[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%.