Nadat ik Anton's IE5 review gelezen had, besloot ik het erop te wagen. Ik heb dus de Engelstalige IE5 bovenop de Nederlandstalige Windhoos gepleurd: het gevolg: nix, alles werkt perfect (zonder de sucking Active Desktop that is). Tenminste, IE werkt zoals ie hoort te werken [hierover zeg ik verder niets, denk zelf maar even na wat ik er mee bedoel ]

Anyway, dat wilde ik jullie dus even snel laten weten

Als je wilt lezen wat Anton van IE5 vond, ga je naar zijn IE5 review. Als je IE5 wilt downen, ga je naar http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/iebuild/msnie5/EN/msn.asp

Thresh heeft GDC Report #2, over de tweede dag van de Game Developers Conference, gepost. Hij heeft nieuws over Quake III Arena, de Sega Dreamcast, nieuwe Hercules kaarten en Matrox G400 met 'Dual Head Technology':

Another touted feature of the G400 is "Dual-Head technology." Dual-Head allows "a single chip to output two physically separate images simultaneously to two different output devices." This means you can have 2 CRT displays for Win98 Multi-monitor or a number of other configurations, listed below:

2 CRT displays

2 Analog Flat-panels

1 CRT, 1 TV

1 CRT, 1 Digital Flat Panel

Dual-Head accomplishes this by incorporating two CRT Controllers into the G400 design, which can then fetch data independently from different locations in the display buffer.

The Register heeft een nieuwsartikel gepost met de plannen van Cyrix:

Cyrix was showing its MII-366/100 MHz chip on its CeBIT stand, which Tobak said was now shipping in volume. The MII-400/100 will ship later in the quarter and the MII-433, also demoed on the stand, will ship in Q3, he said.

Ondertussen heeft Cyrix de codenaam van de Jedi en Jalapeno wegens trademark probleempjes verandert in 'Gobi' en 'Mojave'. Ook zijn ze van plan om een paar software boeren over te nemen. Check out The Register voor deze info.

The Register heeft een paar (errug wazige) foto's gepost van de K7 demonstratie op de CeBIT in Hannover. Moederplank en naakte K7 zie je bij The Register.

Tech-review.com heeft een review van de Hitachi SuperScan 753, een vette 19" kijkdoos, op z'n site geplant. De monitor heeft een dot pitch van 0.22mm (!) en doet maximaal 1600x1200@85Hz (107KHz).

As mentioned in 'first impressions', the image quality is quite good. Running Windows at 1600x1200 at 85Hz is easier on the eyes than normal, but I still prefer to run at 1024x768 resolution.

The first time I fired up GL Quakeworld, for a little clan arena action, I noticed how clean and clear the game looked. It's like someone took windex to the game, with it looking much more realistic compared to my old 17" Sony. The .22 dot pitch really does provide a much clearer picture.

Hardware Central heeft Kryotech's nieuwe Renegade koelsysteem gereviewed. Hier een stuk over de prestaties van het ding:

So what if you're stuck with a 300A that just won't push it to 450MHz? Well luckily (or unluckily) we had one such CPU laying around, and no amount of conventional cooling or messing with voltages would let it run at 450MHz. Once plugged into the Kryotech Renegade, however, we achieved the stability we would expect of the chip running at spec, with no increase in voltage. At 504Mhz, we could make it boot and even start to run benchmarks, but with frequent freezes (even at much higher voltages). Is it worth the extra $350 for an extra 150MHz? Well, maybe if there was no other way to get that speed. Unfortunatley for Kryotech there is, as there will soon be 433MHz Celeron's for under $200. Quite a bit less than the $80 for a 300A plus the $350 for the Renegade case.

Op zich niet slecht dat-ie een bokkende C300A naar de 504MHz brengt, maar of je daar 350 dollar voor neer wilt leggen? Zie Hardware Central voor de review.

Creative Labs heeft nieuwe drivers voor de Graphics Blaster TNT (BIOS update), 3D Blaster Voodoo2 (driver update) en 3D Blaster Banshee (driver en BIOS update) op z'n site geparkeerd. Je kunt deze goederen neerhalen op de Creative Labs download page.

3DRacing heeft een preview gepost van Demolition Racer, een destruction derby kloon van Accolade waarbij het er op neer komt om zoveel mogelijk wagens te trashen zonder er zelf aan kaputt te gaan:

The game allows players to choose from eight different car types and compete in several types of demolition derby events, such as demolition racing, bowl matches, stock car racing, last man standing, and suicide racing. After collisions, vehicles will suffer from performance degradation and will visibly show damage as hoods, tires, doors and other automobile parts fly off cars. A variety of driving conditions will be present in Demolition Racer, including mud and night driving. Gameplay will also include huge jumps that send cars into 360-degree mid-air corkscrews. Demolition Racer features incredible speed and collisions at 30 frames per second.

De preview is voorzien van een paar leuke screenshots. Check 't out.

Beyond3D heeft een preview gebouwd rondom de Power VR 250, die op de CeBIT werd aangekondigd door NEC/Videologic. Een half jaartje te laat weliswaar, maar daar schijnen redenen voor te zijn:

But why is the card still not available now, a year later? Well, first there is Sega. Sega is using the PowerVR 250 chip in their next generation console, Dreamcast and they made a deal with NEC for delivery of about 500,000 chips. That was one delay. Secondly, NEC and VideoLogic have been making some changes in the chip. Why? Well, nobody knows for certain, but it is thought that they want to be more competitive with TNT and 3Dfx. Also, NEC/VideoLogic had a team working with Microsoft to make sure that all the features of the PowerVR 250 would be supported by DirectX.

Dimension 128 heeft een stel nieuwe nVidia Detonator drivers opgevist. Nummertje 1.20 dateert van 17 maart. Ze zijn nog niet officieel aangekondigd door nVidia en het is daarom onbekend wat ze doen/fixen. Je kunt het spul halen bij D128.com.

Sharky Extreme heeft een emmer Celeron heatsinks zitten testen, met als resultaat deze Celeron cooler shootout. De welbekende Wopper van ComputerNerd zit er ook bij, en haalt de twee plaats:

While the look and feel of the 4-fan equipped Whopper is impressive, its performance leaves a little to be desired when comparing it to the Glacier 4500C + Arctic Cap. On average the two coolers were almost identical on each of the heat-intensive tests using the overclocked 550MHz settings, which at first glimpse would appear to produce a draw.

De Glacier 4500C + Arctic Cap (veel reviews van de laatste tijd: AnandTech, BXB, Overclockers.com etc.) is dus de sjampion...

Jippie, nog een preview van de processor die Intel's PIII in z'n broekie zal doen pissen:

AMD has a very complex plan to release its fine new baby, and it all revolves around their Fab facilities and Engineering department pulling through. Their elaborate plan involves 2 different builds of the processor. Their first processor, will be the K7 (or something like that). This will be decked with the EV6 bus, the high speed 128Kb L1 cache, and all the other goodies, but will be on a .25 micron die, and will use the normal "silicon" technology. This first processor will come out at a clock speed higher than 500 MHz (perhaps as high as 600mhz as a model AMD displayed at CeBit was, not overclocked I might add) and will blow away anything that Intel has, even though it is still using fairly standard technology. AMD has hinted that this first release will not be put into high production, and will mainly be for large businesses and server use. Now, this doesn't mean that your average Joe won't be able to buy one, it just means that it will be slightly difficault to. [Though Phoenix will be camped outside of the local AMD distributor and robbing the first shipment that comes out].

De rest vind je in de K7 preview van PC Paradox.

Er komt een 'andere' versie van Win98 die door Bill waarschijnlijk het toevoegsel 'Second Edition' (synoniem voor service pack #2?) meegegeven zal worden. Mikroschoft verwacht de release in het derde kwartaal van dit jaar, maar Bill zou Bill niet zijn als-ie niet weer eens een deadline zou breken, dus reken er maar niet op

Genoeg geblah, hier de stuff van The Register:

Confirmation that Windows 9x lives comes from IE marketing chief Yusuf Mehdi, who says that the new software will include Internet Explorer 5.0 (which is released today) and various other technologies, including Internet Connection Sharing, which will allow multiple computers to access the Internet over a single line. This is clearly intended to take xDSL deployment a stage further via a form of home networking. Microsoft's hit rate when it comes to accurate prediction of how fast consumer broadband is going to take off has so far been absolutely diabolical, but maybe this time it will be different.

't is dus gewoon weer een veredelde bugfix...

PCVelocity heeft een preview gepost van AMD's ass-kickende K7 processor. Ok, we hebben nu al zo ongeveer 10.000 K7 previews gezien, maar leuk blijven ze:

First off, let's clarify things. The K7 is a true seventh-generation x86 processor in every sense of the word. AMD didn't just throw on some cache or add multimedia instructions when they designed the K7; they built it from the ground up. Intel's recent sixth-generation offerings (the Pentium II, Pentium II Xeon, Celeron, and Pentium III) are all based on the venerable Pentium Pro. Intel's next-generation chip (code-named Foster) appears to be even stronger than the K7. Boasting a new feature called a trace cache Foster will remove a step in the processing pipeline. In addition, Fosters' system bus boasts a throughput of 3.2 gigabytes/second, twice that of the K7's 1.6GB/sec. However, AMD's K7 is scheduled to ship in June of this year, while Foster won't see the light of day until 2000 or 2001. As a result, every power-hungry computer user has the K7 #1 on his wish list of goodies. [break] Tussen de tekst zie ik ook nog wat info over de 200MHz busspeed van de K7. 200MHz is prettig, maar waar haal je 200MHz geheugen vandaan (Rambus reepjes hoeven we voorlopig niet te verwachten). AMD beweert het te kunnen fixen met standaard PC100 SDRAM (twee DIMM banken in parallel?): [/break] In addition, AMD claims its' 200MHz bus is compatible with conventional PC100 SDRAM. (Details of how they will accomplish this remain secret.)

Best wel een uitgebreide preview bij PC Velocity. Lees hier de rest.

Rise Technology heeft vandaag bevestigd dat het dit jaar een socket370 processor zal releasen. The Register heeft het nieuws van de CeBIT:

He [mannetje van Rise] said: "You will see Socket 370 versions of our processor this year." He said that the move was related more to marketing its products than giving Rise a technical edge.

Speculation was mounting at CeBIT that SGS, now known as STMicroelectronics, is likely to be the Rise fab partner. If so, that will give the company a huge boost.

Rise was showing its next generation processor, the mp6II on its stand. That will be released in Q2. According to the company, the first iteration of the processor will be at least 300MHz and come with 256K level two cache and an external cache for level three cache.

Eric van Fastgraphics heeft wat korte info gepost over zijn bezoek aan de CeBIT in Hannover. Hier een stuk over zijn bezoek aan de Videologic stand:

Wandering around I suddenly found myself at the booth of Videologic where they had working samples of the Neon 250, the first card with the PowerVR series 2 processor. Like previous PowerVR products this one still uses tile based rendering as an alternative to Z-Buffering. I got a behind the scenes look at the card and it looked quite nice. With the early drivers it showed 49 fps in Timedemo1 of Quake II on a Pentium III 500 at 1024x768, and at 800x600 that went up to 76 fps. The image quality is good, and I look forward to testing one of these cards.

Zie Fastgraphics voor meer CeBIT info.

Anand heeft z'n dual Celery artikel gepost waarin hij in 10 eenvoudige stappen duidelijk maakt hoe je zelf dual Selderij kunt (ver)bouwen. Anand gaat uit van de PPGA Celeron die met mbv van een socket370 riser card op een slot1 plank geprikt wordt. Zoals inmiddels bekend moge zijn is het modifien van de zo'n riser card relatief eenvoudig. Om het geheel nog blijer te maken hebben een aantal fabrikanten inmiddels 'slotkets' aangekondig met ingebouwde dual Celery jumper:

There is escape for those of you that still don't feel comfortable with performing the modifications to the Socket-370 to Slot-1 adapters, Microstar will soon be shipping revision 1.1 of their MS-6905 boards which will feature jumpers that allow the user to modify the voltage going to the Socket-370 processor.   At the same time, a company in Taiwan has already agreed to sell modified versions of the revision 1.1 boards that are going to ship dual processor ready with the trick already performed.  For those of you that can't wait, and are looking for something "daring and new" to try out (there is only so much you can do with computer hardware that's "daring and new"), give the trick a go.

Zie AnandTech voor de info.