AOpen heeft nieuwe Win9x en Windows 2000 drivers gereleased voor haar PA3020A / PA3020G TNT2 Ultra kaarten. Check deze page om ze te downloaden.

Ik kwam bij CNewz deze wazige plaatjes van een opvouwbaar keyboard tegen...

Ga'ash Soffer van Voodoo Extreme heeft een review online gemikt van de Elsa Erazor X GeForce kaart. Dit beestje hebben we al vaak zat voorbij zien wandelen, dus hier maar gelijk de conclusie voor je:

The Erazor X is a high quality consumer product which can be readily had for around $230. While it is more expensive than Creative boards, the latter are becoming increasingly difficult to find. It is also important to remember that ELSA is based in Europe, which means availability in Europe (and perhaps price) is comparatively better than in the States. Furthermore, judging by the board I received, expect tremendous chip overclocking ability make this board a great value to those who are willing to do more than just scratch the surface.

The Erazor X is well done implementation of the latest technology. Boasting the first generation Transform and Lighting engine from NVIDIA, the Erazor X not only has exceptional potential for high polygon count games and professional applications; it's performance is only rivaled by other GeForce based solutions. The Voodoo3/3000 and TNT2 used in testing did not even come close to challenging the mighty Erazor X. Although performance is untouchable, 32bit performance is hampered by slow SDRAM. Still, the Erazor X manages a respectable 40+fps at 1024x768x32bit color (Quake3emo001). While, those who want 1024x768x32bit @ 60fps will have to wait for DDR GeForce solutions (such as the Erazor X2) or other future products, the Erazor X packs plenty of punch for months to come. And at $230, the performance is priced quite reasonably.

Bij GA-Source kwam ik dit artikel tegen over rare gewoontes van mensen tegenover hun PC. In Zweden hebben bijvoorbeeld 20% van de gebruikers de neiging hun PC te strelen, en in Spanje begint 18% te huilen als de PC kuren heeft .

Do you stroke, hit, or talk to your computer? Well, you're not alone.

According to Reuters a quarter of Britons would rather be on their PC than making love and more than half of the population admits to talking to the screen -- not bad for a nation which once ridiculed Prince Charles for talking to his plants.

PCs in Spain suffer violence with 57 percent of owners admitting to hitting them, according to a survey of computer use in five European countries by technology giant Microsoft.

Another 18 percent of Spaniards are driven to tears of frustration while Germans are distinctly unamused by them -- only one in six has enjoyed a laugh with their PC.

The temptation of sex, or even soccer, is not enough to drag some away from the mouse clicker.

``Despite football fever sweeping the nation when the French raised the World Cup last year, nine in 10 French PC owners would rather be on their computer than watching football, more than any other nation,'' Microsoft said.

In Sweden, 11 percent of loved ones are left alone at night as their partners play away in the computer room while 20 percent of users admit to stroking their PCs.

Germans are the worst for dropping food on theirs with nearly a quarter of the nation admitting to spillage.

The over 60s -- so-called ``silver surfers'' -- are most dedicated to their PCs in Britain where they clock up 13 hours a week at the keyboard compared with under an hour in Germany and Spain. hit, or talk to your computer? Well, you're not alone.

Bij Thresh's FiringSquad is een review te vinden van de Abit BF6 mobo. Dankzij het SoftMenu III is dit bordje errug geschikt voor overclocking. Daarnaast is de prijs ook laag gehouden vanwege het ontbreken van een ATA/66 controller. Hieronder wat resultaten van het overklokken van een Celeron 466:

Next we tried a Socket-370 Celeron 466. After the disappointing 300A results we were initially a little skeptical of the 466 but after running well at 525MHz (7.0x75) we decided to bump it up a bit. After dialing in the next setting (83MHz front side bus) and booting up the system we were pleasantly surprised to see it boot into Windows 98 Second Edition without any problems. Unfortunately, we couldn't get the CPU to run stable at 2.0V so we bumped the voltage up a bit. After a little tinkering with the voltage settings, (we finally settled on 2.2V) we had our Celeron 466 running great at 581MHz! (7.0x83)

We were unable to run our CPU any faster than 581, but happy with our results. Our Celeron 500 didn't perform quite as well. After running stable at 563 (7.5x75) we next tried upping the bus to 83MHz. Unfortunately, we just couldn't squeeze anything out of it, regardless of voltage setting.

Overall the BF6 is an excellent overclocking performer, with the 120 options for front side bus speeds Abit has upped the ante in terms of tweaking. Our Celeron 500 results showed the one small chink in the BF6's armor, lack of bus speeds between 75 and 83MHz. While 563MHz is plenty fast for today's games and applications, we would have enjoyed the option to eke a little more speed out of our Celeron 500.

MDM@ stuurde een link op naar deze review van The Tech Zone over het Mellenger Videocard Cooling Kit setje. Deze kit wordt o.a. geleverd 8 RAM heatsinks en wat thermal tape, waarmee het mogelijk is om b.v. je GeForce kaart op 170/235MHz te klokken! Hieronder een gedeelte:

So, how did the Video Card Cooling Kit perform? Really great! Without the kit, the highest I could overclock the GeForce was 150Mhz core and 225Mhz memory. This went up to 170Mhz core and 235Mhz memory with the Mellenger Video Card Overclocking Kit. That works out to a fillrate of 680 Megapixels per second, better than any other video card on the market. The GeForce ran all day at 170/235 during the weekly Tech Zone LAN party without any problem.

If you're looking for the ultimate cooling kit for your GeForce 256 or any video card, the Mellenger Video Card Overclocking Kit from Mellenger.com just may be the ticket. The price may seem a little high compared to other video card cooling kits but you have to remember that you get 8 RAM heatsinks with the kit. This is something that no other video card cooler supplies. The addition of the RAM heatsinks are really nice. With any other video card cooler kits you can only overclock the core but not the memory because nothing is supplied to cool them. The Mellenger kit allows you to overclock both.

Overall, a really great product made by an overclocker for overclockers. If you're the kind of person who just can't get enough, then the Mellenger Video Card Cooling Kit is for you.

The Register geeft wat info over de zeer matige prijsdaling die Intel vanaf vandaag zal doorvoeren. Het echte werk begint pas op 23 januari, dan gaat Intel pas echt stunten met haar prijzen. Hieronder de soep:

Sources close to Intel's plans have now provided us with details of the price adjustments the company will make on its Pentium IIIs on the 12th of December.

And it's clearly a fine tuning exercise, as we already suspected, in preparation for the big bang that will happen on the 23rd of January 2000.

Many prices on Pentium III parts will remain unchanged. There will be no reduction, for example, on the PIII-500 chip.

However, Intel will reduce prices on its top of the range Pentium III 733MHz chip, with a minor reduction of $12. The Pentium III 600MHz chip will fall in price by $10, as will the PIII 500E.

Distributors, meanwhile, are reporting tough supply constraints on Celeron 433MHz and Celeron 400MHz, with system builders rapidly depleting stocks of the popular parts.

As reported here earlier, Intel will intro 750MHz Pentium IIIs but using a 100MHz front side bus (FSB) in January of next year.

Bij Sharky Extreme hebben ze een review geplaatst van de dikke Net-N-Dude Glacier 4500 koeler voor de Pentium II en III. Dankzij dit model verkoopt Net-N-Dude nu ook P3-450's uitgerust met de Glacier 4500 die gegarandeerd de 675MHz (4.5 x 150MHz)zouden halen. Hieronder een gedeelte uit de review:

Well, our last in-house P3-450 didn't manage to replicate the results of the guaranteed models Net-N-Dude sells, likely due to its advanced age (manufactured in February) and the fact that it wasn't screened from hundreds of its siblings as Net-N-Dude must do to find those 675MHz diamonds in the rough.

We did see benefits from using the Glacier 4500 SECC2 cooler however, as it allowed us to overclock two of the three Pentium III CPUs to higher levels than their stock Intel-provided OEM units would allow. The newest Pentium III CPU we possess in-house, the P3-733, was not able to improve its max overclockable speed using the Glacier, it's also an early model in the scheme of Intel production 733 CPUs.

In terms of temperature reduction, the Glacier 4500 lowered the surface temperature of the chips we overclocked by approximately 7 to 10% in raw degrees Fahrenheit when idle.

In terms of peak heat production however, say when an overclocked CPU is getting 98 - 100% utilization continuously by an app (looping Quake2 demos, Prime95 number crunching) the Glacier kept temperatures up to 15% lower than the stock cooling units could, which indicates a strong ability to continuously dissipate heat.

Op de Deutsche site Hardwarelab.de hebben ze wat info gepost over nog een overclcoking device voor je Athlon, genaamd der Powercard. Ik heb hieronder wat tekst neergeplant dat is vertaald via Babel Fish.

There are in the meantime different possibilities, the AMD Athlon to over clocks. It is by Umloeten of different SMD of resistances (Tom's hardware), DIP switch modifications (Trinity Micro), or by active plug-in cards, which completely get along without soldering work on the Athlon circuit board (Tom's hardware). From the active circuit board are not so quite convinced, since on the circuit board of resistances present with the help of relatively high voltage by 5Õhm of resistances become ' replaced '. Quite high energy dissipations at the resistances occur. I did not want to risk my Athlon by such practices. I decided therefore to a solution similarly XLV750R, whereby with the original resistance values one operates. Disadvantage of the circuit is that all ' admitted ' of resistances at the Athlon be unsoldered must. This process is to be up-soldered somewhat more easily than the microscopically small SMD of resistances again, nevertheless is a good soldering iron, a calm hand and good eyes forces

The card is put easily on the internal plug of the Athlon circuit board. With the 4 large switches the clock frequency of the processor can be stopped. A rise of the core voltage takes place with the êr DIP switching hereditary hole on the top right. In order to be able to adjust also the L2 Cache factor, which is however not led on the plug signals, some wires at the Athlon must be soldered on. In the current execution thus the PowerCard is ' chained ' to the Athlon circuit board. In the next execution for this its own plug is used. For adjusting the Cache of factor the êr DIP serves block on the right down.

[...] The clock frequency can be adjusted to values between 300MHz and 1050MHz. It is possible for Underclocking thereby thus also. With core a voltage of 1.75V I could operate mine Athlon 500 with 800MHz stably, whereby the L2 Cache had to be changed over to factor 1/3.

Ace's Hardware heeft wat handige info gepost over problemen bij de produktie van de K6-III, die nogal last heeft van foutgebakken L2 caches:

Idiot told me some very interesting info about the K6-III. As pointed out in our latest article , L2-caches are very vulnerable to particle contamination. besides cleaner fabs, another way to boost yields of CPU's with ondie L2s is redundant row/column protection. In other words, extra rows and columns are manufactured and bad cells are marked during initial wafer test. Then bad rows and columns are disabled and spare rows and columns are enabled with the result that the SRAM or L2-cache works totally correct after all.

The K6-III had minimal redundancy protection, what proved to be a huge mistake! AMD has learned from the mistake, so this is probaby one reason why the Thunderbird introduction (first Athlon with on-die cache) should face less problems.

ExtremeCooling.de, waar 'denn cool ist nicht cool genug', heeft een review van de Panaflo Orb gepost. Dit coolertje werd door Hewlett Packard ontwikkelt om hun PA8000 RISC CPU's koud te houden en is nogal afwijkend vormgegeven, waardoor-ie niet op alle mobo's weggeparkeert kan worden:

Ähnlich wie der Global WIN FDP32 passt der Panaflo Orb nicht auf alle Mainboards, da er sehr breit ist. 90 mm, um genau zu sein. Ich weiß nicht alle Boards, die Probleme machen, die wichtigsten sind aber das Abit BP6 und das ASUS P5A. Auch bei Slotkets sollte man aufpassen. Mit dem MSI Slotket wird es Probleme geben. Ich empfehle das ASUS S370-D, dass ich vor kurzem auch getestet habe. Mit ASUS Slotket und Slot 1 Board sind Probleme unwahrscheinlich. Erfreulicherweise bleiben alle DIMM Sockel erhalten.

Tweak3D heeft een eigen Quake3 timedemootje in elkaar gedraaid, in de stijl van de welbekende Crusher.dm2 demo van 3Fingers'. Crusher en Massive.dm2 groeiden in no-time uit tot één van de meest gebruikte 3D benchmarks, dus wie weet wat er met deze MonkeyCrusher gaat gebeuren...

Takin' a break from his crack-pipe, our very own lovable little non-divisible whole number (that'd be xero) decided he'd record an "in-house" Quake III Arena "crusher" demo. Now his machine's running like it's taken one-too-many hits off the pipe...

Anyhow, for your drooling pleasure, he decided to fire it my way, seein' as how he recorded it using the demo version (can't afford the full version; seems he smoked all his dead presidents). So, after asking me nicely to benchmark the demo with my full version, I felt compelled to post some quick results.

De demo kun je hier naar binnen halen, voor meer info kun je terecht bij Tweak3D.

gdew stuurde een link naar dit vage goedje bij VR Zone. Klinkt als thermal paste, alleen dan ietsie meer liquid?

A company in Japan has come out with this product called the Setten No.1 that can actually improve overclocking capability of your processor. This product is a surface treatment liquid for metal contacts eg. RAMs pins, CPU surface etc. It will smoothen the uneven metal surface that can't be seen in our naked eyes. Under a microscope you will see how uneven is your CPU surface. It can improve the electric and mechanical contact because with a smooth surface you can get more contacts. This product is especially good for those overclockers who want to overclock to the maximum. For those who lap your processors, you will need this to smooth the surface where you have sanded to achieve a higher overclockability. After using this, you may not need a thermal paste after all because the uneven surface has already smoothen out.

For a 5cc bottle, it would cost 4200Yen which is US$41
For a 10cc bottle, it would cost 8000Yen which is US$78

There are other two products developed by this company that can improve your sound and image quality by apply this liquid on the connectors of your graphics cards and sound cards.

djAzEtE schrijft: "Ook vandaag lag er weer een prachtige Microsoft envelop op de deurmat, dit keer zonder database fouten. Microsoft komt ons verblijden met het nieuws dat de Nederlandse RC2 uit is. Nou is het te hopen dat ik als betatester ook de prefinal krijg ":

Het is ons een genoegen u als deelnemer aan het Microsoft® Benelux Windows® 2000 Marketing Betaporgramma, bij deze de meest recente Nederlandstalige betaversie van Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Professional, Release Candidate 2 (build 2128.26), te kunnen toesturen.

Daar hebben we wat aan... een verouderde beta met wazige Nederlandse vertaling.