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The chance of a heatsink falling off completely is pretty small.

Depends on how you use your PC, IMO. It's not a problem with my 1.4 TBird at home, because I assembled the system at home and do not plan to move it around.

If you want to ship the box, or even take it to a LAN party in your car over bumpy roads, you better think about removing the heatsink - especially if you have one as heavy as this beast or one with a high center of gravity like this one. Unfortunately, removing the heat sink without damaging the processor die or popping off a few SMD resistors with a badly designed clip isn't exactly trivial in many cases, not to mention that there's also the issue of correct handling of thermal paste/tape involved.

In my PC, there are only two flimsy plastic noses on the CPU socket securing the heat sink clip, and the sink is quite heavy. I shudder at the thought of the havoc the heat sink could wreak if it should come loose during transport. And should I inadvertently turn on the system without heat sink in place, the CPU would be toast before I even had time to notice something is wrong (the BIOS doesn't start at a 'safe speed' for all I know).

AMD has to do three things in my opinion:

1. Provide an internal (fast) thermal diode similar to the one used in the P4, throttling the CPU down to a safe speed if temperatures get too high.

2. Provide a heat-spreader which protects the CPU die. My local PC parts dealer has half a shoebox full of AMD CPUs with broken dies. It's not really a problem for him, because it's not the dealer who pays for a new CPU if the customer screws up heatsink assembly, but it doesn't generate happy AMD customers.

3. Redesign and standardize the heat-sink/motherboard attachment and provide mandatory design guides for mainboard manufacturers. There are too many clip designs around, some sinks cannot be mounted at all in some motherboards, etc.

Raymond

Why did I buy an Nvidia video card? Well, because I actually did research
rather making vague comparisons. As always, a well set up system with the best drivers will beat one where the person didn't even get agp enabled. If not, then explain why I should trust your opinions over a well known review site...

Yes, their lack of source is annoying. But the fact that they care about Linux as a platform (more than any other card manufacturer) means a lot to me. I know there are people at Nvidia paid to write those drivers, and as long as they have the fastest hardware too, they're likely to always be ahead of any other hardware/driver combination in Linux.

Not to trusting of Tom's Hardware? Have another set of benchmarks.

Stop spreading FUD about DDR chipsets and do a bit of research first. Any set of benchmarks I've seen has shown Intel's i850 w/ RDRAM and SiS 645 chipset in a dead heat - and most of the time SiS comes out on top.

As I posted here, checkout the anandtech.com review.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1574

I don't think so, however there are other benchmarks here.

Well a 1.1 Celeron is not really equal to a Duron 1.1 after all. In the real world you run a 1.1 duron on a kt266a with DDR getting you a "200"Mhz bus speed.

You're assuming that the Duron is matched with a high-end chipset. Didn't Anandtech do a review once that showed that on a cheaper motherboard (the kind found in the "budget" systems which generally contain Celerons and Durons) the Duron and Celeron performed about the same? Ah yes, here it is (link to the summary page). Note though that this old review involves the older Celeron and Duron cores, so it may not be 100% applicable to the present. Still, I would guess that most OEM Duron systems do not have kt266a boards in them. They have cheaper chipsets, like the SiS 735, perhaps paired with SDR memory. This is the "real world" for most computer buyers. People who know how to overclock are a special case (note, though, that Tom says that he wasn't able to unlock the 1.3Ghz Duron!)

In Tom's 1.3Ghz Duron review, the Duron generally (not always!) beats the Celeron, but it needs a more expensive motherboard and more expensive (DDR) memory to do it. Who knows what performance a cheaper OEM system would get? Perhaps the Duron would still be faster in this more typical configuration, but perhaps not.

Both Anandtech and Tom's Hardware have done reviews recently that involve motherboards that use the VIA KT266A chip, which handles Durons and Athlons.

TigerMP.
And a review

I didn't see this mentioned anywhere in the article or in another thread, so here we go. The base price (the player+accessories but no CF card) is only $109 directly from them! You can see all of the different options at their Yahoo! Store. it looks pretty neat, and if you combine this with the seemingly endless deals on Compact Flash cards that can be found (try AnandTech's Hot Deals Forum) this could be a great player.
-OctaneZ

• AnandTech
• BigBigSavings
• Deal of the Day

Actually, he was running RC5. The problem the school had with this is that with RC5, there is a change (albeit a very limited one) that you could win money. He had not stated that he would give the money to the school...

Read about it here:
http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a=tp c&s=50009562&f=122097561&m=1110950822
http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a=tp c&s=50009562&f=122097561&m=7450963242&r=5150986242 #5150986242
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid= 39&threadid=518510&start=1
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid= 39&threadid=518184 This was widely discussed among many of the more well known distributed computing teams. Check it out.

Actually, he was running RC5. The problem the school had with this is that with RC5, there is a change (albeit a very limited one) that you could win money. He had not stated that he would give the money to the school...

Read about it here:
http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a=tp c&s=50009562&f=122097561&m=1110950822
http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a=tp c&s=50009562&f=122097561&m=7450963242&r=5150986242 #5150986242
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid= 39&threadid=518510&start=1
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid= 39&threadid=518184 This was widely discussed among many of the more well known distributed computing teams. Check it out.

Anandtech
already reviewed this on December 27th 2001(compared to THG's Review on January 11th 2002).

"Final Thoughts
Overall, we were quite impressed with this little box. It's small, cute and well thought out. However, it lacks the expandability of a desktop, which brings up the whole "beige vs. unique" debate. So, why buy this instead of a desktop? If space, heat or looks are an issue, this is a system to consider. We wouldn't recommend this for a primary machine, nor for an average desktop (which has room to store that big, beige PC), but there are lots of other places in which it excels.

As we found out, this makes a great "living room," or "average use" PC. It also makes a great "TV PC." If the applications you use most include Office, Internet Explorer, Netscape, Winamp, ICQ, AIM, etc, you're fine. Of course, you're probably fine with just about any computer out there.

Gamers should look elsewhere. Although the Savage4 core is now quite mature, it wasn't designed to compete against top-of-the-line desktop cards. It will work fine with 2D applications and will probably make a good mobile 3D chipset, but a Doom 3 tamer it is not.

Finally, this model is limited by its support for (only) Pentium III / Celeron CPUs. Support for newer Pentium III Tualatin CPUs is crucial to upgradability and unfortunately not provided by this version of the motherboard. VIA does offer a PL133T chipset with Tualatin support but it is unclear as to if/when we can expect to see that implemented on the board. Shuttle has informed us however that they will be producing a version of the SV24 based on the Pentium 4 processor. With the 0.13-micron Northwood core producing very little heat and running at speeds greater than 2GHz, the SV24's successor might be able to offer some killer performance.

After this endeavor, we like the SV24; it doesn't rethink everything, it shrinks everything...and covers it in attractive aluminum. It doesn't replace that beige PC, it complements it. We expect that Shuttle should have no problem selling them at their list price of $250 USD. Hopefully, that will eventually lead to more interesting machines elsewhere as well. "

Anandtech
already reviewed this on December 27th 2001(compared to THG's Review on January 11th 2002).

"Final Thoughts
Overall, we were quite impressed with this little box. It's small, cute and well thought out. However, it lacks the expandability of a desktop, which brings up the whole "beige vs. unique" debate. So, why buy this instead of a desktop? If space, heat or looks are an issue, this is a system to consider. We wouldn't recommend this for a primary machine, nor for an average desktop (which has room to store that big, beige PC), but there are lots of other places in which it excels.

As we found out, this makes a great "living room," or "average use" PC. It also makes a great "TV PC." If the applications you use most include Office, Internet Explorer, Netscape, Winamp, ICQ, AIM, etc, you're fine. Of course, you're probably fine with just about any computer out there.

Gamers should look elsewhere. Although the Savage4 core is now quite mature, it wasn't designed to compete against top-of-the-line desktop cards. It will work fine with 2D applications and will probably make a good mobile 3D chipset, but a Doom 3 tamer it is not.

Finally, this model is limited by its support for (only) Pentium III / Celeron CPUs. Support for newer Pentium III Tualatin CPUs is crucial to upgradability and unfortunately not provided by this version of the motherboard. VIA does offer a PL133T chipset with Tualatin support but it is unclear as to if/when we can expect to see that implemented on the board. Shuttle has informed us however that they will be producing a version of the SV24 based on the Pentium 4 processor. With the 0.13-micron Northwood core producing very little heat and running at speeds greater than 2GHz, the SV24's successor might be able to offer some killer performance.

After this endeavor, we like the SV24; it doesn't rethink everything, it shrinks everything...and covers it in attractive aluminum. It doesn't replace that beige PC, it complements it. We expect that Shuttle should have no problem selling them at their list price of $250 USD. Hopefully, that will eventually lead to more interesting machines elsewhere as well. "

Anandtech has had a review up since last year (December 27). They didn't exactly gush over it, calling it a good pc for average use, but they like the price, $250.

Anandtech has had a review up since last year (December 27). They didn't exactly gush over it, calling it a good pc for average use, but they like the price, $250.

The article actually makes clear that reading and writing HFS is only part of the problem. The other part is making it work with the music database on the iPod. Otherwise, it's just a (very nice) portable hard drive.

My experience is that we tend to have more problems with either over zealous moderators (Slashdot? NO NEVER! Well, on occaision), like recent incidents at DSLR and AnandTech, which have resulted in a few friends getting together an unmodded place at CosmicShell.

It's been working out quite nicely. We've had no real problems, though, activity has gone down with our favourite coder doing extra-solar planet observations for the next week.

This thread on I-appliance talks about the VIA Shuttle, which is halfway between a laptop and a desktop.

anadantech - outpost, with 1GHz Celeron, $330

Now, most people aren't going to care about this but those who are trying to build a quiet PC are -- if you put a P4 in your system you could conceivably cool it passively and take the performance hit.

The problem with this idea is that, clock-for-clock, the P4 is about the slowest CPU out there. That's why all the reviews say that AMD's "model number" (read: P-rating) system is accurate in measuring relative performance (see this review for example). Clock-for-clock, a P4 is very weak compared to an Athlon. For performance, clock speed is the main thing that the P4 has going for it.

I'm willing to bet that a slowed-down P4 would be in the same performance category as Via and Transmeta's new CPUs, which can also be run without a fan and which are doubtless cheaper than the P4! Or, perhaps you could get a P3, Duron or Celeron and run with a slow, quiet fan... or no fan at all? (I seem to recall that some of the slower Durons can run without fans, though it's not recommended.) Anyway, my point is that there are lots of CPUs out there which could run with noiseless cooling (no fan or a very quiet fan). They're not very powerful by today's standards, but they may well be faster (and cheaper!) than a slowed-down P4.

I used the internet in Beijing over the summer (over several dialup lines and an ISDN line), and had no problems viewing websites like CNN, Voodoo Extreme, AnandTech, or Astalavista, or telnetting to my university's server.

While I've been waiting for the site to come up I've put up a new site, AquaPAD.org. This site is meant to support the AquaPAD which I am starting to sell now. I'll have the review up here as soon as the server issues are fixed.

He has a whole new web site created specifically for a device he intends to sell. He's linking to it from a page which reviews that same device. What are the odds the review will be objective? "In conclusion, Aquapads thoroughly suck. Click here to buy one from me at a special review-only price..."

AMD Zone sounds like a great site. I'd trust his reviews. Way more so than Tom's or Anandtech or Dan's data. None of those guys has a deeply personal involvement with the hardware in question.

-B

Mr Snide: No, it doesn't support HDTV resolutions. Frankly, I don't feel this needs to be explained, but lest anyone be confused, 480p is not HDTV, just the weakest mode supported by HDTV. HDTV requires 1080i and 720p modes, as well as 480p.

So, No, your crappy TV doesn't support 480p, but several non-HDTV compatible tv's do. (or did)

For a more lucid descripton of the shortcomings of the gamecube's resolutions, check here.

I've heard there are 760MPX boards coming out (with 66 MHz support for the 64-bit PCI slots; is there anything else?) but I haven't seen any yet. Anyone see any non-sketchy details anywhere? The timing I've read about was mid-November. Anand Tech probably had the best article with pictures of some boards. Here's a link to his Preview from Comdex.

Anandtech had an article on robotics awhile ago with a cool picture of submersibles including the type used in the above mentioned expedition. Amazing how robotics has made great inroads in the past 3 years yet Dianne Sawyer is pushing scooters.

size comparison

XBox motherboard
GameCube motherboard

size comparison

XBox motherboard
GameCube motherboard

Get the whole thing on one page, much less annoying.

It really feels like they only made a token gesture towards using an x86 box. To be honest my next box will probably be a sunblade too (but hey, I'm gonna use it for a desktop ;) Mind you this was a really good article, but I think they should have said that they were just more comfortable with sparc and that was that. There was another good article on a similar subject not long ago, on Anandtech's new server. For that article they benchmarked different configs (mobo, proc, etc) then did a price performace.. as far as I recall. And they chose AMD ;)

Check out the November '01 archives at www.3dnow.net for many reviews of KT266A mainboards and some nForce stuff.

Some links from 3DNOW that I will highlight:

VIA KT-266A Motherboard 3-Way Shootout


VIA KT266A Initial Roundup - October 2001

Turns out that we're both wrong. ;-)

• The CPU that powers the Xbox is a Coppermine based Pentium III with only 128KB L2 cache. While this would make many think that the processor is indeed a Celeron, one of the key performance factors of the Pentium III that is lost in the Celeron core was left intact for this core. The Coppermine core was left with an 8-way set associative L2 cache instead of the 4-way set associative cache of the Celeron. Based on what we've seen with the Coppermine and Coppermine128 (Celeron) cores we estimate that the 8-way set associative L2 cache gives this particular core a 10% performance advantage over the Coppermine128 core of the Celeron.

Protect your sanity and view the whole article on one page here, rather than clicking 'Next' 100 times and downloading heaps of ads.

It says here

The Xbox features a 64MB memory subsystem made up of four 4x32Mb

I could have sworn 4x32 =128?

Overall I would tend to agree. It was the simplistic nature of this particular request which I found off-putting. The CoLo and Office Culture examples are reasonable enough, and while I would tend to put the XBox question in the same category as this one it has the added facets of being (a) - a specific product, and (b) - brand new and thus lacking the wealth of online info that an older product would have.
A month from now I would probably consider the XBox question unsuitable as well.
Something like the RAID question is more suited for an IT version of Consumer Reports. E.g. Tom's Hardware or AnandTech, both of which he would find in a Google search along with many other far more useful pages (e.g. RAID HOWTO's :)

My 2c.

Unfortunately NVIDIA's nForce has not been met with such great enthusiasm by motherboard manufacturers. The five launch partners for the nForce are still dealing with various issues in their designs in spite of the fact that NVIDIA's reference boards have been running just fine.

1. The nForce and its unique read/guess-ahead SSE cache, dual-channel memory pipes, high-speed Southbridge pipe, and DMA addressing make it difficult to build further optimized boards and drivers.
   
2. Unlike the obviously non-performance-oriented Intel 810 all-in-one, the nForce all-in-one can be made to be a cheap all-in-one solution for $500 PC's, but an alternate design can be used for high-end PC's -- thus, the motherboard manufacturers are having to make more motherboards than normal off of one chipset.

• Abit's WA2A
• Asus's (AM266-D?)
• Gigabyte's GA-7DPXDW
• MSI's (MS-6501?)

• Why do the Abit doesn't seem to have USB ports? Or is it rather the PS/2 ports that are missing? (Check the upper right corner)
• Again on the Abit, on the bottom left, there's a PLCC (or another Quad side package) that's empty. Do any of you know if they usually show working motherboards, or rather engineering samples that may do nothing?
• The ASUS is the only one with a full-blown heat-sink (w/o fan) on the North bridge, the other ones only have a heat spreader. For the look only or more stable operation?
• On the Gigabyte, what kind of ports are in the upper center part? Firewire ports? And again, there's only one set of ports at the top (either USB or PS/2). I find it quite strange.

• Abit's WA2A
• Asus's (AM266-D?)
• Gigabyte's GA-7DPXDW
• MSI's (MS-6501?)

• Why do the Abit doesn't seem to have USB ports? Or is it rather the PS/2 ports that are missing? (Check the upper right corner)
• Again on the Abit, on the bottom left, there's a PLCC (or another Quad side package) that's empty. Do any of you know if they usually show working motherboards, or rather engineering samples that may do nothing?
• The ASUS is the only one with a full-blown heat-sink (w/o fan) on the North bridge, the other ones only have a heat spreader. For the look only or more stable operation?
• On the Gigabyte, what kind of ports are in the upper center part? Firewire ports? And again, there's only one set of ports at the top (either USB or PS/2). I find it quite strange.

• Abit's WA2A
• Asus's (AM266-D?)
• Gigabyte's GA-7DPXDW
• MSI's (MS-6501?)

• Why do the Abit doesn't seem to have USB ports? Or is it rather the PS/2 ports that are missing? (Check the upper right corner)
• Again on the Abit, on the bottom left, there's a PLCC (or another Quad side package) that's empty. Do any of you know if they usually show working motherboards, or rather engineering samples that may do nothing?
• The ASUS is the only one with a full-blown heat-sink (w/o fan) on the North bridge, the other ones only have a heat spreader. For the look only or more stable operation?
• On the Gigabyte, what kind of ports are in the upper center part? Firewire ports? And again, there's only one set of ports at the top (either USB or PS/2). I find it quite strange.

• Abit's WA2A
• Asus's (AM266-D?)
• Gigabyte's GA-7DPXDW
• MSI's (MS-6501?)

• Why do the Abit doesn't seem to have USB ports? Or is it rather the PS/2 ports that are missing? (Check the upper right corner)
• Again on the Abit, on the bottom left, there's a PLCC (or another Quad side package) that's empty. Do any of you know if they usually show working motherboards, or rather engineering samples that may do nothing?
• The ASUS is the only one with a full-blown heat-sink (w/o fan) on the North bridge, the other ones only have a heat spreader. For the look only or more stable operation?
• On the Gigabyte, what kind of ports are in the upper center part? Firewire ports? And again, there's only one set of ports at the top (either USB or PS/2). I find it quite strange.

Anand did a new look at the 8500 with the new ATI drivers. He claims that the image quality is now identical to the Geforce3 and that the driver optimizations work for all Quake3 engine based games. Anandtech article

Well since you last heard it has been upped to $800,000 and 120 years in prison sucks to be him.

AMD Zone gives this summary at the end of its review: "No architectural or marketing changes with this release ... expect the previous CPUs to decline in price ... expect a bit higher performance and power consumption."

Anandtech agrees, saying the chip will not offer any significant extra performance over the 1800+, so early adopters need not sweat too much about being left behind. The site believes that AMD is currently the performance leader on desktop processors.

VIAHardware.com reckons users could be just as well off picking up the 1800+ at 1.53GHz and simply overclocking it to 1.6GHz. Users already owning a high-speed XP chip are better off waiting for the next upgrade on the platform to significantly increase performance.

Tech Report has some extensive benchmarking, putting the 1900+ slightly ahead of Intel's P4 2.0GHz in most of them, while SimHQ.com gets very excited about the new chip.

Amdmb.com also has a piece showing the expected five to six per cent performance increase.

There other reviews of this 1.6GHz processor at AnandTech and at AMD Zone and at VIA Hardware. Check them out.

Here. Here. Here.

AnAndTech's review also indicated that XP was slower than 2000...

Anandtech.com said it quite a while ago, in a virtually identical test setup. I haven't heard from anywhere that XP is faster 2000. Of course I don't read Microsoft Toady sites either, so...

If you do get one, get a TBird 1.4 to put in it and save your self some cash. The Palimino Chips (Athlon MP, Athlon XP) have improved pre-built in fetching logic - which negates the DASP on the nForce.

The built-in graphics is the GeForce 2 MX - nothing spectacular.

Where the nForce does have an edge, though is the built-in sound - it should rival the Creative Labs Soundblaster Audigy. I'd love to see a good review or comparison of which one sounds better with 5.1 sound.

If you do get one, get a TBird 1.4 to put in it and save your self some cash. The Palimino Chips (Athlon MP, Athlon XP) have improved pre-built in fetching logic - which negates the DASP on the nForce.

The built-in graphics is the GeForce 2 MX - nothing spectacular.

Where the nForce does have an edge, though is the built-in sound - it should rival the Creative Labs Soundblaster Audigy. I'd love to see a good review or comparison of which one sounds better with 5.1 sound.

My box has an Athlon 600 MHz with an Asus K7M mobo. At this point, I'm trying for a quiet PC (at least as quiet as I can get it). I've already installed an Ultra Quiet power supply and a SilentDrive enclosure, and those are working well so far.

As far as I can tell, the primary remaining source of the noise is the chipset fan (an RDJD K701). Looking through 2Cooltek (a good source for cooling products), I came across the "Alpha P7125 Athlon/SECC Cooler (no fans)". However, does the "no fans" designation mean that the cooler comes without fans but needs them, or that it comes without fans and can operate without them? I'm thinking that if indeed it can operate without fans, then that could mean a significant sound reduction for me.

Then again, if that one does require the fans, then I'm guessing that it's about the same loudness as my current setup :-/. In that case, are there other quiet-coolers I should try? Or, should I just go straight to the acoustical foam?