[H]ard|OCP

[H]ardNews 10th Edition

HardCore OC:

Just when you think you have seen it all, someone goes out of their way to put a new twist on the already extreme. In English too, but you won't need to read because there are tons of pics and the first one is a real knee-slapper. Thanks Ender.

Intel Pentium 4 2,4GHz o/c 3.9GHz - Asus P4T533-C (i850E) - Ati Radeon 9700 Pro o/c gpu500 mem380

Raging AIW 9700 Video:

Yeppers, how 'bout some video footage on a VidCard? RageUnderground has some splendid footage of Rikki Lake and what kind of real time "photoshop" effects can be applied to her and her crying guests with the ATi AIW 9700 Pro. Really.

[H]ardNews 9th Edition

Ugly VidCard Underbelly:

As the World Renders. You gotta love it, even if you hate it, sure keeps things interesting.

Suffice it to say, Nvidia looks like crap here, and deservedly so. They have been working feverishly to discredit ATI at every turn for years, and they have been pretty successful at it. HOWEVER, it would not be so easy if ATI did not keep shooting themselves in the foot. Besides, ATI uses the same kind of back-end pressure that Nvidia does, so they are both bad in this area.

Mental Note...

...to self. "Have friends kick my ass if I even buy another IBM hard drive."

IBM today introduced the world's fastest desktop hard disk drive with IBM-exclusive technology called "tag 'n seek" for its childlike simplicity. Known technically as tagged command queuing, "tag 'n seek" technology enables the new IBM Deskstar 180GXP to perform nearly 25 percent faster than its predecessor and widen the Deskstar performance gap over competitors by up to 20 percent. IBM begins shipping the Deskstar 180GXP in volume today.

I wonder if it will RMA itself? Or keep you up to date with your current class action lawsuit status for all those other IBM Deskstars that failed? Wishful thinking. Thanks Xerxes.

No DOOM in St.Louis:

Well hell, Donahue is a TV talk show host, doesn't that make him an expert? Just about as much as being a webmaster makes you a master of anything.

However, veteran talk show host Phil Donahue has long spoken out against violent imagery in video games. In 1972, he invited Long Island mother Ronnie Lamb to bring her message to his show and launch her campaign to ban video games. Twenty years later, Donahue took up the cause again on his MSNBC program, lambasting MIT professor Henry Jenkins -- one of the researchers who filed a brief in the Missouri case -- for his defense of video games.

MSI 648 Reviewage:

I have been beating this board around the test bench here for a few days now and capped it last night with a flash gone bad. First time that has happened in a while. All my hotflash attempts have left me high and dry. Let's see how the 648 Max from MSI did over at BenchHouse.

MSI made sure to produce this board without cutting any corners, which is a rule in most cases with non-Intel chipsets. An advanced BIOS and many advanced options can guarantee you that this model will not be outdated when the next generation of Intel chipset based motherboards appears. All in all, MSI 648 Max is the logical choice for all users who don’t want to spend a lot of money on a motherboard. On the other hand, SiS 648 will generously give extraordinary performance and many features of the southbridge in return.

[H]ardNews 8th Edition - Yamahaulin'

FREE Stuffs:

One last reminder that the Yamaha Drawing for four of their burners ends today. If you have not already entered, get your name in the hat.

[H]ardNews 7th Edition - Blair's Tech Edition

Fast Ram:

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Toshiba Corp. is putting the finishing touches on a 333-MHz fast-cycle random-access memory (FCRAM) that will usher in the second generation of its low latency memory line. This latest offering brings a 66 percent increase in bandwidth and up to a 20 percent boost in access time over the company's previous-generation device.

Less Power Scotty!

Intel is looking to make its processor designs more modular. This will prevent them from drawing too much power when running on batteries, without resorting to brute-force power-saving methods such as voltage or clock speed scaling.

Tubular, but Small:

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. — IBM Corp. has grown catalyst-free nanotube networks on silicon carbide substrates, the company said last week.

Google Likes Hammer:

Google.com, the world's leading web search engine, has dealt Intel Corporation, the world's leading microprocessor vendor, a rather serious blow by opting not to adopt Intel's 64-bit flagship processor, Itanium. Given that Google seems to be an otherwise tailor-made client for Intel's chip, this is a particularly galling loss that may reverberate to Hewlett-Packard, co-developers of the Itanium architecture.

[H]ardNews 6th Edition - Stoopid Stuffs

Go To Hell:

I figured that enough of you sent this in last week that this follow-up would be of interest to you.

At least that's according to the search engine Google ( news - external web site), which when given a query for the term "go to hell," kicks back the home page of the world's largest software maker -- a rather humorous result, considering Google's reputation for producing the most accurate search results.

Challenge Your Cubemates:

...to a paper airplane competition. And bet money because you are going to be making the most badass long flying planes there are. Thanks to Craig Evans. My money is on the PL-4 Hybrid.

This plane is a mix. It uses the built-up leading edge of PL-2, but is short and wide like PL3. It also likes the outdoors, and needs more room than PL-3.

Endangered Blonds:

If you thought crossing the street was the most dangerous thing they did on a daily basis, check this out. Blame Mr. Burns.

A new study by German researchers claims that people with blonde hair comprise an endangered species that will become extinct by 2202.

I guess pretty soon we won't have to wait to find out if it is natural or not.

Hoff Hassled:

All I could think of when I saw this was, "Friends don't let friends drink and Knightride." Yeah, that was pretty bad, but blame Douglas Terborg for bringing it to our attention.

[H]ardNews 5th Edition

UT2K3 In Da House:

Brent got the golden goods, so we should be seeing some more benchmark field leveling from him soon.

Related to this, if you are still using the utility that we posted last week, the guys at EPIC pointed out one change that needed to be made in the scripting. We have done that and a new version of the benchmark utility is posted here.

Sort of slow round here for a Monday. Hmm, makes you think something is going to happen tomorrow....

[H]ardNews 4th Edition

Still Going:

...and going and going and going. If you want to join up with the [H]orde, check out HardFolding.com.

Swifty Review:

EnvyNews reviews what is the most expensive HSF in the marketplace, the MCX4000, and compare it to the Intel stock P4 cooler. OK.

Well there you have it, the MCX-4000 rocks!

I would certainly hope it would compared to the "freebie" from Intel.

[H]ardForum Happenings:

Mixing Ram

MP3 Player Specs

Troubleshooting

Vapor Phase Cooling

Extra Laptop Panel Into Action

New Linux:

The new Redhat is here! The new Redhat is here! Doubt you will be able to dl it for a few days as the geeks are surely beating on the servers. Thanks Philipp Esselbach.

"September 30, 2002—Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq:RHAT) today released Red Hat Linux 8.0, a highly versatile operating system designed for personal and small business computing. Red Hat Linux 8.0 combines leading-edge Linux technologies with a new graphical look and feel that offers users a polished, easy-to-use operating environment."

[H]ardNews 3rd Edition

Sapphire Radeon 9700:

I bought four OEM 9700 cards the other day for our editors to use and test in various mainboards. The cards that showed up seemed to be exactly what was in our retail 9700 boxes from ATi, but they did have a "Sapphire" CD driver disk with them. GotApex reviews the Sapphire 9700 Pro in its retail version. It seems to be identical to the ATi card as well, right down to PCB color, but it does have a different HSF.

However, the Sapphire isn't really a step up in raw performance over the GeForce line - it's faster, but not consistently so, and the Open GL performance of ATI's drivers are still not quite where one would expect them to be after all this time.

ABIT KT400:

The "old-fashioned" ABIT board that sports the KT400 from VIA. An interesting new PCB color as well. Dunno what you call that...maybe "salmon"?

The KD7 is a good motherboard offering some excellent BIOS tweaking and besides that there's not much that separates it from the rest of the boards. Also, the KT400 does not offer much of a performance difference between the older chipsets and if you already have a KT333 board, we really do not see a reason to upgrade yet.

2800+ nForce2 Benchmarks:

Damien Ilmonen points us towards the MadOnion forums with a couple of URLs that show off some folks that are apparently under NDA with the AMD 2800+ but don't seem to know how to keep those benchmarks quiet. Then again, maybe they meant to. First Page. Second Page.

AMD Athlon XP2800+ (2.25 GHz) Asus A7N8X (Nvidia nForce2 chipset) 2 x 256 Mb Corsair PC3200 CL2 DDR ATI Reference 9700 crappy 10 Gb 7200 rpm Seagate HD Somehow PCmark (and 3DMark too) think it's a Duron. WinXP recognized the CPU correctly though.

Dragon KT400:

Surely a board that many of you are wanting to get your hands on, the Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra. If it performs as good as it looks, it will be a killer. LegionHardware has the facts.

Overclocking on the KT400 Dragon was quite successful, hitting a 191MHz FSB was possible by using an 8X multiplier. Resulting in a total clock speed of 1528MHz saw SiSoft2002 memory results increase by 25%.

[H]ardNews 2nd Edition

AIW 9700 Specs:

The TechReport boys have the scoopage for all you TV folks out there that have to have it on a PC...and a whole lot more.

ATI says that the AIW 9700 Pro will ship in late October or early November, so it should be on shelves in time for most holiday shoppers. Yup, another paper launch. The Radeon 9700 Pro is already out and has been for a while now, so there's no reason to believe that ATI will have problems or delays tacking on the AIW's AV and PVR components.

VIA is Popular:

Taipei, Taiwan, 20 September 2002 - VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator and developer of silicon chip technologies and PC platform solutions, today announced that this year’s VTF event will be bigger than ever before, with increased attendance and more sponsors, with at least 45 companies confirming their support of VTF2002 being held in Taipei and Beijing next month.

Read the PR in its entirety here.

Celery on Sale:

Bill Church points out a hell of a deal. OK, maybe not a deal for today's gamers, but it could certainly be a deal for someone looking to built a web/mail/surfing box for Aunt Sally or possibly a MP3/DivX box for the bedroom. Anyways, 900MHz Celerons with HSF units for US$10 at Frys.

INTEL® CELERON® PROCESSOR 900Mhz, 100MHz, FSB, 128KB FC-PGA2, RETAIL BOX w/FAN & HEATSINK

A reader adds this important point.

Called to order a couple of the $10 Celery chips, 9:30CDT on Monday - didn't bother as they have 9000+ on backorder! Figured I wouldn't see a chip before my 50th birthday anyways.

Copper Cables:

ViperLair looks at the copper-braided cables from Vantec. Certainly a bit different looking from those stainless ones.

Enter round cables, specifically the Vantec Copper Sheathed cables which are the subject of review. In most ATX cases, the hard drives are situated in the lower portion of the case. Dangling IDE cables can cause problems with air flow, especially if they're literally making a wall in front of the fan. Round cables "can" alleviate the problem, but contrary to popular belief, round cables should not be left dangling in front of fans either.

[H]ardNews 1st Edition

Bigger Than A Breadbox:

Well actually it is not bigger than a breadbox, but I guess technically it in not smaller than one either. That would be because this PC is the exact size of a breadbox as the guys over at SilentPC stuffed theirs in one.

...a teenager ran up, grabbed a breadbox, and yelled to his friends nearby, "Hey, lookit my new iMac! Hahahahahaha!" That was good enough for me. I bought one. The picture above shows the end result some 10 days later. It's a complete PC in a breadbox.

HyperThreading Peek:

The 2CPU crew has a bit of interesting information posted about Intel HT. They also have some HT benchmarks posted as well. If you are a Pentium 4 fan, this might be something you are using pretty soon.

To examine the performance impacts that hyperthreading has on our suite of benchmarks I enlisted Hooz to assist me in collecting the necessary data. I re-ran the benchmarks with 2GHz Xeons on my Tyan Thunder i860 and Hooz was kind enough to fire up his Iwill DP400 and run through the benchmarks again with his 2.4GHz Xeons.

Also, we recently saw this set of stickers on a mainboard box we came into contact with that shows support for HT will be built into this upcoming DDR333 Intel chipset, the i845PE.

Pentium 4 Cooling:

It is BIG, it is copper, it is Vantec at SubZero.

I personally would not recommend this cooler for a high end overclocking machine but this is definitely a cooler I would use to be put into machines that I would build for family and friends, as a matter of fact it will be going into the next rig I am currently assembling for family mainly because it performs better than stock and it's quiet.

[H]ardNews 7th Edition

AMD Moves BIG:

In what have to be the BIGgest compilation of one and two sentence paragraphs I have ever read, Matthew Fordahl (never heard of him), puts together the AMD Hammer fluff you have most likely already heard two or three hundred times. I don't know if I can take this for another six months. I personally would have loved to build our recent database servers with Hammer technology (we used AthlonMPs), so this is not a bash, just pointing out the blindingly obvious. Or at least what I see as obvious.

"If AMD is at all successful at their marketing and positioning," Brookwood said, "they will be able to convince a lot of people that 64 is at least as good as 32."

Sadly the rest of the world relies on marketing and the enthusiasts rely on price, performance and reliability to steer their choices.

10Gbps Copper:

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Mysticom Inc. demonstrated a transceiver that set a new watermark for high-end Ethernet signaling over copper wires at the Communications Design Conference this week, sending 10-Gbit/second signals over 25 meter copper using Infiniband cables, and over 10 meters using Category 5 unshielded twisted pair.

Yeppers, 30 feet or so over Cat5 at 10Gbps.

3D LCD:

Justin Carlett points out an interesting article over on InfoWorld.

The screens can only be seen in 3-D from certain angles and distances, however, and a "sweet spot indicator" -- a small bar at the lower end of the screen -- appears solid black when the viewer is at an optimum position for 3-D.

Similar technology has been around for a while now and we have experienced it first hand and it simply sucks for gaming. Still pretty cool if they can make it applicable to gaming though.

Paper No More?

The AMD AthlonXP is showing up in 2400+ and 2600+ flavors as in stock CPUs with many PriceWatch merchants. Just remember to check out the PriceWatch guys on ResellerRatings so you don't get hose.

New CPUiD:

A new version of H Oda's WCPUiD is out and about. I have currently posted it here for the time being. The file is around 225KB in size.

[H]ardNews 6th Edition

P4 Celeron:

Wonder why we don't do much looking into the Pentium 4 Celeron? Not much to it when it comes to OC and gaming. Might be good for your mom though. (No offense Mom.) LeaveMyBits alone has a quick look at it although they did not follow up with any comparative 3D benchmarks. Still, if you are around benchmark numbers at all, what they have will show you that it is pretty flat.

As far as overclocking this chip goes, it isn't anything spectacular. You can increase the speed a noticeable amount, which is always good when its for free - but no-one should buy this chip solely for its overclocking ability.

Worms 4 Sale:

No really, you can buy worms here. We hear they are not just for bait anymore. Some are even returnable.

Because WormSquirm wholeheartedly supports recycling, we have a very special educational offer. When you buy our worms for school projects, we offer to buy back all the healthy worms from you at the end of the school year.

Hot n Wet:

Oh wait, maybe just the wet..if you install it right. Then again if you don't install it correctly you will most likely end up with "Hot n Wet".

Effective cooling and acceptable noise levels seems to be an increasingly mutually exclusive requirement in these days of super-fast, super-hot CPUs. Watercoolers promise the best of both worlds, but they are tricky to put together if you build one yourself.