Fujitsu begint volgende maand de productie van geheugenchips die de komende nieuwe processor van Intel kunnen bij benen, de PentiumIII. De 64MB SDRAM heeft een bus-snelheid van 133MHz. De meeste huidige geheugenchips kunnen standaard op 100MHz draaien. Uitzonderingen daargelaten.

If I am reading it correctly, I think it may be confirming that the mobile K6-2-300 can indeed be 100MHz bus and the 333 can be 95MHz bus (the article lists 66MHz and 100MHz for the 300, and 66 and 95MHz for the 333, as well as 66MHz for the 266).

Interesting...AMD is now at the top of the mobile market, but only for a little while as Dixon 366 should be coming out soon (shouldn't it?)

Nintendo kennen we allemaal vanm de Games, maar ze doen toch echt meer...

Nintendo and Kyocera will form the core of a group wich will be developing the satellite broadcast business using the successor to the BS4 satellite.

The Nintendo Co.Ltd. and Kyocera Corporation (Kyoto Ceramics/Cybernetics/Yashica) have agreed to participate in the satellite digital broadcast business and to grant new licenses.

They will be using the successor to the BS4 satellite - the BS4-b - targeted for launch in the year 2000. The two partners intend to achieve this by capital investment in Satellite Digital Music and Data Broadcasting Corporation, wich have been producing satellite digital music and data broadcasts since November of 1990 and wich posses the know-how and a good track record in this field.

OGR heeft een review gepost van de Creative Labs GraphicsBlaster TNT:

Its clear that being "yet another TNT card" makes the Graphics Blaster RIVA TNT a good purchase from a performance perspective. Other cards offer more accoutrements that might make them a better purchase, though. Creative opted to develop a card without TV-out, which some competing TNT-based cards offer. The software bundle is also woefully light, including only one game, and an old one at that (Acclaim's Forsaken). The chief benefits to Creative's card are the color and gamma correction software included, and their ongoing driver support. While many users prefer to use NVIDIA's reference drivers (and they work fine), Creative has been very good at keeping their drivers up to date and even offering new features. If you're looking for a TNT-based card and don't care about TV-out or a special bundle, Creative's bare-bones solution has been a little cheaper than its competitors thus far. If TV-out and a good software bundle is important to you, look elsewhere

The Heatink Guide heeft een artikel in elkaar geknutseld waarin een simpele oplossing wordt gegeven voor het condensatie probleem bij het gebruik van peltiers:

In theory, it should be possible to reach sub-zero temperatures, which would allow extreme overclocking, with high performance peltier elements. The main problems with high-end peltier coolers (just like with any other supercooling method) is condensation. If the cold CPU is exposed to ambient air, water will condensation, and possibly cause a short circuit.

I've been thinking about a solution, a Peltier sandwich for Celeron CPUs, where no cool part is exposed to the ambient air. The entire CPU core is encapsulated in an insulating material, e.g. silicon, polyurethane or epoxy resin. Two peltier elements cool the CPU, one on each side, and heat up the two heatsinks.

The Techs heeft een review geupt van de Global Win Vek12 Pentium II cooler. Het ding heeft twee vette ventilators, wat 'm erg geschikt maakt voor het heftige overklok werk:

I was able to take my Pentium II/350 with an Abit BH6 motherboard to the maximum with this fan. It ran smoothly going up to 112Mhz BUS setting and a 2.2v core voltage level... I'm beginning to fall in love. This fan was stable for a long time, it ran at about 93 degrees fahrenheit, at 2.2v ... pretty damn impressive. I would have to recommend this fan to those who would like to overclock their newer Pentium II’s also (400Mhz and 450Mhz).

Techweb heeft een nieuwbericht over National Semiconductor, de moeder van Cyrix. Tussen al het gezwam over winststijgingen bevind zich ook wat info over toekomstige processors van Cyrix:

And 1999 will see the introduction of three full-system chips, beginning in May with the PC Chip, which will operate at speeds between 233 MHz and 300 MHz; then followed by the MXi, at 333 MHz to 444 MHz; and finally, the Jedi, which will be available at frequencies between 366 MHz and 450 MHz, Macleod said.

"We have a road map that's very attractive, and now we have to execute," Macleod said. "That's what's ahead of us in 1999."

3D Spotlight heeft een preview gepost van Quake III Arena. Hier kunnen we er de komende tijd nog heel veel van verwachten denk ik.

Hier wat info uit de preview van 3D Spotlight:

As always id Software wanted to be one step ahead of the pack, so they announced Trinity that was supposed to be much more than anything we could have ever imagined, I mean, unbelievable graphics, AI, maybe a push to the whole First person shooter genre but there is so many competition now that it wouldn't be good to id to have develop Trinity that would take a lot of time to develop while other brilliant developer teams at 3DRealms, Epic, Monolith and Valve (just to name a few) have planned to release other great games like Unreal Tournament, Team Fortress 2 and Duke Nukem Forever before the middle of the year, so they announced Quake 3, which should be out just in time to compete with the games I mentioned above.

Voor wie graag met treintjes wil klooien maar geen geld heeft voor zo'n dure Marklin baan (maar wel voor een snelle TNT heeft Gamer's Alliance een review gepost van Railroad Tycoon II. De graphics zien er goed uit, maar het belangrijkste bij zo'n spel is uiteraard de gameplay:

While the multiplayer portion of the game is horrid, the game's single-player experience is fun. In the single player mode, where everything "works" like it's supposed to, victory becomes very satisfying. What's more compelling than just a successful mission done is the fact that it is very possible to buy out computer competitors. Perhaps the single most significant factor of this game being so much more entertaining than the real-time strategies I've played through is that this game is different; I myself have lost about all interest in the redundancy of real-time warfare, and this game just happened to be a great gust of fresh air.

The single-player missions also offer a surprising amount of replay value. Not only are there mission bonuses that the player can choose and random industry placement, victories are separated into Bronze, Silver and Gold victories. No matter how much of the game you finished with lower-level wins, it is possible to go back for a better score. The map editor obviously adds infinite amounst of extra gaming goodness, as it becomes very possible to download new missions from the net.

C|Net News.com heeft een nieuwsbericht over het upgraden van PII naar PIII. Een koekje volgens C|Net, want alles wat je nodig hebt is een update van je BIOS:

Consumers and personal computer makers wanting to improve Pentium II systems by adding Pentium III processors should find it easy going because the chips share design features.

Upgrading won't be difficult, according to Ming Chok, vice president of technology at Soyo, a company that makes the main circuit boards which house the processor. Consumers who want to replace a Pentium II with a Pentium III (or a Pentium II Xeon for a Pentium III Xeon) probably won't have to change their "motherboards" or their chipsets.

Users will have to update the PC's BIOS, but the software will be available on the web, Chok said.

"You can just put a Katmai into a PII motherboard. It's no problem," he said, referring to the upcoming chip's code name.

Game Assyllum heeft een artikel in elkaar gedraaid over 3Dfx genaamd "Why 3Dfx will survive". 3Dfx heeft de laatste tijd nogal wat krititiek te voorduren ivm het ontbreken van 32-bits rendering in de Voodoo en de fusie met STB (waardoor alleen STB nog Voodoo kaarten zal maken).

Games Assyllum doet met een zwaar bevooroordeelde mening op een nogal bekrompen manier een poging om bovenstaande kritieken te weerleggen.

Well there has been much talk about 3Dfx's imminent death, for many different reasons.

As you can probably tell from the title of this article, I intend to prove them wrong! Most of these suspicious rumors started circulating with the release of the TNT, the Voodoo3 announcement, and the acquisition of STB Systems.

Infoworld heeft een review van OS/2 Warp Server en zegt dat het een goed alternatief is voor WindoosNT:

Over the chortles of pundits, one IBM executive after another has pledged undying belief in and support for OS/2. This capable but embattled operating system enjoyed a single brief moment in the sun: Warp filled shelves left empty when Microsoft missed Windows 95's ship date. Since then, OS/2 has changed jobs -- IBM has positioned it as a server OS -- and it has languished in Windows NT Server's shadow.

The beta version of OS/2 Warp Server for E-Business is a dramatic and laudable effort to put IBM back in the PC operating system business. It's not a new OS -- this is OS/2 Warp Server 4 plus all the fixes -- and it includes a Network File System client for Unix connectivity, the Domino Go Webserver from IBM's Lotus division, and the WebSphere Web application server. This lineup makes this OS/2 a fair match for Windows NT 4.0 with its add-ons. This release also brings OS/2 on even par with Windows NT's current technology, and manages to pull ahead in some key areas -- including volume management, year-2000 functions, Java, naming services, and remote administration.

Sharky Extreme heeft een paar screenshots van gepost van Quake II, Shogo, NFS3 en Unreal op de Voodoo 3.

We've already discussed the Voodoo3 (see related articles below) at length and just after Comdex 98 we showed you a little glimpse of it in action with Unreal. This time, we've got a good deal more we can show you. Below are high-res. in-game screen shots of Quake 2 (at 1600x1200), Shogo: MAD (1600x1200), Need For Speed III and Unreal running on a Voodoo3. The Voodoo3 board used was a later rev. of course but still harbored the same configuration of 16MB of SGRAM.

Er zit weer eens een foutje in de zachtwaar van Mikroschoft:

A newly discovered bug may result in many Windows-based applications registering the wrong time for at least a week in the year 2001, Microsoft has confirmed. The bug was discovered by Richard Smith, of Phar Lap Software, who last week reported the problem to Microsoft and the BugTraq security mailing list, according to Microsoft. This bug affects the local time function during the daylight savings time change on Windows-based systems. Computers running Windows 95, 98, or NT 4 will delay the one hour time change for a week in 2001, from April 1 to April 8. The problem has already been fixed for the upcoming Windows 2000 operating system.

"The problem is caused by the Visual C++ runtime library being confused and assuming that daylight savings time doesn't start until April the 8th," explained Smith to the mailing list. "The confusion appears to be caused by the fact that April 1 falls on a Sunday in the year 2001. The same bug occurs in other years where April 1 also falls on a Sunday," such as 1990, and 2007, according to Smith's email post. Microsoft has confirmed the existence of the bug, but believes that any actual problems resulting from the glitch will be few and far between.

Fun's review heeft een comparison met 7 TNT kaarten en een hele zooi benchmarks in elkaar gedraaid. Hier een lijstje met kaarten die ze getest hebben:

Asustek V3400TNT-TV (based on nVidia RivaTNT)

Creative Graphics Blaster RivaTNT (based on nVidia RivaTNT)

Canopus Spectra 2500 (based on nVidia RivaTNT)

Diamond Viper V550 (based on nVidia RivaTNT)

Elsa Razor II (based on nVidia RivaTNT)

Nucleus RivaTNT (based on nVidia RivaTNT) - an OEM RivaTNT card that surfaced in Singapore market.

STB Velocity 4400 (based on nVidia RivaTNT)

Games First heeft een review van Speedbusters gepost. Hier de intro:

hile ultra-realism buffs may prefer racing games like the Nascar series or Grand Prix Legends, I’ve got to admit that my own racing preferences lean way towards arcade-style racers. And in Ubisoft’s Speed Busters, I’ve found a game that indulges those preferences with just the sort of loud, goofy, flashy and crashy gameplay that more or less defines arcade racing.

The game’s premise is pretty absurd—a policeman wins the lottery and stages a series of races on various North American highways. Whoever drives the fastest and clocks highest on the various police radar traps scattered around the tracks wins. Sure, fine.

PC.IGN heeft een preview van Unreal Tournament. Hier een stukkie:

The next battle in the struggle for the heart and soul of the 3D shooter, so to speak, will most likely be fought out in March, when id Software releases Quake III: Arena, and Epic MegaGames releases Unreal Tournament.

And while those release dates are certainly subject to change, one thing is not--both companies are releasing as their next project games that--at least in the design doc stage--are identical.

Both Unreal Tournament and Quake III: Arena are online-only, multiplayer games. Both will offer offline play against computer controlled 'bots, and both will have global ranking systems that will track players around the world on a sort of leader board for deathmatchers.

Billy van Voodoo Extreme heeft een mailtje gedropt bij Tim Sweeney van Epic Megagames over Unreal 221:

With all of the poop flying around lately on the upcoming Unreal 221, I decided to ask The Man (no, not Wayne Newton), Tim Sweeney, if this is more than just a bug patch (as previously noted).  Here's what he had to say:

<<<The fuss that Brandon was making online is about the improved TNT OpenGL support, which flies at 800x600 and is playable at 1280x1024.  Hopefully this will carry over to other cards, as I spend time testing and tweaking for all of them.

On the record, I must say that OpenGL kicks ass!  Now that 3D card drivers are stabilizing, it's really an awesome API to work with.

Voodoo Extreme heeft wat onbevestigde info over de i752, een nieuwe videochip van Intel:

I live in Phoenix, AZ and I know someone who works for Intel here (I don't think he'd appreciate if I gave his name out on the internet ;).  I thought I'd take advantage of that opportunity and ask a few questions.  According to him, Intel has recieved preliminary silicon for their next 2D/3D graphics chip called the 752 (i752 I assume).  He says the tests are very promising so far.  He also mentioned that it most likely wouldn't be as fast as the Riva TNT but that it did have most if not all of the up-to-date features (which features those are, I didn't ask)  I did ask if Intel was planning on having this new graphics chip built directly onto motherboards (like the Voodoo 3 2000 for instance) and all he would say was that it's confidential.

Marc Rein van Epic Megagames heeft een vette update gepost op het Epic Megaboard over Unreal patch 221. Hier een stukkie:

So what does this have to do with the 221 patch? Because this new OpenGL driver will need testing by end-users we decided to hold the release of the 221 patch to include it in order to avoid having to release two patches in quick succession or delay testing of the new OpenGL driver until a later patch was ready to go. Yes we know we’re guilty of feature-creep but in this case we feel it’s justified. It may be another few days or even a week or more before 221 is ready to release but we feel that in 221 we’ll now have a really awesome OpenGL solution that’s going to be every bit as good, and maybe even better than our Glide support. Finally Unreal can really push the full potential of the very powerful TNT and Rage 128 cards and hopefully provide acceptable accelerated performance on some of the lower-end cards too.

This is great news for us, our users and our licensees. For Mac users I talked this week with Westlake and Macsoft and both companies have stated their commitment to try and release the Mac version of Unreal Tournament simultaneously, or very close to, the PC version. As soon as the 221 code is released we’ll get it to Westlake and they’ll hopefully get the Mac version updated to 221 as soon as possible and start working on porting our new OpenGL driver to work on the Mac too.

One more thing. We’re going to go ahead and release the 5 new deathmatch maps, created by the Unreal team, that were previously going to be released with the official patch but had been caught up in the 221 patch delays. Watch for an announcement soon on your favorite Unreal fan site.

Mark Rein,

Vice President, Epic MegaGames

Planet Unreal heeft ergens twee screenshots van Quake III vandaan weten te plukken:

We've received a couple of screenshots from an anonymous source who didn't say where they were from. They appear to be screenshots of the level shown in the Quake Arena movie, at first glance. If you look closely the curved surfaces aren't quite perfect, but this could easily be Quake Arena's lower detail settings.

    

You can grab the screenshots as we got them, very high quality .jpg files. Pic 1 and Pic 2 are both around 500 K, so they'll take a little while to load. We've created our own compressed versions of the screenshots that look very much the same but will be faster to grab if you're on a slower connection, Pic 1 and Pic 2. Now, since we're not entirely sure ourselves, we've decided to get your opinion, so...

OEM sources in de VS hebben bekend gemaakt dat AMD 23 juni heeft aangegeven als streefdatum voor de release van de AMD K7. The Register heeft wat details over de K7:

However, when we spoke to Dirk Meyer, AMD's head of engineering for K7 (see AMD K7 snatches at Intel high-end crown), he said K7 was designed for speeds of 500MHz and up. In contrast, Intel's Pentium III will initially ship at 450MHz and 500MHz.

Meyer also confirmed K7 will support up to 8MB of L2 cache, initially separate from the chip, but possibly brought on to the die in later versions to match the approach the company is taking with the forthcoming K6-3.

Interestingly, TechWeb's sources state K7 will ultimately be made available in a "socket" version to offer compatibility with cheaper PCs. That contrasts with Meyer's statements that Socket 7 would be adequately supported by K6, suggesting K7 would only ship with a Slot 1 interface.

If the sources are correct, it would appear AMD is moving away from its earlier strategy of pushing K7 at the high end and the K6 family at the low end in favour of an across the board push with K7.

Na de onzinnige argumenten over de prijsstrategie van MS in de verdediging van Mikroschoft nu wat betere info uit het verhoor van ene professor Fisher:

David Boies asked him to give the bases for his conclusion that Microsoft had monopoly power in PC operating systems. Fisher replied that when OEMs were asked what would they do if Microsoft raised its prices: "These are the people who, when asked if Microsoft were to raise its price, where would they go? And the answer was no, no, no, they would stay with Windows.

"There isn't any other choice. That's what the market demands. One of them is, as I already testified, write a letter to Microsoft that says, 'if you were not basically'--in substance--'if you were not the only game in town, we certainly wouldn't deal with you,' but they are the only game in town." Fisher also drew attention to market share data: "The notion that operating systems such as Linux or Beos or OS/2 or even Apple are really going to succeed in taking away much, if any, of the business from Microsoft Windows, is a joke. Of course it's not true." It was reassuring to hear being said what everyone in the industry already knows to be true.

Fisher also noted that the substantial price discrimination in OS prices to OEMs "is an indicator of some market power". He continued: "I have looked at what's happened to Microsoft's operating system price over time, and it isn't falling, and I don't believe it's falling even on a quality-corrected basis. And for that matter, it isn't even constant. It's rising, and Microsoft appears to have set its price without regard, not for competition."

Zie The Register voor meer sappige details.

Iomega gaat een aantal onderdelen van het failliete Syquest, eens de grootste concurrent van Iomega, overnemen:

Posted 13/01/99 2:15pm by Tony Smith

Iomega gobbles up SyQuest for $9.5 million

Iomega has announced it has agreed to buy "certain assets" of its erstwhile storage rival SyQuest for a cash payment of $9.5 million.

The deal will give Iomega SyQuest's technology and intellectual property plus its inventory and US fixed assets. The purchase is conditional on the transfer of Iomega of inventory and equipment from SyQuest's Malaysian subsidiary.

However, the agreement does not transfer any of SyQuest's liabilities or material obligations, such as warranties and customer support, or any debts owed to SyQuest by third partes. All these will remain the responsibility of SyQuest itself.

The deal follows SyQuest's collapse and filing for Chapter 11 protection in November 1998. Soon after, SyQuest lawyers announced it was pursuing a buyer, and Iomega was widely tipped as the most likely purchaser.

Zie dit nieuwsbericht van The Register voor meer info.

Rivastation heeft een paar screenshots van Decay. Ik heb nog nooit van het spel gehoord, maar de graphics zien er extreem wreed uit. Hier wat info:

Decay is a new game by Insomnia Software that is still in development. These breath taking pre-alpha screenshots give a impression of the 3D graphics used in the game.

New (Realtime) techniques like  32Bit Rendering, high reolution textures, Phong- and Metal-shader, Bump mapping, volumetric lights and other allow this new quality.

A word from the developer about performance: "The DVA engine will benefit from next generation high speed 32bit hardware acceleration mostly on systems with a slower CPU. The nVidia TNT card, for instance, will produce a high frame rate even on a low CPU speed system"

Meer info is te vinden op de site van Insomnia Software.

Ik zag op Tweak-it! wat info over wat er aan de hand is met de RC5 stats server van Distributed.net, die is namelijk al meer dan een week niet geupdate:

Hi there,

First off, I would like to apologize for the confusion in regards to when the statistics server would be updated. We understand that a huge number of users find this to be the best distributed.net feature and thus we give it a high priority on our list.

However, throughout the DES-TEST-1 contest, as described in my plan (http://www.distributed.net/cgi-bin/dnet-finger.cgi?user=dbaker), we encountered a series of problems on our master keyserver. The master keyserver is the machine that all the proxies/keyservers send and receive blocks from. Since our first priority was to find the DES key, RC5 was put on hold throughout the test. Because of this, we have a huge back-load of blocks to process. This doesn't mean that your blocks are lost; we have them, so don't worry!

Nugget and I will be working today, tonight, and possibly tomorrow on processing the stats backlog and then processing the master keyserver backlog to get your stats back up to date.

Thanks for your concern,

Daniel Baker

The RC5 random drawing for prizes will be delayed until the first day they get the stats back online and then every week there after until I run out of stuff to give away. If the stat server goes down again, that weeks drawing will be delayed until they have it back up.

Wie mee wil doen met het RC5 contest kan een client downloaden en ons team joinen (Team Webmagix - the Dutch Alliance, nr. #10313).

Nog was leuke info van The Register over de rechtszaak tegen Mikroschoft, over het belachelijke prijsbeleid van meneer Bill:

We thought we would take a trip along memory lane to show that the truth is somewhat different, and that Microsoft uses price competition to freeze out competitors to its monopoly.

In 1981-1982, MS-DOS was priced at about $2-$5, to establish market share. By 1988, the price had become $25-$28, in contrast to price trends for similar products such as ROM BIOS which remained less than $5 and decreased in price, because there were several suppliers. When Digital Research's DR-DOS entered the market, MS-DOS prices dropped to $3-$18 where Microsoft was competing with DR-DOS.

In the case of operating system software, competition does not keep prices at reasonable levels. Microsoft's pricing policy is directed at eliminating competitors by predatory pricing, and then subsequently to abuse its dominant position by increasing prices. Microsoft is prepared to reduce its prices to a level that is below cost, in order to compete with any software developer. One example was seen in Microsoft's un-hooking practices, to persuade OEMs to stop selling PCs with DR-DOS. Price was not an obstacle when it came to unhooking an OEM who had contracted to use DR-DOS.

Mikroschoft heeft gisteren de 960% jaarlijkse groei (volgens Mikroschoft) van het aantal Linux gebruikers gebruikt als onderdeel van de verdediging in de anti-trust rechtszaak tegen MS. The Register heeft er een artikel over:

Linux rears its head again as Microsoft's Exhibit A in the argument as to why there's plenty competition in the OS business, really. Richard Schmalensee's testimony cites it on numerous occasions, points to an annual growth rate of 960 per cent since 1991, and says Linux in 1998 had 7.5 million users.

But hold hard there, folks. 960 per cent annual growth rate has a pretty spectacular impact on that 7.5 per cent. With our faulty maths (you Linux guys out there are good at this stuff, mail us) we'd figure that should take Linux past the 50 million mark within three years.

As he says, "The growth of Linux exemplifies the exceedingly low barriers to entry in the software business. Linux is a version of UNIX that was written by Linus Torvalds while he was a college student in Finland. He posted an initial version of the source code on an Internet site in 1991 and invited people to develop the program further. Many programmers accepted his invitation. As Forbes Magazine noted, 'Within a year Torvalds' software had taken on a life of its own.'"

Ik heb op Anand's BBS een toffe thread gespot van iemand die z'n pc onder gedompeld heeft in 3M FC-7100, een vloeibaar niet geleidend goedje. Dit is zo'n beetje de meest wrede manier van koeling die je je kunt voorstellen en relatief eenvoudig te maken:

For those of you who are interested in overclocking your machines (and who isn't ??) but want to avoid running multiple fans just to keep the system cool, try 3M's FC-7100.

I use it at home and have my motherboard video card, CPU, memory (BH6, Millenuim G200, Celeron 300A) completely submerged to keep everything nice and cool. The hard drive and FD, CDROM are outside my "case" but something to remember is that except for the CDROM and hard drive, my system is absoutely silent :-)

For those of you who are technically minded, FC-7100 is a diaelectric, non-conductive, non-corrosive liquid which can withstand tempretures much lower than -70 C. In my opinion it's the most effective solution available.

OCTanePC heeft een TNT tweak guide in elkaar gezet met wat o.a. wat info over het overklokken en koelen van je TNT plank. Hij heeft zelfs de geheugen chips zitten koelen:

The OCTane total cooling solution can be taken a step further by attaching heatsinks to the memory chips. You can use the OEM heatsink and cut it to fit the Memory and/or a 486 CPU heatsink. I recomend using thermal tape or another conductive adhesive to attach the heatsinks. Do not use non-conductive adhesives, such as "super glue", this will only trap heat causing you to insulate the chips instead of cooling them.

I used a product used in OEM applications called T-Wings Instead of using a heatsink. I chose this over heatsinks because of the compact size, lite-weight and ease of installation. T-Wings come with a thermally conductive tape applied. Either of these solutions will quickly and effectively draw the heat out of the memory chips. The OCTane XS-COOL will remove this heat from the video card.

Jeremy van AGN 3D heeft z'n review van de Celeron 366 en 400 geklaard. Maandag wist-ie nog te melden dat hij z'n C366 stabiel op 500 had gekregen door z'n pc buiten te zetten en moeder natuur een handje te laten helpen. Het is 'm ook nu nog niet gelukt om de Celeron indoors stabielte krijgen:

Attempts at overclocking both of the chips with conventional cooling methods has been in vain because of extreme heat issues. Attempting to run either processor at any speed above their rating has caused them to get hot enough to fry an egg. Since it has been extremely cold here in Ohio, I thought that I may have a solution to my heat problems. I dragged my PC (with an open case) outside into the below 0°f temperatures and placed a household fan blowing into the case. Before everyone starts emailing me with worries of condensation, you need to understand that when it is that cold even moisture freezes. Just simple chores like breathing leave create the effect that I am a chain smoking Marlboro Man.

With my computer now "super cooled", I plugged in the 400MHz Celeron and shot for the magically 600MHz that I was dreaming about the night before. After numerous bios setting tweaks and reboots, I finally gave up on trying to get the computer to boot at 600MHz. It seems that the Celeron 400 that I have is just not ready for that type of speed.

Lots of information is flying around about this deal. I emailed STB for a statement about how they plan on supporting STB customers and cards with NVIDIA chipsets.

Here is Brian Burke's reply:

It will have no effect on our legacy products trough their current product cycles. We will be supporting our current commitments for products from both a sales and customer support perspective. Our customers are #1 priority in this transition.

This seems like good news.

In an Email sent to various news organizations, NVIDIA provided some answers to the questions surrounding the merger of 3Dfx and STB.

Q:How does this impact NVIDIA's business?

A:We do not believe that this will affect our business, because OEMs choose our technology and then the board supplier. We are fortunate to have a number of board vendors working with NVIDIA that have the ability to sell to our OEM customers.

Q:What does this merger mean to NVIDIA's business in the short term?

A:NVIDIA's OEMs will demand that their business needs for the RIVA TNT graphic cards are met trough this transition. We don't expect a lot of near term change.

Q:What are 3Dfx's motives behind the merger?

A:3Dfx wants to get into the OEM market. We can only speculate that they believe that purchasing STB will help them. As we said, OEMs choose technology first, then supplier, so we don't understand this move.

Q:Is NVIDIA next to enter the graphic accelerator market?

A:Unlike 3Dfx, we don't have to change our business model in order to have success in this market. Right now we see absolutely no reason to enter the board market. NVIDIA is the latest viable, independent 3D processor supplier. We're excited to service the markets that 3Dfx just vacated.

Q:Do you think this will impact Glide?

A:Yes, we do think it will impact Glide. The broad industry base for the API is gone. What developer is going to do a special part for a single supplier?

So it would seem that NVIDIA is not too worried about this move by 3Dfx!

What does this mean for the millions of RIVA based STB card owners? It is too soon too tell. It seems that 3Dfx made this move since STB has one of the largest manufacturing capacities for video cards.

They also were the premier nVidia OEM, the company that would be first to test and ship cards based on nVidia chips. This move may give 3Dfx the ability to build and market its own cards, without having to go trough another company.

Some 3D cards that are already made under this arrangement are based on the Matrox G200 and soon the ATI Rage 128. Matrox and Rage manufacture their own video cards, eliminating the need for someone to pickup their chip and integrate it into a card.

This may help 3Dfx control prices and release their own branded product. The extent to wich this will affect nVidia and STB card owners is still unknown...

AMD does own 3dnow.com! Prevously, it was owned by some other group. Now Internic lists them as being the owners. Of course, they're too lazy to do anything with it.

Hey, AMD! Give me access to your 3dnow.com server and I'll make a better site than what is already there! Sure my version will still suck, but suck is better than zilch any day!

I'm hearing word that there are K7 prototypes on 0.18um running at 800MHz (without extra cooling, I'd assume). This info comes from SI:AMD, but may just be a misinformed rumour so take it with a gallon of salt.