Als het een beetje meezit dan zal ome Bill deze week een beta versie van Service Pack 6 voor WinNT4 releasen:

Microsoft Corp. will release this week a beta of Service Pack 6 (SP6) for its Windows NT 4.0 operating system to technical beta sites of its premier customers. The service pack will apply to the Workstation, Server, and Enterprise Edition of NT and should be available in general release in approximately 60 days.

According to a Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) spokesperson, the content of the new pack is not complete. However, some new fixes that will be covered by SP6 include repairs for memory leakages which occur during remote access; DNS problems at startup, and a known blue-screen issue. The new service pack will include all fixes covered by previous service packs. [break]In hetzelfde artikel (van ZDNet) ook een opmerking over de release date van Windows 2000: [/break] Windows NT 4.0's successor, Windows 2000, is schedule of release before the end of the calendar year.

...dus geen oktober?

Enhanced Memory Systems (EMS) heeft aangekondigd dat z'n 150MHz / 6,6ns high-speed SDRAM chips vanaf heden leverbaar zijn:

The 150-MHz HSDRAM is available in 8Mx8 (SM3603T-6.6) and 4Mx16 (SM3604T-6.6), versions packaged in a standard 54-pin TSOP. The new components target 3-D graphics systems, specialized PC systems for bus speeds up to 150-MHz, DSP, and communications memory applications.

"Our 150-MHz HSDRAM is one of the fastest 64-Mbit DRAMs currently available," said David Bondurant, vice president of marketing for Enhanced Memory Systems.

PC-133 HSDRAM DIMM modules are available to end users and resellers on-line from the Enhanced e-commerce Web site, www.pc133memory.com. The new 150-MHz HSDRAM components are sold to computer OEM customers through a network of sales representatives. Product datasheets and application notes, including support for the new Texas Instrument C6203 DSP, are posted on the corporate Web site, www.edram.com.

Mac Gamers' Ledge heeft een artikeltje over de nieuwe 3dfx Voodoo2 reference drivers voor de Mac, waarmee het nu eindelijk ook mogelijk is om SLI te gebruiken op de Mac:

Then 3dfx stepped up to the plate! They announced they were releasing Voodoo 2 'reference' drivers for Mac! What does this mean? It means you can purchase ANY Voodoo 2 card, whether for Mac or PC and use it in your Mac with the 'reference' drivers! No longer are Mac users stuck with one choice in Voodoo 2 cards.

Another advantage of the new 3dfx reference drivers are that they support SLI or Scan Line Interleaving. SLI lets you use TWO Voodoo 2 cards together at the same time for more 3D power. Also using two Voodoo 2's in SLI lets you break the 800x600 resolution limitation, and gives you 1024x768.

3dfx only supports using two cards in SLI that are exactly the same brand, manufacturer, and RAM size. It has been rumored that mixing two different manufacturersÕ cards for SLI is possible, so do so at your own risk.

PC Paradox heeft, als toevoeging op hun Permedia3 review van een week geleden, meer benchmarks gepost van de Permedia3 in 3DMark99, Expendable, Quake 3, Slave Zero en Lightwave. Check ze hier.

Ars Technica heeft een artikeltje gebouwd over de VMWare WinNT beta. VMWare is een proggie waarmee je vanuit Linux of NT een andere OS kunt emuleren/simuleren. Of zoiets:

Seriously though, a lot of what he has to say is relevant to this product, but for those of you too damn lazy to read it, VMWare is a PC "emulator" (emulator is in quotes because, well, it's not really an emulator, but it's like one). It runs in Linux or Windows NT and simulates an entire PC (well the portions of one that are currently implemented) in such a manor that you can install and run another OS onto the virtual PC. Pretty nifty, eh? VMWare can only be hosted, that is run, from within Linux or NT. The program, once running, can run NT, Linux, and Windows 9x. Although VMware is interested in supporting as many x86 OSes as possible, they say that they have no plans to support the BeOS right now.

The remarkable thing is that while VMWare does slow your system down, it doesn't bring you to an unusable level (at least not on my PII 400 with 128MB RAM…). Were you expecting a PC emulator that doesn't stick you with a performance hit?

Best wel kewl of niet? Ik kan me voorstellen dat dit ideaal is als 'zandbak' waarmee je met Linux te klooien. Check Ars voor de preview.

Dimension X heeft een review van de Elsa Erazor III online geparkeerd. Hier heb je een stukje over de overklokbaarheid van de Erazor III (ja, handmatig overgetikt want die Dimension X jopies vonden het leuk om de tekst in een .GIFje te stoppen ):

There's only a Heatsink on the card, which first tells me that the TNT2 is a well designed, cool chip. It doesn't get very hot, even after lang nights of Counterstrike for HL (I love that game, even if it is in beta). It's much better than the "You can cook bacon on me I'm so hot!" Voodoo3 chips (Anthoter side note: Peopel are saying 3dfx's latest hcips is called 'Napalm', but maybe the V4 should be called napalm due to all the heat). I managed to get the card up to 140Mhz core and 158MHz memory before it quit out. a fan would have been cool here (PUN INTENDED), but I didn't wnat to do something that most users wouldn't have done and slap it on (There are the diagonal pis holders ont he card for anyone willing to take off the Heatsink. My guess is that a Stealth V3 would fit on, but I didn't try.). The card just wasn't built for overclocking.

Steve heeft vandaag officieel Apple's nieuwe consumer-portable aangekondigd. De iBook heeft een 300MHz G3 processor en gaat 1599 dollar kosten, een sympathieke prijs voor zo'n krachtig machientje:

Looking like a cross between Apple's earlier education-oriented portable, the eMate 300, and the iMac, the clamshell iBook will ship with a 12.1in TFT screen, full-size keyboard, 300MHz PowerPC 750 CPU, CD-ROM drive, 32MB RAM (expandable to 160MB), 3.2GB hard disk, two USB ports, and built-in 56kbps modem and 10/100 Ethernet adaptor.

The notebook will also be Apple's first machine to sport an AGP graphics bus, through a 4MB AGP 2x ATI Rage Mobility graphics card.

Like the iMac, the iBook has a built-in carry handle, and, like a cellphone, activates when the case is opened. And the power cable rolls up into the machine on a ratchet mechanism.

The new "iMac unplugged" will ship in the US in volume in September (again as predicted here) in two iMac-style colours: tangerine and blueberry. Apple claimed the machine has a six-hour battery life.

Meer info vind je in dit artikel van The Register.

Alweer nieuwe drivers.

ASUS has released new drivers for their 3800 series of TNT2 cards. No word on what fixes are included but they are up to version 2.08c for Win9x and 2.08a for WinNT.

Download ze hier.

Beta 1 van PHP4 is gereleased (thanx Diederik voor het nieuws ). PHP is een super handige scripttaal voor het bouwen van server side dingetjes, zoals database koppelingen (waar denk je dat Tweakers.net op draait). Hier heb je een (heftige) hap uit de press release:

After eight months of intense development, the PHP group is pleased to announce the release of PHP 4.0 Beta 1. This new, downwards-compatible successor to the award winning PHP 3.0 Web scripting language, features revolutionary enhancements that will allow PHP, more than ever, to compete in the forefront of Web development tools.

PHP 4.0 offers drastic improvements in every aspect - performance and scalability, features, platform support and extendibility.

The most significant change in PHP 4.0 is the integration of the Zend engine. Zend, developed by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans in the last eight months, is a full rewrite of their PHP 3.0 scripting engine; The new version is blazing fast, and offers significant performance boosts for both simple and especially complex Web sites. In addition, the new scripting engine enhances the PHP language with a bunch of new features, and removes limitations that existed in version 3.0.

In addition to Zend, PHP 4.0 introduces several other new features. PHP 4.0 is truly platform independent, and is portable across operating systems and different Web servers; Sascha Schumann added native support for HTTP sessions, without the need of a 3rd party library; And, Stig Bakken implemented a modular build process for UNIX, that would make it easy to use and distribute dynamically loadable PHP modules.

Beta 1 Status

PHP 4.0 has been tested by a group of about 30 people for the last three months. This small scale beta test was conducted to ensure that the first public beta of PHP 4.0, when it is released, is stable enough to be tested by the masses. We now feel that the code has reached a stability level that is suitable for a public beta test, as most legacy PHP 3.0 scripts we try to run on PHP 4.0 run without a glitch, and this very web site, the one you're browsing now, is powered by PHP 4.0.

However, it is still beta software. As such, we're positive that there will be bugs in it. Since mostly all of PHP has been either written from scratch or heavily modified, the chances of finding no bugs in the new code are slim. For that reason, we don't recommend that you use PHP 4.0 Beta 1 on production servers; If you choose to run PHP 4.0 Beta 1 on a production server, at least make sure your web site runs properly under PHP 4.0 by first testing it offline, on a different Web server.

Because we release the code as a beta, the default build configuration builds PHP 4.0 in debug mode. Debug mode is considerably slower than Release mode, but allows for more useful bug reports. If you want to benchmark PHP 4.0 against PHP 3.0, make sure you turn debug mode off.

De Win32 versie (vrij simpel aan de praat te krijgen met de Xitami webserver) kun je hier downloaden.

Billy "Wicked" Wilson, de gestoorde webmaster van Voodoo Extreme heeft een e-mail ontvangen waarin staat dat er vannacht om 1:00 poldertijd een demo zal worden gereleased van Mortyr. Dit stond er in de mail:

I'm sure everyone knows Mortyr and all the rumors about the publisher, content of the game (symbols, violence).

After few weeks of silence, when we were waiting the future publisher of the game, we decided to publish Internet demo.

During this time we have changed many things (you can check the list at www.mortyr.com.pl/press/)like new levels, new graphic features, increased speed etc.

You can see new look of Mortyr in our demo which will be avaiable at 0.00 GMT [8PM EDT] on following sites:

www.mortyr.net

www.mirage.com.pl

www.mortyr.com.pl

This demo can be found only on Internet. No magazine will have permission to covermount it. Later in couple days we will publish another demo, bigger and containing more features, with permission to put it on cover CDs.

In about 2 weeks Polish version of Mortyr will be ready to sell. We still don't know the release date for Europe and US.

If you have some questions or comments about the demo or the game itself, mail us: mortyr@mirage.com.pl or radek@mirage.com.pl

Gamespot UK heeft een Hands-On preview geshreven van Unreal Tournament. De preview is niet zo lang, maar er zijn wel een paar mooie screenshots in opgenomen.

Here at GameSpot UK, we've just got our feverish hands on the beta preview code and the early indications are that Tournament is going to be a real contender. Although there are plenty of different multiplay options and variants like classic CTF or Domination style games, we've chosen to test drive the standard Deathmatch option, because we suspect this is where most gamers will head first. Basically Tournament Deathmatch is your standard 'frag everything that moves' style affair, where you face an ever increasing challenge from Tournament's trigger happy Bots - with the last player standing declared the winner and the rest?... Well they're just so many twitching corpses littering the floor.

Ik las dat Game PC een korte 1-pagina review heeft geschreven van de nieuwe Asus P3B-F moederbord. Deze plank schijnt goed bruikbaar te zijn voor overklokken:

We were able to get a P3 450 overclocked to 600 MHz at 2.2 volts. The system stayed completely stable throughout the bench marking. We did run into a slight problem on boot up, but came to the conclusion that we had a memory problem. After replacing the memory, 600 MHz was a total success. The settings we used to achieve 600 MHz involved using a clock multiplier of 4.5 and a front side bus speed of 133 MHz. One feature we found with this board is that it will boot up to the BIOS/memory count screen no matter what setting you have chosen. For example, if the wrong clock multiplier is selected a POST (Power On System Test) is shown instead of no screen as with other main boards. What you get is the default speed of that CPU so you get something to work with. In any case, the hassle of having to short the reset jumper is virtually gone with this feature. People who currently own Celerons may run into some problems with this board. If the heat sink is the Whopper from Computer Nerd, the capacitors on the main board behind the CPU will get in the way making the CPU not seat correctly.

Sharky Extreme heeft een review gebakken van de Hercules Dynamite TNT2. Dit is dus niet de Ultra versie, maar een 'vanilla' TNT2 met 16MB geheugen. Hij is echter wel rap geklokt, op 145MHz core en 170MHz memory.

While experimenting, our particular test card was 100% stable in our endurance tests when set to run at 154/175. Any higher on the core speed or SDRAM speed and it would begin to show visual artifacts on the screen and would eventually suffer from system lock ups.

This is quite a bit faster than the stock NVIDIA recommended speeds for the standard TNT2 chip, and a testament to Hercules' quality control standards that it performed the way it did.

Hercules has opted to include a small heatsink/fan on their Dynamite TNT2 16MB card in order to keep its heat to tolerable levels even while overclocked. In our testing the heatsink worked well, but it's no P3 cooler or anything. Once temperatures get too hot for the Dynamite's core it will crash, again ours handled anything up to 154MHz, and then it got rough.

Any way you cook it…er, look at it…overclocking is fun, it allows a performance increase, and it raises the enjoyment factor while using your PC for entertainment. Both we here at Sharky Extreme and consumers alike appreciate that Hercules offers cards that break from the norm and allow some configurability beyond the stock levels.

For those who are curious, the Hercules drivers will allow you to set the maximum speed of the Dynamite TNT2 card to 200/235.

Bij Thresh's FiringSquad hebben ze en interessant artikel gepost over hoe je 2 Celerons 366MHz op 550MHz kunt laten draaien op een Abit BP6 moederbord. Check het artikel hier.

This past month we've started hearing a lot about the new Celeron 366 processors. We heard from several different sources that the newest Celeron 366's can easily overclock to a minimum of 550MHz. One local hardware vendor told us that almost all of the new Celeron 366's that he's tested could do 550 with a standard heatsink/fan combo and little or no voltage tweaks. A few could reach speeds above 600MHz @ 2.3V. Another vendor e-mailed us with similar information.

Could this be the second coming of the 300A? It seems fitting that these new highly overclockable 366's started appearing right when the last of the 300A's are disappearing from vendor channels.

Zoals verwacht is er nu weer een nieuwere versie an Q3Test uit. Als je vorige week versie 1.06 al naar bendeden had gehaald hoef je nu alleen de upgrade te downen (1.7MB). Voor een lijst met mirrors, klik hier.

Overclockers' workbench heeft een paar benchmarks gepost van de nieuwe FastTrak66 UltraATA/66 RAID controller van Promise:

Whether you want a blazing-fast graphics or A/V workstation, or a high performance, data redundant corporate desktop or server, FastTrak 66 delivers. This amazing IDE RAID 0,1, and 0+1 card optimizes Ultra ATA/66 drives to dramatically increase their storage performace (RAID 0) or provide RAID 1 mirroring data protection.

FastTrak66 links up to four high capacity Ultra ATA/66 drives together as a single "virtual" drive (bootable or non-bootable) on a PCI system. FastTrak66's multiple data channel, multiple drive access design doubles transfer rates of attached Ultra ATA/66 drives to easily surpass Ultra2 SCSI or single UltraATA/66 drive speeds.

De Winstone99 benchmark vind je hier.

Overclockers' Workbench bericht over problemen met de Softmenu voltage settings van Abit's nieuwe BE6 slot1 moederplank:

We just got of the phone with ABIT USA a few moments ago with regards to some information we recieved from Gary at Overclockin.com and Alex at Motherboard Monitor. It has become evident that some ABIT BE6 motherboards have a problem with the BIOS setting for the core voltage of the processor. Regardless of what this is set at (e.g. 2.1, 2.2, 2.3V DC), the setting always reverts back to 2.0V DC when the BIOS is saved and re-booted. ABIT has acknowledged the problem and has issued an early recall on these boards. Apparently no more than 200 boards were released to the public with these faulty characteristics. Better check your boards peeps! This could make for some unhappy overclockers who need voltage settings in excess of 2.0V DC. Don't worry, I was assured that ABIT will promptly take care of your problem.

MagixX (duitse game news site) heeft 8 Mortyr screenshots op het net gezet. Hier al vast 3 tumbnails:

FPS3D.com heeft een review gepost van de Hewlett Packerd CD-Writer Plus 8200:

Hewlett Packard really loaded the CD-Writer Plus 8200's box with goodies. Along with the drive, you will find all of the necessary cables, a CD-R disk, a CD-RW disk, the installation disk, a very detailed manual, and a Neato CD Labeler. The gigantic manual covered every question possible, and was written extremely well. The Neato CD Labeler is tough to use, but is nice to have if you want a custom label on your CDs. I was very impressed with how much stuff HP crammed in the box, it gives first time users a chance to experiment with the drive without worry.