insane schrijft: "Amdzone heeft de kx133 te pakken. Als ik de specs lees is dit in een woord BAGGER. 2 dimm slots en 2 pci slots. Die 2 dimm slots kan nog wel maar die 2 pci slots is echt belachelijk":

Tja...wat wil je op een Micro-ATX sample bordje. Ik mag hopen dat de retail-borden wat beter uitgerust zijn.

I just picked up the sample board from Via with the KX133 chipset. It's in micro ATX format with an AMR, AGP, and 2 PCI slots. It also includes on board sound, wake on modem and wake on lan, 4 massive heatsinks on the voltage regulators, 2 dimm slots, two thermal sensors, to 3 pin power connectors, 2 usb ports, 2 serial ports and 20 dip switches. Of course the most important thing is the Via KX133 chipset. According to the documentation with the board the supported bus speeds are 66, 75, 79, 83, 100, 110, 115, 120, 124, 129, 133, 138, and 143 with PCI dividers of 2, 3, and 4.

Check AMD Zone voor meer info.

VHware bezorgde ons deze link waar gezegd wordt dat AMD de K6-3 gereanimeerd heeft. Die geruchten gingen al langer, maar nu is het ook door AMD zelf bevestigd.

Rumours that AMD's K6-III is destined for the chip gulag have been scotched by the company today.

Instead, AMD will roll out new variants of the K6-III during this year and will continue to develop the product, a representative of the firm has confirmed. [break]De reden waarom de K6-3 toch verder ontwikkeld wordt is waarschijnlijk dat AMD ook een notebook-processor wil kunnen leveren. Deze vrij lucratieve markt is zeker in het hogere segment volledig Intel-terrein.[/break] He said that the K6-III continued to be successful for notebook PCs because of its integrated Level Two cache. The same reason, he said, made the K6-III popular for business applications.

Hilko schrijft: "Nieuwe koppen voor harddisks van TDK, die ervoor zorgen dat we straks schijven van meer dan 250 gigs in onze kastjes kunnen stoppen. Helaas komt al dat moois pas in 2002 in de winkel :":

TDK developed new magnetic heads capable of reading and writing information onto HDDs with storage densities of five times existing drives. These new heads can be used in disk drives with more than 50Gb per square inch densities (compared to currently available 5 to 10Gb per square inch). TDK is going to distribute heads samples to HDDs manufacturers in H2'00 and has plans to start mass production in 2002.

harry-s schrijft dat WCPUID 2.7 gereleased is, het proggie dat handige info over je processor weergeeft:

"Via de download pagina kun je hem ook downloaden bij Vector (HighSpeedDownload), bij mij kwam die binnen met 950kb/sec!!"
[lekker belangrijk Harry... ]

Versie 2.7a biedt nu ook support het nieuwe Athlon L2 cache type. Hieronder nog een screenshot:

ChUcKiE en Uenk stuurden beide een link naar het BP6FSB proggie van BP6.com, waarmee je de busspeed van je BP6 on-the-fly vanuit Windows kunt aanpassen:

This program will enable you to change the Front Side Bus on your Abit BP6 dual Celeron motherboard, the program is currently still in the beta stage, and thus somewhat experimental. The most recent version is 1 beta4.

BP6FSB kun je hier van het net plukken.

InMaccen en wegwezen, gezien op de Computer Planet:

iMac gebruikers, die zich ook onder de zwaarste omstandigheden niet willen ontbinden van hun lieftallige aaiMac, zien het licht op GrabPac.com.

Sinterklaas 82 tm schrijft: "Bij Kenwood weten ze van CD-spelers maken. Op al hun discman's staat DPC, ik hoop dat die naam door de Dutch Power Cows geregistreerd is anders gaan zij er mee vandoor. Ik heb zelf natuurlijk een DPC-discman":

Wij voelen ons sterk vereerd .

Telecomtoko Eneco heeft de rechtszaak tegen Superweb verloren en moet nu een dwangsom van 1 miljoen gulden per dag neerleggen, meldt Webwereld (thanks Cableboy voor de tip):

In een poging onder de dwangsom uit te komen spande Eneco een zaak aan tegen Superweb. Het telecombedrijf zei machteloos te zijn en de overeengekomen inbelcapaciteit met geen mogelijkheid te kunnen leveren. KPN Telecom zou niet aan haar beloftes hebben voldaan.

De rechter besliste echter dat zijn eerdere uitspraak onverkort gold. Eneco had nu eenmaal dat contract gesloten en dient daaraan te voldoen.

Eneco voert nu onderhandelingen met KPN Telecom om zo snel mogelijk de inbelcapaciteit te kunnen leveren aan Superweb. "We hebben goede verwachtingen dat het deze week nog in orde komt," aldus woordvoerder Cor de Ruijter van Eneco.

CaptTripps schrijft: "Een goede grap: de Computer Planet van Planet Internet is ineens in oud-hollandsche stijl omgezet. Toch last van een milleniumbug? ":

In de laatste jaren van den afgeloopen eeuw is onze maatschappij gewend geraakt aan de eene na den anderen uitvinding: zo is het waarlijk onbevattelijk dat Röntgens' straling slechts vijf korte jaren terug is ontdekt. De groote belofte aan het begin van het einde der 20sten eeuw lijkt zonder twijfel den electriciteit. Modernisten en futurologen spiegelen ons eenen fantastische wereld voor, waar machines - gelijkend op de mensch - ons verlossen van druilerig en monotoon fabrieks- en huishoudelijken arbeid. Den toekomst zal het leeren!

Erg mooi werk van Lars (en Diederik?)!

hjs stuurde een link naar dit interview van Power Gamerz met Nick Triantos, de software goeroe bij nVidia. Echt veel zinnige info wist men helaas niet los te peuteren. Hier een sampletje:

PG: It's fair to say that NVIDIA is one of the top graphics chipset designers, if not the #1 at the time. Besides your main competitor (3dfx), do you see companies like ATI and S3 moving in on NVIDIA's market share in the near future?

Nick: Sure, all those guys have made good graphics chips, we have to always stay aware of what kinds of products they're bringing out. There's been announcements of good products from some of them for this coming year, too. I believe NVIDIA has some REALLY hot products we're working on, and I don't know if any of those guys have announced anything that sounds as great as the new things we're building, but I'm sure they've all got something they think is great to compete with our best products.

Bij Overclockers' Workbench wordt verteld dat de FC-PGA Coppermine P3's 500E en 550E niet beschikken over dual processor support. En da's best jammer want ze bleken eerder wel zwaar goed overklokbaar te zijn. Onderstaande tabel met de info leen ik even van Overclockers' Workbench:

Samsung meldt in opperste blijheid dat het de ontwikkeling van 288Mbit Rambus chips voltooid heeft. De chips worden op een 0,17micron proces gebakken worden en zullen beschikbaar komen in het tweede kwartaal van dit jaar:

Reuters is reporting that South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co has completed development of a 288 megabit Rambus dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chip, double the capacity of its mainstay Rambus chip.

A 0.17 micron design rule has been applied for processing the chip. Samsung has also completed development of a 576 megabyte Rambus in-line memory module, which will comprise 16 pieces of 288 megabit chips, Samsung said in a statement.

Rambus chips use a high-speed memory technology format developed by Rambus Inc.

Samsung currently produces 144 megabit Rambus DRAM chips and is set to gradually raise its monthly production to some two million units by February from around one million in December.

Het volk achter Digital-Clips hebben een review klaarliggen van de Sony FD Trinitron VAIO HMD-A200 17" CRT monitor met een maximale resolutie van 1280 x 1024 @ 60 Hz. Hieronder wat meer over zijn beeldkwaliteit:

Sony Trinitron tubes are renown for whipping some serious butt when it comes to image quality, which explains why Silicon Graphics and several high end CAD system providers resort to Sony monitors or boob tubes. And of course, we were duly impressed. Text output is, simply put, razor sharp. Never seen anything this nice, and we weren’t even using G200 or G400 for that sense, just a plain-Jane TNT graphics card. Unlike other 17” or 15” monitors where we could pick out faint ghosting or image defects, the A200 churned out nothing short of perfect, at any resolution from 640 by 480 all the way to 1280 by 1024, although it truly shines at higher resolutions. Bold text, however, seems to lack the eye-popping clarity that normal text has, but remains extremely eye catching. Graphics are just as good, with colors vivid as ever. Using this to play Incoming and Expendable was truly a feast for the eyes. Looking at the flat screen may be slightly disorientating at first, the monitor almost seems convex as it’s so perfectly flat.

Anand heeft een review neer gemikt van de SYS Technologies Cold Fusion 1000, een kant en klare PC gebaseerd op het Super G barebones systeem van Kryotech. In het supergekoelde kistje bevindt zich een Athlon 750 op 1GHz met Gigabyte 7IX moederbord en 128Mb PC133 SDRAM. Hier een stukje over de performance in BAPCo SYSMark2000 en ZD Winstone 2000:

The SuperG is the fastest, although not by a huge margin, in this test. It is noticeably faster than the previous Athlon king, the 800, but it should be noted that the Athlon in its current form (with the K75 core) will most likely never hit an air-cooled 1GHz clock speed. Instead, the first 1GHz Athlon will probably based on a core with a full-speed on-die L2 such as the Thunderbird or Spitfire.

The SuperG enjoys a similar lead over the competition in the Content Creation Winstone 2000 test, although it is followed up by the Athlon 800 rather than the Pentium III 800.

Once again, although the SuperG is the current fastest processor in this test this performance is not indicative of the air-cooled 1GHz Athlon that will ship next year. The air-cooled 1GHz Athlon should be noticeably faster due to its faster L2 cache speed and other possible optimizations.

FPS3D.com heeft een review van de Addtronics 6896A full tower online gezet. Het frame van deze kast lijkt veel op die van de SuperMicro SC760-A (waarvan je m'n review hier kunt lezen), alleen is deze kleiner. Net zoals de SC760-A biedt de 6896A veel ruimte voor extra koeling:

The 6896A has absolutely no problems when it comes to cooling. It was made to have a capacity of at least 7 fans. Two of those fans in the usual regular positions like the other cases and the other three are what really makes this puppy "cool," two of them on the sides of the case, which will do some extensive cooling of the 5.25" drive bays, and one of them blowing redundantly on the CPU, this is especially good if your nervous about your chip getting too hot or if your an overclocker demanding for the best cooling system.

The last, but not the least fan, is the one directly blowing on your hard drives, this is a crucial option if you have a 10K RPM SCSI hard drive or a fast 7200 RPM EIDE hard drive.

Cole3D.com schreef een review van de Aureal SQ2500, een Vortex II geluidskaart met 4-speaker support en coaxiale S/PDIF uitgang. Uit de Quake III benchmarks in review wordt duidelijk dat A3D2.0 nog steeds een behoorlijk heftige performance hit geeft:

As you can see in the Quake III benchmarks, A3D really degrades the performance when paired with High Quality Sound. There wasn't a huge difference between high quality sound and low quality, only a frame or two. I feel that it is not possible to play Quake III at a desirable framerate with the graphics options set at what they would be without using A3D.

If gaming is your main use of a computer, the SQ2500 would be a great choice based on the fact that most games support A3D. The SQ2500 also does a fine job at performing any of your DVD sound and music duties. Despite the performance problems in Quake III, none of the other games I played on had any problems on framerate.

De jongens en meisjes van Sharky Extreme hebben een review van de ATI Rage Fury MAXX op hun site geparkeerd. De performance van de Fury MAXX blijkt, ondanks de hogere theoretische fillrate van van 500MTex/sec, achter te blijven op die van de GeForce DDR:

Understandably, the price of two processors and 64MB of RAM is significantly higher than what it would take for a single chip solution, but if it takes two processors to deliver the performance, the price will be an issue. At $299, the MAXX is more expensive then even ASUS's V6600 Deluxe, without the features present on the ASUS card. For ATi to compete against the SDR GeForce boards, they will have to lower the price to match. When/if this happens, the ATi Rage Fury MAXX will indeed become the price/performance king.

The technology behind the MAXX is exciting, and the fact that ATi is planning on implementing it in future generations of graphics processors is a thrill to think about. However for the time being, the Rage Fury MAXX remains the first implementation of the AFR technique and from our experiences, it performs flawlessly and seamlessly.

Lost Circuits maakt ons blij met een review van de AOpen AX6BC Pro II Millennium Edition. Een erg schone plank, met bovendien een super snel bootend BIOS:

The BIOS is written by Award and even though it is pretty standard, there are a few things that are not quite the average garden variety. The first unusual thing is the speed at which the system boots into Windows. Normally the Award BIOS is substantially slower in this respect than the AMI versions, however, the AX6BC Pro II breaks at least even with those. Within the BIOS are also the options of setting the different FSB speeds via soft-BIOS. Further options include the adjustment of the core voltage to increase stability under overclocked conditions and the selection of the individual system RAM timing parameters. Last not least, in addition to the option of loading Setup Defaults, there is the possibility of loading Turbo Setup. The latter is accompanied by the explicit warning that this should only be done if a good CPU, memory and HDD is used in the system since this BIOS option only performs a superficial system check, but more about the effects of this option later.

3D Accelerated Gaming heeft een review van de Pontis (ken ik niet) SP503 MP3 player online gezet. Het spelertje wordt geleverd met slechts 16Mb flash memory, kun je net een kwartiertje muziek op kwijt raken:

OK, so we’ve been through the look, how does it sound? Sounds Great. In fact, I was perplexed (Is that good? --Ed) by the sound quality provided by the SP503. This player comes with very good earphones, in which with the whole ensemble, if you maxed the volume, everyone in the room can hear the sound clearly. I learned this, of course, during math class that day. I’m a biggie on equalizers and many barely do anything at all. The equalizer on the SP503 works fine, and the changes can actually be heard. Any drawbacks? Well I was listening to a couple of my favorite songs on the player during math class. THAT is the drawback. What? Well its very simple, I could only fit TWO songs on there. Of course they were high quality, each running at approx. 5 minutes each. But you still can’t fit many songs onto a 16 meg card. At the most I could fit about 5 songs. This was the GREATEST annoyance I experienced using the SP503.

Ik lees bij Ace's Hardware dat VIA een stel nieuwe chipset drivers heeft klaargezet:

De afgelopen weken is het stil gebleven rond de geruchten dat Gateway met Athlon systemen zou komen. Volgens nieuwe info van AMD Zone zullen de Gateway Athlon's volgende maand beschikbaar komen:

I received word from Darrell Wedgewood that he waltzed into his local Gateway store, and the manager claimed that Athlon systems would be available in February. Now where have I heard this before? We will see, but I must remain a bit skeptical.

SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corp.) heeft de opvolger van de welbekende SPEC95 cross-platform benchmark gereleased. Hieronder een overzicht met de belangrijkste veranderingen:

Run-time: Several of the CPU95 benchmarks were finishing in less than a minute on leading-edge processors/systems. Given the SPEC measurement tools, small changes or fluctuations in the measurements were having significant impacts on the percentage of improvements being seen. SPEC chose to make run times for CPU2000 benchmarks longer to take into account future performance and prevent this from being an issue for the lifetime of the suites.

Application size: Many comments received by SPEC indicated that applications had grown in complexity and size and that CPU95 was becoming less representative of what runs on current systems. For CPU2000, SPEC selected programs with larger resource requirements to provide a mix with some of the smaller programs.

Application type: SPEC felt that there were additional application areas that should be included in CPU2000 to increase variety and representation within the suites. Areas such as 3D and image recognition have been added and data compression has been expanded.

Fiets richting SPEC.org voor meer info over de CPU2000 benchmark.

JSI Hardware heeft een review gepost van de Ricoh MP7060A-DP, een IDE fikker die leest op 24 voudige snelheid, schrijft op 6-speed en herschrijft op quad speed:

First thing I did when I got this home was write of a few cds to see how the writer performs, I decided to write all the stuff that has accumulated in my downloads folder to cd (which took about 3 cd's). I was very impressed by how fast the writer wrote the cds, it wrote a full cd it about 12 minuets including table of contents and disc closing. After a wrote the cds I tested them on various drives to see how well the had written and I was pleasantly surprised, the cd's read on all the drives even my crapy old 2x creative dvd drive that even has trouble reading origional cd's.

The reading performance of the drive is also very good, although its not super fast by today's standards it is fast enough for most of us and will also read most of the cd's you can through at it.

Another thing to note is that you can back up your Playstaition games without any need to modify your Playstation and invalidate your warranty.

Een bezoeker van Ars Technica heeft daar op het forum een aantal handige SiSoft Sandra benchmarks gepost van de AMD 751 met en zonder SuperBypass:

Hoewel het hier om een nietszeggende synthetische benchmarks gaat, lijken me dit toch geen slechte resultaten.

GamePC is één van de eersten met een review van de Asus V6800 Deluxe, een behoorlijk compleet uitgeruste GeForce kaart met DDR SGRAM, TV-out, S-Video input, S-Video output, composite output en support voor de 3D shutterbril van Asus:

We have no doubt that this card will be a big hit this year, it's simply the best GeForce 256 card that we've seen to date. While the drivers aren't up to par yet, Asus is usually very good about updating and releasing new driver sets when problems occur, we have faith that Asus will pull through and perfect the drivers before this card actually ships to retailers. All of the speed and features come with a price though, we're expecting this card to debut with a hefty $400 price tag. Of course, retailers will drop the prices a bit, but most people will eventually have to shell out at least $350 to get their hands on one of these cards, a price most people simply aren't willing to pay. Most gamers won't use many of the features that the Asus card has, and there's really no reason for them to pay the extra price premium for these features. Call it what you will, the Rolls Royce of video cards, the Swiss Army Knife of video cards, it's just simply got it all.

Overklokken deed de V6800 met een maximale core/mem setting van 150/350MHz ook erg goed.

Gamepublisher R&P haalt Sony DADC, dupliceerder van CD-ROMs, voor het gerecht omdat hun Securom copy protections een zware mislukking blijkt te zijn (thanks WebMan voor de tip):

Securom werd op de Milia '99 beurs geïntroduceerd door Sony als beste beveiligingssysteem. Uitgebreid werd uiteengezet hoe door de toepassing van Securom de investering van de uitgever veilig werd gesteld: geen illegale kopieën meer en hogere verkopen!

Begin vorig jaar koos R&P uit de vele beveiligingssystemen voor Securom van Sony DADC. Medio Augustus ontdekte R&P echter dat Securom finaal faalde als kopieer beveiligingssysteem. Het falen van Securom was zo ernstig (op de meeste computers kun je gewoon kopieën maken en afspelen, of anders middels een kleine wijziging in de configuratie van Windows), dat van enige beveiliging nauwelijks meer sprake was. R&P heeft Sony terzake aansprakelijk gesteld. Sony DADC ontkent niet dat Securom heeft gefaald.

Step Thermodynamics maakte eerder bekend dat zij voor 15 dollar een Athlon GFD aan zouden gaan bieden. Helaas krabbelen ze nu terug: volgens een update op hun site zal de 'STEP-UP K7 Accelerator Card' $39,90 gaan kosten (thanks UniMatrix voor de tip:

Due to overwhelming customer demand, we will soon be offering our own STEP-UP K7 Accelerator Card to allow users to custom set their Athlon CPU's to virtually any Multiplier and VCore setting they choose, by simply plugging the card into their Athlon CPU.

Naturally, our Card will be the best built Card on the market, built to ANSI Standard IPC-A-610, unlike the many other offerings on the market today.

In January 2000, we will be selling our STEP-UP K7 Accelerator Card in one of two ways. Our customers will be able to purchase the Card separately for only $39.00, or you'll get the STEP-UP K7 Accelerator Card absolutely FREE, with the purchase of one of our upcoming Athlon Internet Specials! Please keep an eye on our site...