to come, in which the more powerful TNT can be better utilised when the super-7 owner upgrades later on.

For overclockers, you can push up the core speed up to 110Mhz and the ram up to 125Mhz using Power-Strip. It's stability is a bit flaky at this speed. Beyond this speed for either the ram or core, your games will crash very quickly. There's no option in the the ASUS utilities to overclock the card.

Planet Hardware heeft een review van de Elsa Erazor II, een van de weinig TNT kaarten met SGRAM geheugen.

Hier wat stuff uit de review:

he board itself is actually quite small for all the power it holds, and is noticeably smaller than the STB Velocity TNT board, to put it simply, you'll have no trouble finding room for this little morsel. Mounted on the TNT chipset is an incredibly small powered fan and heatsink combo, one thing I love about this board, since TNT is one of the hottest (temperature wise) chipsets on the market today. The board is mounted with 16 megs of SGRAM, which seems to be standard, although Elsa went with EtronTech 125MHz memory modules. 4 on front, 4 on back, 8 2MB modules to be exact. Elsa also decided to cut off TV-out from their end product, as some other companies have done as well, as most people never get around to utilizing it (including myself). But hey, if you want TV-out, there are plenty of other boards out there if you look.

Gamer's Alliance heeft een review van SiN. Daar hebben we er al 10.000 van gehad, maar die reviews van Gagames zijn altijd erg goed, dus hier maar wat info:

side from the improvements in gun style and level designing, the Ritual people also put in a little effort to make the engine a little more gameplay-oriented with area-based damage and dynamic skins. Area-based damage means, sort of self-explanatorily, that when you hit a guy in the leg, he limps, and when you hit him in the head, he’s a goner. Dynamic skins just mean that when you DO hit somebody in the chest, their skin changes to show some of their clothes shot through and some blood oozing on their skin (and if you’re really sick you can toy with the female civilians and their shifting skins). I really liked the area-based damage – it at least kept me from just spraying bullets all over the place, and forced me to try and hit people realistically instead of just hitting their player-box as in Quake. It’s also pretty cool when you hit somebody in the head with a high-powered rifle and they do a backflip over the rail they were standing on. And you can’t forget about the power-ups. They didn’t put them into the single player very much at all, so this is mainly confined to the multiplayer. I’ll still mention it here as it is part of the dynamic of gameplay, however. You’ll find power-ups ranging from adrenaline (which will make you run at about 50 times the normal speed) to cloaking (which has a cool Predator effect) to megahealth (which pumps up your health 100 units) and invincibility. My favorite is switching to a pistol, grabbing an adrenaline, and then tempting my rocket-wielding friend on LAN to shoot me before flying off at 500 mph.

Er is weer eens een nieuwe versie van Powerstrip gereleased:

For your convenience, the latest PowerStrip build supports optional command-line parameters that allow you to shift clock speed(s) via an ordinary Windows shortcut. Syntax is as follows: pstrip.exe /clk MClk SClk, where MClk is a mandatory integer specifying the new memory clock, and SClk is an optional integer specifying the new core clock where asynchronous PLLs are available. Examples: pstrip.exe /clk 110 100 sets the memory clock to 110MHz and the core clock to 100MHz, while pstrip.exe /clk 125 sets the memory clock to 125MHz. Note that changes take effect in real-time, and there are no confirmation prompts, so use with caution.

Het ding kun je hier halen.

Het klinkt een beetje onwaarschijnlijk maar het schijnt te kunnen: gamen op een Mac. Gamer's Alliance heeft wat info over nieuwe Mac titels:

Gathering of Developers has plans for supporting the Macintosh platform in 1999. The Gathering will ship a Macintosh version of Railroad Tycoon II, a strategy simulation game, and FLY! flight simulation (Mac/PC). The company, in conjunction with LogicWare, is also releasing Jazz Jackrabbit 2, an action-packed, side-scrolling, arcade-style game, for the Macintosh in early 1999. The Gathering is showing all three titles and some sneak peeks of other upcoming games at MacWorld, Booth #135 in the North Hall from January 4-8, 1999.

Hardware Central heeft een review van de Turtle Beach Montego II. Dit ding heeft net zoals de MX300 van Diamond een Vortex 2 chipset van Aureal en ondersteund A3D 2.0.

Hier wat info over de geluidskwaliteit:

nlike previous generations of sound cards, the current crop of sound cards all have crystal clear sound quality, and the Montego II is no exception. Both static noise and distortion were minimal throughout our tests.

With 3D sound, it all comes down to how realistic it is. Because the Montego II only supported 2 outputs and the SB Live! 4 outputs, HardwareCentral used earphones with both to allow for a fair comparison. After head-to-head comparisons between the A3D API of the Vortex II based Montego II and the EAX based SoundBlaster Live!, HardwareCentral found the Vortex II to be more realistic even without the additional reflection/occlusion features found in A3D 2.0. When listening to sounds coming from behind on the SoundBlaster Live!, it sounds like the source is actually coming from inside your head. However, with the Montego II, sounds coming from behind actually sounded like they originated from behind.

Dus de Montega heeft maar 1 stereo uitgang? Dat suckt (MX300 heeft er 2, net zoals de SBLive).

3D XTC heeft een review in elkaar gepleurd van de Kenwood Multibeam 40x, een CD-ROM drive met toffe specs:

Computer hardware is constantly becoming faster and faster. So are CDROMs, now reaching speed up to 40X and above. Kenwood has taken a step into the opposite direction and actually lowered the rotation speed to approx. 12X with their new Multibeam 40X. So you can say they made it slower but still faster. And how does that fit? Well, utilizing TrueX technology from Zen Research, the Mutlibeam 40X, as the name reveals, is first in the world to use multiple syncronized laser beams, 7 of them actually, to read data from the disc. Giving a performance equivalent to around a 60X CDROM.

Ace's Hardware heeft een artikel met info over de zwaar geheimzinnige Transmeta processor die volgens sommige buitenaardse technologie gebruikt (jammie). Hier wat stuff:

Rumors suggest Transmeta is developing a microprocessor designed to execute foreign instruction sets, and their patent lends some credence to these rumors. A product capable of running all of the software available on all other platforms (or at least the biggest ones) could become the defacto standard on which other semiconductor companies base their designs. Imagine Intel developing x86 microprocessors by using technology from Transmeta. Another possibility is that Transmeta will market such a product directly to the end user, selling OEMs and VARs a chip that can run anything and everything. There are problems with this theory, however. By all accounts, the successful emulation of another instruction set is more time consuming than the direct execution of that instruction set in hardware. For example, Digital's FX!32 is slower than genuine x86 hardware.

One of the best ways to try to get some insight into what Transmeta is up to is to look at the people who work for Transmeta. Though I won't mention any names, at least one Transmeta employee worked on Stanford's SimOS project (http://simos.stanford.edu/), a program capable of emulating other architectures (SimOS currently emulates MIPS and Alpha hardware). Additional Stanford projects which may relate to work being done at Transmeta include the FLASH Project (http://www-flash.stanford.edu/), the building of a large-scale shared-memory multiprocessor, and a UNIX-compatible operating system that survives hardware and software faults, called Hive.

The Techs Network heeft een review van de T-Rex PII cooler van 3DfxCool. Het ding heeft net zoals o.a. de FAP2X3B van ComputerNerd 3 fans en ziet er erg heavy uit.

Hoewel het dus een PII koeler is, kun je 'm met wat geknutsel ook op een Celeron gebruiken:

Bart did warn me that this is not a Celeron cooler at all, and did ask me to please review it as it was meant for. Well Bart, I did do that above... now it is time for the modifications. I took my Celeron, 3DFXCool's heatsink and took those nice 3DFXCool fans and started some modifications. Mind you, this is in no way endorsed by 3DFXCool, but it does so well I thought I would tell ya about it anyways. I took the 3 fans and some GOOP, then got to work. I attached the 3 fans to the metal heatsink that I had drilled 4 holes in to support the Celeron bracket that I had from my old Celeron, then plopped some GOOP on the bottom and I was done. My Celeron running a single heatsink/fan combination had always been unstable at 464Mhz and of course at 504Mhz. CPU temperature came up to around 100 degrees when I attempted this. Now I can run successfully at 464Mhz @ 89 degrees fahrenheit... that is better than most fans that I have even seen.

Als logisch vervolg op de prijsverlagingen van Intel heeft AMD hetzelfde gedaan. Hier (alweer) wat stuff van The Register:

ntel officially introduced its 366MHz and 400MHz Celerons yesterday but AMD has taken retaliatory action over the holiday period and has slashed the price of its K6-2/400 by $60.

Over the last two weeks, AMD has briefed its distributors and dealers about the price drop, which is intended to take the wind out of Intel's sales.

The public clash between Intel and AMD hides a bitter battle behind the scenes. As exclusively reported here at the beginning of December, Intel dropped the prices of its 300MHz and 333MHz Celerons in a bid to shift inventory and prepare the market for the January price war.

Cyrix and some distributors made the claim that Intel was dumping its stock of Slot One Celerons as it prepared to push Socket 370 processors into the marketplace.

The pricing of the AMD K6-2/400 now pits it against Intel's new introductions today. The Celeron 366MHz costs $123 while the 400MHz part will cost $158. The AMD K6-2/400 now costs around $175 while the K6-2/350 is around $100.

The lower speed Celerons, the 300A and the 333MHz parts, drop in price to $71 and $90 respectively. Intel also cut prices on its 350MHz and 400MHz parts by five and six per cent respectively to $202 and $353.

Nog wat spul van The Register over de overclockers-lock die Intel wil gaan inbakken in z'n nieuwe CPU's:

Intel’s justification for preventing overclocking is that it is anxious that unscrupulous people will sell machines at higher clock rates than the parts warrant. This is a counterfeit argument.

Earlier this year, our colleagues at c’t magazine, along with other journalists around the world and a reservoir of anxious resellers revealed that Intel was taking precious little notice of a large number of counterfeit Pentium IIs swilling around in the channel.

The problem became so great that c’t magazine even went to the lengths of producing a piece of software which would detect whether chips were overclocked or not, apparently to Intel’s blithe indifference. (Stories: Program released to counter re-marking and Intel's outsiders come to resellers' aid)

Intel does not want you to overclock its chips. It wants you to carry on buying Intel Inside PCs with new chips, such as the 366MHz/400MHz Celerons it will sell you from Monday, or the Pentium IIIs with Streaming SIMD it will introduce at the end of February.

It’s fair enough that Intel, a large corporation which makes microprocessors, wants to sell you new chips so it can carry on in business and make gross margins of over 50 per cent.

But when it starts using spurious arguments to conceal its true mission, it stands convicted of hypocrisy. That’s why it’s a whitened sepulchre.

Erg droevige info van The Register: Intel gaat het overklokken onmogelijk maken (ok, dat wisten we al maanden):

Letters written by an Intel microprocessor designer to an Internet overclocking site have revealed that the practice is set to become a thing of the past.

Chip engineer Karl Andrews wrote to the Overclockers Comparison Page earlier this month and said that newer chips will have a "more effective speed control method" built into them.

That means, said Andrews, that overclocking "will soon become a dead subject".

He said Intel’s reasons for doing so was not just to prevent hobbyists experimenting with their personal property but to prevent counterfeiting.

The information is in the public domain, claimed Andrews. He says that on its Web site there is a statement that Pentium IIs optimised for the 100MHz front side bus have circuitry built in to prevent overclocking.

Intel warns that if the speed is set too fast on such processors, a system will attempt to boot and then reset itself. When it restarts, the chip will be reset to its default value.

This information does not just apply to the T440BX motherboard but to other chipsets, Andrew said.

Future chips will be hard coded to prevent over-clocking, he added.

Vooropgesteld dat AMD geen gekke dingen gaat doen voorspel ik dat overklokkers massaal zullen overstappen op AMD processors. Dood aan Intel. Lang leve het overklokken!

IBM gaat K7's bakken voor AMD, aldus dit artikel van The Register:

Although on the face of it IBM and AMD have no cross licensing deal on x.86 technology, it now appears that Big Blue will make K7 chips.

The complex cross licensing technology on copper technology -- which exclusively prevents Intel from using it -- is likely to lead to boards from IBM later in the year.

Last week The Register exclusively reported that a 1GHz K7 will emerge from AMD at the beginning of next year.

As reported here earlier, AMD has a complex cross licensing agreement with Motorola on process technology, allowing it to leapfrog chip giant Intel.

Further, IBM also has a set of complex cross licensing agreements with a number of senior industry players, including National Semiconductor, Intel and many others.

No one from IBM Microelectronics was available at press time to either confirm or deny that it had cross licensed AMD technology. Nor would AMD comment, when we spoke to them this morning.

The Register heeft wat leuke info over de AMD K7:

Sources close to AMD said today that future plans for the K7 are already well in place, after its Dresden fab comes onstream next year.

AMD has always had designs to use copper, as first revealed by The Register when it talked to senior VP Dana Krelle at the introduction of the K6-2 in Versailles 15 months back.

But now sources at the company have revealed that it will launch a 1000MHz K7-Intel buster early in the year 2000.

They say it will have an even faster bus than the 200MHz on the second iteration of the K7, expected in the second half of 1999.

Niet slecht, 1000Mhz.

Ik hou me totaal niet bezig met voetbalspellen, maar Fifa 99 ziet er toch wel erg vet uit (wat ik er op TV en in de magazines van gezien heb). PC Sports Gaming heeft er een review van.

Hier wat geziek over de grootte van de grasmat (als tegenwicht tegen al het positieve gedoe rond Fifa99):

The field is too small. This is probably my biggest complaint about the game. When I play NHL99 and NCAA 99, to use two EA examples, I distinctly feel like the players are modeled in correct proportion with the playing surface. Conversely, from RTWC through Fifa 99 I have been very aware of the fact that the soccer players and the ball look like they are about 30% too large. Graphically, the issue is very noticeable right at the kickoff. The center circle looks more like one on an indoor soccer pitch than an outdoor one. In terms of gameplay, this field size discrepancy impacts every aspect of the game. Clearances go from one end of the field to the other, headers travel from the goal box to midfield, and long passes often turn into shots and force saves from the goalie. Also, because of the small field, there can be no buildup to an offensive attack. There is not enough space to hold the ball for any length of time in the opponents half because as soon as a player crosses midfield he is almost in shooting range. As well as EA has done in modeling the players and the stadiums, one would think that they could accurately model the size of the soccer field in relation to the players and the play. This problem is very unfortunate and, more than anything else, serves to turn the game into one of direct passing and shooting rather than weighted passing into space and long runs.

Electric Games heeft een review van Heretic II, waarvan hier wat stuff:

nstead of the typical first person perspective, Raven has turned the Quake II engine into a Tomb Raider-like third person action/adventure experience. This doesn't even look like the Quake II engine, it's much more attractive, and features some special lighting effects that are just beautiful. There are a few spaces that "waver" when viewed at the right angle, but otherwise the engine is very solid and realistic. Heretic II relies on magical attacks much more than standard weapons, so the associated pyrotechnics allow the designers to push the envelope on lighting, flame, and other special effects. The end result is a world filled with amazing graphical tricks. The sound effects and music are also wonderful. You get so immersed in the game that you don't really notice the music right away, but it is extremely well scored and fits the theme of the game perfectly. Sound effects are not typical, and creatures make unique sounds as they skitter, fly, or slither through the levels. I was impressed how seamlessly the third-person perspective fits into this game. Rather than a gimmick, the viewpoint allows you to perform some athletic maneuvers that wouldn't be possible from first person. Rolls, flips, spinning attacks, and even pole vaulting are not only possible, but necessary for success.

GamePower heeft een review van LucasArts' nieuwste Star Wars titel.

Hier een stukkie info:

Making no attempt to be anything more than a straightforward action shooter, Rogue Squadron succeeds in giving the player fast-paced and exciting thrills. You are Luke Skywalker himself and it's your task to lead the Rebel Alliance's elite "Rogue Squadron" into a series of 16 missions. Admittedly, your wingmen hardly ever seem to prove particularly useful, but occasionally come through for you. All the missions are planetside this time around, so there's no space combat, although there are some very impressive cloud world battles. Upon completing a mission, you'll be awarded a medal based on your performance. The better the medal, the better the rewards -- like the use of more ships, new weapons, even secret missions. You can also re-try the missions as often as you want to get a better score, giving the game a nice sense of replayability.