3DSpotlight.com heeft een review gepost van de Xitel Storm Platinum, da's een geluidskaart met Aureal Vortex2, dezelfde chip als die de op MX300. Geheel volgens traditie hebben ze 'm vergeleken met de SBLive:

n my opinion, when using 4 speakers there was almost no difference between the cards, while some effects were cooler in one some other were better with the other card. Now, when using 2 speakers, positional audio in the Storm Platinum was better. In the other hand, music and MIDI playback and that kind of stuff was better in the SB Live!.

Which should you buy then?

If you're a real gamer, don't look further, go for the Xitel Storm Platinum Gamers pack and kick some ass with the Force Feedback headphones, but if you're a music enthusiast, my recommendation goes to the SB Live!

FullOn3D heeft een artikel gebakken over de 22-bit rendering van de Voodoo2/3/Banshee. 3Dfx gebruikt het als excuus voor de lage maximale kleurdiepte van z'n Voodoo planken door te beweren dat de 16-bits van de Voodoo eigenlijk toch echt 22-bit is. FullOn3D gaat behoorlijk diep in op de stuff. Hier een hap uit de intro:

I don’t want to start on a negative point because I understand totally where Gary is coming from, but I do think that his JPEG comparison is a little suspect. It doesn’t really matter how small a compressed JPEG image is, it will still require more than 16-bit color depth if the final image is to contain more than 65K colors. Of course many images don’t actually require more than 65,536 unique colors and this is where palletising comes into play, however, we are talking here about 'frame-buffer' bit-depth not 'texture' bit-depth and we mustn’t get confused between the two. The RamDAC on a graphics card reads the data from the frame-buffer as RGB information (not palletised) and for 3dfx products that’s in 565 representation; i.e. 5-bits for red & blue and 6 for green (5+6+5=16 bits of color). So what is this pseudo 22-bit color all about? Well it’s all to do with 'dithering'.

De rest is hier.

Sharky Extreme heeft een review van de PIII-500 geupt. Dit vraag ik me dus ook af:

With the upcoming Pentium 3-550 and Celeron 466 due in early May, is there any room for the $700 P3-500 in buyer's systems? And with significantly more powerful CPU options like Intel's .18 micron "Coppermine" 600MHz P3 CPU, and AMD's K7 looking to release sometime in the summer, should anyone be buying any other CPU besides a Celeron to just get by in the mean time?

De overklokbaarheid blijkt ook nog eens erg mager te zijn. Bij Sharky kregen ze 'm niet eens stabiel op 560MHz. Waardeloos ding IMO. Anyway, check 't out hier.

Evil Avatar (huh wattes??) heeft een Starsiege review geplaatst. Hier is wat stuff:

As for the equipment and weapons that are available, well, all I can say is "Holy mackerel!". This game will definitely delight those who love to tinker with their Herc designs. I can’t even begin to list the ways you can modify the Herc chassis you choose to ride because the options are so diverse and plentiful. Multiplayer games (more on that further down) should be full of surprising, unique designs, as players tweak their machines six ways from Sunday between matches. There simply isn’t anything you can’t change on these Hercs (or tanks, for that matter, which are also playable). Weapons show up when you mount them, all with their own distinct looks that change the silhouette of the Herc they are mounted on.

When it comes to Multiplayer, this game really shines. As I alluded to above, the sheer number of items that can be used to tweak a Herc chassis to the player’s taste means that players will always have to be on their toes. Just because the chassis you see coming your way is familiar, doesn’t mean it’s capabilities will be. A healthy selection of maps will keep familiarity from creeping in for a while, but the game stumbles again as the only forms of gameplay are Deathmatch and Capture the Flag. There’s also a neat sounding Starsiege Football multiplayer game, but I didn’t find anyone willing to play it. Why some of the great match ideas from Starsiege"TRIBES" aren’t available in Starsiege, I couldn’t say, but it would have seemed like a no-brainer to include them at Herc-scale to me.

Sounds good dus....
Lees hier verder en check vooral de koele screenshots!

Linuxworld.com heeft een artikel gepost over Linux en games. Die twee willen tot op heden nog niet lief saampjes spelen', en daar moet verandering in gaan komen. Het belangrijkste probleem op dit moment is het ontbreken van een algemene game device API voor Linux (zoals DirectX bij Windoos):

The problems for Linux are numerous, however, and need immediate attention. In the first place, Linux needs a standard 3D API with broad support for hardware acceleration. OpenGL is already available for Linux - perhaps this would be the way to go. I would appreciate hearing your thoughts.

More important, Linux needs to support the vast majority of sound cards and their special features.

Check Linuxworld voor meer info.

Terwijl de Voodoo3 nog niet eens goed en wel verkrijgbaar is beginnen ze bij Thresh's Firingsquad al te speculeren over wat de V3-4000 (über V3 met 4x AGP enzo) gaat brengen:

According to a tip, the "Voodoo3 4000" will deliver final 32-bit color rendering , a 32-bit Z-buffer, and 32 or 64MB of RAM. We've also heard that this part will be able to run dual in 3dfx's famous SLI, but the AGP/PCI matter lends doubt to this conjecture.

Klinkt lekker. Check Firingsquad voor het complete artikel.

3DDimensional128 levert zijn bijdrage aan een de stortvloed van Voodoo3 reviews die momenteel gaande is. Naast de gebruikelijke info heeft de review benchmarks (TNT/V2/V3) en 3DMarg99 screenshots. Hier een stuk over de image quality:

As you can see the V3 3000 image is clearer, sharper, and actually somewhat more colorful than the TNT or V2 images. Notice how the 4 bolts in front of the black and yellow stripe on the floor shows up. Plus, if you look, the number 99 is ledgable on the weapon itself. This is very typical on most games using theV3 3000. I also noticed a suprising difference with Quake2 and Tribes as well.

Nog een wazige site met foto's van een watergekoelde PMMX (niet erg opwindend, maar de pics zijn wreed). Kijk hier.

Hothardware heeft een paar pics van een watergekoeld Celery systeempje:

You guys and gals just gotta ( yeah that's a word) see this! One of our Super Techno-Freak readers, by the name of Charlie Tung (all the chicks dig him!), sent in some picks of his Water Cooled Celeron Rig! Check it out! These are the best pics of how to water cool your CPU that I have seen yet! Hey Charlie, what's that cool little box that covers and cools the CPU made of!?? I'll post more details as I get them. For now, feast your eyes!

Check zem out hier.

We hebben vorige week iets gemist over de K7. Ace's Hardware heeft een artikel over de chipsets, Ram en cache structuur van deze nieuwe super processor. Ook wordt de vraag beantwoord hoe het zit met 100/133 MHz geheugen en de 200 MHz bus:

You see that the EV6-bus is NOT the bus connected to the memory. The EV6 bus is the big fat pipe from the CPU to the chipset. The chipset has different pipes to all the other buses, including main memory, PCI, and AGP. In a Slot 1 system, the same local I/O bus must handle the I/O requests of the CPU, main memory, AGP, and PCI bus. The K7, however, will have its own private pipe to the chipset. So it really does not matter what RAM will be available, AMD can use the 200 MHz EV6-bus. What RAM can be used depends on the chipset. When the first K7 for the retail market are shipped, you will plug cheap 100 or 133 MHz SDRAMs in your K7-motherboard and you will get a K7 with a 200 MHz EV6 bus. On top of that, don't forget that the K7 has a still a 512 KB backside L2-cache. 90 to 95 percent of the time, the K7 will look in the L2-cache for the data that is needed. So, regardless of whether you use DIMM modules running at 133 MHz or 200 MHz, the performance impact will be minimal. The notable exception to this, however, is AGP.

Nieuwer is hun eigen review van de K6-III. Daar staat onder andere een benchmark voor de tijd die nodig is om een Linux-kernel te compileren.

CRUS heeft een Superbike World Championship review geplaatst. Dit spel is, kan ik je uit eigen ervaring zeggen, erg vet....

Superbike World Championship has both an action and a simulation mode so both the beginner that never has played a racing game before ( like anyone hasn’t done that ) or the experienced biker will both have the blast of their life. When you select the easy setting so will the computer do almost everything for you, all you need to do is press down the throttle key and the stear around the curves as the computer will control both the changing of gears and the braking when you approach the corner.

Superbike World Championship supports D3D, so pretty much any 3D card can be used. If you don't have a 3D card, don’t worry the software rendering is acceptable, and perhaps the best in this day of 3D support.

The graphics of the game are excellent and are the best of any racing game I have seen. Just imagine Need For Speed 3 with better graphics and on a bike so will you know what I am talking about. The bike looks nice and the course too.

I enjoyed every moment I played Superbike World Championship and I still play it every day as it is a fun and challenging game, with excellent graphics, great physics and plenty of excitement. But you better have a powerful computer to play the game with all the graphics and computer contrrolled bikers. Until now has Grand Prix Legends been the best racing simulator but now there is a new game that will be played by the racing fans for a long time and it is called Superbike World Championship. Go out and buy this game now.

Superbike WC scoorde een vette 94%.

Lees hier verder...

U-games heeft een Theme Park 2 preview geplaatst. Even wat stuffjes over de opvolger van het origineel in 1994 uitgebrachte spel:

Wow, it's in, like, 3d, dude. Indeed. Do you think I could have got any more commas in there? No, me neither. Anyway, it is indeed all in 3d. Gone are the dull flat sprites of the original, and in their place comes an entirely 3d engine - based loosely on that of Populous: The Beginning, but including numerous advancements. The new game-world will be fully rotatable, you'll have the luxury of being able to zoom in and out, and this new engine under the hood should mean that we can now ride our creations from the perspective of one of your park visitors. However, all this new 3d eye trickery, we're promised, won't result in a minimum spec. that excludes all the but most elite of hardware, far from it. Even without a 3d card, the game will appear smoother than a cashmere-codpiece, thanks to the wondrous and nigh-mythical properties of the fore-mentioned game engine. It's scalable, boys and girls.

Also proving that 'if it ain't broke don't fix it', the original system which provided the player with info on the their visitors state of mind (remember the little speech bubbles above each visitor?) will again make an appearance, however, this time the routines controlling this beneath the surface have been refined and more attention to smaller detail is being paid. There, I knew I'd find a full stop somewhere.

Wij werden vandaag getipt (dank nog, Sander) dat Micro$oft ondanks het proces gewoon doorgaat Netscape te pesten. Alleen gebruikers van IE5 kunnen info krijgen over Windows2000, en ook voor updates heb je dit monster nodig. Zie hier de gewraakte pagina. Op The Register het originele bericht.