Anders van Sharky Extreme heeft een review gepost van de Skywell Magic TNT.

We found the MagicTNT to be rock solid when it came to OpenGL performance in Quake 2 on a Pentium II-450Mhz machine. The results fell short of a single Voodoo2 at 640 x 480 which doesn't really matter so much. The TNT is quite capable of kicking out over 60 fps at 800 x 600 and around 40 fps at 1024 x 768, even 1280 x 960 is quite playable if you're not to picky about framerates. In terms of speed and visual quality, a single Voodoo2 is beaten at it's own favorite game, at least on the high-end machines (which is what the TNT is intended for). Going down to a Pentium II 300Mhz one would expect slightly different result in favor of the Voodoo2 of course. We've already seen how poorly the TNT scales. But you can't ignore the fact that the Voodoo2 is still lacking high-res support and to be honest the TNT actually produces far superior image quality even at the same resolution as the Voodoo2.

Rivastation heeft uitgebreid zitten benchmarken met de nVidia Detonator drivers en is tot de conclusie gekomen dat ze sucken. Ze zijn nauwelijks sneller en soms zelfs trager. Het lijkt erop dat nVidia weer zwaar heeft zitten hypen, net zoals voor de release van de TNT, die niet helemaal bracht wat het beloofde.

he new NVIDIA reference drivers v1.09 Detonator are currently the topic in many diskussion boards in the web. After the big announcement of NVIDIA and the first public 3DMARK99 results many gamers had big expectations.

You could see a couple of benchmark runs that showed no detonation at all. Others speak of a decrease in some games.....Time to check that out.

I made a comparsion of the v0.48 reference drivers with the new v1.09 Detonator drivers on a STB Velocity 4400. The following Benchmarks were used: GLQuake1, Quake2, N.I.C.E.2, Incoming, Forsaken, Tirtanium v1.2, 3DMARK99 and Halflife: v0.48 vs Detonator - WhereŽs the Detonation!?!

Number Nine heeft aangekondigd dat het S3's Savage4 gaat gebruiken op z'n nieuwe videoplanken. Hier wat info uit de press release op AGN Hardware:

Number Nine Visual Technology Corp. today announced that it has designed, built and delivered working samples of its forthcoming graphics accelerator boards to many the industry's largest makers of computers.

The boards, known as the SR9 Series, are the industry's first announced AGP 4X (Accelerated Graphics Port) capable graphics accelerators.

[...]Built around S3's Savage4 128-bit super pipelined 3D engine, the SR9 supports trilinear-filtered, single-pass multi-texturing for high performance 3D special effects, S3 texture compression (S3TC) for photorealistic image quality in gaming, entertainment and business applications, true 32-bit 3D rendering and support for Intel Pentium III and AMD K7 3Dnow!-based systems.

"S3 clearly outpaced the competition by bringing industry-first AGP 4X technology to market with its Savage4 accelerator," said Ken Potashner, president and chief executive officer of S3 Incorporated. "This, in turn, is enabling our strategic partners, such as Number Nine, to secure AGP 4X design wins with major PC OEMs."

BXBoards heeft wat info over het koelen van de BX chipset op Abit BH6 moederborden. Overhitting van de BX chipset kan wazige random crashes tot gevolg hebben. De heatsink op de BX chipset zit nogal losjes en door er een simpelweg wat koelprut tussen te smeren kun je het koelprobleem fixen:

Now some of you might not think that the BX chipset can get hot enough to cause any problems or that just the addition of heatsink compound will help, but I am here to tell you that I have found out differently. On at least 3 different occasions I have found that adding the heatsink compound was all that was necessary to totally eliminate random crashes.

Verder vind je op BXBoards nog wat info over de PIII die Andy op dit moment aan het testen is.

Tom was ff onbedoeld een weekje weg maar heeft gisteren weer een nieuwe Monday Blurb in elkaar gepoot. Tom heeft vette plannen met z'n site:

Since last Tuesday I am working on five major projects at the same time and they need all of my attention. The most important, most time consuming and certainly most interesting one is the build-up of a major test-lab over here in sunny but currently cold California. I am in the lucky situation to have found some of the world’s best professionals to work in this lab and if I am talking of a major lab then I really mean it. This won’t be a small room with a big desk and a few people working on a few computers, it will be a highly professional institution with no less than up to 30 test stations that will all run in parallel. It will be supervised by one of the most skilled performance experts of this planet. My excitement about this long planned project kept me from focussing on writing, because slow updates won’t only very soon be a complete thing of the past, this lab will provide more hardware reviews than any other institution has ever provided for you before. Tom’s Hardware Guide is now existing for almost three years and the success of this website has finally made it possible to take this major step. Thus I would thank all of my readers for keeping the faith in my team and me, you will soon be rewarded better than you would ever have expected.

Verder heeft-ie nog wat info over de 3Dfx, de TNT2 en benchmarking.

Sharky heeft Intel's plannen voor 1999 op een rijtje gezet. Hier wat plakwerk uit zijn Intel CPU Roadmap for 1999:

The transition from slot 1based SEPP (Single Edge Processor Package) Celerons to the PPGA (Plastic Pin Grid Array) connector will happen mostly in Q1 and see the SEPP Celeron phased out completely in Q2 in favor of PPGA. Intel feels that the packaging transition from SEPP to PPGA Celerons reduces the cost by some $10 per unit.

Fullon-3D heeft ergens een gloednieuwe ATI Rage Magnun vandaan weten te halen, met als blij resultaat een review van het ding. Hier wat info over deze ATI Rage128 kaart met 32 vette megs SGRAM aan boord:

I'll keep my comments brief: single texture fillrate is quite satisfying to start with but gets very interesting at higher resolutions, it even exceeds the 100 MPixel/s mark we'd expect from the 100 MHz core clock. My first hypothesis would be that the internal caches have a positive impact here up to the memory clock speed, but I'll need a finer comb to sort that out properly than the current build 100 of 3D Mark99.

Ars Technica heeft een 'Slot One Battle Royale', een deathmatch met een C300A, C366, PII 450 en PIII-500 als level boss. Hoe seniel zijn de oudjes in vergelijking met Intel's nieuwe top model?

However, to be honest, we're doubting that's the whole problem. The important thing to look at here is what makes up the current PIII-500. The Katmai (oops, Pentium III, excuse me) was supposed to have all sorts of nifty stuff going for it--a .18-micron manufacturing process and a 64K L1 cache being two biggies. The PIII-500 doesn't have either of those things, and it shows.  With the 500MHz PIII chip, the only substantial advantage over the PII-450 is that extra 50MHz, which, we suspect, is at least partially offset by less aggressive L2 cache timing. These oversights could be remedied with later PIII offerings, but with the current chips, that's where we sit.

Veel meer info vind je hier.

Warzone heeft een Settlers 3 review gepost. Hier is wat stuff:

Before we get to the technical problems, I should make things easy for veterans of the previous two Settlers games. All you need to know is that Settlers 3 is a graphical update of Settlers 2. As far as differences in the gameplay go, the only ones I noticed were that you can no longer call up a window to follow a single settler through his or her day (why you would want to I don’t know, since you have no control over individual settlers anyway), you don’t have to do anything to create roads anymore, they’re created automatically, and hunters are no longer modeled in the game. That’s about it really. Settlers 2 was a cute-looking game, and Settlers 3 with its updated graphics and whimsical death animations is even cuter.

Dit vond ik op Coolinfo over de nieuwe game 'Powerslide':

Two words here: Voodoo2. Gorgeous graphics. They are a little reminiscent of Pod..in fact at first it did look like Pod 2 on the first track, but then as you progress to the other tracks you’ll see quite a difference. Let me refer you back to the Urban Brawl course: the graffiti and advertisements are so well rendered, you’ll just have to take a practice lap to view all the work that went into something you’d only see for 3 seconds if you really drove around like you were supposed to. You can run this game in 1024x768 on an SLI Voodoo 2 system, and did I mention how fantastic they look? I thought so.

En dit vond ik op Coolinfo, gaat weer over de Window$ refund day van gisteren...:

FOSTER CITY, Calif. (AP) - The protesters carried penguins and shrink-wrapped software. The corporate leaders served lemonade and iced tea. No effigies were burned. About 100 computer users marched to Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news)'s Silicon Valley offices Monday demanding refunds for Windows software they say they didn't want to buy and don't plan to use.

``I got stuck with this software because I couldn't buy a laptop without it,'' said Charles Lingo, a retired maintenance engineer from San Jose. ``It's a ripoff by a monopoly.'' About 90 percent of personal computers sold these days come pre-loaded with Microsoft's Windows software, which runs all the other programs on the computers. But Lingo and most of the demonstrators are among a growing minority of computer users who don't care for Windows. They have chosen to operate their computers with Linux, a system with a cherubic penguin mascot that has risen to the forefront among the relatively unknown products that can substitute for the Windows operating system.

Microsoft spokesman Robert Bennett said his company isn't forcing anyone to buy Windows. ``You have the choice of operating systems,'' he said. ``You can buy a personal computer with a non-Microsoft operating system, you can buy a computer with no operating system at all. Most customers choose Windows but you certainly don't have to.''

He said that although Microsoft won't give them refunds, they could go back to the company that sold them the computer. It's not that simple though. IBM, Compaq, Acer and other computer companies do not offer refunds to customers who aren't going to use the Windows software on their machines. Instead, customer representatives at most major computer companies send callers back to Microsoft. ``How many rounds of Catch-22 do we have to go through?'' asked Eric Raymond, a self-described ``Linux theorist,'' who came to the demonstration dressed like Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars.

Linux was developed in the early 1990s by a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds. He wanted to create an operating system for PCs that worked like the high-powered operating system Unix, the main system used on the big computers that run most of the Internet. But rather than start a company and market the system, Torvalds did something that captured the imagination of programmers around the world. Torvalds posted the Linux source code - the blueprints for the software - on the Internet. Linux can still be downloaded for free. It's also sold in a commercial version by Durham, N.C.- based Red Hat for $50. The system has an estimated 8 million to 9 million users worldwide. By comparison, Microsoft closely guards the Windows source code and charges about $90 for its operating system. Microsoft's Windows and Windows NT operating systems have about 10 times as many users as Linux.

Microsoft officials served refreshments to the demonstrators on the upper deck of their parking lot Monday under an 8-foot banner that said: ``Microsoft Welcomes The Linux Community.'' They said that if the computer makers aren't giving refunds, customers could always just take their entire computer back to the store where they bought it. But dozens of individuals, clutching their brand new Windows license agreements, argued that they want the computer. They just don't want the software inside. ``We don't want your drinks and we don't want your software. We want refunds,'' said Raymond.

id Software heeft nieuwe Quake III Arena screenshots gepost.
Tjek em out!

Op Coolinfo vond ik een link naar een review van de Magic TNT op Sharky Extreme. Hier is wat stuff:

The Sharky Extreme test lab has already tested numerous nVidia TNT based boards from the likes of Diamond, STB and Hercules. But what about little known Taiwanese board manufacturer's, Skywell technology? They also make a TNT based product don't you know? Thus we've taken a long hard look at one of their Magic TNTs to see just how it stands up against the other 'branded' TNTs. Just to make sure you know what you're getting with the Magic TNT, take a look below at the Specs list. You'll quickly see that the list matches almost any other TNT and that's because it's a straight reference design.

As the Magic TNT is based on nVidia's reference design, there's no TV-out at all. Neither is there any resemblance of a fancy onboard fan, or any Witchdoctor capabilities to speak of. But don't let these facts deter you from the MagicTNT. It's not an undesirable product- the TNT doesn't really require a fan and who cares about TV-Out anyway? What you do get it a rather small AGP card with 16Mb SDRAM spread out over eight 2Mb memory chips which are capable of memory speeds of up to 125Mhz and of course the TNT processor itself which still has a heat-sink slapped on it.

Lees hier dus verder...