Volgens The Register zal Intel de levensduur van de BX chipset noodgedwongen (door de vertraging van de Camino chipset) moeten verlengen tot de PIII-700. Da's mooi als je een nieuwe CPU op je ouwe BX plank wilt stoppen, zou je denken. Helaas zit er een addertje onder het gras:

While this might sound like good news for users with existing motherboards, Pentium IIIs at this kind of speed will be power-hungry (even at 0.18 micron) and require a rev to the voltage regulation to meet the VRM 8.4 spec, so unless you're handy with a soldering iron, a new motherboard will be in order.

It seems likely that the next speed bump for the PIII, the 550MHz variant due out next month, will need beefier VRMs too.

Vraag ik me alleen af: nieuwe 0,18micron PIII's zullen op lagere voltage draaien = minder energieverbruik, maar clockspeed is hoger, dus meer energieverbruik = bij elkaar nog steeds ongeveer eventueel?

Bij 3DGaming.com hebben ze een review van de ATI All-in-Wonder 128. Hoewel niet echt interessant meer nu de V3 en TNT2 voor de deur staan heeft de All-in-Wonder toch een paar leuke features voor video editing/capturing en DVD playback waarmee de kaart zich onderscheidt van de rest:

f you are looking for high-quality, studio-level PCI-based video capture for a mid-range system, you will probably have to look elsewhere; the All-in-Wonder 128 in its current form will not have the same level of quality as cards as you need -- that's why such cards can cost $1000 alone! For the home or small-business consumer, this product should be perfect. On these platforms, the All-in-Wonder 128 can use ATI's proprietary VCR 2.0 compression, which is quite good though not professional-grade. Far better than the ATI VCR 2.0 is the full real-time MPEG compression on the All-in-Wonder 128. I was a bit skeptical at first and was only able to allude to the support in my first preview, but when it was officially announced along with the Pentium III, I was naturally stunned. ATI has confirmed that MPEG encoding will be included out-of-the-box which means progress is ahead of schedule!

VIA heeft nieuw drivers gereleased voor z'n Apollo Pro, MVP3 en VP3 chipsets. Het spul (busmaster, AGP en IRQ routing drivers + PCI bridge patch) kun je hier halen.

Hothardware heeft een artikel gebouwd rondom hun dual config met twee 515MHz PII's. Er staat niet bijzonder veel info in, wel een paar Winstone benchmarks maar zonder referentie met andere (single CPU) systemen. Hier een stuk over software met SMP support:

Already we have heard of Quake 3 Arena and Falcon 4 support for SMP. So I ask you, why play the MHz game when you can just add another processor and increase your processing power exponentially? OK, so let's back off on the hype for a minute. We aren't quite there yet.

Win2000 isn't out yet and applications and games that support SMP are just now being announced for release later this year. At this point it really doesn't make sense for the average user. Only people who are running high end NT Servers and Linux Servers need apply for this kind of set up. However, at some point this technology will absolutely be a viable option for the Home/Office User. We at Hot Hardware thought you would like a glimpse of the future! Here are my findings.

Voodoo Guru en FullOn3D hebben reviews van respectievelijk de Soyo SY-6IBM en Shuttle HOT-675. FullOn3D heeft een stuk over de overklokbaarheid van de HOt 675:

The disadvantage of overclocking on this motherboard is the need to tape a lot of pins.

First of all, I needed to tape the B21 pin to make the motherboard recognize it as a 100 Mhz bus CPU and then, since the Celeron could not run at 450 at the default voltage, we needed to tape more pins to increase voltage because Abit is currently the only motherboard maker that allows you to change the voltage of the CPU.

Stability was adequate although it was not as stable as our reference BX board (Abit BX6) if host bus memory clock was used.

Once again, stability and overclocked stability is always improved because of the special memory speeds allowed.

Ars Technica heeft een artikel in elkaar gedraaid met erg veel benchmarks van de K6-III, PIII en Celeron. Er werd o.a. getest met Winstone99, 3DMark99, Quake II en Unreal. Hier een stuk uit de conclusie:

All in all, AMD's latest looks to be competitive once again with the latest generation of Intel processors.  For those who want blistering performance on everyday applications like MS Office or Netscape, any of these chips will do.   However, a K6-III will really, really do; it's a real screamer in these sorts of applications, and it's not shy of the 32-bit environment of Windows NT, either.   (I'm willing to venture it'll go like stink with Linux or the BeOS, as well.)

That said, the K6-III looks like a mixed bag for other types of performance, such as gaming and other floating-point-intensive apps.  If you get the right 3D card with the right driver optimizations, for instance, 3DNow could pay off.  NVIDIA is, I believe, working on 3DNow optimizations for their TNT and TNT2 drivers, and 3dfx led in this area in the past, in part due to help from AMD.  Still, depending on developers to integrate 3DNow SIMD support is likely going to be a constant, frustrating vigil for the enthusiast--especially now that Intel is pushing its own SSE as an alternative.

Ik zag via The Register deze site waar ze de specs hebben van de Intel 810, 810E en 820 (Camino) chipsets. De info is in een of andere super wazige onbegrijpbare taal, maar de tabellen zijn wel leesbaar.

Anand heeft het eerste deel van z'n Ultra ATA hard drive comparison klaar gekregen. De nieuwe Western Digital (IBM) schijf doet het erg goed:

As you can probably guess, the top two winners are all 7200 RPM drives, and the drive that came in as the absolute fastest happened to be both a 7200 RPM as well as an Ultra ATA/66 drive, the Western Digital Expert 9.1GB.

Interestingly enough, the 4th runner up, the Quantum Fireball EX, is actually a 5400 RPM drive that happens to be tied with IBM’s 7200 RPM 14GXP. This helps illustrate the fact that 7200 RPM drives are not necessarily faster than their 5200 RPM counterparts.

Bij Ace's Hardware hebben ze een kleine review gemaakt over hoe je erg goedkoop een snelle spelle pc maakt. Ze kiezen voor de Celeron 366 en de K6-2 350 als processor, die net als de videokaarten flink overgeklokt worden. Videoplanken zijn de Asus TNT, Voodoo2, en de Savage3D:

The old Savage3D at 100 mhz really is a very overclockable chip. I got it up to 120 MHz! Well, I know that a lot of people have reported this before I did, but it still surprised me. Don't forget that it has 10 ns SDRAM on board. If anyone can explain this, be my guest.

The Voodoo2 with 3 hot chips, could not get past 100 MHz reliably. I know some people got the voodoo2 to 109 MHz (with special gear), but, in my opinion, the extra 9 MHz is not worth the hassle, cost, and the heat. Remember that a hot videocard can decrease the overclockability of your CPU by warming up your computer case.

The memory on the ASUS v3400TNT could run at 120 mhz, but the chip itself topped out at 105 mhz. This videocard ships with a fan on the processor. I must tell you that I did not experience any Super 7 problems, ASUS seems to make sure that their own videocard works on their ASUS P5A.

Door speciale legereingen die doen denken aan een zeer klein bimetaaltje zou het mogelijk zijn om een PC sneller te laten lopen.
In feite gaat het hier om sneller geheugen en een grotere opslagcapaciteit.

Door gebruik te maken van speciale legeringen die hun vorm kunnen "herinneren" zal het in de toekomst mogelijk zijn om PC's zo'n honderd keer sneller te laten lopen. De gebruikte legeringen kunnen in de vorm van kristallen bij verhitting direct van vorm veranderen. De kristallen kunnen zo dicht op elkaar worden geplaatst dat zelfs op nanometer niveau (klein moleculair) nog data is op te slaan. Tony Anon proffessor aan de Brunel universiteit in londen maakte dit gisteren bekend in de Sunday Times. Volgens de eerste berekeningen zijn er honderdvoudige verbeteringen in de geheugencapaciteit van PC's te verwachten. Op een cd-rom schijfje zal zo'n 1000 Gb aan data opgeslagen kunnen worden, dit in tegenstelling tot de gebruikelijke 650 Mb die er nu op kan worden weggeschreven. Ook de data overdracht zal veel sneller kunnen plaats vinden , c.a 27Gb per seconde tegen de paar Mb die er nu per seconde kunnen worden verwerkt. Toepassingen van de opslag van data door legeringen met "geheugencapaciteit" zijn legio. . Zo zou een TV kunnen worden uitgerust met genoeg geheugenruimte om 500 films moeiteloos op te slaan.

Jammer genoeg zal het nog wel een tijdje duren voordat dit echt operationeel is...

Nog een leuke thread op Anand's BBS over Voodoo3 overclocking. De meeste V3's trekken het tot zo'n 170MHz.

Redhat 6.0 zal volgende week gereleased worden. Hier de info van Infoworld:

Red Hat officials on Friday confirmed that its Linux 6.0 will be formally announced April 26 with availability scheduled for May 10. The new version will sport the new 2.2.5 version of the multiprocessing kernel "with patches'' that make it more stable, according to Red Hat Chairman Bob Young. A 2.2.6 version of the kernel is in the works with yet more patches, but that version will not be available for at least another month, Young said. The product will also feature two graphical interfaces, Gnome 1.0 and KDE 1.1. Red Hat Software Inc., in Research Triangle Park, N.C., is at www.redhat.com.

Ik zag via overclockers.com deze site waar ze een tabelletje hebben met temperaturen van een aantal heatsinks op een C300A @ 450MHz / 2,0V. Er zitten o.a. een Intel retail heatsink, Cooler Master, Glacier 4500C en nog wat Global Win coolers bij. Check 't hier.

Intel heeft een nieuw moederbord gereleased met onboard TNT & SB64. Onboard video & audio = bagger en Intel = ook meestal bagger als het om moederplanken gaat, dus dit is waarschijnlijk weer nix voor de serieuze overclocker. Anyway, hier de info van The Register:

The new Sun River, aka SR440BX, boasts onboard 16Mb nVidia Riva TNT AGP

graphics and Creative Labs SoundBlaster AudioPCI 64V with 64 voice wavetable

audio and with a 500MHz Pentium III on board is reported to run damned fast at a

street price of around £120.

The Heatsink Guide heeft een superwrede peltier sandwich gebakken. 2 peltiers aan beide zijde van de PCB! Hier wat info:

In theory, it should be possible to reach sub-zero temperatures, which would allow this 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 condense, 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 polystyrol. Two peltier elements cool the CPU, one on each side, and heat up the two

heatsinks. Thanks to the insulating material around the Peltiers, no cool part will be exposed to ambient air - bye bye condensation!

Errug extreem, zie www.heatsink-guide.com voor info & pics.

Riva128 heeft een review gepost van de Leadtek Winfast S320. Hoewel een échte review (dus geen preview), werd er nog steeds getest met een pre-production model. Hier de mening van de reviewer van riva128.com (pro-nVidia):

Besides the obvious numbers which show just how amazing a product Leadtek and NVDIA have come up with, there is more to tell.  Know I could be in serious mental delusions, but the night I first clambered into a Quake2 pickup game at 1024x786 at 32bit...I got killed a whole lot.  Why besides I stink?  I was watching the explosions and the fire that results along with looking at everything I could like I had never played Quake2 before.  When I shot a rocket...my eyes would leave the opponent only to be fixated on the so much more realistic fire from the blast than I have ever seen before in this game.  Maybe it was me, but everything seemed to be so much more robust, colorful and realistic.

I have to say that the TNT2 will be the hottest card out when it arrives at the end of this month.  It has everything a gamer could want...speed....32 bit color....AGP 4X and texture memory support through said bus...and more speed.  I couldn't imagine having the money to buy this card and buying anything else but a TNT2.  The results were more than I expected and knowing the engineering gurus over at NVIDIA, I hate too see the results of these same demo's with drivers two months from now.