[H]ardNews 3rd Edition

nForce2 Reviewage:

Hexus has one of the first reviews up of the ABIT nForce2 board, the NF7. Sadly they do not seem to be very impressed with it. I have been testing our sample since late Wednesday and have run into some of the same problems that Hexus is stating. Seems to me that the PCI bus is holding back OCing on our board but ABIT engineers claim the PCI bus is locked at 33MHz. More when we know it, but make sure you check out the Hexus review.

I was a little dismayed to see our unlocked XP2400 only booting into Windows XP at a maximum FSB of 188, even though it would boot into BIOS at 205FSB+ with ease (no hard drive). Whether this is a PCI issue is unclear, as a competing nForce2 motherboard definitely has a locked PCI BUS. What's clear, though, is that it can definitely run the 166FSB processors with ease.

We are testing with a retail 2400+ as well and it will run fine at 166MHz bus (but not at 168MHz) and the performance is awesome with the dual channel memories.

Dark Underbelly:

This sort of stuff goes on all the time in the "review industry". We have seen even large companies in the past do their best to control the press. GeekExtreme lays the documented facts out. While a lot of the bigger sites do not find this pressure...much, you can rest assure the "small guys" have companies try to get control over their content all the time.

GeekExtreme is a fair and unbiased review site. We do not accept editorial control over our products. We never will. HoloMAXX now accuses us of being unable to be fair and unbiased, because we will not accept their agreement.

Extermination Needed:

While it could be, this is not about any fanboy sites. What it is, is an interesting read on the state of our software. Thanks Iceman.

The National Academy of Sciences earlier this year urged lawmakers to consider adopting legislation to hold software vendors liable for security breaches.