Onze Russische vrienden van iXBT hebben de primeur met een review van de VIA Apollo Pro133, de eerste chipset met officiële support voor PC133 SDRAM. Serieuze concurrentie voor Intel?

As we have expected, the main trump of VIA Apollo Pro133 is still its price, which is twice as low as that of i440BX. And from all other points, except a great number of various integrated features, of view VIA Apollo Pro is none other than a huge disappointment. VIA Apollo Pro133 will have absolutely no practical value until the appearance of some new processors working with 133MHz FSB. And as soon as they appear, Intel will introduce its own core logic right away. VIA's chances to dominate in the chipset market are equal to naught, because their chipsets are considerably worse in terms of memory and AGP than those by Intel. As far as VIA's main argument is concerned, namely the support of a PC133 memory, which is cheaper than RDRAM, it is no longer that powerful, because Intel has also introduced PC133 SDRAM support in its i820 chipset last MCH. So, VIA Apollo Pro will most likely compete with i810e - a cheaper Pentium III chipset with the integrated graphics.

Check de info en benchmarks bij iXBT Labs.

Hardware Central is na Firingsquad de tweede site met een review van Abit's nieuwe socket370 wonderplank. Jammer dat ook deze review niet zo compleet is. Ik zou bijv. graag willen weten of het nou wél of niet mogelijk is om CPU's met verschillende multipliers te gebruiken, en hoe het zit met het IRQ gebruik van de extra UltraATA/66 controller. Helaas valt daarover niets terug te vinden in de review. Dan maar de gebruikelijke info over Softmenu en de aanwezige busspeeds:

For those that like to try and overclock their CPUs, the updated Soft Menu is a dream. You can adjust the core voltage separately for each CPU. That way, if one CPU needs 2.2 volts while the other runs just fine at 2.0 volts you won’t have a conflict.

The BP6 offers more bus speed options from 66MHz to 100MHz than any other board you will find. The following speeds are supported: 66, 72, 75, 78, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, and 100. Unfortunately, this level of granularity doesn’t exist after 100MHz. Above 100MHz the only two supported speeds are 124 and 133MHz. The PCI bus is clocked at œ the front side bus from 66 to 91MHz. It is 1/3 from 92 to 100MHz. 124 and 133MHz settings use a Œ divider. Multipliers are in half increments from 2.0 to 8.0.

Lijkt er op dat er dus toch géén extra busspeeds tussen 100 en 110Mhz zijn.

DemoNews meldt dat er een nieuwe versie van Powerstrip uit is, kan je je videokaartje naar hartelust mee tweaken

PowerStrip 2.51.02 is now validated with the retail Matrox Millennium G400, as well as the Diamond Stealth III S540 and Creative Savage4. Trident Blade3D support is also enhanced in the latest build.

Download het zaakje hier. (658kB)

Eigenlijk weten we allemaal al dat dit een geil kaartje is, maar UGN3D vond het toch nog nodig om er een review over te bakken. Hier heb je een stukkie over de overklokbaarheid, wat bij hun een beetje tegen viel:

While the Xentor 32 doesn't include a utility for setting core and memory speeds. Powerstrip or even TNTClk works perfectly for setting these variables. On the test system, which was equipped with a PII-450 and 128 MB of 100mhz SDRAM, I wasn't able to overclock the RAM further than 195mhz, and overclocking the core past 180mhz was more than a pain in the ass. I've seen some reviews with people claiming that their boards had reported a higher 195mhz RAM speed and a slower 150mhz core clock. The card I recieved, which is a later release than most, seems to have none of those apparent glitches.

c't zegt over informatie te kunnen beschikken waaruit zou blijken dat Intel de prijs van de PIII-600 onder die van de Athlon-600 vast zal stellen. Hier heb je de wazige Babelfish vertaling van de oorsponkelijk duitse tekst:

In view of the forthcoming launching of a vessel of AMDs flagship K7 " Athlon " accesses Intel to the extreme one: For the first time the processor giant undercuts the price of the directly comparable competition product of competitor AMD. The Pentium III with 600 mc/s, which Intel wants to throw two weeks before the AMD Premierenfeier in running, will be clearly cheaper after c't information than the fire-new 600-MHz-Athlon. Its price determined AMD to 699 US Dollar, while Intel had advised a OEM price of 823 US Dollar (with acceptance of 1000 pieces) until recently for the 600-MHz-P III. Still before start of sales of the Athlon Intel thereby seems to recognize its advance in performance. An outline of the bench mark results published so far brings c't in output 14/99 (starting from Monday at the kiosk).

Yeehaa! John Carmack heeft z'n .plan geupdate met Quake3 benchmarks op een 550 en 600MHz AMD Athlon systeem. PIII piest spontaan in z'n cartridge:

AMD K7 cpus are very fast.

Some timedemo numbers (a new demo, not comparable to previous scores):

Run at 640*480*16 bit color to emphasise the cpu/driver performance rather than the hardware fill rate.

K7-600 K7-550 PIII-500
TNT2 ultra 16 bit 73.9 68.5 53.8
Voodoo3 3000 16 bit 70.5 65.2 46.0 [break]Even onrealistisch lineair omrekenen en een 550 en 600Mhz PIII zouden resp. 59 en 64fps op een TNT2 moeten halen...[/break] This is with K7 optimized drivers vs seperate PIII optimized drivers.

There is still wiggle room there in that it is possible that more effort was expended to make the AMD drivers perform better. That is perfectly valid from a consumer's point of view, but muddies the technical CPU comparison.

On identical code run on the systems, there was some more interesting data:

On my map processing tools, the K7 was faster than the PIII, but only slightly more so than the reletive clock rate increase. I would guess that this is due to larger data sets that don't fit in cache as well.

On the matrox OpenGL drivers, which have not been optimized very much and (to my knowledge) contain no PIII specific code, the K7 was a LOT faster.

The bottom line is that I feel comfortable standing behind the statement that the K7 is faster than the PIII. I will have to wait for some stuff to come out of NDA to provide a more detailed technical analysis.

Architectural cleverness is all well and good, but if AMD can't keep the clock speed up with intel, they will still fall behind. A 700 mhz PIII would probably find a lot of applications (especially integer apps) where it would outperform a 600 mhz K7.

Ik liep toevallig rond bij Matrox Users, en vond daar een nieuwsposting over de release van een G400 X-Server. Ik ben zelf te dom voor Linux, maar kan me voorstellen dat dit blij nieuws is voor de nerds die het wel snappen :

Xi Graphics is pleased to announce fully accelerated support for the Matrox G400. This update provides fully accelerated support at 8, 16, and 24 bits per pixel. Benchmarking was performed on the Matrox G400, and, at 24-bit color depth, the results of the test for the Accelerated-X server versus the corresponding XFree server and Metrolink server are shown below along with the locations of the update and its text file. It is worth noting that this is the fastest support Xi Graphics has ever released.

Accelerated-X Server: Xaccel; 40.1 Xmarks
XFree Server: No Support
Metrolink: Xmetro; No Support

ftp://ftp.xig.com/pub/updates/accelx/desktop/5.0/intel/D5000.014.tar.gz
ftp://ftp.xig.com/pub/updates/accelx/desktop/5.0/intel/D5000.014.tar.Z
ftp://ftp.xig.com/pub/updates/accelx/desktop/5.0/intel/D5000.014.txt

This driver update can be applied against Desktop Accelerated-X v5.0 or the demo version of Desktop Accelerated-X.

Firingsquad heeft een review van NFS4: High Stakes online gezet. Hier heppie een stukje over de gameplay:

High Stakes is just good clean fun, and it gives you plenty of ways to do it. In arcade mode, you can play a quick race, play a knockout tournament, or join a good ol' fashioned cop chase in Hot Pursuit mode, as either the fleeing car or The Man. The same options are available against one to seven human opponents in multiplayer mode, and finally, you can play in the game's flagship career mode. Convertible. Nice. Ssssssmokin'

In career mode, you start with a certain amount of money. You need this money to purchase cars, purchase upgrades, enter competitions, and if you aren't careful during races, repair your car. This being the case, you have to take into account the cost of body work when deciding whether to slam that pesky Beemer into the side of the course. Busted up cars don't perform as well, and (unless you're rich), you've only got one. Also, it's quite helpful to make sure your headlights work before going into a night race.

Planet Unreal heeft een 4 pagina's dikke Unreal: Return to Na Pali feature gepost. De 4 delen bespreken de multiplayer gametypes, multiplayer levels, system requirements en single player gameplay. Over dat laatste onderdeel een quote:

The single player portion of Na Pali was done extremely well. There's a proper opening and closing with around 10-15 hours of gameplay between the two. Both indoor and outdoor maps are present and very well done. Legend has definitely proven their level designers, by tweaking maps that never made it into Unreal and adding their own slew of environments to explore and conquer.

The game is inhabited by original Unreal creatures, as well as three new additions. There are various sizes of spiders, extremely deadly space marines, and my personal favorite, the pack hunters. Pack hunters group in packs of 5-7 and come at you very quickly. They'll often come at you from a few directions at once and give you a real rush. With the exception of the spiders, I thought the new monsters were not used anywhere near enough. I fought 5-10 space marines in a quick five minute battle. That was it for the entire game! [break]Planet Unreal heeft massa's screenshots. Check ze hier.

Verder blijkt er een bug in de server zachtwaar van Na Pali te zitten:[/break] 2)Next I set up a server to try it out and noticed the rockets don't explode upon impact! [break]En het antwoord van Jess "Zarniwoop" Crable van Legend:[/break] Bug #2- This is indeed a bug, and we (Legend) will fix this soon. The Mission Pack is currently using version 224v of Unreal. When the next Unreal patch is available, we will be releasing our own version of that Unreal update, which will include the normal fixes/updates from Epic as well as fixes for minor Mission Pack specific issues. That's the plan for now- some things might change slightly, but any issues like this that pop up will certainly be addressed!

Just to clarify: the lack of visible rocket explosions only occurs when playing (multiplayer) from a server that you are running. Clients or people playing in singleplayer mode won't run into this problem.

Voor het complete verhaal moet je ff richting deze thread op het forum van GT Interactive fietsen.

Bleem! heeft weer een nieuwe versie uitgebracht van hun populaire PSX emulator.
Hier volgt een lijstje met de volgende fixes bij Bleem! 1.2:

Paletted Texture Improvements (including fix for V2/V3 Crash)

D3D clipping, Black Boxes, Transparency, Translucency, "Update Bug" as seen in Tekken 3

Ability to Disable Memory Cards, Fixed Crashes in MK4 & Hot Shots Golf, Fixed Loaders in Castlevania & Ogre Battle (AND MORE!)

**IMPORTANT** : Please use fresh, clean Memory Cards with this new build -- Bugs in the earlier Memory Card logic may have affected your Memory Cards and could result in saved games not loading properly

General Improvements in Sound (much less scratchiness and noise)

Speed limiter improvements

ALT + F1 will toggle between Software and Hardware modes

Final Fantasy 8 Support

Gran Turismo Support (stopping at the Notice Screen on some Win95 machines)

Je kunt 'm hier downloaden. Je moet overigens wel in het bezit zijn van de CD.

Voor de voetbal- en fifaliefhebbers heeft Soccer Gaming 2 wallpapers geplaatst over FIFA 2000. Helaas zijn deze wallpapers wel 640x480. Ga naar Soccer Gaming voor de grote wallpapers