Als Tom of Anand het niet doen, dan doet sympathieke Andy het wel: BXB heeft een vette BX mobo roundup gepost, specifiek gericht op overclocking. Ik denk dat ik maar het beste het mailtje van Andy kan citeren:

The 5 board overclocking shoot-out featuring the Iwill BD100Plus (vcore and vio voltage tweaks!!), MSI 6163 (voltage tweaks and onboard sound), Asus P2B-F, AOpen AX6BC, and the Abit BX6-2 is online (AX6BC / BX6-2 re-reviewed)

With Camino delayed, extensive tests at 133Mhz and beyond was carried out, using PC133 Enhanced HSDRAM and also ultra fast Samsung -G8 / Hyundai 8ns SDRAM. With a new chipset round the corner, the search was on to for a board to power you past Camino and beyond! Some of the boards on test even managed a stable 152Mhz!

We've got Celeron 300a benchmarks up to 527 (4.5 x 117), P3 scores up to 560Mhz and P2-300 also up to 527Mhz. Also benchmarks at 133Mhz at well. Compartive scores at 66, 100 and 112Mhz are online, alongside Q2/TNT-2 scores at 450Mhz in 1024 x 768.

Too many URL's to the individual articles to mention, so the Front Page kicks the whole shebang off....

It starts at http://bxboards.com

Thanks

Andy

Teveel URL's? Hehe :

- Asus P2B
- IWill BD100Plus
- MSI 6163
- AOpen AX6BC
- Abit BX6-II

Dit stuurtje blijkt behoorlijk populair te zijn onder de hardware reviewers. Bij Beyond3D doen gezellig mee en posten hun eigen review:

One cool thing with the FS is the cartridge system it employs. Supplied with the wheel is a cartridge that enables the wheel to work for the system you bought it for. Of course, I got a cartridge for the PC, but it should be easy to just buy a new one to enable it to work on an N64 or similar system. This cartridge system also is supposed to make the wheel future-proof as Act Labs plans on releasing updates for it.

En voor het geval je nog nooit foto's van het ding gezien hebt, heb je er hier 3:

Ik kreeg van Koen / Hardwareinfo.net een ICQ message (sorry dat het zolang duurde voordat ik 'm gepost heb dat-ie een artikel geschreven heeft over het imago probleem van 3Dfx. Hier heb je een stuk:

[...]Diamond overstroomde de wereld met reclame voor de Monster 3D II, Creative bleef haar 3D Blaster VooDoo2 kaart promoten en 3dfx had te tijd van haar leven. De PR-kostenpost van 3dfx bleef staan op 0 en de verkoop bleef stijgen. Op dit punt heeft 3dfx in mijn ogen de grote misrekening begaan: hoewel 3dfx dacht dat het woorden als "3dfx" en "VooDoo" waren die zo'n grote bekendheid genoten waren het dus woorden als "Diamond Monster" en "Creative 3D Blaster". Bij 3dfx zag men de grote winsten van de VooDoo verkopende fabrikanten en kreeg men het idee om de verkoop bij hun volgende produkt, de VooDoo3, anders aan te pakken. De afloop van dit idee kent ondertussen iedereen: 3dfx fuseerde met STB en de VooDoo3's zijn nu alleen maar van 3dfx/STB zelf te verkrijgen.

Interessante materie: het lijkt dé grote misstap van 3Dfx te gaan worden. Niet voor niets kondigden ze vorige week aan dat andere fabrikant toch V3 kaarten mogen gaan fabriceren. Lees het artikel van Koen hier.

Helaas niet zozeer interessant voor ons Nederlanders, maar desondanks toch handig om te weten:

Montreal, Canada, May 31, 1999 - Matrox Graphics Inc. today announced that it will be taking online pre-orders for the Matrox Millennium G400 Series as early as Tuesday, June 1, 1999 at 12:00 noon EST via Matrox's online store, located at http://onlinestore.matrox.com.

Open to residents of Canada, Europe and the US, pre-orders allow online customers to purchase Matrox Millennium G400 Series graphics boards before they arrive at retail in mid-June. Customers will prepay by credit card and will receive their products within three to four weeks of placing the order.

"Demand for the Matrox Millennium G400 and Millennium G400 MAX cards has been soaring ever since we announced them," said Vic Caruso, Director of E-Commerce, Matrox Graphics Inc. "Because demand is so high, we wanted to offer our customers the opportunity to guarantee themselves a board right away."

Customers can pre-order the high speed Matrox Millennium G400 16MB for US$149, the blisteringly fast Matrox Millennium G400 32MB for US$199 and the shock wave speed Matrox Millennium G400 MAX for US$249

Beyond3D heeft een artikel gepost van de TNT2. Het is niet zozeer een review van een specifieke kaart, meer een bespreking van alle mogelijkheden die de TNT2 biedt. Hier bijv. een stuk over multi-texturing op de V3 en TNT2:

Some of you might not be aware of how the TNT2's multi-texturing works, so I'll take a moment to explain. With 3dfx boards, you have 2 pixel pipelines. If multi-texturing is used, the primary pipeline renders the pixel with the first texture, and the second, simpler pipeline renders the second texture. So if 3dfx says they render 300 MTPS (million textured pixels per second) they can only render 150 million complete pixels per second, or MPPS. On the other hand, NVIDIA, with a clock of 150 MHz, can render 300 million pixels per second. How is this? Well the TNT2 renders 2 pixels per clock cycle. This means that the second pixel can either be used for a second texture (as in multi-texturing) or it can be used to render an entirely separate pixel. This gives the TNT2 a serious performance advantage in the games that don't use multi-texturing, though this is becoming more and more uncommon.

Best wel goede info. Fiets er zelf naartoe: de review is hier.

Bij Glide Underground hebben ze een review van de Diamond Viper V770 Ultra gepost. Hier heb je een stuk info over 32-bit rendering op de TNT2/V770:

Many people out there doubt the abilities of a card that supports 32 bit, which makes nearly every card in the market, except of course for 3Dfx card, fall into that category. 32 bit simply means there will be a much larger color palette available for the video card to render a scene. This results in more smoothly blended colors, which are more vibrant. Without 32 bit color in games like Quake 3, major dithering effects are visible on smoke trails, and fire. But switch over to 32 bit, and it's all gone. Eventually, more and more games will take advantage of 32 bit colors, and a Voodoo 3 will be completely useless. Sure, the V3 wins at yesterday's games, but what about tomorrow's games? That's what your buying the card for isn't it? Any card now will run Quake 2 far more than playable. What about games like Unreal 2? Quake 4 and the Trinity engine? All of these games will most likely have 32 bit textures, at high resolutions. So if you don't want to have to buy another video card, personally, I'd stay away from Voodoo until 3Dfx pushes up their feature list.

Verder geen overklok info, maar wel veel benchmarks. Check de review hier.

i-XBT heeft weer iets nieuws in huis: een review van de Leadtek Winfast3D S320V. Naar mijn weten is i-XBT hiermee de eerste site met een review van een TNT2 Vanta kaart. De Vanta is basicly een TNT2 met een gemankeerde 64-bits memory bus, een lagere core/mem clock van 100/125MHz en een beperkte hoeveelheid onboard RAM (8Meg). Dus rijst de vraag: wat zijn de gevolgen van deze amputatie voor de performance?

The analysis of the results obtained on the Pentium III based system shows that unfortunately Vanta falls behind Riva TNT (not to mention TNT2!). Frankly speaking it is a rather sad fact though the lag is not that great. The performance drop while shifting from 16- to 32-bit color is somewhere between Riva TNT and Riva TNT2. And the picture remains the same with central processor frequency decrease.

As for the results obtained on AMD K6-2 system, we may only say that the picture is very similar to the previous one, i.e. here as well Vanta falls behind Riva TNT. However, in this case the lag is relatively small and sometimes to our great delight Vanta even manages to slightly surpass Riva TNT chipset.

Hmm...da's niet best. i-XBT heeft zoals gewoonlijk weer een een flinke berg benchmarks gepost, waarmee je 't zelf kunt uitzoeken.

Nintendo heeft weer een emulator site plat gegooid. Hier is de info, van The Register:

The sEMUf emulator was shut down this weekend due to unspecified "legal action from Nintendo", according to the project's site, here. The project's programmers admitted that development "has been stopped and will not continue".

At this stage it is not clear whether Nintendo's legal threat was targetted at the developers themselves or their ISP -- as was the case with emulator writer Jerremy Koot's Snes9x.com site just over a week ago (see Nintendo pursues emulator sites and Snes9x.com host explains actions).

Riva3D heeft een screenshot comparison in elkaar geknutseld waarin de beeldkwaliteit van de TNT2 en Voodoo3 met elkaar vergeleken worden. Eerlijk gezegd zie ik weinig verschil, maar dat komt grotendeels omdat de screenshots gedownscaled zijn naar 400 bij y pixels, waardoor je geen dithering meer kunt zien (die is tijdens het downscalen weg-geantialisased). Tamelijk waardeloos dus, die comparison...

Firingsquad heeft een preview gepost van de nieuwste simgame 'The Sims'. In plaats van steden, planeten, mieren, boerderijen etc, neem je hier de controle over MENSEN.

With Maxis' new game, called The Sims, you won't be controlling the macro states of a city anymore. This time, you're in charge of actual people's lives! The easiest way to describe the Sims is that it's an interactive soap opera. Instead of tweaking roads, water pipes, and school funding to improve a city, you'll be directing a person's actions to improve his or her life. In fact, as you get better you'll be able to control and manipulate an entire neighborhood of people! -- snip -- The extreme interactivity of the Sims is amazing. If your character buys a new hot tub or pool, the neighbors will come over for a party or a BBQ. The "interpersonal" relationships between the Sims become important in determining their overall happiness. Romance is a definite possibility, and I was astonished at some of the complex AI I saw at E3. They demonstrated a male Sim whose advances were always rejected by a female neighbor. The male Sim tried to soften her up with a gift, but the female Sim actually took the gift and stomped on it right in front of him. Talk about getting shot down!

Lees hier de volledige Preview. Dit zou weleens een HEEL verslavend spelletje kunnen gaan worden. "Little Computer People - the Next Generation ??"

...en dan gooi ik (Femme) er een paar leuke screenshots bij:

Ik heb weer een lading game previews, reviews, interviews, screenshots enzooi bij elkaar verzameld. De oogst van vandaag:

Nations: WWII Fighter Command preview (AGN 3D)

Metal Fatique preview (AGN 3D)

No One Lives Forever preview (3D Action Planet)

Drakan demo preview (3DGaming.net)

Fly! screenshots (Screenshots.net)

Nocturne screenshots (Screenshots.net)

Tribes 2 interview (Gamers' Crypt)

Dan van Tweak3D heeft een aantal NFS4 tweaks gepost:

I was playing around with the demo a bit more and I made a few observations. In my opinion, it looks cooler to disable car chrome (as well as shading). Set the Special Effects to low or off, and it will lower the detail of the smoke. Smoke is probably the #1 cause of slowdown during Need for Speed III and High Stakes.

If you use regedit (Start, Run, regedit) and look at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Electronic Arts\Need For Speed High Stakes Demo\ you can find some more registry keys to tweak. Although I couldn't tell the difference, you could try changing the resolution here. It is the key called Thrash Resolution. Try changing the value to 1024x768 or your liking (Like I said, I couldn't tell if this actually worked). Also you can enable Triple Buffering by setting the value to 1 instead of 0. I didn't see a performance difference from this, but if triple buffering truly is enabled, it should give a slight boost.

Ik zit hier nu niet op m'n eigen pc en heb daarom niet kunnen checken of die resolutie registry key effect heeft. Ik ben bang van niet (als je in de NFS4 Demo dirs rond snuffelt dan zul je daar een paar files tegenkomen met '640' in de filename, zou kunnen dat de demo daarom alleen op 640x480 loopt).

CPU Review heeft een review gepost van...een stuk zachtwaar: Caldera OpenLinux 2.2. Volgens CPU Review is de installatie super makkelijk, dus misschien een serieuze concurrent voor Windoos?

Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 has taken ease of installation to new levels. I have no doubt that a knowledgeable Windows user (who had hardware supported out of the box!) would have little difficulty installing OpenLinux.

I would caution corporate users to familiarize themselves with the OpenLinux license agreement; due to Lisa and some other proprietary tools you are not allowed to install OpenLinux on more than one PC (unless you ftp and install the 'lite' version from Caldera's site)

Bij Sharky Extreme hebben ze het vierde deel van hun Memory Guide online gezet. Dit deel gaat over memory timings: CAS/RAS toestanden enzo. Best wel heftige info. Check 't hier.

De Dynamite TNT2 Ultra lijkt dé TNT2 kaart bij uitstek te worden. Reviews waren tot nu uitsluitend (zwaar) positief. Wat zegt Anand:

The Hercules Dynamite TNT2 Ultra is the fastest TNT2 accelerator on the market, and has the greatest potential. It is perfect for users with CPU's faster than a Pentium II 350, and for once, that isn't exclusively for Intel owners. Super7 owners will enjoy the same performance benefits from the TNT, including the Dynamite TNT2 Ultra as soon as NVIDIA publicly releases their latest 3DNow! drivers which should be shortly in the next week or so. Until they do in fact release the drivers Super7 users should stand idle before shelling out the cash for the Dynamite TNT2 Ultra or any TNT2 accelerator for that matter, as soon as the drivers hit though, go out and enjoy the benefits. [break]Wat betreft overclocking, waar de Dynamite TNT2 erg goed in is gebleken, zegt-ie het volgende:[/break] In AnandTech's tests, the Dynamite TNT2 Ultra made it up to 195MHz core, and 230MHz memory. After a few hours the 195/230 settings eventually crashed, however dropping the core down to 190MHz seemed to stabilize things by a noticeable margin. The sweet spot will most likely be 190/220 on most boards, however the success of your overclocking attempts will vary depending on the yield of the TNT2, memory parts, and the PCB itself.

Hmm...wat is vetter: G400 of Dynamite TNT2? Check eerst Anand's review.

Gisteren hadden ze bij Exscape in de 'Five days of id'-serie een artikel over Wolfenstein. Vandaag zijn Doom en Doom II aan de beurt:

To say that Doom was a remarkable game doesn't begin to do it justice. Doom transformed the gaming industry in so many ways that it's almost impossible to keep track of them all. Everything, from its marketing to its 3D engine to its violence level to its multiplayer game, changed the way that people thought about games. While that might seem like too much credit to rest upon the shoulders of one title, Doom's got the history to support it.

Oja, motorzaag rulez!

Samhell heeft in z'n column bij Shugashack een interview gepost met Eric Biesmann, project leader van het spel Soldier of Fortune. Hier heb je vraag 2:

2. What will set Soldier of Fortune's AI about from, say, HL or Kingpin? What kind of interaction will there be between environment characters and your character?

I really don't want to make any comparisons between Soldier of Fortune and other games because they are always so biased. Instead, I will just say that we are focusing hard to make sure that the AI adds to the game instead of detracts. In the end, it's easiest to say that the game will be both challenging and fun and leave it at that. Enemies will be smart enough to take cover, run away when outgunned, and lean around corners to mow the player down. On top of that, with our new scripting language, enemies and NPCs will be set to do things beyond 'wait for the player and kill him.' In a lot of games, enemies are placed to stand in a spot until they detect the character and then try to kill him. In Soldier of Fortune, we are setting it up so that enemies (and NPCs!) will be doing things instead of waiting for the player. This adds to the player's immersion in the game and really helps to draw the player in. Examples include smoking a cigarette, talking to a buddy, looking through binoculars, and working with machinery. There will also be many areas where the player learns information from characters as the game progresses. All of this will be done through in-game cinematic that will give the player a strong 'action-movie' type feel to the game.

ff snuffelen of ik nog een paar SoF screenshots op m'n FTP heb liggen....hoppa:

Sharky Extreme heeft een kleine review van Diamond's Savage 4 Pro kaart gepost. Staat eigenlijk niks nieuws in. Zijn prestaties zijn gemeten met die van de V3-2000. Hier kan je het lezen...

Hier kan je een prieview lezen van Metal Fatigue.
Metal Fatigue is een Red Alert alike strategie 3d spel.

Joshua van AGN Hardware heeft een review gepost van de Turtle Beach Montego II Quadzilla, een geluidskaart gebaseerd op de Aureal Vortex II chipset met 4 speaker support (vandaar het bijvoegsel 'Quadzilla'):

As we all know (and those of us who don't, should), the Vortex 2 is the king of positional audio. While the Live! uses careful reverb and echo effects to create sound environments, the Vortex 2 uses mathematical algorithms to calculate the position of a sound in a particular space. In 2 speaker tests (using Altec Lansing ADA-305 speakers), the Montego II was certainly better at recreating positional audio than the SoundBlaster Live!. Games such as Half-Life and Aliens Vs. Predator sounded a bit more realistic in positional sound placement (environmental effects aside) on the Montego II.

Lees ook mijn review van de Xitel Storm Platinum (= Vortex II).

PC Paradox heeft maar liefst 25 screenshots van de RTS game "Earth 2150" gepost. De graphics zijn wreed! Hier heb je er een paar:

.

FiringSquad heeft een Hands-On Preview van Unreal Tournament gepost. De game ziet er mooi uit met gelikte graphics, en de wapens zijn ook, zeker ten opzichte van deel 1, veel mooier en beter.

De preview is overigens zeer uitgebreid en echt alle onderdelen worden in detail besproken. Hier is een stukkie:

Along with Quake 3, Unreal Tournament is among the most hotly anticipated first person shooters out there. Gamers may remember that the original Unreal was heralded as the Quake 2 killer. With its rich graphics and cutting edge weapons, it indeed could have dethroned Quake 2 as the first person shooter to beat. However, sketchy network code doomed Unreal to stay in the background as a serious multiplayer contender. A year and several patches later, the net play was stabilized but in that time its window of opportunity lapsed. The Epic team has learned a lot in that time period and is determined not to make the same mistakes again.

Fast forward to today and with all the hype surrounding UT, people are already declaring it the king of first person shooters, with some going so far as to say that Quake 3 will be DOA because of Unreal Tournament. Does UT live up to the hype? Have the weapons been improved since the original Unreal? Can it offer the same adrenaline pumping deathmatching that id is known for? Are the two games even comparable? We had a chance to take a peek at this hotly anticipated game - what exactly does UT bring to the table?

Je kunt hier verder lezen.

Anand heeft gisteravond een review over de Xentor 32 gepost.
Hier iets over de kaart:

The Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 isn't an intimidating card at all, unlike the first Voodoo2 cards that hit the streets with their full length PCI stature, the standard sized AGP card is outfitted with a full 32MB of EliteMT manufactured SDRAM. The 5.5ns EliteMT SDRAM is clocked at 183MHz, which is a definite drop from the original 200MHz goal, which was then lowered to 195MHz, and finally bumped down to 183MHz. It seems like Guillemot was trying too hard to compete directly with Hercules' 175/200MHz Dynamite TNT2 Ultra, in doing so they almost released a card that would end up flaking out on quite a few users.

De review vind je hier