Well, it is about time, under the new motherboard rating system, the first manufacturer to receive an "A" rating is AOpen.

What motherboard? The AOpen AX6BC. I realize that the AOpen AX6BC is old news now, however the latest revision of this motherboard features a few new features, such as the 8.0x clock multiplier, and the 153MHz FSB setting...want to know how far I managed to push the board? Take a look at the review to find out.

As I mentioned a few days ago, you can expect more motherboards to begin shipping with 140MHz+ FSB settings in lieu of the upcoming Pentium III release. Speaking of which, what is my take on the Pentium III? Well, although you won't be seeing a review of the processor on AnandTech until the day of the release (my contacts at Intel aren't alenient as those at AMD), here is a quick breakdown on the Pentium II and what you can expect: Take a look at the review to find out. As I mentioned a few days ago, you can expect more motherboards to begin shipping with 140MHz+ FSB settings in lieu of the upcoming Pentium III release. Speaking of which, what is my take on the Pentium III?

Well, although you won't be seeing a review of the processor on AnandTech until the day of the release (my contacts at Intel aren't as lenient as those at AMD), here is a quick breakdown on the Pentium II and what you can expect: The Pentium III will be no different than the Pentium II outside of the 70 new instructions that have been officially dubbed, Streaming SIMD Extensions, or SSE for short. You'll remember SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data execution) from my coverage, last year, basically it will allow for simultaneous execution of the same instruction (albeit applied to different tasks) at once.

Judging by the impact SIMD had with the K6-2, you can expect SSE to provide a noticeable performance increase under FPU intensive applications (i.e. games). Contrary to initial information posted about the Pentium III, it will run on Slot-1 BX motherboards, at the 100MHz FSB, and will only contain 32KB of L1 cache.

It will be introduced on February 28, 1998 in two speeds, 450MHz and 500MHz. We'll have to live with 500MHz until mid-year when the Pentium III makes the jump to the next level of performance after being paired up with the upcoming Camino chipset. At this point (sometime between June and September of this year) the Pentium III will be bumped up to the 133MHz FSB, and will make it up to speeds greater than 533MHz.

I got a personal look at the Camino chipset behind the scenes at last year's Comdex, and it does appear to be quite promising. The Camino chipset will basically be the same thing as the BX chipset with a few improvements, including official support for the 133MHz FSB, and the replacement of SDRAM by Rambus DRAM (RDRAM) as the supported memory technology in order to keep up with the rapidly increasing FSB frequencies.

An unfortunate absence from the Camino chipset will be integrated IEEE-1394 (Firewire) support which Intel is refraining from supporting in this next major chipset jump. The Camino will raise the AGP performance specification up to 4X mode (up from the current 2X data transfmode).

The jump to AGP 4X may be welcomed by the upcoming graphics chipsets from 3Dfx/STB and nVidia, however we're just going to have to wait and see. ATA-66, the 66MB/s successor to ATA-33 (or UltraDMA/Ultra33. The VIA Apollo Pro+ Pentium II chipset already supports ATA-66, however motherboards that are shipping with this chipset now don't feature the updated south-bridge with support for the specification.

You can expect those motherboards to begin shipping in a few weeks time, and the first ATA-66 drives have already started to hit the market. Western Digital has a 13.6GB EIDE drive that is ATA-66 compliant, you can check out a review of it over at www.storagereview.com.

AnandTech will be receiving an updated Apollo Pro+ board with ATA-66 support as well as a MVP4 reference board for some testing in the near future. Well, this short little update turned out to be a little longer than I expected, but that's what's going on in the industry...I may write a little roadmap for the first half of 1999 if I can find enough to say ;) For now, enjoy the review and I've got tons of other motherboards here just waiting to be thrashed by Winstone 99's stability test.

Overclockers Workbench has an article about water cooling socket7 processors.

Only the first part of this artilce is up, so it isn't much use right now. At any rate, to read th article - Water Cooling your Socket/Super 7 Part 1. click here

New stuff, as I said a few days ago.

I've met with Martin Traute from ATI and he gave me a Rage Fury 128, with the new Rage128 chipset. A full review can be expected somewhere in the weekend. I also got to play with the Pentium III with Katmai. I've done pretty some benchmarking, but unfortunately I can't tell you anything about it, since it's all NDA stuff. The ABC of 3D has been finished, and I'll post it on Friday. Last but not least I finally got

the SGI flatpanel and the #9 Revolution IV-FP. Review really soon...(01/10/99 22:10 CET) Silent Times. The holiday season is over and all new products have been launched. Right now I really don't have any new graphic cards since there just aren't any new exciting ones (click here for a list of cards that I've tested so far).

I don't think that we can expect any news from 3DLabs soon, same goes for VideoLogic. Tomorrow I'll be meeting Martin Traute from ATI, and I hope to get a Rage 128 to review. Later this week I'll be talking to people from Hercules to hear what we can expect from them in the near future.

But generally times are quite in the graphic card world, which is pretty rare. I'm not sitting still though, I'm working on a totally revised graphics card overclocking guide, a ABC of 3D, a roundup of Force Feedback wheels and last but not least I hope to get you all some Pentium III info (pics+benchmarks) really soon.. That isn't certain though.

Can Microsoft beat the Year 2000 budget blues? Time's running out.

If you were among those expecting Microsoft Corp. to ship Windows 2000 by mid-1999, don't hold your breath.

Beta 3 of the long-awaited operating system is now not expected to reach testers until April, Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) officials confirm. And Microsoft itself, in a tacit acknowledgment that Windows 2000 won't be a first-half product, told resellers this week that it is extending its Windows NT Server 4.0 upgrade promotion through June 30. The Windows 2000 jinx Win 2000 beta by Valentine's Day?

NT 5.0 renamed Windows 2000 -- due out in early 1999

If Windows 2000 slips much beyond a mid-year ship date, Microsoft could find itself facing head-on problems that the company has claimed are figments of analysts' imaginations: Namely, that IS departments, faced with Year 2000 budget concerns, may hold off for a year or more from deploying Windows 2000 en masse.

Microsoft officials this week acknowledged that April is now the Beta 3 target, and claim any date slippage in the beta won't negatively impact the final ship date.

"We're still shooting, hopefully, for an end of year ship date," says a corporate spokeswoman. "We are still expecting we can get it out before year-end."

Mike Chambers from Viper 3D sent word that he has posted a big driver shootout for the Viper 550.

With all the drivers for this card that have surfaced lately, this will prove to be a great guide for those of you deciding which driver you should use for the best results. Here's what you'll find:

Viper V550 users can start a slogan similar to that used by Microsoft - "what set of drivers do you want to use today?" Here is the scoop in the quest to find out what drivers offer the best 3DMark 99 performance. To help out, James Barsing has run benchmarks (default and overclocked speeds) on the Viper V550 using the following drivers: - Hercules driver version 4.10.01.0048 - Diamond driver version 4.10.01.0220 - Diamond driver version 4.10.01.0239 - Diamond driver version 4.10.01.0245 - WHQL driver version 4.10.01.0252 - NVIDIA reference driver version 4.10.01.0048

He also has some benchmarks from an overclocked P2-333 running at 560mhz with some serious cooling. And next week you'll be able to find Half-Life (D3D) and Shogo benchmarks, and possibly Sin and Quake 2 benchmarks as well. Check out the driver comparison here

Check out the driver comparison
here

WinChip2 review here

Can I wake up you conspiracy nuts again? Well, in Anand's recent WinChip 2 review, the IDT chip does not take a hit in going from Winstone 98 to Winstone 99 like the K6 does. In Ws98, the W2-225 is 3.4% slower than the K6. In Ws99, the W2-225 is a rather surprising 29.1% faster than the K6-233.

Mind you, that means that in the new ZD benchmark, a WinChip-2-225 is virtually indistinguishable to the K6-2-300 in business performance, even if you're using a motherboard from several years ago! As a point of note, I recall that Anand said that the WinChip-2 couldn't compare in performance to the PII, but his benchmarks didn't show it. I'm dying to see how a W2-225 would compare against a P233.

Hey remember that stuff put up;

On the AMD webpage accidentally letting us know about the K6-2-450 and K6-3's voltage requirements? Very unhappy, I emailed Bob from AMD in the unlikely chance that it was somewhat incorrect about the 2.3v requirement (which would make it unworkable with a select few SS7 boards). Well, to my near-infinite surprise and happiness, I got confirmation that the K6-3-400 will in fact run at 2.2v officially.