Extreme Hardware heeft een review gepost van de Terratec Xlerate Pro. Deze geluidskaart heeft net zoals de Diamond MX300, Xitel Storm Platinum en Turtle Beach Montego II een Aureal Vortex II processor:

With a suggested price of $99.95, the Xlerate Pro is priced in line with competing Vortex 2 cards as well as the SoundBlaster Live! Value Edition. However, unlike competing Vortex 2 cards, no software bundle is included, which places the Xlerate Pro behind the pack a little. Compared to the Monster Sound MX300, it doesn’t have the MX300’s strong software bundle, but it does have a digital output port. Compared to the Xitel Storm Platinum, it is practically identical, but costs $20 more. On the whole, $99 is a good price for the Terratec Xlerate Pro. Compared to similar sound cards however, the Xlerate Pro seems a little expensive.

Ook Fasgraphics heeft een review van de Asus V3800 gepost. De V3800 die FG getest heeft draait op 125/150Mhz core/memory. Er zit ook wat overklok info in de review. Overklokken bleek helaas minder succesvol als bij de V3800 van Hardware Central:

Overclocking this card turned out to be quite a pain. The SGRAM would cause system lockups already at 160 MHz, which is only 10 MHz over the default of 150 MHz. Increasing the core speed was possible, but the BETA of PowerStrip that I used wouldn't clock the TNT2 core over 140 MHz... I've ran a couple of benchmarks, but the increase was hardly noticeable...

3DHardware.net heeft een review gepost van de Abit ZM6 socket370 mammaplank.

ABIT has truly done it again. With the ZM6 they've the low price without holding back on the features and performance. Why cut back on quality when you go down in price? Well, ABIT seems to ponder on that question too and I bet that they still haven't come up with the answer, as the ZM6 boasts great quality and a low price. The stability, compatibility and user friendliness are more than enough to make it a kick-ass motherboard, but ABIT does not stop there, they've added features not supported through the original Intel ZX chipset and they have, using ABIT's own slogan, "stirred it up again".

Check ook onze eigen review van de ZM6.

Bij 3DSpotlight werden ze enigzinds bezorgd over de release van de Savage4, die al lang plaats had moeten vinden. Ze besloten daarom om ff een mailtje te droppen bij S3 en dit is het antwoord:

Hi Julio,

    

The product launches from folks like Diamond and Creative have slipped a bit, but nothing to be concerned about -- I believe they'll have boards on shelves within the next two weeks!

    

Bottomline, Savage4 has been so successful and in such demand from OEM, AIC vendors and channel (VAR/VAD/SI) partners, that we're stretched a bit thin on resources and have found that we can't do it all at once.

    

So, the blame is ours to accept, but I don't think the delays are a major concern (a few weeks at most).

    

paul c.

    

S3 Inc.

Scott Miller van 3DRealms heeft in een post op Yahoo gezegd dat de release date van Duke Nukem Forever verschoven is naar 2000 :

To make clear:

Duke Nukem: Zero Hour for the N64 is set to be released by September this year.

Duke Nukem Forever will be a next year release.

Alex van Sharky Extreme heeft een preview van de Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor kaart geupt. Dit model heeft 16Mb RAM en is gebaseerd op de TNT2 chip en loopt op 125/166MHz mem/core. Een stuk uit de preview:

Guillemot isn't specifically pitching the Xentor 16MB to the 'serious' gamer. For that they've suggested (as we would) that you use their 32MB UltraTNT2 product instead. In any case, the Xentor 16MB was still pleasantly capable in gaming conditions under 32-bit. Expendable was fast, fluid and of course crisper than at 16-bit and playing the demo of KingPin resulted in respectable frame rates. The performance hit on the Xentor 16MB when switching from 16-bit to 32-bit color depths was slightly greater than it was on the Viper V770. But this is a result of the 16MB amount of SDRAM instead of the Viper's 32MB as well as the reduced clock speeds, which reduce the fill rate. The Forsaken benchmarks were plenty fast enough at 32-bit… Our advice is not to expect too much from a lower-end CPU when playing at 32-bit. The TNT2 is still pretty CPU dependant and scaling down to anything lower than a Pentium II 300MHz really isn't where it performs at its best. Having said that, 16-bit is still plenty fast enough on a lower-end system.

Sharky Extreme heeft een interview met Michael Sporer van Lucky Goldstar, o.a. bekend van hun geheugen reepjes. Hier een vraag over het potentieel van Rambus RDRAM:

Let's be realistic here. RAM has always played second fiddle to CPU technology in terms of marketing and getting credit for system performance. Rambus technology will enable future CPUs to run at their full potential by eliminating the potential bottlenecks that would occur if you were using a traditional memory architecture.

You cannot take a system architecture *of today* which is not limited by memory performance and expect to see an improvement... because there is nothing to improve upon. But with faster CPU busses, increased AGP demand and increased I/O requirements it is apparent that drastic changes are needed.

From a technical perspective the initial implementations of Rambus have a peak bandwidth that's 200% better than PC100 and an effective bandwidth of up to 300% better. You can draw your own conclusions about performance differences. In addition, Rambus requires about 25% of the pins and interconnect wires from the chipset to the memory, so if you could use the same number of pins already in use by SDRAM you could have 4x the performance over the first Direct Rambus implementations.

Nog maar nauwelijks of de markt of hij wordt al (met succes ) overgeklokt.

We found out that the Asus V3800 is operating far below its potential as a 3D graphics accelerator. Running it at 125/150 is just doing an injustice to the card. We actually managed to run the card with impeccable stability at 170/160. It seems the ram just isn't good enough to run faster than 160, but playing around with the ram settings leads us to believe it doesn't make a very big performance difference at any rate.

Voor meer info moet je ff de review lezen.

Intel heeft de noodzakelijke 'register level programming information' voor de Intel i470 als open source vrijgegeven. Deze is noodzakelijk om betrouwbare drivers te kunnen schrijven voor Xfree86, de grafische schil voor Linux.

Last year, Red Hat backed the development of Precision Insight's i740 driver -- available in binary form via the Red Hat XBF program. This license by Intel corporation will result in the driver source code becoming part of the industry standard XFree86 X Server in the next major X Server release. The driver will be distributed on Red Hat's XFCom - for "XFree86 Compliant" - ftp directory (ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/XFCom/) until it is released by the XFree86 Project.

Vlak voor de officiele releasedatum (eind mei) hebben ze bij Interplay nog een demo van D3 uitgegeven. Het mooie van deze demo is dat multiplayer ondersteund wordt.

Here's a brand new playable demo of Descent 3, the action shooter developed by Outrage Entertainment and set to be published by Interplay in May.
As with the original, pioneering Descent shareware game, your objective is simple but your mission difficult--navigate through the 3D world in your combat ship avoiding the numerous robot enemies. We recommend a joystick but the game can be played with a gamepad or the keyboard.

De systeemeisen zijn niet misselijk (PII-300, 64MB RAM), maar het is zeker de moeite waard !!!!

Meer info.

Op de jaarlijkse voorjaarsbijeenkomst voor beursanalisten en aandeelhouders onthulde Intel -naast de gebruikelijke blabla- plannen om al volgend jaar met 0.18 micron chips in de GHz range te komen

Je wilt met Linux beginnen maar je weet niet hoe je eraan moet komen, en al helemaal niet welke distributie je moet pakken. Of je bent zelf helemaal enthousiast geworden door dit alternatieve OS en je wilt je baas overtuigen dat het echt een beter serverOS is dan Windows NT. Lees dan ff de "Complete Guide to Linux Distributions".

Om Linux geschikt te maken als desktop OS voor Oma is er een begin gemaakt met een soort PnP voor Linux, zodat je net als onder Windows een nieuw stuk hardware kunt inpluggen en meteen laten herkennen.

"The crazy kiddies over at Linux Mandrake have started the Lothar Project . The goal is to make hardware detection and configuration easy. The code is in CVS and they need all sorts of different people and furry animals, so take a gander at the page, look at the pretty screenshots, and contribute to world domination. "

Het project heet dus Lothar, en is hier te vinden.