This article is more than 1 year old

Hardware Round-up spins the platters

Disktastic day

16 February 2000 Hardware Round-up is back after a couple of days leave of absence: sometimes there just ain't enough Reg staffers to go around. Anyway, here goes for a disktastic day in Hardware Review Land. First up is Storage Review, which takes takes time out to spin the platter with the Quantum Atlas V. This represents a "competent improvement over its predecessor. Improved scores across the board combined with heat and noise levels no worse than the Atlas IV allow it to displace the latter drive as the current 7200rpm SCSI champ". The full review is here. Next on the block is 3D Hardware which has "slapped" a review of Pioneer's "dead fast 10X DVD-ROM. Drives this fast are normally really noisy, but the Pioneer 114 manages really well in this chapter". But let's not forget it's Intel Developer Forum Time: Tech-Review.com certainly hasn't. And boy these guys are fast. Following the Intel demo of the 1.5GHz Willamette, the site has decided to "whip up a quick article outlining the information that is currently available on this new wonder chip". Finally, we mustn't let AMD fans feel left out. BX Boards ever-reliable Andy Drake has posted the first in a first in a series of VIAKX133 mainboards reviews. This is the Epox EP-7KXA Athlon KX133 and it's a goodie, according to Andy. "With voltage tweaks in 0.5v steps, bus speeds from 83Mhz up to 115, support for 133Mhz Front Side Bus and also an asynchronous memory clock, we finally have a viable alternative to the AMD Irongate chipset." 13 February 2000 Some good, hard controversial stuff on Tom's Hardware page a couple of days running. Forgive us for not yet covering it, we've been travelling to the Intel Developer Forum and its minority counterpart the AMD ligs off the Intel Developer Forum. Under these titles there is a deal of controversial stuff: Is AMD covering up bugs and A Titan Falls. The gist of these two pieces, written by different writers, is that AMD does not give the level of detail on errata on its microprocessors that we should expect from such a major player. The second piece discusses whether AMD can topple Intel, and that in unrolling his strategy, Jerry Sanders III has at first given his firm a chance against Chipzilla. To rather more mundane matters. Over at Anandtech, there is a review of the Iwill WSS-133N 810 mobo. A reader has pointed out that if Intel ever gets round to sticking one of those pesky TM letters after the words Flip Chip (FC), it might find itself in a spot of bovver with The Big Q. They point out that according to this page here, the term Flip Chip is a still registered trademark of Digital (Compaq). This is something that Charlie Matco should be interested in they point out. Well how about it Charlie? JC's News points out that 800MHz Pentium III Coppermine parts have started appearing on Pricewatch, suggesting that perhaps the drought is finally coming to a close. ® 11 February 2000 At Tom's Hardware, there is a look at the Platform 2000 conference which happened late last month, and which we were unfortunately unable to attend. This piece looks in some detail at the future of the different memory platforms over the next couple of years. No sooner did AMD release its 850MHz Athlon than Gamer's Depot managed to post a review/preview of the beastie. And Sharky Extreme also rushed to have a look at the Athlon 850MHz part too. Jonathan Hou at Full On3D has posted some information about Joshua. The company will be unleashing it at the massive CeBit show, which starts at the end of February. There's also some information on the SECC-FC PGA transition, which we wrote about a couple of weeks back. (See Intel to make major CuMine stepping April 7). We have an invite to meet Via at CeBIT. ® 9 February 2000 There's a piece here at Super 7 about a goldfinger style device called the Freespeed Pro from a UK outfit called Ninja Micros. It will let you clock until you drop, according to the review. The boy genii at Anand Tech have posted a review of a video card called the Absolute Multimedia Outrageous 3D Graphics GeForce DDR, a cognomen that's so heavy we're surprised it can get up in the morning. Our Brit friends over at BX Boards have posted a review of mobo the Shuttle AV64, a design that makes use of Via's PC-133A chipset. Missed this one out yesterday, but Tom's Hardware has taken a peek at the difference between the Athlon Irongate chipset and the KX-133 from Via, which takes advantage of the Super Bypass. ® 8 February 2000 That's what JC's pages report. You might also care to look at our report, which is here, to find out what Intel is telling its channel partners. AMD Zone's Chris Tom, who lives in Austin and so reads the local press, noticed that Austin American-Statesman, had interviewed Hector Ruiz, who wants to step into AMD's William Jeremiah Sanders III shoes, after a fashion. Lots of other AMD stuff on that site today. Ruiz will not leave his Austin home because, according to the local newspaper, his wife is a hardcore Austinite... Kyle Bennett at Hard OCP, has posted a piece about how to apply a hardware modification to those pesky PPGA boards so they can be used with pesky flip chip things that Intel is now making. And at Sharky Extreme, we see that there's a review of an Asus i820 mobo, with those thar Rambus RIMMs. ® 7 February 2000 At Tom's Hardware Pages there is an article that suggests the Via KX-133 chipset, which supports the AMD Athlon, will give the processor a boost, because it will supersede AMD's Irongate, which has somewhat "damned" the K7. Meanwhile, other hardware sites, including JC, are speculating like mad that the KX-133 in a microATX form factor, could well form the basis of Microsoft's legendary X box, also implying that AMD chips would be in there somewhere. And it's KX-133 everywhere, because Anandtech also has a review of the Via chipset at this page. Over the weekend, both AMD Zone and JCs reported that AMD and Computer Associates will make some type of desktop announcement tomorrow... ® Anandtech has posted a review of the Leadtek WinFast GeForce 256 SDR". Kyle Bennett at Hard OCP points to this Aussie Overclockers Site which we haven't visited before. Here the boys from Down Under take a look at a water cooling radiator. Wow. Ace's Hardware has a lengthy piece here about the K6-2+ with Johan De Gelas describing it as the final upgrade for Super 7. Tom's Hardware Pages takes a look at the Transmeta Crusoe announcements. 3 February 2000 Slot A has a review of a mobo using the new Via KX133 chipset. The boys have also updated their list of Athlon motherboards at this page -- there are now 56 mobos listed. Over at Ars Technica, there is a review of iWill's VD133. This, according to the review is a board that loves being put through overclocking torture. Meanwhile, at Sharky Extreme, there is a review of a Midiland Dolby Digital speaker system. More speaker systems over at CPU Review, where Bill Henning publishes a review of an Altec Lansing system. PC Game reviews the famous Vancouver mobo from Intel here at this page. ® 1 February 2000 At Anand Tech, there's an interview with Mr Shane Long, of Bitboys. The Glaze3D stuff and more are discussed here. At Brit hardware site BX Boards, there's a review of the infamous i810 mobo with a Socket 370 jammed close to its heart. Go over to Sharky Extreme for that site's view of the joint Gigabyte-Matrox mobo cunningly named the GA-MG400, just in case we forget. We know there were quite a lot of unhappy bunnies over at Cyrix when Via bought it last year. And we noticed that on JC's pages there's a X-Cyrix employees page which is a group of former employees looking for work after Via left the US outfit with a skeleton staff.... ® 31 January 2000 There's an interesting article here at Tech Junkie with a Via suit (rather than an Intel legal suit) who suggests that there is no conflict between itself and AMD because it is doing low-end chips, while Tyrranazilla is making performance processors for the desktop. Via regards AMD as one of its strategic partners, and it is certainly true that the latter's roadmap is chock full'o chipsets from the Taiwanese company. However, it just could be that this is a marriage of convenience. At AMD Zone, word comes that the K6-2 533MHz is a shipping in old Akihabara. JC's Pages point to a benchmarketing opinion piece, as well as to the Tech Junkie piece, above. Sharky Extreme took time out to visit Platform 2000 in San Jose last week. This link looks in detail at what was about. Lastly, but certainly by no means leastly, take a look at PGA 370, a site which not only looks at the CuMine stepping we discussed over the weekend, but also asks some questions about symmetric multiprocessing, which, according to the site, seems to have been disabled in some Flippy Chippy Pentium III combos. ® 28 January 2000 The boys at Full On 3D take a decko here at the Razer Boomslang 2000. This is a high resolution mouse. Why do you need one? Well, this site reckons that there's a "degree of smoothness" that other mice only aspire to. And if you need a surface for the mouse, there's always the Ratpadz, which you can find at Hard OCP. Sharky Extreme has written part two of a series on the audio-video products it saw at the Computer Electronics Show. Go here for the lowdown. Noticed a link from Anandtech to Target PC, a site that we haven't visited before. Here there is a review of the IBM PC camera. Video killed the radio star. And another new reference, to us at least. Here, at Gamer's Depot, there is a review of the new Gigabyte Athlon board, the GA-71X. ® 27 January 2000 At Aces Hardware, there's a piece about the AMD K6-2+ and the last possible gig for a Super Socket Seven jig. There's a review of an Asus Camino based board at Hardware One. Anandtech is looking here at the Diamond Monster Sound MX400 card. Kyle Bennett reviews The Maximizer at this page. This uses the so-called gold fingers on an AMD Athlon to make the chip scream for its life and go that tad faster. And here there is a review of a Viewsonic monitor. ® 25 January 2000 JC refers to a story on Asian wire which claims Taiwanese firms are being forced to buy Intel processors on the black market. Tom's Hardware Page is pursuing a Battle of the Titan's theme, and has just posted its third piece, looking at three cards. Our friends at Ars Technica have posted a review of the Athlon 750 at this page. And OGR has posted a review of the Athlon 800. Who knows, you might see a review of an Athlon on The Register soon enough. Anandtech has posted a review of the Nvidia Quadro DDR graphics card here. The card comes with 64 meg of mem and according to the boys it's a cool piece of kit. ® 24 January 2000 CPU Review has applied Linux to the Cold Fusion 1GHz Athlon box it has had for review, with excellent results, according to editor Bill Henning. There's a review here at Anandtech of one of those zooty boards whch use the Intel 810E chipset. This is a Supermicro mobo -- you may recall that some PC manufacturers have complained that the i810e chipset is not what it could be, and Intel is expected to announce an answer very soon now with the i815-II. Meanwhile, word comes from Japanese reader Battlax that Supermicro's mobo using the i840 chipset has now become available. Kyle Bennett at Hard OCP has had his Ratpadz reviewed in a couple of places. There's one here at Tech Report. We had two samples of this mouse pad delivered to Vulture Central last Friday and have put it through its paces. The nine pads on its base certainly give a whole lot more stability to this pad than those cheapo give-away ones you see everywhere, that's for sure. And there does seem to be a lot more grip between the mouse-ball and the large surface, which seems to be made of some substance brought to earth courtesy of the aliens found at Roswell. The IT Network has posted a review of ATI's Rage Fury Maxx. The review says that the high end gaming card is a worthy contender in the graphics battle. Meanwhile, Sharky Extreme has posted a review of the Diamond Viper 2, which the site says has good price/performance features. ® 21 January 2000 That's what Kyle Bennett at Hard OCP reckons in this piece. Basically, it's a way of getting all the heat out of your box and into the ambience. Yeah, one time we had an 1MHz Acorn Atom and its 6502 CPU ran so hot it melted the plastic case onto itself. A hacksaw job, that. A little while since we visited Ars Technica -- sorry about that folks. This link points to a review of a case, but the site is well worth bookmarking and looking at regularly. Blues News wouldn't go down well in Brazil. Subtitled All the Carnage that's Fit to Post, the site has up to date news on PC games that would make a pacifist quiver. Interested in Nvidia technology? Check out Riva Station, which is a German and English site and has some great information on 3D graphics. ® 20 January 2000 Hard OCP is reporting that AMD has hired lawyers to put pressure on dealers selling overclocked Athlons. According to Kyle Bennett, AMD claims that its copyright and patents are being violated by such actions. Overclockin has posted a piece about scraping layers off Celeron processors to get better performance out of the chip. The technique is called Sanding the Slug. And because Celerons are now so cheap, it probably won't kill your wallet if you get it wrong once or twice. The IT Network has a useful review of the Athlon 800MHz, in which it notes inadequate cache. Here's the conclusion... "In terms of performance, the Athlon 800 does not exhibit a commanding lead over a Pentium III of the same speed. The processor is also expensive. Users wanting more bang for buck might want to wait for the next generation of Athlons with integrated L2 cache". The full review can be found and linked at http://www.itnetwork.com/article4259. There's a link from Anandtech to a review, at Storage Review of Western Digital's Caviar WD205BA hard drive. 18 January 2000 There are no AMD referrals in the roundup today. It's a little while since we've been to Firing Squad, which covers games extensively, but also as a matter of course, the hardware that makes them fizz. Today, the site is loking at the Asus P3C2000 mobo. It's got i820 support, and that's a contentious issue at the worst of times. Tech prodigy Anand Lal has a review of the brand new 533MHz Celeron up on his site. We've heard whispers about fans on Celerons being dependent on the software that's powering a PC. Anything in that, folks? Sharky Extreme, to mix our bird metaphors, is taking a gander at the Guillemot 3D Prophet DDR-DVI. The $300 DDR box offers support for flat panel displays and LCD projectors. Kyle Bennett, at Hard OCP, is reporting that someone threatened his Pentium III-550 with a good headbutting until it overclocked to "an easy" 807MHz. See. Got through the entire thing and only mentioned AMD twice, at the beginning and the end... ® 17 January 2000 A hardware review on Cnet claims that Dell's 733MHz Coppermine based XPS system is a disappointing buy. Go here for the reviewer's comparison. And at Slot A, there's a review of the Asus K7 Athlon motherboard that was missing in Cyberspace for so long last year. Tech Report has a piece here on an Athlon level two cache speed control beta. And if it's TNT benchmarchitecture that you're after, Kyle Bennett at his Hard OCP site here has the dirt. We're going to take a look at all the overclocking sites we can find sometime this week, but in the meantime check out this 3D Cool, which keeps your beer cool if you've got a stack that need keeping cool... Over, briefly, to UK site 3D Now, which we hadn't noticed before. Plenty of info on PC platforms there. Please keep your suggestions coming -- we want to look at as many new ones as we can... ® 14 January 2000 We haven't looked at Kick Ass Gear before, but wish we had. This page shows you how you can take an innocent 466MHz Intel Celeron and make it scream 525MHz at you. Some other very good stuff here too. And on the same subject (kicking ass), wonder how the Brazilian government is getting on with the ban on vicious games it imposed just before Christmas? As long as it's still possible to access the Internet there in Bahia, it's going to be pretty hard to police, especially with sites like Kick Ass around, which on its front page has the Top 40 games demos Brazilians can download. Some folk have wondered why we haven't visited Aces Hardware for a good old while. This was not unrelated to a spat we got into with some guy who got very cross with The Register about 15-16 months back. But now Johan is there, we're sure we're on talking terms with them again. This piece here is about budget Athlon systems. ® 13 January 2000 The boys at AMD Zone have had a busy day of it. Aside from the fact that they've put together a piece on the AMD super bypass function at their Slot A site, they have also posted figures which suggest that AMD Athlons have already had their prices slashed, ahead of the official date of the 23rd of January. A .25 micron 500MHz Athlon now costs $173 (less than a brand new Intel Celeron), while the 600MHz part costs $249, the boys say. Anand Lal Shimpi at Anandtech has got his screwdriver out and reviewed the ELSA ERAZOR X2 DDR GeForce video card. At Sharky Extreme, there's a look at a PC case. A case, you wonder? Well, we do agree with Sharky that a well-designed case makes all the difference between a sweat-free build and a complete nightmare. Some of the cases out there can give you the equivalent of the death of a 1000 cuts. Another bug in the Intel Copper-Nein? That's what JC Pages are reporting. This time, it's to do with moving stuff around the MMX registers. According to the piece, Intel says it will have a fix in the erratumnotbug later on. Know of any other hardware sites we should be scanning? Or have you posted something on your own hardware site that would be interesting to our readers? Drop us a line here and we'll have a look at the pages. While we're inordinately fond of the usual suspects we cover, we're happy to look at others... ® 11 January 2000 At JC's news, there is speculation that giant Intel distributor Dell may report an earnings shortfall, following Gateway's announcements last week. If this report is correct, we still anticipate that the last domino amongst the major PC vendors will have internal psychological problems forcing itself to use AMD Athlons. Slot A, part of the AMD Zone empire, is reporting that its list of mobos supporting the Athlon has now overclocked the 50 mark. Like portals? How about this new Hardware Portal, which appears to be part of the Anandtech empire and opened last week. The CPU Review has posted a review of the Sys Cold Fusion 1GHz system. And at Sharky Extreme there's also a review of a 1GHz Sys Cold Fusion system. ® 10 January 2000 Despite predictions over the weekend that Gateway would announce the availability of PCs using Athlon today, the techies/marketeers seem to have jumped the gun, as witnessed by this Gateway page. Thanks to AMD Zone for the tip. We expect Gateway to announce PCs with Athlons today.... (Sure enough, AMD posted a press release to that effect on Businesswire when the US woke up this morning). See also Gateway to use AMD because of Intel chip famine Kyle "Clockin" Bennett takes a look here at an old piece of HP kit called the Panaflo Orb which apparently can be used to torture Slot One processors beyond their limit of clock endurance. Something a little different and Bootnotish here. On CNNDOTCOM -- a TV channel -- last night, there was a piece of puffery about Jim Clarke, he of SGI, Netscape and shutterby.com, showing him on his high tech boat. He is saying what we said a couple of years back -- expect to see the price of silver drop through the floor when the whole world moves away from the old film media. When we first met Jim nearly 10 years ago, he was on crutches after tripping over a hatch on his boat...and he was not in a good mode. Be that as it may, take a look at the Digital Photography Review, a site we haven't visited before, which has all the news about the up-and-coming market... The overclockers at Overclockin claim they have tested a D-Link 10MB network kit using a couple of NICs and a phone line. Lastly, not leastly, look at this Sharky Extreme review of the 533MHz Celeron, one of the last of its kind before the gulag catches up with the 66MHz front side bus... ® 7 January 2000 At PC Presence, a French site, there is a review of the part. Expect to see many more of these on the hardware sites RSN. JC has spent time typing K7-800 into the Pricewatch pages and getting the result $899 for AMD and nothing for the Pentium III-800. At Full on 3D there's a link to the Wu Name generator, which is fun. Perhaps not as much fun as the Jamaican version of The Register found online, but still a gas. At WuName, you type in your first and last name and you then get Wu'd. Examples: Drew Cullen is the Flippant She-Creature, Mike Magee translates to The Prickly Comedian, and Linda Harrison becomes The Big Wicker Ventriloquist... Bill Henning at CPU Review has posted some scientific data on the old Athlon... ® 6 January 2000 You've undoubtedly noticed that one of the sites that we regularly look at is AMD Zone. But yesterday we received an email from Chris Tom, who with his brother runs this and also the Slot A site. He was a little puzzled and perturbed to have learned of another AMD Zone in the UK. Certainly the similarities between the two sites are somewhat uncanny... c't is reporting on this page that Motorola may well enter the 1GHz desperation derby as a runner and rider with its G4 microprocessor. Get your Lernhowtospell & Hauspie or Babelish out if you don't read German. Sharky Extreme has started writing about the Apple Macintosh platform. We hadn't visited Wim's Bios Page before. But we have now. Very good Bios information and links to other places here. And one of the links from the site above is to the PC Disk pages. Wanna know about jumper settings, need utilities and the like? Check it out... ® 5 January 2000 At Full On3D, there's a picture of a design for Socket A, which will be used by AMD and its customers for the low cost version of the Athlon due out during the course of this year. And while we're on this subject of slots and sockets, weren't both Intel and AMD saying a few years back that to achieve the better speeds that their chip technology would offer, the processors needed to be mounted on slots. So what was all that about then? Marchitecture? At JC News, there's a benchmark of Athlon's Bypass function running under Linux and contributed by a Swiss techie. According to AMD Zone, the K6-III is not just resting, as the firm said yesterday, but is instead writhing around in its death throes, with the K6-2+ poised to deliver the coup de grace. Tech Report has taken an Athlon 800, kicked it up the butt and made it clock at 900MHz. This site is well worth a look for other Athlon clocking madness. Kyle "Clocking" Bennett at Hard OCPhas word of a Soft FSB program that lets you change your system bus on the fly. And while we're on the Kyle topic, check out this entry on the name from Brewster's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: "Kyle for a man, Carrick for a coo (cow) Cunningham for butter, Galloway for woo' (wool) Kyle, a strong corn-growing soil; Carrick, a wild hilly portion, only fit for feeding cattle; Cunningham, a rich dairy land and Galloway, long famous as pastoral country." ® 4 January 2000 The winner of today's Hardware Review's Instant win a Register baseball cap competition is Paul Felsheim. In answer to the question "where does Kyle's (as in Kyle Bennett, the supposed Texan of HardOCP renown) name come from, Paul was the first to pin-point its origins in "the Gaelic 'caol' meaning narrow. It is often used in the study of an area's surface to denote a narrow strait or channel - particularly in SCOTLAND". You might think Paul is a girly swot, but he's got a Register baseball cap. Unlike two entrants who got there before him - with the wrong answers. Sorry, but "his mother" will not do... how do you know Kyle wasn't adopted? Also, the reader who suggested that Kyle is Aboriginal for boomerang. We always thought boomerang was Aboriginal for boomerang. We also think you are confusing Kyle (male techie) with the wonderful Kylie Minogue(all-round Australian sex goddess). You should be so lucky, For what it's worth, The name Kylie is reputed to be an(not the Aboriginal word for boomerang. This may even be true -- there are, after all, several Australian aboriginal languages.


At

AMD Zone

the boys have noticed a piece which appears in next month's issue of

Maximum PC

speccing up Gateway's Athlon machine. And at its sister site,

Slot A

, there's an updated page of Athlon Power's K7 mobos. And

Ars Technica

is taking a peek under the bonnet of the Motorola G4 processor, contrasting and comparing it with Athlon Power's K7. Away from AMD, at the end of the last century,

Tom's Hardware Guide

took an in-depth look at the ATI Rage Fury MAXX. The frenzy never stops.

Sharky Extreme

also flies by the same topic on its pages. Anand Lal Shimpi reaches the levels of the chip stratosphere with his piece on

Anandtech

called

Pro-Engineer Comparisons of High End X86 CPUs

.

2 January 2000: Intel mobile roadmap laid bare Kenneth at his tech pages

has gone for it and published Intel's roadmap for the mobile platform this year (19100). SpeedStep (Geyserville) is the name of the game here, and Chipzilla will manage to do 800MHz CuMine SpeedSteps by year end. This page also contains the roadmap for mobile Celeron products. Download Eka. At

AMD Zone

there's this .EXE file called CHIPID which checks the 751 AMD chipset to see if super bypass is enabled. Go to AMDZONE's front page for some explanatory blurb before you download it from

here

. Own risk stuff... Download Dva. At

3D Files

, which we noticed by looking at Anand Lal Shimpi's pages, there's a link to a download of utility PowerStrip which works with Miicrosoft OSes. It's a beta version, so at your risk, OK? German site

Hardware Lab

talks about something called the TweakCard, which apparently uses Athlon Power's K7 Goldfingers to overclock until eternity...

Electronic Business Asia

is reporting that Via will make a big splash at CeBIT 2000, showing its Samuel chip, while Rise, who we saw at CeBIT 1999, has still not given up on its range of processors. It's yet another Bank Holiday in Blighty tomorrow, folks... ®

30 December 1999

While people have been stuffing themselves with Christmas pud and wassailing away at innocent apple trees across the rural idyll which is today's England, AMD has been applying its virtual screwdrivers to its 750 chipset. So says

Tom's Hardware Guide

in this piece. It could be argued that one reason AMD has done so well this year is that it took note of the large overclocking community -- a set of people one chip distributor described to us as the Mad Power Nutcases. Intel, on the other hand, did not seem to want to encourage people to mess around with their machines, despite the fact that if people blow up their processors, they'll just have to buy another one. Now,

Overclockin

has posted a look at the infamous gold fingers on the AMD Athlon and this piece says overclocking is just a piece of cake.... And more AMD news. Anand Lal, at this spot

here

, has taken a look at Kryotech's 1GHz supercooled Athlon system, which has already made its way into a number of systems. ®

29 December 1999

Kyle Bennett at

Hard OCP

has noticed that Soyo is taking no chances with the Y2K bug, and has already released information about an Athlon mobo, but dated the 3rd of January 1999.... Sharky Extreme takes a look at the new flip chip Coppermine designs at 500 and 550MHz and says they offer a great deal if you're an overclocking kind of a soul. Go

here

for the piece.

Super Seven

thinks the time will soon come when there is a PC in every room in our houses. Every room, even the little one? Whatever, here you'll see a review of one of those little legacy-free ATX Flex boards, this one from Taiwanese firm Elitegroup. While the i820 Rambus saga rolls on,

Hot Hardware

, which we haven't visited before, has posted some information on how well such boards perform. ®

28 December 1999

With the aid of liquid nitrogen, it seems there's little these enthusiasts aren't prepared to try. So at

Vision Online

we have a claim that a Japanese fan (

ha, ha, Ed

) has taken his 750MHz Pentium III to the staggering speed of 1286MHz. Don't try this at home, those of you who have ready supplies of liquid nitrogen in your deep freeze... Many hardware sites are reporting that AMD will take a scalpel to some of its prices on the 4th of January next, and at the same time introduce the 800MHz Athlon that is upsetting Intel so much. And, on the AMD front, in the Mamma and Papa of all microprocessor wars, there's a page, in German, of the company's plans at

Tom's Hardware

. Time to drag out your Babelfish or Lernhowtospell software again if you don't read the language. On the same subject, a reader has asked us to have a bash translating the information at Akihabara Pricewatch about the missing two capacitors on Pentium III-750. We don't have the language here, but do have a copy of Lernhowtospell & Hauspie's Japanese to English translator. We're not going to try and make sense of this information, but present it to you in the form L&H machine translates it. Which is: "For an interesting deep matter, there is a little mystery for Pentium III 750 MHz. 500E MHz/550 E MHz of FC - PGA version to be on sale in front with, with 750 MHz if I try to see and compare it, the past understands that the capacitor that was made a run on 14 for CPU back (on the side of a pin) decreases for 12. Though the past looked like "III" of Roman numerals also just, strangely, because it decreased two as the central vertical advanced wanes with 750 MHz, there is "H" this time as arranging it of a capacitor it is visible like a character of "river" also. I newly can do an object like a golden guidance road pattern for it is what and meaningful, and, portion. "Are indistinct for whether these change with an inside specification or not either of. For a data seat 25 days (soil) as not opened the present time to the public, whether to be Dual (SMP) support or not also includes it and has no choice but to say with a free mystery now." Got that? The original reference to this page can be found below... ®

27 December 1999

Our friends at

c't magazin

have posted a roadmap for Intel, Via and AMD for next year. You're going to need Babelfish to translate it if you're not a German speaker, but if you're an English speaker, there's a pretty clear table that gives you the details you might want to know about. And if you're a Japanese speaker, have a gander at

Pricewatch

. Battlax writes us to notify us of the availability of the Pentium III 750MHz part, Viper II, and the Pentium III Xeon 666. There are prices given in yen and pictures of Intel's now famous flip chip socket 370 package. According to Battlax, who points to

Pricewatch

, again, there are a mysterious missing two capacitors on the 750MHz part. Anandtech used Boxing Day to have a look at some

flat panel speakers

from Monsoon. If your PCs suddenly got very slim, you'll want to have speakers to match, is the idea. Sharky Extreme takes a look at

Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine

on this page. Keep your hat on, Harrison. And finally,

HHardware Guru

has an interview with the folks who designed 3D Mark 2000, which clarifies some of the haze surrounding the vexed question of benchmarketing... ®

23 December 1999

At

Target PC

, there is a piece about AMD's roadmap next year which is worth a read. According to these folks, the K6-III is now in dodoland, and has entered AMD's own little gulag... The folks at

Overclockin

have posted a piece that compares and contrasts seven pieces of memory technology.

CPU Review

looks at Intel's licensing of 3D Labs patents in quite a bit of detail.

JC

points to this

bulletin board posting

which suggests that Intel engineers have decided to have another decko at their Willamette design, given the intense competition that the Athlon is likely to offer during the year 2000.

22 December 1999

There's a bit of a rumble happening over there at

AMD Zone

, which feels that

Sharky Extreme

has been a little biased towards Chipzilla 2000 and its 800MHz Pentium III Coppermine...Sharky E denies it. And no sooner does Chipzilla 2000 get its flip chip Sockety 370 Pentium III kind of out the door than the overclockers get on the case. There's one at

Anandtech

and young Kyle at

Hard OCP

is also giving it a good kicking, we are given to understand. Slightly away from the chip wars and over to

Tom's Hardware

, where the good doctor and his team take a look at an Asus deluxe mobo, in the continuing Battle of the Titans series the site is running. At

Sharky Extreme

, already slightly mentioned in these despatches above, there's a guide to what a respectable gamer might expect from Satan Claus in his or her Yule stocking this festive season. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like