CNET heeft een zeer uitgebreide roundup gemaakt van de verkrijgbare 19" monitoren op de markt, 22 stuks om precies te zijn.

If you still think less is more, it's time to change your view. Once available to only those with the deepest pockets, 19-inch monitors are falling well into the affordable range--we even found one for less than $400.

While an extremely low price often means low quality, that's not always the case. We rounded up 22 jumbo monitors to find out which ones offer the best combination of image quality, usability, and price. Sure, you can spend close to $800 on one of these major displays, but unless you demand high-end features, such as a USB hub, you can still find terrific values. The two highest-ranking monitors in this roundup cost just a little more than $500.

Adrenaline Vault heeft een interessante newsposting over de ontwikkelingsstatus van Mortyr. Zoals bekend wil Ubisoft het spel niet uitgeven, volgens eigen zeggen omdat het niet in hun line of products past. Volgens AVault is er meer aan de hand...

According to our source, when Interactive Magic signed a deal to purchase Mortyr, it got the title for “a sweet price,” under $200,000. Although the game’s creators, Poland-based Mirage, enhanced the title during its stint at IMagic and even signed a three-game contract with the company prior to the deal with Ubi Soft, our source claims the game was in no condition to ship yet served to increase the paper value of the CD-ROM side of IMagic’s business.

“It had a ton of sorting problems, the multiplayer was practically non-existent and the player models were little more than parodies," our source said. "It was mostly stable though, with just a few crashes. Regardless of what Ubi Soft is saying officially, the game is way below their normal release standards. It had some potential, but needed at least six months and a major overhaul. One of the things it needed most was a storyline. The one it has was written in a couple of hours by the producer.”

EETimes heeft een artikel over de K7 op het net gekwakt. Hier heb je een stukje:

"The K7 will be a success; it will become AMD's bread and butter," predicted Donny Chien, a manager at motherboard giant First International Computer Inc. (Taipei, Taiwan).

But analysts and battle-hardened competitors are less sanguine, warning that even though the K7 processor itself may be a technical success, creating the surrounding infrastructure to support the MPU could be a challenging task, particularly in the commercial market.

The K7 is the company's most powerful and complex assault on Intel's X86 juggernaut yet. The 120-person K7 team completed the design in 17 months, said Dirk Meyer, chief architect of the K7 and a veteran of MPU designs at Intel and Digital Semiconductor. With 500-, 550- and 600-MHz versions already being sampled to many personal computer OEMs, the K7 appears set to move into the real world. And AMD has a system bus, licensed from Digital, which adds to the technical merits of the processor.

[...] "We've had sample K7s along with reference boards since April," said an engineer at a major Taiwan motherboard manufacturer, who asked not to be identified. "Currently, we have both 550- and 600-MHz sample CPUs. We are now on our fourth revision of K7 mainboards, and we expect to go into mass production in August."

JC heeft SPECint en SPECfp benchmarks van de K7 te pakken weten te krijgen. Het zou hier om een K7-550 gaan met L2 cache op 1/3 snelheid (produktie K7's zullen hun L2 cache 1/2 snelheid draaien):

benchmark	Score	Compared to Xeon-550	Compared to PIII-500	Compared to PIII-550
SPECint_95	25.7	+5.33%	+24.76%	+15.25%
SPECfp_base95	21.4	+38.06%	+62.12%	+55.07%
SPECfp_95	22.5	+31.58%	+53.06%	+49.01%

Check JC voor meer info.

Jeremy van AGN 3D heeft z'n dagelijkse DNF Q&A'tje weer online gezet. In totaal 5 vragen, waarvan hier al vast eentje:

Coincidentally last but definitely not least, will the game feature a REAL ending or endings? ( I ask this because virtually no FPS have good endings)

Yes. We've been extremely dissapointed in the ending of every FPS game to date. You put 25 hours of gameplay into something and you get very little in the way of an ending. We'd like to change that. You should be rewarded for finishing a game and feel satisfied. Not "oh, it's over".

Extreme Hardware heeft een review van de 3DCool Super Slot Fan cooler gebouwd. We hebben al vaker reviews van dit ding voorbij zien fietsen:

De slot fan is erg handig om bijv. je hete TNT te koelen:

The Super Slot Fan is installed in an expansion slot and its 2800rpm fan pumps air out of the case. The ideal use for the Super Slot Fan is for video card and/or CPU cooling. In this respect, the Super Slot Fan does its job well. It is the first cooling device not directly attached to my CPU that has noticeably lowered its temperature by several degrees, a five percent drop on average. Furthermore, the Super Slot Fan helped to cool my TNT2 enough for a few extra MHz increase when overclocking.

TechWeb heeft een artikeltje gepost over de IBM Microdrive, een harddisk met een capaciteit van 340Meg, ter grote van een postzegel. Het ding is zo klein dat het zelfs een bedreiging zou kunnen vormen voor de flash memories:

On the surface, the Microdrive would seem to compete directly with flash memory, especially since it conforms to the CF standard's physical dimensions. With an adapter, it can also fit into a PC Card slot.

"Microdrive works where flash capacity cannot be had or is too expensive," said Martin Reynolds, an analyst at Dataquest, in San Jose, Calif. "Generally, flash is better -- if you can get enough of it and you can afford it. But there is no such thing anywhere as 340 MBs in a [CompactFlash Type II] slot except with the Microdrive."

Ik las bij Betanews.com dat Alex van Kaam een nieuwe versie van Motherboard Monitor gereleased heeft. De nieuwe features in versie 4.08:

- Support for LM80 (via Intel Smbus, QDI and Trenton verfied)
- Support for FMS2701 (2 temperatures chip) all possible 3 (thanks to Nigel "sysops" for the datasheets)
- Support for Tekram CPU sensor using Tekram supplied calculations (select LM78 - Tekram probe)
-Support for ShutDown NOW! & Fan alarm
-Support for Epox voltage correction on -5, -12 and +12 (voltage tab, setup)
-Support for Tekram voltage correction on -12 (voltage tab, setup)
-Added starting date + time in the Up/Down log , this is for users how have their system running longer then 24 hours
-Added Increased priority for CPU Mhz thread, this should decrease the number of people who get a wrong (to high) readout of their CPU speed
-Added Slovakian language
-Added CPUSpeed section on the display tab
-Added Explorer Crash sensor (just made that name up), If you get an explorer crash (and who does not) which will kill your system tray and create a new clean one, MBM will detect this and re-appear in the new system tray.
-Changed it so that MBM will no longer stop monitoring when 1 alarm goes off and the dialog box is waiting for user input.

MBM4.08 kun je hier neer gaan halen (1,345Mb).

GamePC heeft een review geschreven van Aliens vs. Predator. Dit is echt een zwaar cool spel! Check de review hier!

Graphics come via Direct3D, and a very good implementation of it to boot! The game engine supports resolutions up to 1600x1200. I played most of the game at 1024x768x32 bit color, and the frame rate was very smooth. On the other end of the spectrum, a Pentium Pro 200 with a Voodoo2 running in 640x480 was a little choppy, but playable. 32-bit color does add some benefits mostly in the areas of lighting quality. In 16-bit color, light sources are dithered and banded. Colored lighting is a huge part of the game as all the levels have a very dark feel, keeping in line with the Alien movies. You are capable of breaking many lights (a very cool feature). Flares, gunfire and energy weapons all create gorgeous light shows. When you get into alien infested areas or artifacts, the textures are very Giger-esque. Human towns are very much like those found in the Aliens movie. Visual effects are really cool especially the various modes. Overall visual quality is still on the down side of Unreal (no huge expansive spaces) but easily better than Quake2-based games.

De Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 is waarschijnlijk een van de betere en goedkopere TNT2 Ultra kaarten nu verkrijgbaar. Deze review zegt eigenlijk hetzelfde. Hier kun je hem lezen.

Moving back to 3D image quality and speed. Guillemot's UltraTNT2 is one of the two fastest UltraTNT2 cards on the market now. It's Xentor32 ships with 183/175MHZ memory clock rate. It can scale to 2048X1536X65M at 60HZ. In 3D enhanced games this equals to excellent image quality and speed. A good testament to it's 3D power was in Fox Interactive's Aliens vs. Predator, a virtual 3D killing machine for under powered video cards. Guillemot's Xentor32 moved the images in high resolutions fast and playable along with excellent image quality at 16bits and 32bit output. We just replaced our 3dfx Voodoo3 3K with this card, so fast speed was etched into our minds. We didn't miss our fast V3 and we also got better image quality in return. We aren't knocking our V3, it's in our other machine. But for our main gaming and work machine this card replaces it for now.

[break]Wel een minpuntje: [/break]

The only really sour spot for Guillemot's Xentor32 is the lack of AGP 4X execution. It features support for AGP 1X/2X but it's not ready to tackle upcoming AGP 4X powered chipsets that hang on the horizon. Guillemot states that they're still currently testing AGP 4X inclusion before stating it features it on the box. Does that mean it's in it but not being advertised yet? We're not sure but it's cards AGP connectors look identical to other TNT2 AGP4X claimed cards. Just keep in mind that this card might not be ready to tackle AGP4X down the road. Although it's more then likely upcoming AGP4X chipsets will be backwards compatible with AGP1X/2X execution, so all is not lost for you!

Alweer een review van deze kaart, Gamelinks.net had er gisteren ook al eentje. Deze is echter van Hardware pros en is hier te vinden. Hier heb je een stuk over de overklokbaarheid van de Erazor III.

Unfortunately ELSA didn't include any utility to overclock the card like many other manufacturers. So we used Powerstrip GX to overclock the card and see how far the card would overclock.

Surprisingly, the core overclocked to 155MHz and was very stable with just the regular heatsink. Anything higher than this caused artifacts on the screen and/or crashes. This is the same clock speed as we achieved with the Leadtek S320 II with its heatsink/fan. What this means is that we either got a fairly good quality chip, or active cooling doesn't really make that much of a difference. The heatsink on the ERAZOR III is much larger than the one on the S320 II (because the fan takes a lot of space), so this could be a reason why it makes it to 155MHz.

The memory was a different story, we were only able to get the SDRAM chips up to 155MHz before weird things started happening. I suspect the reason for this limit is the use of SDRAM rather than SGRAM. The 7ns SDRAM on the ERAZOR III was from Samsung and at the same time, the 7ns SGRAM on the S320 II was from Samsung also, but it was able to make it to 170MHz. Perhaps our card just had bad RAM and it can actually make it higher, if anyone can verify this, please email me. 155MHz memory speed is not very good, considering that memory does make quite a difference in performance with the TNT2 chip.

Anand heeft een review in elkaar gedraaid van een Savage4 Pro videokaart, en wel de alom bekende Gainward CARDEXpert SG4 Savage4 Pro met 32MB. Hij draait op 110MHz core en het geheugen op 125MHz. Hier heb je een plakkie:

Under both OpenGL and Direct3D, there is about a 10% drop in performance when 32-bit rendering is enabled - quite small in today's 3D accelerator market. Performance up to 800x600 resolutions is generally pretty good and quite playable, but a fairly large drop off is noticed when switching to 1024x768 and above. For the most part, the performance is quite close to that of the original TNT. The Quake 2 Crusher scores are quite interesting, especially on the Pentium II/266 where the Savage4 is at the top of the pack lagging only behind the Voodoo3 in 800x600.

Users with lower end CPU's will be happy to see that the performance with a Pentium II/266 nearly matches that of a Pentium II/400. The flip side is that users with high end CPU's should probably opt for something with a little more power than the Savage4.

It's also interesting to note that the Gainward CARDEXpert SG4 came out ahead of the higher clocked Savage4 Pro Plus used on Diamond Stealth III S540 in Shogo at 800x600 on a Pentium II/266. This is most likely due to the use of newer drivers on our Gainward card that simply were not available at the time of the Diamond review.

Lees verder

Ik kwam op een site van een bedrijf die data communicatie levert over het elektriciteitsnet. Ze beweren vele malen sneller te zijn dan elk ander bedraad netwerk. Dus inclusief glasvezel!

The advantages to employing power line communications are many. They include: COVERAGE: The power grid is the most extensive “wire” network in the world. More individuals and businesses have access to electric power than any other “wire” network, including hard-line telephony. MODERNITY: The electric grid in most areas of the world is more modern and better maintained than any other wired communications network. STRENGTH: Signals over the power grid can be carried more than 2,000 miles without regeneration—much farther than fiber optic cable (20 miles), co-axial cable (15 miles) or standard copper wire (5 miles). SPEED: The electric grid propagates information faster than any other wired network. Fueled by magnetic fields created by alternating current, signals are pulled across wires on the electric grid at near light speed. CAPACITY: Analog waves, such as those on the electric grid, have enormous information carrying capacity—far greater than any digital system which necessitates analog-to-digital-to-analog conversions, clock pulses and packetization, and far more efficient. SIMPLICITY: Powerline communications are not burdened by telephony’s conventional technologies, including outdated routers, bridges, gateways, legacy switches and software, which slow down traditional telecommunications.

Ben benieuwd wanneer dit in Nederland komt

Drew Markham van Xatrix Entertainment weet te vertellen dat Kingpin klaar is om geshipt te worden. Persoonlijk vond ik de demo niet al te geweldig. De graphics waren koel, maar ook veel te donker & deprimerend. Uiteraard zijn er weer mensen die daar totaal anders over denken. Voor hen deze info van Voodoo Extreme:

Kingpin is finished and off to manufacturing! You should see it in stores by the end of the month. I'd like to personally thank the entire team for pulling off the incredible feat of getting this title completed in just over 13 months. I think that you'll find a lot of attention to detail has gone into the single player game; we listened closely to the comments regarding the demo and have managed to implement quite a few of the features that people really wanted to see.

The multi-player aspects of Kingpin weren't overlooked either; we worked hard on getting a well-balanced feel in straight death-match. Also, "Bag Man" has turned out to be much cooler than we ever imagined. We've been playing it quite a bit and its very addictive.

Thanks again to everyone for you patience in waiting for Kingpin. We were (and still are) very passionate about this title. Enjoy!

Drew Markham
Xatrix Entertainment