[H]ardNews 3rd Edition

Win2K On The Xbox:

Well the guys that worked on the Linux hack for the Xbox have got Win2000 working on an Xbox. Pretty damn cool, too bad MS is already changing the mainboards on the consoles to prevent this stuff.

Today the Xbox Linux Project announced that Microsoft Windows 2000 has been successfully started and run on a Microsoft Xbox gaming console. This has been accomplished by using the Linux operating system, which already works reliably on the Xbox, as host environment. Windows has been run inside Linux with common PC virtualization software. Full networking is supported and Windows 2000 can make use of a keyboard and a mouse connected to the Xbox, as well as of any other devices connected through the USB.

Bluetooth For WinXP:

Bluetooth has been the next big thing, for so long, we almost forgot what is actually did. I remember 2 years ago listening to the “revolutionary wireless…” stuff back then, maybe this will give the tech a boost.

MS on Thursday released to manufacturers an update that would add Bluetooth support to Windows XP. Bluetooth allows peripherals, handhelds and cell phones to connect to PCs without wires. The technology is complimentary to 802.11b wireless, or "Wi-Fi," which is used to network computers together or connect them to the Internet over the air. Bluetooth support in Windows XP could be a big boost for the much-hyped technology that has yet to find much momentum in the consumer market.

[H]ardNews 2nd Edition

Sapphire Radeon 9700 Pro:

The Radeon 9700 Pro, this one being a Sapphire branded card, is on the test bench at AMD World going head to head with a Ti4600.

The gap is already fairly large at 1024x768 and eye-candy off, but as the settings are increased the Radeon just walks away. In particular look at that very last setting: with everything on the Ti4600 is running a slide-show, but the 9700 would be playable - if 3Dmark2001SE were actually a game.

NVDVD Review:

NVDVD compared to PowerDVD and WinDVD in this write up at BoogleTech. I still think that NVIDIA should offer the player as a free download, and not charge for it like they plan. That’s just me talking though.

Selecting a DVD Player isn't usually a decision you will spend a lot of time on. But if you take a closer look, it is a much harder decision than you first thought. You need to think about what graphics card you have, what type of image you like to see, and whether you like playing about with extra features.

Buncha BIOS Updates:

Need a new BIOS?? Hit up ASUS today and grab a new BIOS for your board. There is a handful of new ones listed, so grab em’ if you need em’.

[H]ardNews 1st Edition

Cool Your Hard Drive:

Bjorn3D put a little fresh air on the ol’ hard drives with the Antec hard drive coolers. I am a firm believer in cooling, especially your drives, so check out the review here…it’s a quick and easy one pager.

We can see that the drive cooler heatsink, 2 fans, and specifically designed housing do make a big difference in cooling An added bonus is the temperature monitor which, all make for a handy way to monitor your hard drive's health.

HardOCP Cartoon:

If you haven’t visited Troy’s Bucket lately, you are missing out on a cool ass online comic. Matter o’ fact this comic here pokes a little good natured fun at Me, Kyle and Asia. Funny stuff…they even included my infamous cigar, and Kyle BBQ’ing with CPU’s…check it out.

Get On The Bus:

Got fans? Wanna control them with the flip of a switch? Speed em’ up, slow em’ down, turn them off? Well, you can do it all with this baybus being reviewed over at PCA.

In the continued pursuit of keeping our system and expensive peripherals cool, we usually add more fans. It's not uncommon for many of us overclockers to have 3 or more case fans and in some extreme cases (c'mon, raise your hand) some even have six! Of course, don't mind all the noise those fans put out, just as long as our system is cool. What? You'd like some peace and quiet? Why can't we make those noisy fans spin slower and quieter when we do not need the cooling.

PC Skeet Shooting:

Our buddies, Bob, Luis and Ben thought it would be fun to take their system out and put a ton of lead into it with shotguns and send me the pictures. Heh…cool.

[H]ardNews 10th Edition

Ping As A Speedometer?

Blair sent me this link to an article about using computer pings to measure the speed of light. Pretty damn cool stuff when you think about it.

A centuries-old endeavor has leapt into the computer age with a novel new method to measure the speed of light proposed by physics educators at Youngstown State University. "The approach is simply to reflect small data packets -- ping signals -- between two computers that are connected with Ethernet cards and cables, and record the round-trip time," method author and physics professor Michael Crescimanno explained in his recent paper on the topic.

H20 Box:

Sudhian, formerly VIAHardware, has a review of CPUfx’s complete water cooled system. Everything you need tucked into a nice aluminum case, very cool. The fellas seemed to really like it to, check it out:

The CPUfx Koolmax - Kool 101 would make an incredible gaming box to show off. It would fit in very nicely in a modern office. One might perhaps imagine it in their entertainment area. Above all, it would make a great addition to the "Must Have" list of anybody looking to get into performance computing. Newbie and veteran overclocker alike have every reason to be impressed.

Glowy Cables:

I figured out a long time ago that black lights in your case are only cool if stuff in them actually glows ( imagine that ) like these glowing rounded cables. Cool stuff for case modders.

Today I would like to introduce you to a new product from AKASA, UV reactive rounded cables. I'm sure you know that a rounded cable is little different from a normal IDE Cable, but there has been some argument as to whether they actually reduce hard disk performance or not. So I'm also going to attempt to lay out the facts about it.

RC5-64 Cracked:

Well, it was actually a few months ago, then discovered last month…and umm, announced today. There you have it.

Kinda anticlimactic now wasn’t it. I’d rather be [H]ard|Folding anyways, how bout you?

Useless Studies:

I want a grant from the government to research this kinda crap. A very big grant.

Women change their Web habits more than men when they become parents, according to a new study by an Internet market research group. ComScore Networks found that family community sites and home furnishings retailers attracted the highest percentage of new and expectant moms. Toy retailers then porn sites, respectively, garnered the highest concentration of dads.

[H]ardNews - UPDATE!!!

UT2K3 Benchmark v1.001:

Working with NVIDIA, we have made a single change to our high quality UT2K3 benchmark settings. It is actually a pretty simple change but seems to have an adverse on High Quality score on cards such at the 4200 and "lower". The changes made should not affect visual quality in any way shape for form. We have verified the information given to us by NVIDIA with EPIC Games.

Brent will be posting a follow up to this as well. Thanks to NVIDIA and the guys at EPIC for helping us make it a better utility and setting us straight. Hell, I am sort of surprised we only got one correction. Brent deserves props as well for good work.

The old files have been removed from the server so the old link will be dead. The new v1.001 UT2K3 Benchmark can be downloaded here.

Please feel free to direct link, mirror, or redistribute the file at this time, thanks!

[H]ardNews 8th Edition

Intel DRAM Speculation:

A very interesting article that is speculating that Intel is looking hard at the DRAM market. Of course there is no confirmations from Intel other than “we talk to them guys all the time” kinda stuff.

Eric Tan, a vice president at Powerchip, told EBN that Intel and the Japanese chipmakers “have conducted talks for several months on the alliance,” but he declined to provide further details. An Intel spokesman in Folsom, Calif. downplayed the discussions. "Basically, it's just speculation. We talk with memory vendors all the time. We're trying to coordinate capacity, so there's no news there. Anything else is speculation."

MSI KT4 Ultra-FISR:

The bright red PCB and loads of extras make the MSI KT4 Ultra-FISR reviewed at PCStats a board seriously worthy of your consideration. Gotta love the Gigabit ethernet…and why not, if you can take everything else the “extra mile” why not your LAN too?

MSI have adopted bluetooth and the very alluring 8X AGP. The KT4 Ultra-FISR is based on the brand new the VIA KT400 chipset. The KT400 chipset supports AthlonXP processors at FSB's of 100MHz, 133MHz, and the tantalizing 166MHz. Now even with on board IEEE1394 and bluetooth support, it is really those two small Serial ATA 150 connectors which manage to draw our undivided attention.

Hydrogen Car:

Saw this on CNN awhile back, now Wired has an article covering this GM Prototype that is pretty damn cool. The car is on a “skateboard” design that keeps everything needed to control, power, motivate the car in the floor board area. You can actually lift the body off and put a new one right on…sign me up for one.

[H]ardNews - NEDs

New NEDs:

NEDs v40.71 Beta. That is all.

[H]ardNews 6th Edition

CPU’s On Linux:

This review is for all the alternative OS guys out there, Linux Hardware reviews both the XP2400+ and the P4 2.4GHz and P4 2.8GHz CPU’s. Good info here, certainly worth a look regardless of what OS you use.

Seems like there has been a slight shift in the recent past as now a comparable Intel chip can be had for less than the AMD part. When looking at Intel's high-end parts though we see an almost $300 markup for 400MHz of power and a faster FSB. In addition to the actual costs though, it's important to note that while all of the Intel processors are available now, AMD's newest chips (2400+ and 2600+) won't be available until the first of October from most online retailers. When is comes to evaluating what's the best bang for the buck, it seems prudent to recognize what you will be using your computer for.

Creative Labs Ti4600 Review:

Games Fusion has their hands on a Creative Labs 3D Blaster Ti4600. Somewhat of an odd review, they tested the card against a Radeon 9700, but they only used MadOnion’s 3Dmark 2001 SE for benchmarks, and the test systems were running at different speeds as well.

Ti4600 may no longer be the fastest card on the market it still does the job and now with its affordable reduced price what better time to get that upgrade you’ve been thinking of.

P4 2.66GHz C1 OC’ed:

Some serious air cooled overclocking going on at BlargOC with their C1 stepping 2.66GHz CPU. From the looks of things, they ran theirs CPU all the way up to 3.5GHz. Sweet.

Today I look at the next step in Intel's Pentium 4 line, the C1 core. The C1 core will allow Intel to increase the clock speed of it's Pentium 4 line far above the older Northwood core cpus, with a tiny increase in core voltage and a slight change in the layout of the external components (see later). The C1 core should be available in all flavours of P4 from 1.8GHz upward, but for the moment, the only sure way of getting a C1 core cpu is to get one of the following cpus; 2.50GHz, 2.60GHz, 2.66GHz, or 2.80GHz. So, this review and overclocking test will concentrate on the 2.66GHz part, which runs with a 20x multiplier and 133MHz FSB (533 QDR).

[H]ardNews 5th Edition

Power Supply Round-up:

Quite the day for “round-ups” today, Tech-Report has a handful of PSU’s that they pitted against one another. The results just may surprise you…or maybe not, either way they have some good info in this review.

Power supplies are generally not thought of as the most interesting PC components, but they can often be the most vital, especially for system stability when you're pushing your hardware to its limits. You see, the power supply is responsible for keeping all of your PC's flashy goodies fed with ample quantities of steady, clean power. Without a good power supply, your high-end system could be reduced to a mess of crashes and instability.

EPoX 4G4A+ Reviewage:

The i845G powered, EPoX 4G4A mainboard spent a little quality time on the MikhailTech test bench. EPoX seriously outdid themselves on the box though…errr, flashy pink.

Although there are a few problems when using DDR400 on the 4G4A+, the problem does not come from the board but rather from the chipset. And let's face it, this chipset doesn't even support DDR333 officially, but EPoX did their best to include it and it works great. So asking a DDR266 chipset to run DDR400 is a bit too much, but i845G had no real problems doing that. Except for the increased voltage with the 512MB module, I had no problems with DDR400. Other than that, the 4G4A+ is a very solid board, mainly for overclockers and tweakers.

37 OS’s One PC:

Check out this story of a 18yr old guy who built a box that has 6 hard drives and 37 different operating systems on it. No kidding. MaximumPC has a write up covering the whole deal.

The rig’s audacious architect is 18-year-old Richard Robbins—an Eagle Scout, all-state jazz drummer, and tireless OS enthusiast who drove with parental units and PC all the way from Southern Utah to our offices in Brisbane, CA just so we could verify the authenticity of his creation. Is this guy nuts? No. But he does confess that he launched the Menagerie project specifically because an online computer expert said it couldn’t be done.

Windows 3.1.1 pWnz j00!

[H]ardNews 4th Edition

Unreal Internet Traffic:

Not sure how they came up with the data, but Atari is saying that the Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo made history by making up HALF the worlds internet traffic on the release date. If the statistics turn out to be accurate, that is amazing. Considering the fact that at any given time, half the people on the internet are downloading pr0n, there should have been no bandwidth left on that day for anyone else…heh.

According to statistics tracked by Web sites offering the demo, nearly 1.2 million users accessed the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo between Friday night and Wednesday morning. The global Internet 'Traffic Index,' which tracks how fast information is transferred through the Internet, took a sizeable hit when the demo was released on September 13. As a result of so many people downloading the file, the average speed of the Internet worldwide was cut nearly in half.

[H]ardNews 3rd Edition

Five Board Shootout:

Five i845E boards are rounded up by the Overclockers from New Zealand. Abit, Aopen, Asus, Gigabyte had boards included in this review, so if you have wanted to see these boards go at it, here’s your chance.

Today we bring you the shoot out of five I845E motherboards. The five motherboards are Asus P4B533, Aopen AX4Bpro 533, Abit BD7 II, Abit IT7 and Gigabyte 8IEXP. Unfortunately, Epox was not included in this roundup. The once popular Epox motherboards suddenly become a scarce product in New Zealand especially their top of line Pentium 4 motherboards.

ASUS Ti4200 Deluxe:

The ASUS 8420 Ti4200 Deluxe is getting some press at Riva3D. This is not your ordinary Ti4200 card either, the come with the same PCB and layout as the Ti4600 cards, BGA memory and a decent bundle. We looked at the same card a while back, our review for comparison is here.

Comparing even to high-end video cards such as it's Ti4600 series older brother, it may be a little too much to dish out for the average gamer. With all the manufacturers producing the Ti4200 cards, we ask ourselves if the Asus V8420 Deluxe can be far better than other venders producing the same type of graphics card. With 128MB SDRAM DDR, a full set of extra goodies and an excellent bundles, we will perform a series of tests to see how well the Asus card fares on some recent games the average gamer would be playing.

Bums And Auctions:

We thought about all these 50” Plasma screens being auctioned by Enron and wondered how much they’d go for…but the thought of standing in line to bid on those guys stuff was less appealing than hanging out with these two dummies that are now spending their “Bum Fight” proceeds to keep themselves out of jail.

[H]ardNews 2nd Edition

Yamaha CDR-F1DX Review:

CDR-Info has a hell of a write up on the latest in external CDRW drives the Yamaha CDR-F1DX with Disc T@2. We normally don’t cover much drive reviews, but these nice drives with a slick new “tattoo” feature that I personally really like.

The YAMAHA CRW-F1DX offers many features to users who wish an external desktop recorder. The drive supports both FireWire (IEEE1394) and USB2.0 interfaces, making it a truly universal solution for both MAC/PC platforms. In addition, the CRW-F1DX offers all the unique features of its internal brother (CRW-F1E), DiscT@2, AudioMASTER Pro, CD-RW Audio Edit and of course Mt. Rainier format.

We are also giving away a few Yamaha drives right here at the [H].

Super Silent Cooler:

EXHardware takes a look at the Arctic Cooling Cooler that utilizes a temperature controlled fan to keep things quiet. How well does it work? Read the review and find out…

The fan's speed is controlled by a thermal sensor fixed in the middle of the heatsink. The higher the temperature, the faster the fan spins and with faster speed, more noise is generated. When the heatsink is cool however, it slows down and makes less noise. Although I would personally prefer to have my fans run at one constant speed, this is a good idea for those who want their systems to be quiet when they are asleep.

Getting Those ZZZ’s:

Issue 145 of ZZZ Online is up, and they talk about their usual run of weird tech related stories, but they also have a story about goats & silk. Before you say anything, the silk was not a gift to the goat ( regardless what that damn goat says ).

Some genetic engineers inserted spider DNA into goat genes, the result being goats which produce silk in their milk. Silk, specifically spider silk, is one of the strongest (weight to strength ratio) materials known to man, and if it were easy to produce, it would have endless applications.