Week of June 20, 2004

Saturday Edition: Saturday, June 26 2004 - 7:49

i9xx chipsets
MBReview has posted thier thoughts and findings on the

"The most disappointing aspect about these chipsets has to be the performance of the i925X chipset versus the i915P/G. Intel claims performance enhancements for the i925X over i915P/G such as an advanced memory controller that is capable of offering more bandwidth. They come through with that fact, but in the end that isn't enough to make the i925X a viable buy over the i915P/G chipset in our eyes. Until we start seeing some better gains from i925X motherboards, they're going to be hard to recommend over the certainly cheaper i915P/G motherboards."

HDD
Having a couple of these in RAID 0 would be pretty nice, but expensive.

"The main barrier that hard drives face is that as opposed to other computer hardware they are still mechanical. Motors, platters, actuator arms and other components, all packed together in a small housing and asked to work in perfect harmony. To increase hard drive performance the answer is simple, increase the RPM (revolutions per minute). Although the answer might be simple its implementation is not, excess heat, limited storage size and dependability have worked against high RPM hard drives. In today's review we'll be taking a look at the Western Digital Raptor 74GB SATA, 10,000 RPM, 8MB cache hard drive that dares to go where no hard drive has gone before."

Cooling, Cases and Power
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Sound and Vision
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2 Optical Drives
The are video reviewed by the 3dGameMan.

"The AOpen CDRW (CRW5232) & Combo (COM5232) offer excellent features with fast worry free writing of data at a bargain. Both drives come with 2MB of data buffer memory, two extra faceplates & useful software. The CRW5232 is a 52X CD-R, 32X CD-RW & 52X CD-ROM drive & the COM5232 is a 52X CD-R, 32X CD-RW, 52X CD-ROM & 16X DVD-ROM."

Radeon to FireGL mod
V2.0 has been updated to the at ARP.

"Want a FireGL workstation card but can't afford to pay ATI's exhorbitant prices? Well, why don't you grab a Radeon desktop card and mod it into a FireGL card? Yes, you can easily mod a Radeon into the FireGL with just a simple BIOS flash!"

ByteSized
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Evening Edition: Friday, June 25 2004 - 10:38

Posted by: Marc

Corsair

It is a well-known fact that speed is all important in the computer market. Back in the olden days, when there were not very many serious computer enthusiasts, a fast CPU was perhaps the most sought after component of a computer. That era has passed, and nowadays an extremely fast Video Card is what matters. Increasingly, however, serious users are beginning to understand the importance of RAM. For those of you who are just....

Watercooling

I am overly impressed with these products. If you take a look at this German website here you'll see that the Nexxos Pro is placed 3rd while our no.1 performing block, the Cascade, (if you are lucky enough to get one in the U.S.) is placed at number 11....

Bytesized Bits

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Afternoon Edition: Friday, June 25 2004 - 2:28

Posted by: Scott

CDR Info Reviews
They've been busy over at CDR Info today with 5 reviews for you to read.

MP3
PC Stats have taken a look at the which has quite a few features.

"As MP3 players continue to come down in price, manufacturers are segmenting them for every part of our daily lives. Smaller, fixed memory players like the Samsung YP-55i are just fine for the morning commute, a trip to the store, a jog around the block, or whatever. Able to store 192MB worth of music in MP3 or WMA format, the roll-of-quarters sized YP-55i also includes a digital FM tuner. It also offers the very neat capability of encoding FM-Radio to MP3 recordings on the fly; how cool is that!? The Samsung YP-55i is like the Swiss Army knife of portable music players; it functions as a USB hard drive, offers up the ability to record voice memos, and of course... approximately 15hrs music playback time with one AAA battery."

6800
Hopefully we will get to see the likes of the in more than just reviews soon.

"It overclocked well and the stock reference cooler isn't the loudest in the world. Should you wish to partake in a little next generation graphics action, you could do worse than give XFX that considerable chunk of change. Recommended for the early-adopting enthusiast."

ByteSized
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Free Schwag!
Hardware Pacers is hosting a random giveaway on the

"Giveaway details: Shipping costs will be responsibility of the winner. All payments by Paypal.
Giveaway End Date: July 1, 9:00 PM US Eastern Time / 6:00PM Pacific - random picks will stop there."

Morning Edition: Friday, June 25 2004 - 5:57

Posted by: Scott

PC4400
Overclocking an Intel system to it's limits requires some pretty fast ram, being one of the fastest.

"GeIL has really been making a name for itself over the last several years on the enthusiast and performance memory scene. Whenever I read or hear the name, I typically think of the 'Golden Dragon' modules they make, which feature really cool Asian dragon artwork and packaging. GeIL's flagship line is not the 'Golden Dragon' though; it's the 'Ultra Series.' I'm lucky enough to have the GeIL Ultra Platinum PC4400 DDR550 Dual Channel DDR Kit up for review."

PC3200
And if you're not an overclocker or run and AMD system, this budget ram from seems to have impressed Overclockers Online.

"The Ultra Dual Channel Kit is clearly a budget kit as it's quite affordable and comes in a very nice box you'll never use again. If you don't plan on overclocking your FSB very much then this kit would be an ideal low budget decent performance alternative to the Corsair, TwinMOS, OCZ modules."

USB and Bluetooth
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HDD Activity LED Mod
A nice little project this

"Tired of seeing that HDD LED always shining? It's kind of bland so I decided to do something with more eye candy. I saw circuits in some other sites that used two LEDs, but I wanted to use a single bicolour LED that would change its colour depending on HDD activity. I also wanted to be able to represent both information using a single LED. The circuit is very easy and cheap to do, it doesn't require too much soldering, so any person with basic knowledge is going to be able to do it without any trouble."

ByteSized
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Evening Edition: Thursday, June 24 2004 - 8:46

Posted by: Marc

Video card features

Whenever a new generation of video cards roll around, one of the big arguments that we all get embroiled in tends to be regarding any new features that said cards may or may not have. Of course, some of them are definite show-stoppers, but these days there always seems to be new functionality that gets shunned by developers and falls by the wayside....

Gigaram

In fact, it performed spectacularly well. Gigaram has released this memory to the mass market and proved themselves to be great budget memory. Those of you strapped for cash should give Gigaram a chance. It performed well, it's reasonably priced, and offers great overclocking potential....

Gigabyte

With the ever increasing hope to cover all ends of the market share we have seen graphics card entering the market lately that range from high-end to low-end. The Gigabyte FX 5700LE that we're reviewing to today is one that perhaps would be on low end of the scale, but it does have more MHz left in than meets the eye. After running it through a battery of benchmarks we came away very....

Bytesized Bits

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Afternoon Edition: Thursday, June 24 2004 - 3:44

Posted by: Hubert

Free Mags
IT professional? Simply a cubicle drone? Eitherway, may be worthwhile.

All the magazines are free to those who qualify. No catches or hidden trials. if the above don't appeal to you.

6800 Ultra Review
Modfather reviews the . This is a retail version of the card, and should be indicative of the performance you'll get out of the box.

This meant using that lovely little scart plug in the back of the TV. To my delight, with no hassle a picture appeared. Then I started playing a few games with the DVD running to see if there was going to be any lag at all. None. This means that you can link your card straight to the VCR for a bit of lag free demo recording.

Cool Stuff

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Morning Edition: Thursday, June 24 2004 - 9:10

Posted by: Hubert

SiS655
Overclockers New Zealand has posted a review on the , which compares nicely against Intel's Springdale.

I am pleasantly surprised by Gigabyte's 8S655TX Ultra's performance, as it is nearly on-par with Intel's I865 chipset, in dual channel mode; in some cases it is even a bit faster than Intel I865's offering.

AIW vs Personal Cinema
At the high-end, ATI has no equal when it comes to the AIW series. Tech Report goes mid-ranged to see the differences with the .

As ATI and NVIDIA's next-gen graphics chips duke it out for 3D performance supremacy, there's a second battle being waged over multimedia graphics dominance. In one corner, we have ATI's veteran All-in-Wonder. In the other, NVIDIA's maturing Personal Cinema. Which multimedia graphics solution reigns supreme? We've rounded up an All-in-Wonder Radeon 9600 XT and Personal Cinema FX 5700 to find out.

A64 3700+
AMD Review digs into the . This is about as fast as it gets with AMD's "older" socket.

Today, we will be looking at AMD's latest Socket 754 chip, the 3700+, clocked in at 2.4 GHz. This clock speed is the same speed as the FX 53 chips, featuring a 1 megabyte L2 cache as well. The only difference between the two chips, sans the socket difference, is the memory support.

Tsunami by Tt
The Overclocker Caf� takes a look at the new , which is a pretty loaded case when it comes to features.

Looking at the front panel, we figured out why this is called the Tsunami. Several case manufacturers have put out a wave type front bezel case. Thermaltake takes a go at it as you can see below. The curved bezel is made of aluminum and represents about a third of the total weight of the case.

PSU Reviews

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Rodent Gathering

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Bytesized Bits

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Intel Writeup
Bytesector gives us a look into the technology behind the . This is a major launch by Intel, and it's best you do the research before diving in.

Intel released 2 of the greatest chipsets yesterday and I will briefly describe what these two chipsets bring to the market and how they will revolutionize the way we use our computers. Alderwood and Grantsdale are the code names for the first of the 900 series chipsets brought out by Intel yesterday; commonly referred to as the Intel 915 or 925 chipsets respectively.

Dually Goodness
If one isn't enough, then two should be. Planet3D Now! reviews the . Hope you've been saving those pennies.

Despite all efforts on the part of AMD the Athlon MP processors has it to considerable acceptance and spreading in hot however never contested and from Intel created dominated x86 server market. Whether here the marketing department of AMD had to do slept or more important is times undecided, Potenzial had the processors quite.

Evening Edition: Wednesday, June 23 2004 - 8:43

Posted by: Marc

X800XT

It is with alot of interest today I turn Driverheavens new test rig to the PCIe version of the gold award winning powerhouse that is the X800XT. This specific card we are reviewing today, codenamed The R423 is the non platinium edition meaning it is clocked at 500mhz core and 500/1000mhz ram....

HIS Excalibuer

Hightech Information System Ltd better known as HIS has released some great graphics cards in the past. In and effort to keep up with the competitors inroads in lucrative low-end market a new video card was brought to the market bearing the moniker "9550". In this case it happens to be the HIS 9550 VIVO model. So come on along....

ATI ALL-IN-WONDER

When it comes to home entertainment and the PC ATI has an aptitude of combining the two gracefully. The AIW series video cards from ATI are available in many flavors to fit your needs and budget. Today we will be looking at the budget minded AIW9600: a video card with enough options to pop your popcorn while movie viewing along with keeping you from missing your favorite TV shows with its....

Asus

There are many reasons why system integrators love motherboards built with nVIDIA's nForce2 chipset as much as they do; it's an extremely powerful and totally loaded core logic, and it boasts many features too. Until recently though, there wasn't a Pentium 4 chipset that offered a similar level of versatility, that is until ATi released their Radeon 9100 IGP Northbridge. Like the nVidia nForce2, the ATI Radeon 9100 IGP is no slouch when it comes to integrated chipset performance, and easily puts Intel's integrated solution, the i865G to shame....

Bytesized Bits

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Cooling and Cases

Afternoon Edition: Wednesday, June 23 2004 - 2:28

Posted by: Scott

Watercooling
Another look at cooling system which while not powerful aims for silent cooling.

"Watercooling. It used to be synonymous to overclocking, at least until mainstream manufacturers like Apple started including watercooling options in their systems. Zalman's Reserator 1, an imposing tower designed for watercooling might look like an extremely powerful unit, and looking at the cost had us believing it would be. Our tests, however, gave us a whole different picture. The highs: it's quiet, looks good, and easy installation. The lows: high cost, lack of mobility, and mediocre performance. The lowdown: If you're looking for silence, this is worth a look. If you're looking for pure performance, look elsewhere."

Bjorn3D Hatrick
3 items at Bjorn3D today, , and

9800 Pro Voltage Mod
Speaking of overclocking of graphics cards, has been posted at ARP.

"When you hit a snag overclocking the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro's GPU and memory chips, what do you do? Better cooling will help but have you also considered volt modding the Radeon 9800 Pro? Join Max_87 today as he goes through the many voltage modding methods for the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card, including a new method he discovered and personally tested!"

9600XT
Great cards for the money these cards, and they are getting cheaper too.

"Tonight it's time for a graphic card review and this time it comes from Sapphire. We got a Radeon 9600XT Atlantis with 128mb DDR memory."

Also at SweMOD is the

ByteSized
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Free Schwag!
Perfect way to end this afternoons news,

"The contest has been running for a while now and it's almost closing time! The prizes you can win in this contest ranges from lots of fans, cables, and lights to a new and impressive AC Ryan power supply! The AC Ryan power supply, named RyanPowerTT 2, is the first factory made PSU with CableFREE" design and is equipped with Tweakz".

Morning Edition: Wednesday, June 23 2004 - 6:06

Posted by: Scott

PC4000
If it was all in a name, I think these would grab your attention.

"BuffaloTech has long been in the OEM field and just recently slid into the performance market. We've taken a look at their previous DDR modules and they all faired rather well. Today we have their newest dual channel matched pair package in the 2X512MB flavor. If anything, they have THE coolest names...let's see if they perform that way."

9800XT
The new X800 pro's are in stores so the prices on the 9800XT's are dropping. GruntvillE have the on the test bench.

"With many different manufacturers producing similar boards, the battle has been tight. We look forward to seeing how these two cards compare and seeing who stands taller with the extra headroom. ATI has recently showed the consumer world they care by cleaning up their driver division and offering more tools and utilities in the Catalyst drivers. In fact, it has been said that ATI is now paving the way with its driver division. nVidia was once well known for its rock solid driver stability and after a couple of "optimization whoops'" they seem to be scrambling to get the reputation back. The newly announced NV40 has caused quite a stir and earned our coveted KOTH award."

FX5700U
At the lower end of the field we find the likes of the aimed at those who would like some change from their money.

"I really like this card because of many reasons, the first and most important being that it performs really well. The next best thing to a great video card is giving it two DVI ports to output that performance to DVI ports on two LCDs. The stock speed of this video card makes it a great buy and the overclocking ability makes it even better. One of my complaints with the XFX 5600 Ultra I previously reviewed was that it lacked a game bundle. XFX has addressed that negative aspect by including a pretty good bundle and also includes all of the necessary cables and adapters."

ByteSized
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6800 GT
A little slower, and a little less bandwidth, but a lot less money; that would be the then.

"Next to that, the GeForce 6800 offers a huge performance bump over the previous generations of graphics silicon. At the heart of the beast we find 222 Million transistors running at 350 MHz and yet the card manages to produce numbers that will force you to make noises like guuuaaahh. The combination of the new 61.34 drivers also really helped here. It's quite clear that NVIDIA still can tweak some more 'juice' out of the 6800 series and that makes sense."

Evening Edition: Tuesday, June 22 2004 - 9:49

Posted by: Marc

Chaintech Apogee

Chaintech's Apogee 5700UA is without a doubt an excellent mid-range graphics card featuring excellent cooling, great overclocking utility, the latest technology with DDR3 SDRAM, and a nice software bundle. In the race for the high-end cards, ATI seems to have the lead with the X800 Pro and X800 XT Platinum Edition but not everyone has $400-500 laying around to burn through and that much power is simply overkill for the vast majority of users out there. In the mid-range market with the 5700 Ultra against....

FIC

The design is tasteful, simple, functional and elegant all at the same time. Drive bays up front are all stealthed- there is no discernable bay for the optical or floppy drives up front. On the back, there are no screws holding the case cover to the chassis. The top of the unit is a black grill; holes are not drilled arbitrarily in the side like a lot of other units, the grill looks like....

Cooling and Cases

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Bytesized Bits

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Afternoon Edition: Tuesday, June 22 2004 - 2:33

Posted by: Scott

DVD Burner
Finally Dual Layer DVD Writers like this can be found in stores.

"We can't criticize much about DRU-700A reading capabilities, as it is doing its job meeting our expectations. As usual, only pressed DVD-ROMs are read at 12X, while dual layer discs, CD+/-R/RW are read at 8X. CDs (including Audio CD and VCD) are read at 40X. In addition, the DRU-700A handles low-quality discs rather swiftly."

Watercooling
OC-Zone take a look at which aims to provide silent cooling for your PC.

"What can I say about this watercooling kit...it got the looks, quality components, it has everything you need to put together a complete watercooling system, is easily installed, although may take some time mount it because, there's just so many things in the kit. It has a performance on par to the best air coolers in the market, and it's ultra silence, you cant hear a thing! Ups, I lied, you can, there's just a thing that makes me a bit crazy, since I installed the kit, its the sound of the HDD working!! Even went they're not being accessed, I can still hear the spinning noise!"

Notebook Mouse
I personally have no problems using the touchpad on a laptop, but I do know a few folks who could benifit from this

"Laptops/Notebooks are certainly getting a lot of attention as of late, especially with such technologies as Intel's much-touted Centrino features and the advent of high-performance mobile videocard options, both of which make portable systems more attractive to a wider range of people. Indeed, true desktop replacements are now a reality, and have been so for a little while, as many people find that all they need is a notebook. But regardless of who is using a notebook, most will find that despite their convenience, notebooks tend to lack on the ease-of-use of their pointing devices. While it may be that one can get used to, or even prefer the feel of a notebook's keyboard, especially if it has a good layout, it'll be hard to find someone who likes the use of a trackpad over that of a mouse."

FX6800
T-Break are taking the and put it up against the X800 Pro, it's main competitor.

"nVidia sent us their FX6800 reference card clocked at 325/700 which they say will be priced around $350. Along with other cards, we'll compare this card against its main competitor- the Radeon x800 PRO which is ATI's lowest end card in their new line-up as well. Coming back to the price, it would be interesting to see how this card compares to the high-end older generation of nVidia and ATI cards as well as they are somewhat similarly priced."

Canterwood
As I said earlier, with the launch of the 915 and 925 chipsets, canterwoods like this will eventually come down in price.

"Abit has always made great boards. As a proud owner of a VP6 that I purchased about four years ago, I can personally attest to their quality. Lately however, Abit seems to be stepping things up a bit. They are producing some very high-end motherboards targeting the overclocking and gamer crowd. One such board is the IC7-Max3 that I have with me to look at today. With features such as active northbridge and VRU cooling, six RAID-capable SATA ports and firewire connectivity, this board is packed with features. Add in some great overclocking and top-notch performance and you have the recipe for an instant classic."

ByteSized
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Morning Batch #3: Tuesday, June 22 2004 - 11:00

Posted by: Hubert

X800 Review
Dark Tweaker has a review up on the . The translated quote makes no sense to me, but the pics and numbers are what is important.

Why we straight for a PowerColor decided? Already alone because of the own version, which does not only have a long name, but also offers, which long names promise in such a way. In addition it was one of the first models, which we could do wars; -). Actually it would not have come us into the sense to select a mark which we did not use so far, everything only prejudices.

TWINX XL
is on the review bench over at Tech-Mods.

As an old hot rodder by heart, I'm a firm believer that cheap gasoline for the engine equals deprived recitation! Why feed a fine tuned performance engine with anything less than premium fuel. Well I look at a performance computer to be no different, why have less than premium memory running in a fine tuned system.

LGA775 Analyzed
Legit Reviews gives some attention to the and shares their thoughts.

Intel has brought a ton of new technology to the table and so far it starts where the previous technology left off. How far will this new technology will go and the performance benefits from it have yet to be fully understood.

Bytesized Bits

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A64 Mobo
R&B looks at which is based on NVIDIA's latest chipset housed in Chaintech's top-of-the-line package.

Tonite it's time to check out a nice looking AMD64 motherboard from Chaintech. They sent us their ZNF3-250 motherboard. Chaintech is well known for making boards and video cards that overclock very well so we will focus on that part later on in the review and also after some benchmarking etc.

A64 3200+
is the subject of today's reviewage over at OCModShop. With Socket 939 CPUs on the expensive side, the 754s are a good option.

This is a great processor and I am pleased with what AMD has done with it. Not only is it a great processor now but it will only get better. With 64-bit operating systems and software not far off this Athlon 64 has a lot to look forward to soon. Another great thing about this processor is although it is indeed 64-bit capable it is also 32-bit backwards compatible.

TWINX LL #1
Our buds at Tweaknews have a look at the , which pairs their low latency modules with some blinky LEDs.

Other than the price, which is definitely offset by the overclocking, the TWINX1024-3200XLPRO Kit by far is one of the better PC3200 performance kits on the market today. With full low latency support, great looking activity LEDs, stellar overclocking and Corsair quality wrapped into one tight package.

Here's a link to our review for your comparison reading.

915/925 Review
The Tech Report reviews the today. It was a wild weekend for Intel, so let's see what TR thinks.

We've tested the whole shebang, from the Intel 915 and 925X Express chipsets to new processors including the Pentium 4 model 560 at 3.6GHz. We've tested PCI Express graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA, and we've benchmarked Maxtor's impressive new MaXLine III Serial ATA hard drives with support for Native Command Queuing.

Cooling and Case Related

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Bytesized Bits

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TWINX LL #2
Controlled-Insanity PC Mods, other than having a long ass name, is the latest site with some on the review bench.

With all of the latest memory releases being geared towards the high FSB, high bandwidth, Intel platforms, it's about time that a company step up and release some quality low latency DDR, that can still handle decent FSB.

Morning Batch #2: Tuesday, June 22 2004 - 9:37

Posted by: Hubert

PC3200
For AMD systems this is one of the best you can get your hands on.

"The reason you should want this ram - clearly is adaptability and versatility! Whether you are running a stock system using DDR400, the Corsair XMS 3200 XL modules will provide you with the best possible performance, or if you are running an overclocked P4 the XMS3200 XL will accommodate speeds up to DDR500 (and beyond we are sure) at tighter timings than other modules on the market today."

More PC3200
More of Corsairs PC3200 but the Cafe have the with the activity LED's. You can catch our review here.

"Today we will be looking at Corsairs newest addition to the XMS family, the TwinX1024-3200XLPRO. If you haven't yet seen the bombardment of reviews for the TwinX1024-3200XLPRO around the net, then you are in for a treat. With the absence of BH-5 IC's on the market today I really didn't think I would see low latency IC's using anything less than BH-6, but it appears Corsair is going to change that. Corsairs TwinX1024-3200XL memory is sporting some of the lowest latencies currently available in the PC3200 market. Does Corsairs newest PC3200 have what it takes to take the performance crown in the ultra low latency market? Lets find out!"

Case
I'm not a fan of Acrylic cases like this , but if done right, and a tidy interior they can make quite an impression.

"It appeared there were over ten screws on each side panel just to remove it! I also did note that the acrylic was extra thick and it looked very sturdy. There are also five 80mm fans with standard wire grills. There is one fan in the front and two on the side of the case for intake, and one in the back and a blowhole on top for exhaust. This is a fairly impressive fan placement for an acrylic case and the airflow looked promising."

Canterwood
Hexus have gone bargain hunting in light of the new 915 and 925 chipsets from Intel (read about them here in our primer), which should drop the prices on the Canterwood platforms.

ByteSized
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90nm issues
With IBM and Intel having problems at 90nms rumors have begun to spring up about AMD also having issues.

Tuesday Morning: Batch One: Tuesday, June 22 2004 - 9:01

Posted by: Hubert

Grantsdale Review

The new GA-8GPNXP Duo is one of Gigabyte's latest high-end motherboard based on the Intel 915P chipset. Packed with all the features you could ever think of, Gigabyte has left no stones unturned.

Windows Backup

Backing up your data can protect you from the worst, in the event that your hard disk fails or files are accidentally erased. Windows XP includes a few handy tools that allow you to back up data with a few clicks of the mouse, but it is also very easy.

TWINX XL

Recently Corsair has brought a new series of RAM modules to the table. We like to call these their XL series. XL stands for X-treme Low latencies.font>

Bytesized Bits

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Take the red pill: Tuesday, June 22 2004 - 8:21

Posted by: Hubert

We had a news database mishap yesterday, so we apologize for losing our news from the last several days. We've moved to a new news system which is a bit more reliable, and are working on getting news to you guys and gals.