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On the (small and possibly entirely unrepresentative) sample of machines I've seen it run on, performance took a hit. All the bells and whistles cost cycles, simple as that. YMMV, of course.

However, I'm not the only one. Check out this story at Anandtech comparing 2000 and XP. Note that they were basing their research on RC1 and not the final version, however, so again things may have changed somewhat.

Yeah, I'd love to see a tiny sized board based on the nForce chipset. GeForce graphics, 5.1 audio, AMD cpu...mmmmm.

There's been an emerging form factor in the SBC (Single Board Computer) world recently, known as EBX. It's a 5.75" x 8.00" board built to be racked, stacked and expanded. They even have tiny pci cards (pc/104-plus). I'd love to see more consumer PCs based on these specs (especially an nForce one!). Great for those PCs you've always wanted to scatter around the house.

Plus, you could case-mod your old Star Wars lunch box.

A much better review is available over at AnandTech.

A much better review is available over at AnandTech.

Anandtech has a good review that compares all the latest p4's and athlon xp's. Check it out here.

There are at least 2 IDE cards that do hardware RAID. Adaptec AAA-UDMA and Promise Supertrak

Anandtech did a review of 5 different RAID cards (3 software and 2 hardware) in June. http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=14 91&p=1. The performance was disapointing (at least to me) but now you can't say that you haven't seen a IDE card do raid 5 in hardware ;)

It comes with an nVidia remote, which is such a cool feature. Unfortunately, according to this TV Tuner Video Card Roundup from AnandTech, the PVR software included with the ATI All In Wonder board is a lot better than nVidia's.

It comes with an nVidia remote, which is such a cool feature. Unfortunately, according to this TV Tuner Video Card Roundup from AnandTech, the PVR software included with the ATI All In Wonder board is a lot better than nVidia's.

Just a note, as can be seen HERE, Epox have not honoured AMD's request to display the REAL clock frequency.

You can still see the real clock.

AMD is treading a thin line, currently they are doing the only thing they can, and currently they are not overstepping the boundary. But the moment they do, people will drop them like a hot potato.

My 0.02...

Very slick! I wonder how this bodes for future MB chipset designs.

When you see what companies like nVidia are doing with chipsets like the nForce (i.e.: better then mediocre on-board graphics, very capable on-board audio, Ethernet etc, etc...) we may start seeing motherboards with surplus PCI slots.

Anandtech has an overview of this technology here.

http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=71 This from Anandtech faqs from earlier in the month pretty much covers it all - and covered it a long time ago.

The DTLA series was pretty screwed up. Last week I sent another two drives that died after about half a year of ordinary desktop usage. As far as I can see it's the technology used in the 70GXP series. See this article on anandtech for more details. I've already seen 5 drives from this series going down the drain. A low level format usually helps to solve the problem, but only temporarily! The error most likely occurs after some weeks again, in one case it reappeared even after some hours! Some friend of mine called IBM Germany and taled to them. They say it's MS Windows' fault, because it doesn't write correctly to the disk. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard! And two of the disks I sent in were running Linux nevertheless...

The Geforce Ti 500 is just an overclocked Geforce 3.

Looking at Anand's Geforce 3 roundup, all of the cards tested overclocked to the performance level of the GF Ti 500. Generally, the core speed was lower, but the memory was faster.

• "...it enables the Web server to establish contact with a surfer's browser and then count the number of ads displayed on a screen."

If I hit "G" in Opera, every image on the page disappears. Yeah, all the nice ones like the picture of the foot, the mainboard, the greenback, the Apple logo...but also the "How many different development tools do you use? Click here" SourceForge banner ad up the top. If a site is well designed like slashdot (and I'll get a few flames on that no doubt) and has the alt= attribute set in the <img> tag, I can turn images off and still see "It's funny. Laugh." and "Technology" etc instead. Of course, this is hopeless for some sites, like AnandTech (which looks great with images turned on, but I think is poorly designed nonetheless), and sites where you want to see the pretty pictures (I'm thinking of news sites like BBC News; I don't know about you :P), and it also tends to be quite pointless in terms of blocking ads because it's rather like executing fifty people because you know one of them is a death row escapee, but I just thought I'd mention it, because it seems that this software would prevent you from even choosing to turn all images off in your browser. Frankly, I'd like to know how they do this considering the many different browser types out there, but I presume they can and do, using Java probably. If any web designers can enlighten me, please do.

My question is, how much right does a site have to tell me that I may not turn off images altogether? Technically I am not even blocking the ads; I am simply choosing to ignore all the <img src=""> on a site, and instead am displaying the <img alt="">, which prevents me from downloading the image itself. There's still a little box indicating an image, with "Click here" inside it if it's an ad. Does that count? It also seems ridiculous that a site can penalise you based on what browser you choose to view it with, because text-based browsers such as Lynx would surely be affected by any site running the software developed by GmbH. I realise that few people run Lynx or other text browsers any more, but it's still something to consider. I know sites need their revenue, but I can't believe they think forcing people to look at their ads is going to help. I for one already boycott sites with too many ads (although popups aren't a problem any more since I have disabled them, using Opera), and the more in-your-face an ad is, the more annoying I find it, and the less I feel inclined to click on it. As far as I can tell, this is about as in-your-face as you can get. Do sites honestly believe this is going to increase their revenue?

Get the whole article in one shot with the Print Article link.

Get an ECS K7S5A mobo for $70. SiS735 chipset, stable, best deal in town. I've built two boxen with 'em. See Tom's Hardware here or the AnandTech forum here.

> CPU: AMD Thunderbird 1.2GHz Socket A 266MHz
> RAM: DDR SDRAM 2100 2 * 256 MB

Cool.

> Harddrive: Western Digital Caviar 7200 RPM 40 GB

Get a cheap Maxtor 40gig instead - faster, more reliable and standards compliant.

> Motherboard: Asus A7M266, AMD761-chipsett,

Not one I know about, but sure :)

> Sound Card: Creative Soundblaster Live! 1024

Either stick with the onboard audio, get something that Linux has OS drivers for, or an Audigy.

> Video Card: Matrox Millenium G450 32MB DDR-Ram, Bulk

Pretty good card, if you're not after the latest games. If you are, get a Radeon.

> CRT: Samtron 96P

CRT? Pah. Get the Planar 17.4" LCD instead - 25ns refresh, DVI+analog. Have a look at Anandtech Forums for some comments.

> CD-ROM-drive: Creative 52x IDE

The Liteon 24x is possibly the best drive on the market, especially if you want to be able to make backups (for legit use).

Damien

The Nforce Reference board was Benchmarked today
at Anand's,
runs about par to slightly slower than KT266A,
Maybe a few tweaks from Nvdia was boost it above
the KT266A.

Probably depends where most of your collisions take place, but I do know that when you have multiple Pentiums (not sure on Xeon based), that when one CPU is accessing the memory or I/O, the other has to sit and wait. That's one of the big benefits of a multiple Athlon system - both CPU's can access memory simultaneously.

We bought one of the APPRO 1U dual TBirds, and this thing -screams-. It also howls, but that's the four big blower fans. :)

APPRO is at http://www.appro.com, and Anandtech had a writeup on the server.

Motherboard monitor only scans the hardware for changes in values every 5 seconds or so. Even if that catches it right after the heatsink falls off, you still won't get much further than Win98's "Shutting down your PC" screen before the lightshow starts and your CPU goes China syndrome.

Oh, and Linux boxen can, indeed, be convinced to do the same thing with clever use of lm_sensors but as indicated above, if the heatsink falls off and the machine is powered off, it won't do diddly squat.

On a related note, I once ran my Celeron 433 with just a heatsink, no fan, to see if my enormous Globalwin heatsink was up to the task. It did about 5 minutes of Prime95's torture test before it hit 65degC and was still climbing; at that point I got nervous and switched it off. This would suggest to me that a stopped fan is much, much less catastrophic than a fallen-off heatsink. Let's just hope that more and more SocketA heatsinks are the screw-to-motherboard type.

Anyone wanting to get up to date with the SOTA in cooling should hit Anandtech.com's latest roundup, which is a pretty good summary of all those whacky overclocking HSFs.

They ran the tests again with RC1 and there was a 5 to 10% improvement in speed. Not great, but a little better.

bah...
try this, i should of previewed it

If you have questions read what he has to say Anandtech forum

The system ran for the next 10 business days without any downtime, something NT machines had not been able to do very often. All issues that did come up were fixed on the spot without a single kernel restart.

Just in case nobody has posted this yet, the author of the article at Anandtech explains that there's an NDA in force. It'll be eighteen months before he can reveal the name of the company. You'll have to search for "Paul Sullivan" to see his comment.

Failure is its own reward.

That would be a fairy tale. Look at this statement on page six:

Linux was not the right tool for every job, but it certainly had proved its metal as a cost effective alternative and helped give them some breathing room as they worked to bring soaring IT costs under control and reduce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).

Linux was only used were it had proven to be a viable solution.

The hardware review sites like Tom's Hardware and Anand Tech don't seem to fit into the category of tech sits described in this rant... Although I agree with the characterizations made, in general, and as they relate specifically to sites owned by C|Net (ZDNet, etc.). The hardware sites , however, don't seem to have the same incentive with regard to supporing a software product through download services, and tech tips, as, these types of support related content don't really apply to hardware (other than perhaps discussion boards per product). It still is critical for the hardware sites - as with the software sites - to keep focused on their primary business, but thet seem like they'd be less prone to the influences outlines in the rant (article, posting, whatever).

--CTH

Well, remember one thing: The clock speed IS significant in the speed of a computer. A 1Ghz processor is generally faster than a 100Mhz processor. We are talking about 20-30% differences here, so the consumers are not THAT misled.

Considering that P4s are competitive with Athlons running about 2/3 rds their speed (see benchmarks on any web site, such as Anandtech's review of the P4 2Ghz), people who believe that megahertz are the only indicator of processor speed are in fact misled. You don't account for a 33% difference in Mhz (or 50% from AMD's perspective) by saying "oops". Architecture as much (or more?) than clock speed. See the UltraSPARC's SpecFP numbers for an example of this.

Of course, the biggest lie is the hardware marketers who try to convince everyone that they need 2.0 Ghz. To even try to sell the average joe a 1+ Ghz box has to involve some kind of misleading by the salesman :) None of the speeds in which a P4 is available should matter to more than 1% or so of the population, so I have to wonder why it's such a big deal.

... it's the difference between AMD losing market share because the average person looks only at MHz when buying a computer and levelling the playing field to reflect an AMD processor at a lower MHz performing the same as a P4 at a higher MHz.

See this article. AnandTech points out that MHz is NOT everything. (I'm sure there are countless more benchmarks and articles like this one).

Let's see, we have a Firingsquad review...

An AnandTech review.

And let's not forget ExtremeTech's review.

And finally Kyle and the gang at [H]ardOCP did a review.

Incidentally, [H] got their p4 to over 2.2ghz, but ran into heat issues at 2.3.

Here.

Basic conclusion: 2.0GHz P4 == 1.4GHz K7, but when the 2.2GHz P4.1 comes out in November it will take a clear lead.

You bought it from ThinkGeek? Tsk, tsk -- Taco, you paid too much.

We just (yesterday at 4 PM) placed an order for one of the new APPRO1124 dual Athlon 1U rackmounts, with a 2 GB of DDR RAM and 2 1.2 TBirds, and a couple 10K SCSI drives.

I'm looking forward to playing with it when it gets here next week. :) The writeup on Anandtech about "the perfect server?" was one of our primary reasons for deciding to give this a shot.

For the curious, the machine will be running J2SE, JBoss, and Jakarta/Tomcat, for a custom app that connects to a (in this case, local) Postgresql database, which is why we have so much RAM in it.

Here posted today. Basically the SiS 735 wins:

The real beauty of the 735 isn't its performance, especially since you'll find it quite difficult to notice a performance difference (in most cases) between it and the 760/KT266. No, the real beauty of the 735 is its price. The ECS board we used in this review retails for less than $80. We have seen it places for as low as $65 plus shipping. This makes the board and the platform the perfect companion for the very low cost Duron and Athlon processors. For less than $200 you can easily upgrade your system to a Duron on a SiS 735 board with DDR SDRAM courtesy of the very aggressive pricing from AMD, SiS and DDR SDRAM manufacturers such as Crucial.

Look at distributed.net CPU speed tables. The fasted risc CPU of any kind (UltrasparcIII @ 800Mhz) is less than half the speed of a Pentium III doing 1.2Ghz (for RC5 cracking).

Hey, check your facts before making broad statements like "Sparcs are slow at RC5, so Intels are better". Somewhere in the distributed.net docs is stated that most RISC CPUs lacks an important assembly instruction (n-bit rotations, if I remember correctly), as opposed to x86 and PowerPC. Guess what, that instruction is essential for RC5 cracking, and Sparcs, Alpha and co. are slow. You might want to check DES cracking speeds, where RISC CPUs are flying at unbelievable speeds, leaving common x86s in the dust.
It all depends on the particular application that you are testing.

Sure, there are marginal improvements in total system performance from things like cache, bus speed and so on. They are marginal.

Again, no. They are marginal when you write "Hello, world" programs. But for heavy computing/database and such memory bandwith/latency is crucial. Even in the PC world, just ONE cpu can be stalled by the lack of memory bandwith. Look at the Pentium 4 test at Anandtech: in particular applications (mp3 encoding, streaming in general) there's a 30% difference between different chipsets).
Guess what happens when you have 4 CPUs on a single board, all begging memory access to random locations to complete their database lookups...

The test on anandtech shows Intel's 845 chipset is intentionally crippled. Intel probably don't want people to say/think "Gee, your SDRAM chipset has latency as bad as DRDRAM and yet VIA's chipset has better latency; with performance within 5%, and a lot less $ investment using DDR SDRAM, I will buy the VIA product instead of yours."

Because they can't outperform Via. Thus... just like their partner, Rambus, counter attack with lawsuit. What a classic. Meanwhile, Via has a very strong case, too.

Some bits here and here at Anandtech, and there is another one at Hardware Central. Then, here and here at Tom's Hardware.

All says: Via Rocks, Intel sucks. I'll leave it to you to judge.

Because they can't outperform Via. Thus... just like their partner, Rambus, counter attack with lawsuit. What a classic. Meanwhile, Via has a very strong case, too.

Some bits here and here at Anandtech, and there is another one at Hardware Central. Then, here and here at Tom's Hardware.

All says: Via Rocks, Intel sucks. I'll leave it to you to judge.

Because they can't outperform Via. Thus... just like their partner, Rambus, counter attack with lawsuit. What a classic. Meanwhile, Via has a very strong case, too.

Some bits here and here at Anandtech, and there is another one at Hardware Central. Then, here and here at Tom's Hardware.

All says: Via Rocks, Intel sucks. I'll leave it to you to judge.

It allows a low polygon model to look much more detailed without sacrificing frames per second. See this and this for an illustration of what truform *could* do.

It will be very interesting to see what this truform thing can do. Read more about truform here.

Please! Reviewing the new features of chips is a great thing, but for fuck's sake we all know about Tom's Hardware, AnandTech and Ars Technia, All of which have covered the P4 in extensive detail.

Tom's Hardware Guide or AnandTech

Sorry, but comparing a 1.1gig/200Mhz FSB Athlon to a 1.7gig P4 is laughable at best. What hardware review site uses a processor that's over a year old (Athlon 1.1gig/200FSB) in a comparison to one of the latest processors from the competition?

Too bad that the ATI Radeon 64MB DDR has ALOT lower benchmark scores than my $50 Geforce2 MX 32MB in 90% of the applications.

Isn't it nice to see the non-nVidia brands redeemed?

Isn't it nice to see the non-nVidia brands redeemed?

Wromg, wrong, wrong. DDR-RAM IS NOT faster than rambus. check Anandtech or Tom's Hardware. They benchmarked and compared P4 and Athlon and came to the conclusion that P4 has much greater memory bandwidth than Athlon, an part of this speed is thanks to rambus memory.

If Athlon beats the hell out on P4 is thanks to the excelent job AMD did on the chip itself.

But the same benchmark shows an advantage of Intel chips in multimedia and memory bandwidth intensive aplications.

--

All the news as of late, all the apparant holes popping up in the product activation, and the latest - a Senator challenging Microsoft's media player.

Not only that, but with respected tech sites churning out articles like this, a lot of people are bound to be turned off.

In my opinion, (yea, I know - dangerous) Microsoft tried too many tricks too soon. In the next year or so is when linux is really going to have a chance to break out and rain down upon the masses. I'm not a linux zealot, but I just see this as a real oppurtunity for the OS to really get out there and make itself known to even the most casual computer user. Especially with backing from IBM...I would IBM probably has a pretty good hate on for Bill and m$ for the whole OS/2 deal years back.

Hey, that's just my .03, flame away!

Caino

Don't touch my .sig there!

http://www.pcliquidator.com/pcmciadrivebay.htm
or
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem& item=1252635232

forums.anandtech.com thread on these cards

Still beta, I know, but startling nonetheless.