Geen idee of dit waar is, maar het zou wel leuk zijn: JC kreeg info over iemand die de L2 cache chips van z'n Athlon heeft vervangen met DDR SRAM:

Quick scoop, I'll integrate this into an update later: Daiki knows of someone who chunked faster SRAM ("this Athlon is Athon500@835 with DDR-SRAM Full speed L2 ") of some sort in place of the L2 on a 830MHz (overclocked) Athlon. Reportedly, the latency of the cache was 23 cycles. According to Daiki, performance with this was very fast, allowing the Athlon to outperform the Coppermine even in the "Athlon-killing" Super-Pi benchmark .... If this is true, it's very promising. The Thunderbird will have far superior caching compared to this setup, as the latency will be probably better than halved (and hopefully, the cache bandwidth will be improved, but even without that it should be fairly sweet). More on this later, I guess.

Extreme Hardware vond het nodig om nog een review van de Aureal Vortex II SQ2500 aan onze collectie toe te voegen. Hieronder een gedeelte, lees hier meer.

If you are looking to purchase a Vortex 2 based sound card, the SQ2500 is currently your best choice, unless you need an optical SPDIF (TOSLINK) instead of the SQ2500’s RCA output. The SQ2500 offers the best Vortex 2 performance and features an excellent game bundle. In comparison with other competing 3D sound chips, the SQ2500 is still a good choice, because of its quality positional audio with two speaker and headphone output. While the 30% performance hit incurred when using A3D 2.0 is disappointing, the SQ2500’s non-A3D 2.0 performance is as fast as if not faster than competing sound cards. Thus, by going with the SQ2500, you get normal A3D 1.x/DS3D support without a speed penalty, and have the option for A3D 2.0 if you wish. Overall, Aureal has created a sound card that any gamer should be happy with.

De gasten achter Maximum3D hebben een review in elkaar getimmerd van het Guillemot Force Feedback Racing Wheel met cool Ferrari logo. Hieronder een plaatje uit het archief:

After making some final adjustments to the sensitivity, I was ready to feel the real power of this wheel. I jumped back into the game, and went full throttle down the freeway in the wrong direction. Suddenly the wheel came alive in my hands. Every thing from the bumpy grass to the harsh impact of a guardrail at 120mph was accurately and realistically telegraphed through the wheel, and the whole driving experience was elevated to a new level. Now this was racing!

After several laps around the windy city, I loaded up Star Wars Racer. Again the wheel was detected, and worked flawlessly. The hum of the pod's motors was the first indication of things to come. Flying through the desert at 500mph was exhilarating with my old wheel, but now it was almost unbelievable. G-Forces pulled the wheel as I banked around corners, and the pod shook violently whenever I smashed into another racer.

Finally, I ran a few laps in Need For Speed High Stakes. Here the subtle effects of traction and road texture were even more clearly defined. This is what really makes Guillemot's Racing Wheel shine. Anyone can make a controller that will shake violently in your hands during a massive pile up, but Guillemot has really done a fantastic job of giving the gamer a total package; offering a wheel that at times can literally rip itself from your grasp, yet still reproduce the slight tremble of an idling car motor.

wildhagen schrijft: "Nog meer millennium-problemen, maar dan van een andere soort ":

De verkoop van servers is in het derde kwartaal sterk gedaald vanwege de voorbereidingswerkzaamheden voor de millenniumwisseling. Dit blijkt uit cijfers van onderzoeksbureau IDC. De wereldwijde verkoop van servers is maar liefst 10 procent gedaald ten opzichte van vorig jaar. Daarmee komt deze markt uit op een omzet van 13,5 miljard dollar.

Op de site van MCSE meer

ChUcKiE schrijft dat BP6'ende Linux gebruikers beter niet de laatste BIOS voor hun mobo kunnen downloaden:

If you're running Linux on your BP6 system, you should probably hold off on upgrading to the new BIOS posted yesterday. I've been getting emails from users having kernel problems after flashing with BIOS BP6PW.

Nieuws geleend van BP6.com.

Bij Gamers Depot is vandaag een review online gekwakt van de Diamond Viper II kaart gebaseerd op de Savage 2000 van S3. Vanwege de Quake III optimized drivers presteert hij daarin ietsie beter dan een SDR GeForce.

As we can see from the Benchmarks the Viper II's drivers are obviously optimized for Quake III, especially under 32bit mode where the SDR GeForce is lacking as usual. Although the drivers seem to not fair as well under Direct3D, they still don't do too badly, and I'm sure they'll get better with time. Notice that under Unreal Tournament (D3D Mode) the Viper II starts to surpass the SDR GeForce at the higher resolutions because of the SDR limitations. Overall I was pleasantly surprised by how well this card did, I mean after all it's an S3 chip, and it's great to see them finally come out with a product that can compete on the high end scale.

As far as S3's S3TC (S3 Texture Compression), it seems that good game support for this technology is still a ways off. Currently only a handful of games support it, namely Unreal Tournament.

Riva3D heeft een mix gemaakt van de Nvidia 3.65 en 3.62 drivers om Athlon-eigenaars een zo hoog mogelijke Direct3D performance te geven.

Of het enige effect heeft is nog niet bekend dus dat moet je zelf maar uitvinden

Riva3D has created some drivers for Athlon owners that will increase Direct3D performance by using the Direst3D core from the 3.65 reference drivers in the 3.62 (Athlon only) shell. No confirmation on whether or not these drivers actually help framerates, so use at your own risk. HalcYoN: I did a little, ok a lot of the driver mixing back when the first Detonator drivers were released for the TNT. Back then, the TNT drivers went from SGIS-multitexturing to ARB-multitexturing. Since Quake2 used SGIS, the resulting framerate drop was about 20%. I think that amount of framerate was worth the risk. Maximizing Direct3D performance for one more frame/sec? Idunno...

De drivers kun je hier downloaden.

wildhagen schrijft: "BetaNews heeft een artikel geschreven waarin beschreven is hoe je het beste kunt upgraden naar de final-version van Windows 2000 vanaf Beta 3, RC1 en RC2...":

Microsoft Corporation recommends that you are running Release Candidate 2 in order to upgrade with the most ease, although it is not necessary to perform the upgrade successfully. Those users running Beta 3 of the product must upgrade to Release Candidate 1 before installing the Windows 2000 Final code, which does not upgrade directly from Beta 3. Member servers and workstations can upgrade to Release Candidate 2 directly from Beta 3 or Release Candidate 1. The Windows 2000 Final code will upgrade systems for those workstations and member servers with Release Candidate 1 already installed. Domain Controllers must be running Release Candidate 1 in order to properly upgrade to Release Candidate 2. And must be running Release Candidate 2 or higher in order for the final code to upgrade Windows correctly.

Kijk hier voor het hele artikel.

wildhagen schrijft: "Velen van ons zullen tot de ontdekking gekomen zijn dat Partition Magic niet werkt onder Windows 2000. Powerquest is bezig met een fix om dit probleem te verhelpen. Nog even geduld hebben dus...":

A number of registered users of Partition Magic have recently discovered that the software will not install on Windows 2000. PowerQuest is busy at work and should have a patch available soon.

Under Windows 2000, Partition Magic 5.0 currently displays an error message stating that the software is incompatible. If you desperately need to work around this problem, you can create startup disks with a DOS version of Partition Magic. The program to make the two floppies is found in the /ENGLISH/RESCUEME folder on the CD. After the disks are made, simply insert them on bootup.

If you are patient, you can wait for the patch which currently doesn't have a definite release date. PowerQuest requests users to subscribe to the Partition Magic Update/Patch mailing list at http://www.powerquest.com/support/subscription.htm for the latest info.

Bij nV News hebben ze wat benchmarks gepubliceerd van Test Drive 6, een racegame die via Direct3D Transforms en Lightning ondersteund. Het verschil is errug groot te noemen:

I mentioned the other day that Test Drive 6 supports T&L via Direct 3D and includes a benchmarking mode. I finally got around to benchmarking with and without T&L and the results are like night and day.

On the Annihilator Pro I am reviewing, I got a result of 46 fps at 1024x768 in 32-bit color with T&L enabled. Without T&L...16 fps

Klik hier voor de benchmark grafiekjes.

Bij Hot Hardware zijn wat benchmark scores te vinden van Gigabyte's i820 plank uitgerust met Rambus geheugen. Klik op de plaatjes voor de vergrotingen.

I have to tell you that I really think Intel is the one to beat with the new i820 chipset. The drive numbers above were staggering to me. This was done on a standard DMA66 7200 RPM WD drive. The memory benchmarks were impressive too but I am not comfortable saying that this test really shows off RAMBUS or even if RAMBUS is contributing real gains here.

Het volk van Beyond 3D heeft een review gebakken van de Guillemot Maxi Sound Fortissimo. Deze soundcard met de Yamaha YMF744 processor heeft support voor DirectSound, EAX, A3D 1.0, en Sensaura Interactive Positioning.

One thing that I didn't like was that there was little in the way of an internal amplifier. Using some regular stereo speakers, I couldn't hear a thing until I help them directly up to my ears. This also is really a negative if you're like to wear headphones for either listening to music or gaming (after all, speakers don't work very well when your boss is near by, do they?). Headphones were better off than speakers, in that you could hear them well enough, but if you plan on having them loud at all, you can pretty much forget about it. There simply isn't enough internal power to push them.

Running ZD's AudioWinbench, we found that CPU utilization stayed acceptably low at most quality levels. Only at 44.1 KHz and 32 voices.did it near 10% utilization.

Overall, the Fortissimo is really a good board. As I said before, like with all sound cards, the Fortissimo has things both going for it and against it. When you consider that the price is only $50 though (compared to $99 for just about everything else), the Fortissimo becomes a much better value. So, if you're budget-minded and in the look for a new sound card and the lack of internal amplification isn't important to you, I'd have to say that the Fortissimo certainly won't do you wrong.

AnandTech heeft een review in elkaar getikt van Kryotech's SuperG Athlon systeem op 1GHz. Een erg cool ding, maar de prijs/prestatie verhouding is nu best wel scheef vanwege de release van 800MHz air-cooled Athlons en Coppermines. Blijft wel een leuk speledingetje natuurlijk

The SuperG is obviously the fastest x86 system on the market, and Kryotech has definitely gotten their act together with making sure that enough resellers can get their hands on these systems in order to provide these to the public. Kryotech is still selling the bare bones systems (this includes the CPU, motherboard, case and cooler) from their on-line store for $2495, but you can also get them fully configured with peripherals from their authorized resellers. Next week, we will be taking a look at one such system from one of their resellers, SYS Technology, Inc.

With air-cooled Athlons currently available at 700MHz, and the 750/800MHz Athlons due out for public sale early next month, a 1000MHz Athlon at this point wouldn’t be worth the added price premium to business users or gamers looking for the latest and greatest. In a few months time we can expect to see air-cooled Athlons approach 900MHz+, thus making the SuperG obsolete. So why on Earth would Kryotech even bother producing the SuperG?

Unlike the Cool K6-X series of Kryotech systems, the SuperG is actually ideal for high end workstations that require the fastest performance available today. Especially for those individuals working off of grant money that are given a certain amount to spend at one given time, the SuperG makes the perfect product if you have the money now and you won’t be given an opportunity like this again.

Unfortunately, the low cache speed of the SuperG in comparison to the newly released Pentium III 800 makes the 800 an overall better value for some applications that are very L2 cache dependent, especially applications that contain Pentium III specific SSE optimizations, a rapidly growing population.

Via Robwar kwam ik op dit artikel van WebWereld over 0800-providers als Superweb, QuickOnline en straks ook WebGate. Volgens KPN-topman Wim Dik zullen deze bedrijven snel overbodig zijn omdat de KPN zelf de flat-rate abonnementen gaat aanbieden voor ongelimiteerd lokaal bellen.

Internetten zonder tikken is voor de grootgebruikers zeer aantrekkelijk. Vandaar de populariteit van 0800-providers. Die ISP's worden mogelijk in de loop van 2000 echter overbodig. KPN-topman Wim Dik heeft namelijk aangekondigd dat ook in Nederland zogenoemde 'flat-rates' zullen worden aangeboden. De gebruiker mag dan tegen een vast maandelijks bedrag ongelimiteerd lokaal bellen, dus ook met de PC naar de ISP.

Superweb en QuickOnline waren niet bereikbaar voor commentaar.

hjs schrijft dat FPS3D een review van de Elsa Erazor X GeForce kaart online heeft geknikkerd. Hieronder een stuk:

I couldn't find any real performance increases at lower resolutions (640x480, 800x600) in any game or application, no matter how high I brought it up with standard cooling. However, at high resolutions a couple frames were gained. Even after I attacked it with a 30Watt Peltier I could only get 8fps extra out of it at 1600x1200 only! Far less at lower resolutions.

Conclusion? Well I don't think the GeForce is worth overclocking unless you can keep the temperature below the shipping temperature. We already know that nVidia had to clock the GeForce 256 lower than they would have liked simply because of design difficulties. Even so, the increases yielded are at resolutions that are unplayable anyway (around 20fps at 1600x1200 overclocked to the max with peltier cooling). If you do want to do out-of-the-box overclocking without any additional cooling, tests with all GeForce cards currently in the FPS3D labs have shown that the Erazor X is the best overclocker if you must know.

Dit is al min of meer bekend, maar wordt nogmaals genoemd door ZDNet: AMD zal waarschijnlijk volgende week tijdens de Consumer Electronics Show een 800MHz versie van de Athlon aankondigen:

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NYSE: AMD) is expected to announce its 800MHz Athlon processor, with support from at least two major PC makers. AMD will also demonstrate 900MHz versions of the chip, running at room temperature. Two demos will show off a version of the current chip at 900MHz and a version of the chip utilizing copper interconnects, running at 900MHz.

[...] Intel will host a number of product demonstrations, including a demo of a digital camera for children and in-car computers. For the latter, the company will show off of two auto computers, including one from Clarion and another from Ford Motor Co.'s Visteon division. They are both based on Microsoft's AutoPC, running on Intel processors. Clarion offers its AutoPC for $1,299.

Also on tap from Intel: Demonstrations of home networking and digital subscriber line (DSL) technologies.

Na de PIII-750 @ 1286 nieuwsposting van gisteren wordt het tijd om naar overklok resultaten aan de AMD kant te kijken. Bunny's Workshop heeft resultaten van een Athlon 750 op 1050MHz met 1/3 L2 cache divider:

L2 functions Athlon750MHz obtained at this time, and the thing of 300MHz of Motorola, Inc. is used, and L2 begins not to function by about roughly 370MHz.

The limit 2/5 times this CPU the L2 magnification was about 975MHz. As for this, L2 becomes unstable in the above-mentioned clock. Then, L2 was set to 1/3 times, and the limit in the core was examined.

Even 131.3*8.0=1050MHz was able to acquire some Benchmark by water-cooled of CPU. However, some is unstable. 3DMark2000 was not able to complete the test. I seem usually to be going to use PC regularly with 128*8=1024MHz. CPU is very steady when it is this near clock, and I can use PC pleasantly.

EBN Online bericht dat een aantal Taiwanese geheugen fabrikanten hebben besloten om deels over te schakelen op de productie van 256Mbit memory chips (waarvan je er dus 8 nodig hebt om een reepje van 256Meg te smeren):

Tired of lagging the rest of the DRAM pack, Taiwan's memory makers hope to catch up to their rivals on the density front by making available limited supplies of 256-Mbit chips.

Three local DRAM suppliers-Mosel-Vitelic Inc., Nanya Technology Corp., and Winbond Electronics Corp.-are in the process of developing their respective 256-Mbit parts, with volume shipments slated for mid-2000 or sooner.

[...] At present, vendors are boosting their production of 16- and 64-Mbit DRAM, with plans to ramp up 128- and 256-Mbit chips in the next year. It's unclear who is leading the DRAM race in Taiwan, but Hsinchu-based Winbond last month become the first company on the island to announce a 256-Mbit part, with plans to ship the chip in production early next year. Winbond's 256-Mbit DRAM design comes from its technology partner, Toshiba Corp.

Other vendors claim to be close behind with their own devices. “We plan to ramp up our 256-Mbit DRAM production next year,” said Rajit Shah, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing for Mosel-Vitelic, also based in Hsinchu. “We expected to make a lot of product announcements in the first quarter of next year.”

Ga'ash Soffer van Voodoo Extreme heeft het tweede deel van z'n artikel over 3D engines online gekickt. Hier een stuk over het gebruik van triangles ipv normale polygonen:

Polygons which are concave and/or do not lie on a single plane are extremely difficult to render (as we will find out when we discuss rendering). Since triangles are never concave and never lie in more than one plane, they are very suitable for rendering. While it is possible to render concave and/or polygons which do not lie in one plane, it is difficult and would most likely involve breaking up the troublesome polygon into triangles. Back in the days of software renderers, single plane, convex quadrilaterals were often used instead of polygons, particularly in games which made use of lots of walls and floors. This approach has it's advantages, particularly with software renderers, but we won't bother dealing with quads.

Maximum3D heeft een review gepost van de Elsa 3D Revelator, een errug cool brilletje als we de reviewer mogen geloven:.

Simply put, the 3D Revelator breathes new life into your games. My first reaction was.....WHOAH! I've never seen a product that could make your games truly 3D, over a monitor. Couple this bad boy with a decent size screen and a kick-ass sound system, you'll forget you're on planet Earth in a meat body. The Revelator takes you much closer to an immersive 3D environment.

The Register meldt dat Compaq een .PDFje op hun site heeft neer gemikt, waarin ze uitleggen hoeveel geweldiger de Alpha is vergeleken met Intel's Itanium / Merced. Op zich is het natuurlijk niet vreemd dat Compaq claimt dat hun Alphaatje sneller is dan de proc van de buurman, afgezien daarvan hebben ze wel een aantal interessante punten:

And, according to the Adobe PDF document entitled Alpha and IA64, which can be found here, any dreams of world domination Intel may have with such 64-bit architecture are just that, dreams.

The document cites facts, figures and benchmarketing to demonstrate that pound for pound, the Alpha outperforms Intel architecture. One soundbyte says: "Alpha will be superior to IA64 in commercial applications".

Some of the material the Big Q has posted has been available before, but the important point with this document is that it is really a positioning statement. And it clearly shows Q is going to attempt, at least, to give Intel a run for its money. "IA64: a smart compiler and a dumb machine" gives a flavour of the piece. [break] En een stukje direkt uit dat .PDF document: [/break] An Alpha processor will exploit static and dynamic instruction-level parallelism with out-of-order execution, and thread-level parallelism with simultaneous multithreading. Out-of-order execution has a benefit of 1.5-2x over in-order execution. Simultaneous multithreading has a benefit of 1.5-3x over single threaded execution.

Niet echt belangrijk, maar wel grappig om te melden, Linux gebruiker redt Microsoft

Ondanks de status een van de grootste bedrijven ter wereld te zijn, vergeten ze bij Microsoft blijkbaar soms de rekeningen te betalen. Bijvoorbeeld voor de vernieuwing van de domeinregistratie van passport.com, een deelsite van Hotmail. Hierdoor konden Hotmail-gebruikers op 24 december niet langer hun mail lezen. Een van die gebruikers, een Linux-consultant uit Nashville, betaalde de rekening van 35 dollar dan maar voor de softwaregigant.

Tja.. wat wil je, met zo'n enorme stapel domains..

D66 vindt de telefoon kosten te hoog.. eindelijk eens iemand die het met me eens is

De D66-fractie in de Tweede Kamer vindt de telefoonkosten van het Internet-verkeer te hoog. Het kamerlid Bakker vraagt minister Jorritsma (Economische Zaken) hiertoe initiatieven te nemen. Anders zou het toezichthoudend orgaan Opta dat moeten doen. D66 zou graag een vast bedrag per maand zien voor verbinding met Internet. Dit zou het Internet-gebruik door particulieren aanmoedigen.

Moet ik nou toch nog D66 gaan stemmen?!

schaduw stuurde ons de volgende link naar een opmerkelijk bericht:

Een Amerikaanse vorser heeft in Berlijn een ontdekking gedaan die als basis kan dienen voor een computer zonder chips, maar met gasmoleculen, zegt het wetenschappelijk tijdschrift New Scientist. De wetenschapper, James La Clair, ontwikkelde een molecule, SENSI, die aan- en uitgeschakeld kan worden door stikstof en koolstofdioxide. Anders gezegd, de molecule kan net zoals een bit in een computerchip functioneren. Moleculaire gascomputers bieden een mogelijke uitweg. De huidige generatie processors - zoals de Intel Coppermine en AMD Athlon - worden gebouwd met 0,18µm-technologie, maar een gasmolecule is slecht enkele nanometers breed. Voor dezelfde rekenkracht zou dus een heel wat kleinere CPU nodig zijn.

heijx schrijft: "De zoveelste MP3 CD speler voor aan de HIFI, maar hier kan je een Hard disk bij plaatsen (40 GB= ±40000 minuten of bijna 28 etmalen muziek).
En hij is eindelijk van een bekend merk...
Kost 888 DM in die Heimat.
Vertaling uit het Duits van de Terratec tekst:":

Het apparaat speelt MP3 en audio CDs af. Leg een cd-tje in en de m3po doorzoekt het op .MP3-bestanden en Playlists, die zich ook in directories bevinden kunnen. De songs kunnen via het Menu met een draairegelaar geelekteerd en gestart worden. (Maar nu komt het naast de CD speler kan een doodgewone (of minder doodgewoon ) IDE-schijf ingebouwd worden! Hierop kan je ook via de CD speler songs en Playlists overspelen. Als je bedenkt, dat op een 40GB grote Plaat meer dan 660 uur (27 dagen!) Muziek passen, kan het wel even duren voor je in de ruimteproblemen komt.