Celeron: ThreshFiring Squad

More about the my favourite processor from FiringSquad. Seems like they do like this processor as well! Why not? With Mhz to match the P!!! at a fraction of the cost, it has put massive processing power on the desktop of users.

"When looking for Celeron overclocking information, you often encounter references to the week number of a certain chip, as in "week 25 chips overclock well." You can find the week number on your chip, but don't let the number fool you. It's not the "week" the chip was actually made. Most likely, it's the week they were stamped and prepared for shipping."

Something which I did not know until then! All this while I thought that the week of the manufacture was stamped onto the chip!

Find out more...here.

GeForce 256 Compare:SystemLogic

Looks like Nvidia has a winner on their hands once again with a few manufacturers already announcing their Geforce products. They include Big names like Creative, Leadtek, Elsa,  Guillemot.

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GeForce 256:SharkyExtreme

Some new kickass hardware from Nvidia again, consolidating their place in the graphics card arena. Looks like it is going to be a exciting time in the graphics arena with the upcoming chipset from the BitBoys(Glaze3D), 3dfx(T-Buffer).

Here's some specs released from Nvdia about their new product that is rolling out from their wafers:

• 15M triangles/sec - sustained DMA, transform/clip/light, setup, rasterize and render rate.
  
• 4 Pixels per clock (4 pixel pipelines).
  
• 480M pixels/sec fill rate - 32 texture samples per clock, full speed 8-tap anisotropic filtering.
  
• 8 hardware lights.
  
• 350 MHz RAMDAC.
  
• Most feature complete for DX7 and OGL - Transform & Lighting, Cube environment mapping, projective textures, and texture compression.
  
• Will utilize 4x AGP performance with Fast Writes, which enables the CPU to send data directly to the GPU (1 GB/sec transfer rate), increasing overall performance and freeing the system memory bus for other functions.
  
• 256 bit rendering engine.
  
• Highest quality HDTV (High Definition Television) video playback.
  
• High Precision HDTV video overlay.
  
• 5 horizontal, 3 vertical taps.
  
• 8:1 up/down scaling.
  
• Independent hue, saturation and brightness controls in hardware.
  
• High bandwidth HDTV class video I/O.
  
• 16 bit video port.
  

• Full host port.
  

• Dedicated DMA video.
  

• Powerful HDTV motion compensation.
  

• Full frame rate DVD to 1080i resolution.
  

• Full precision subpixel accuracy to 1/16 pixel.

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Modified TNT2:HardOCP

Hee...something quite cool from the guys at HardOCP. They have some really new ideas about installing heatsinks onto their card! Nice round heat sink!

Check it OUT!

Celeron on PCI?:TheTECHZone

For those who are stuck with their Pentium motherboards and have the urge to upgrade to a new system, Evergreen Technologies has the perfect solution for you! The PCI slot upgrade allows you to upgrade your computer to a Celeron 433 with 128MB of Ram! The great thing is that it is as easy as installing a video or sound card. NO HASSLE!

Check it out here

3dfx Velocity 100: iXBT

Competing with the M64 3dfx has come out with a low cost card that does not compromise on performance. Let's hope it'll help some people hold out until NV10 or Vooodoo 4 comes into the market.

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Live! Vs Vortex 2: Pc Paradox

Competition in the video card arena is tough. But it has not been easy going for makers of sound cards as well. Creative which used to enjoy a monopoly in sound card has recently been challenged by Aureal, makers of the highly successful A3D sound API. Going one step further they have come out with A3D 2.0 to mount a challenge to EAX by Creative. Both of these API offer immersing 3D sound for games which support them. Depending on your needs and speakers configuration you might want to seriously consider sound cards using these 2 chipset if you are still holding on to your trusty old SB16!

More here

Clash of the 600Mhz: Firing Squad

Fresh from the wafers of AMD silicon plants is the Athlon running at 600Mhz! AMD was not just satisfied to take a back seat to Intel and has been rolling out faster and more advanced chipset through the months. After playing catch up, AMD has finally the weapon to break Intel's stronghold on the microprocessor market. If the synthetic benchmarks are any indication of how the Athlon will perform in real world application, it will give the P3-600 a run for its money! On most test the P3-600 lagged behind by about 5-10%, with the overclocked P3-660 inching past the Athlon clocked at 600 Mhz.

Check it out here

Glaze 3D: 3D Hardware

Something here for 3dfx and Nvidia to be afraid of judging from the specs of this graphics chipset from the Bitboys.1.2 Gigapixels per second , quad texturing and all the graphics features you could ever dream of. Now I have got your attention huh? Let's hope this does not fall as bad the the Riva 128 which suffered from image quality problems. The interesting thing is that there are only 1.5 million transistor on the chip. Compare this to the next generation of chipset from Nvidia and 3dfx which has 20 million transistors. Interested in knowing more?

Click here.

High Density Drives:Discover

180Gb on a penny-sized CD!?!?! Sound incredible. But that is what you can expect from the future of high density storage. Scientist are moving on to atomic levels to store data which allows more data to be packed in seemly impossibly small spaces.

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BX-Boards RoundUp:AnandTech

2nd round-up by AnandTech about BX motherboards. Since his last review, there has been some newer motherboards coming to the market. It seems that memory buffers on the Abit BX 6.0 does not make the motherboard more STABLE when you use up 4 DIMM. The champion this time round is, Aopen AX6BC, which proved to be the most stable board. But then the Abit BH6/BX6 is still a good buy for people who want to overclock their system. Pop down to AnandTech for the 23 motherboard shootout.

More here.

Nothing much happening recently, hence the lack of updates. However you can check out this funny dual fan concept for those who have a ABIT BP6 here.

G400 or G400 Max?: Matrox User

Well thatz the decision that you have to make when you want to get the latest product from Matrox! I'm thinking of getting one and it is a tough decision between G400, Voodoo 3 and TNT 2. G400 has great 2D and it costs only $199 for the value (16MB,125Mhz) which compares well with the Skywell TNT 2(16MB,150Mhz) and Voodoo 3 2000 (16MB,143Mhz). However if you are not a hardcore gamer and have a large display, the G400 Max would be the card for you. Period. Its performance at low resolution is not great but when you do pump up the resolution to 1600x1200, it smokes the competition at 32-bit colour depth. Maybe you can give me some advice? I'm now running on a Virge which is not really great coz of the low quality RAMDac. I'll be getting a new graphics card soon. Anyone using a G400 now, maybe you can mail me about that product and your views!

Full review here...

Celeron 101:Speedy3D

Speedy3D has a full article about the celeron. Yeah i guess you have an idea which processor is my favourite huh? I'm now running a celeron 300a overclocked to 450Mhz using a Abit Bh6 motherboard and i did not have any problems what-so-ever. Endless hours of Quake 2, Unreal, surfing (computer on for most of the day) and still going strong by the looks of it. However due to the recent improvement in the quality of the chips produced by Intel, it would be wiser to get one of those 366 celeries and get the chip to 550Mhz! The era of the 300a is over.

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NV10

Here are some specs about the up and coming NV10, the successor to the highly successful TNT 2 chipset from Nvidia:

NV10 Details: 

Transformation & Lighting acceleration with DirectX 7.0 and
OpenGL
estimated 15-25 million triangles/second
"350 MHz RAMDAC"
"about twice the fill rate of current generation 3D chips"
"HDTV support"

"motion compensation for full 1080i/480p HDTV displays" 
x-y video scaling acceleration
"colorspace conversion"

AGP 4X
32 meg and 64 meg versions

Compare it with the power of current 3D cards. This baby might just be about twice as powerful as the current cream of the crop Voodoo 3 and TNT 2! 64Mb on board Ram? 15-25 million triangles/second? Any takers??

366 to 550

Today I was helping my friend to fix up his computer. Since he was on a budget we decided that a 366($117) and a Abit BH6($160) motherboard would really be what he was looking for. Add a Creative TNT ($150) in, and we have a really kickass machine ready to handle any games u can get your hands on in the market! But the best thing was that we were able to overclock his Celeron 366 to 550! This was done without any additional cooling! It booted and went into windows without any glitches. Great. But if you want to try this out, I would suggest some really good cooling methods to prolong the life of the chip. 

AMD K7: FiringSquad

AMD might just get this correct with the launch of the K7. My experience with the k6 was one of frustration due to the fact that i was using one of the first 100Mhz motherboard which was powered by the SIS5595 chipset. Driver updates were frequent to sort problems with the AGP port.But with the arrival of the K6-3 AMD has got their act correct again and this time with the k7, it seems like they have a Pentium-III killer at their hands! At firingsquad the guys will give u a rough idea (hence preview and not review) what the K7 is capable of..and it certainly looks good. 600Mhz of raw processing power!

"AMD's engineers have returned to the drawing board, and are now attempting to prove they know jack, by creating the most powerful floating point unit ever seen in an x86 CPU."

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TNT 2 Roundup: AnandTech

10 page TNT 2 round up. What makes this review different is that it touches on a question that has been ignored in other reviews which is the 32Mb VS 16Mb on board video Ram. The ability of the card to overclocked depends on the memory as well since you can overclock either the memory or the core frequencies. A breakdown of the different type of Ram used in the different cards have also been included. Seems like the Hercules board has come up tops  in this review. If you have the money to spare, you might just want to pop that monster into your computer! That is if you have a processor that is 300Mhz and above.

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