[H]ardNews 3rd Edition

NVIDIA Cg @ Work:

You hear a lot about Cg language but what does that mean to you and me? Not much, unless the game developers can actually use it. Here is an article outlining the nVCg plug-in for Maya 4.5. Other Cg tools are available for SoftImage and 3DSMax as well. So bottom line is hopefully we will be seeing real DX8 and DX9 games with a much shorter time to market. VP of GameDev with NVIDIA told us in a meeting at Comdex that we are going to see games this next year that really take advantage of some of the DX9 features. Thanks Iceman.

"I have been waiting for something like this for a couple years now. To have the ability to see our high-end in-game shaders in the Maya viewports is going to streamline our art pipeline and put a lot of creative power in the hands of our artists," said Jeff Dobson, senior artist for Star Wars: Galaxies at Sony Online Entertainment. "The integration of the tools into Maya is seamless."

nForce2 Review:

Scott has been burning the midnight oil over at ClubOC and has delivered us a write-up of the MSI K7N2-L. We currently are testing this board as well. Also, in case you missed it, we posted our review of the ABIT NF2 board on Christmas Eve day.

After beating the board up with quite a few different settings, I found what seems to be the most stable Overclock while holding a 200MHZ Front Side buss. The RAM bus is running 1:1 using Manual settings of CL-2: 3/3/6 to match the specification by Corsair for running at this speed. The CPU Multiplier is set at 11.5 which gives us a total of 2300 MHz.

Dets Comparisons:

First you can head over to TweakersAsylum to see what those crazies have to say about the latest NEDs, and if that does not blow your skirt up, you can always check out BitBenderTech if you need a second opinion.