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Check out this test sharky did, were talking VERY minor speed increases. in the actuall apps(err, games :o)
Check out the mem. specific stuff here, not to worry. This link works :o)

Why does my links act(i would have said something else, but i hurts my karma!!) up? the html is correct, THANK YOU.. and the complete mb review, here

Its interesting stuff, i know it saved me from running out getting a i820 based motherboard.

Shiny's Sacrifice
WXP's Isle of Morg
Planet Moon's Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Computer Artworks' Evolva

i'm not quite finished wetting myself.

Shiny's Sacrifice
WXP's Isle of Morg
Planet Moon's Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Computer Artworks' Evolva

i'm not quite finished wetting myself.

Shiny's Sacrifice
WXP's Isle of Morg
Planet Moon's Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Computer Artworks' Evolva

i'm not quite finished wetting myself.

Shiny's Sacrifice
WXP's Isle of Morg
Planet Moon's Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Computer Artworks' Evolva

i'm not quite finished wetting myself.

Sharky Extreme has a great review up too, also technical in nature. I read it, and as I recall, it was about 30 pages, pretty in depth.

One of the biggest points is that current x86 cpus are not fast enough to outrun the graphics card in low res. When tested with a 1 GHZ Athlon, and an 866Mhz P3, the graphics card doesnt fare much better in low res than does the original GeForce. It is essentially a barrier for games, created by realease dates :-)

Also of note, the business practices of NVIDIA are scrutinized, such as their 6 month release intervals, which seem to be resulting in their being king of the hill rather freqently.

Supposedly, the ATI Radeon MAXX will be the only thing remotely close to the nv15 (GeForce2 GTS). However, the only thing expected to defeat the GeForce2 (NV15) will be the NV20.

For those of you who haven't had the time to read the reviews, they're going to come out with the NV15 VERY soon. Oh, and the 1 ghz athlon cant keep up with it, as mentioned. At the same time there will be 128MB versions of the original GeForce, geared towards workstations. Soon after, there will be 64mb versions of the GeForce2. Shortly after that, we will see the mobile gforce, NV11, a 3d card for laptops. 6 months from now, nvidia will introduce us to the nv20.

IMO things are shaping up very nicely in the graphics arena. We are not just seeing more frames in our games, but many additional features, thus letting people from hardcore gamers running at 640x480 in low detail, to those that desire 32bit quality and large detail wanting to realize all that our technology can bring us, be satisfied with one card, regardless of the company producing it

This review goes into the technology as well as the benchmarks and shows that the GTS is clearly tops.

Odd... I submitted this hours ago, yet my writeup was rejected...

Anyway, the ATI Radeon can do 1.5 gigatexels per second. The Voodoo 5 can only do 667 megatexels. So, the Radeon will far outperform a V5. And it has T&L! What a deal! The funny thing is that 3dfx is hyping the V5 based on its fill rate...

Now, on Wednesday, nVidia is going to announce the GeForce 2. It will have a fill rate of 1.6 gigatexels, just a bit higher than ATI's offering. On the geometry side, the GF2 will do 250 million triangles per second. I don't know how fast the Radeon is as far as geometry, but if anyone else knows, please share! It is also rumored that the GF2 will be in stores on Friday. As in, THIS Friday. Whoah.

Back on ATI's side, the Radeon looks like it will have more features that the GF2. As a game coder, I like that. :) Also, ATI is likely to have better Linux support. I also like that.

It looks like choosing between these two cards will be tough, but I'm leaning towards ATI right now. One thing that I know for sure, however, is that 3dfx is not in the running. Their only hope right now is to drop their prices very low. I would not like to be working at 3dfx right now.

Oh, here's some links:

• Sharky Extreme's Radeon review
• Computer Games Magazine's Radeon review
• Acto Micro's GeForce 2 review (no one else has reviews up because nVidia has not announced the thing yet)
• nVidia - They have a flash movie up which mentions the 1.6 GigaTexels thing.

Again, nVidia will be announcing the GF2 on Wednesday. Check their site then for details.

------

Here's a HardwareCentral review of the Celeron 2 (today must be the day NDAs were lifted; look for other butt-kicking sites like Thresh's and Sharky's to maybe have something on it later today.

Here's BP6.com, an excellent reference for those of you with that funky Abit board. Check out the video preview of the Powerleap FC-PGA adapters - basically they plug into Coppermines and allow two of them (new stepping ONLY) to run in SMP mode. Of course, your BP6 would be running at 100MHz FSB by default - and overclocking well past 100MHz (which is what is required to unlock the true potential of Coppermines) is flaky on any BX board.

Coppermines seem, for me, an excellent buy. I have a 500E running at 733Mhz (147MHz FSB) on an MSI MS-6309 Apollo Pro 133A board. Excellent performance, and super stable.

The 66MHz FSB for these new Celerons is a double-edged sword. It's good that the 66MHz+ gap is open, which is really what made the original Celerons such good overclockers; but besides the performance hit (naturally), the lower FSB means a higher multiplier. The internal multiplier (locked by Intel) for the 600MHZ Celeron 2 is 9.0x. That's ass-high, people. I don't think many motherboards currently support that. At the very least I think a BIOS upgrade is in order, unless you're absoluely sure the board can handle that high a multiplier - but getting back to the performance hit, not only is your memory, etc. running at only 66MHz, but with the high multiplier your chip is running 9 times faster than your system. That's a low of waiting on its part.

My advice? Get a 500E or 550E (both can be had for around $200, if you know where to look) and overclock them beyond insanity. 150MHz FSB is not out of the question for these chips, especially the ones with the new core stepping. I'll be going for a 600E (FC-PGA) as soon as school lets out for me for the Summer.

For a truly bent journalistic look at the Coppermines, check out this piece I wrote for the fantastic Overclockers.com over Winter Break.

Okay, I noticed there's a lot of misinformation/total crap being thrown out on /. right now...so I'll clear a few things up.

Correction: Clock for clock, according to SharkyExtreme's and AnandTech's benchmarks, the Pentium III takes a majority decision against the Athlon while using the i820/RDRAM and KX133/SDRAM chipsets (with the notable exception of professional CAD/CAM), which is useful for the money-is-no-object department. Interestingly, Anand also benched the P3 with a Apollo 133A/SDRAM chipset revealing a give-and-take tie relative to the Athlon, for those of us that are a bit more price conscious.

Correction: The P3 L2 cache is 8-way associative, 256 bit wide, 256KB in size, and runs at full clockspeed. The Athlon L2 cache is 512KB in size, running at 1/3 the clockspeed. The Athlon also has a 128KB L1 cache compared to the P3's 32KB L1 cache, both running at full clockspeed.

Correction: There is NO yield problem at Intel. There is, however, a supply problem, due to management mispredicting what quantity in chips they need to have supplied, as well as reallocation of resources as Intel prepares its fabs for Willamette and Itanium. Gotta love management. For proof, check out the amazing ability of Intel's 500E-600E chips to overclock to 700+ MHz. That's not a characteristic of a chipmaker with yield problems.

Correction: Why on Earth are people deciding what processor is superior by the supply of said chips? Like most sane people, I happen to judge performance on the basis of performance alone. Or maybe it's because I'm not a brand-name zealot. Either way...unless you're talking price/performance (in which case why even talk about GHz processors?) please can the supply arguments.

So who wins? The consumer does. Hopefully with the introduction of Cyrix's Joshua processors, the chipmakers will be squeezed even harder to cut both profits and prices. If you really desire a God Box, go take out a student loan and treat yourself to an SMP Alpha platform.

See here. From the people who brought us the review posted w/ the Athlon article earlier this week.

Sharkey Extreeme implied in the AMD 1000 MHz article that he would now have less work to do since the speed increments would be more significant. 150MHz was a big deal when compared with a 100MHz chip. 750-800MHz? *Yawn* I don't expect people will even notice the difference between a 1.2Ghz chip and a 1.25GHz. People can now focus upon more subtle things like quality. Just give me a chip that doesn't run HOT...thankyouverymuch

In 18-22 months we should have 2GHz chips!

Sharkey Extreeme implied in the AMD 1000 MHz article that he would now have less work to do since the speed increments would be more significant. 150MHz was a big deal when compared with a 100MHz chip. 750-800MHz? *Yawn* I don't expect people will even notice the difference between a 1.2Ghz chip and a 1.25GHz. People can now focus upon more subtle things like quality. Just give me a chip that doesn't run HOT...thankyouverymuch

In 18-22 months we should have 2GHz chips!

As you can see here, the Athlon 800 delivered a severe can of whoop-ass to the Pentium III 800 (both 133 and 100 bus speeds). And the following two points can be observed:

1) The Athlon 800 has the same cache divider as the Athlon 1Ghz.
2) The performance of the Athlon does not "severely lag" behind the Pentium, and in fact, it's a whole lot faster!

expect the Athlon to significantly lag the PIII at the same speed

Dude, either you work for Intel (FUD anyone?), or you better have some concrete information to back up your outrageous claims.

From the Article :
Pricing and Availability
AMD is currently shipping its 1GHz AMD Athlon processors priced at $1,299 in 1,000 unit quantities. AMD is also announcing the availability of 950MHz and 900MHz AMD Athlon processors. The 950MHz AMD Athlon processor is priced at $999 in 1,000 unit quantities. The 900MHz AMD Athlon processor is priced at $899 in 1,000 unit quantities.

I don't know about everyone else, but that's a little pricey for a processor. You can build a decent full system for that kind of money. The benchmarks are pretty decent though.

The price to stay ahead of the Jones' isn't moving much, even with heated processor competition.

//Phizzy

I wonder how much of an impact this will have on performance, compared to Intel's Kamati offerings with a 1/2 speed cache? Also, does anybody know what the multiplier is on Intel's newest P3's? I can't remember their stupid name.

You can see on this page some benchmarks, showing that the AMD 1Ghz just barely outperfom the Kyrotech 1Ghz chips. When you look at the cache, the kyrotech is an 800 upped to 1G, therefore the cache, which was at 320 is at 400 in the kyrotech, vs 333 in the AMD chip. What else was changed in the AMD chip to make it outperform an older version of itself with faster cache?

thanx

S3 makes a couple of them.

The ViRGE/MX, which is afaik just a laptop version of the /GX2. The utah-glx project contains early alpha support for the ViRGE line of cards. It works, but it's not exactly what you'd want to play Quake3 on.

The mobile savage line is more interesting if you're after 3D speed on the laptop. Savage/MX and /IX. Check out the preview on SharkyExtreme.

ATI also has a couple, the latest being the Rage Mobility 128.

Well, according to this Sharky's blurb we can expect it in the 2nd quarter, or April-June of this year. Interestingly, that's around the timeframe predicted for Intel to debut its next-gen gigahertz Willamette core.

Nothing like an old-fashioned corporate pissing contest.

They are not clueless - shut up my account quickly when I tried to run some daemon. I had to remove it :-( the dedicated server is yet too expensive for me

I run Pref News there - a russian-speaking e-zine devoted to Perl, Python, Java and PHP-programming. 8 people post interesting links and code snippets almost daily. We are looking for more enthusiasts.

/Alex

It was the Celeron. Whatever intel did to make such damn high quality C300A's was great. They used technologies from P2 production and yet left the Celeron at 1.5 times less Mhz than the P2.

This left us with only one thing to do. OVERCLOCK. They tried to lock the bus to make it hard to do, but that didnt matter. With the advent of really nice 100Mhz FSB boards out there like the BH6 which was rock solid for overclocking, things just took off.

Now that Celerons up to 533are now being produced, with Intel 'doing the OC for us' by having them at 100Mhz bus now, those halcyon days are over. The C300A was just the BEST at overclocking. No need for any special cooling devices for me, and among a dozen friends that tried it, 11 of us succeeded - the other guy went and got a replacement that worked. The power/$ because of this is something the Athlon wont even match til prices fall this summer.

Or ARE the halcyon days over? According to this slashdot note about this article, there may be more such days ahead during the early release of the intel flipchip 500 and 550e, before they start streaming into high quality high speed high price chips, and lo end ones which wont OC. GET THEM AT THE START of the cycle.

If you arent running a server, the leeway intel has given for overclocking is just too large to ignore. If you consider it, the Athlon, while a technological marvel and all for the elegant solutions it employs to be compatible with a stupid x86 design (see this ARSTechnica comparison G4 vs Athlon) just does NOT give the same bang for the buck if you check it all out. (And REALLY, the Alpha is still an amazing chip, 64 bits and all, and heavily underused - and its years old.)

So if price/performance and x86 compatibility are all that matters, the Celeron300A was the best CPU deal of the year.

Math

Is it just me, or has Sharky been infected with the "suck up to our advertisers" disease that hit Tom a while back? Get this quote from here:

...the MAXX is a direct contender once again with the SDR card, however it almost overtakes the DDR board as well in high resolutions. Once again, the raw power of the two Rage 128 Pro chips stands up well to the extra high bandwidth and T&L of the DDR GeForce.

Well, excuse me, since ATI has thrown two chips at the problem compared with one for the NVidia card, I would expect the words "raw power" to be applied to the GeForce. On top of that, he says that the ATI card "almost overtakes" the GeForce DDR; the framerate differences between the ATI and the SDR card on the three tests on this page were 0.4 FPS, 0.1 FPS and 0.4 FPS again, whereas the gaps between the ATI and the DDR card were, respectively, 5 FPS, 5.4 FPS and 5.1 FPS. Since we're talking about a nearly 20% difference in F/R between the ATI and the DDR cards, his comments strike me as being just this side of dishonest. He then goes on to say that the DDR GeForce card has better bandwidth and T&L, as if NVidia were cheating or something.

If you look at the tests, many of them show the ATI card getting its ass well and truly kicked by the GeForce cards, sometimes by margins of 100% or more, yet Sharky skims by these figures as if they were of little importance, even though he's the one who did the tests. Faugh. Show us your list of advertisers, Sharky.

If these are going to be used as phones, why not overclock the processor to 900MHz (or 2.4 GHz!) to match the frequency of cordless phones?

This would settle those occasional comments about CPU frequency interfering with radio frequency and vice versa, since they don't.

AnandTech, Sharky Extreme, Adrenaline Vault, and Ars Technica seem to have screenshots of a new overclocking record every week or two. I believe it currently stands at ~1300MHz -- is 2.4GHz unreasonable to think?

--

When you merge together staples of the Internet like that, you're taking away choice (either intentionally or not) and that just seems like it goes against the entire impetus of the Web.

It does - check Sharkyextreme.com - they just did a roundup on three new Intel processors, and both the 800/100 and the 800/133 outperformed the Athlon 750 in nearly all benchmarks... even the P3 733/133 outperformed the Athlon 750 in some tests.

The Sharky Extreme Overclocking Guide claims that 75% of Celeron 466 can be overclocked to 525 MHz, that all 400 MHz CPUs can be overclocked to 450 MHz, and 85% to 498 MHz.

This led me to the conclusion that a 400 MHz Celeron might be better than a 466 MHz, due to the greater likelyhood of overclockability, and the fact that successfull overclocking will give a faster bus speed (83 MHz for 400 oc'd to 498 MHz).

Is there a flaw in my reasoning? Am I Comments?

celerons are hands down the best processors to buy if you're on a budget and don't let anyone tell you any different. you can pick up a 466 for less than US$70 right now and with some cooling it should overclock to 550 easy. if you go with a 366 celeron you should still be able to overclock it 500+ with cooling - intel's yields on celerons are very good, so a lot of the time there is little difference between the slower and faster models besides the 'official' clock rate. i've read about celeron 300As overclocked past 600mhz. performance is usually about the same as a p2/p3 at the same clock rate (though the celerons use a slower bus...)

i'll have to respectfully disagree with the last poster: you'd be crazy to upgrade the 16 meg banshee when you've got a 166 in there. your processor is much farther behind than your video card.

if visit this site on a regular basis you won't go wrong: www.anandtech.com

it's a slashdot-esque site dealing only with the x86 hardware industry (mainly the gaming side of it...). they link to stories/reviews/etc that other good hardware sites publish. there are many nice hardware sites out there, if you look at anandtech you will quickly find some good ones.

this page does a 'weekly cpu price guide' article in which they also recommend which cpus they think are the best to buy: www.sharkyextreme.com

if i were going to buy a computer right now it'd definitely have an abit bp6 mainboard with a pair of overclocked celerons.

AMD Will slash Athlon Prices: This is one of the biggest misconceptions about

The Athlon 600 is retailing for as little as $379 now, about half of what they were at four months ago. Granted, it wasn't in one dramatic price slash, but it's a hell of a drop. AMD has kept the Athlons cheaper and faster than same-Mhz PIIIs forever, and I don't see that changing soon. Maybe Intel will get ahead in the Mhz war, but that won't change the market situation for people not buying the absolute fastest chip.

• 28 million transistors
• 106 mm2 die size
• 1.1 to 1.7 V operation

• 8-way set associative, 1024 sets
  
• 32 byte line (32 bytes data, 4 bytes ECC every 2 clocks, equals 11.7GB/sec throughput at 733MHz
  
• 36-bit physical address space
  
• 4 x reduction in latency versus Katmai P3 L2
  
• Cache bus speed fully scalable with core frequency
  
• 288-bit transfer width (256 data, 32 ECC)
  
• 2 cycle back to back throughput
  

• 6 Fill Buffers (previously 4), increasing the number of concurrent non-blocking data-cache ops that can be done.
  
• 8 Bus Queue Entires (previously 4) to allow more outstanding memory/bus operations.
  
• 4 Writeback buffers (previously 1) for reduced blocking during cache operations.
  

Information on how to help the victims of the Taiwan Earthquakes can go here:

Sharky Extreme's Taiwan Earthquake Relief Page

There are several links there.

--

--

SharkyExtreme has a more lengthy writeup, including some initial performance comparisons from a prerelease version (chips clocked to 125Mhz instead of 143Mhz, beta drivers).

--

• Sharky Extreme
• Ars Technica
• AnandTech
• Hard OCP
• Ace's Hardware
• CompHardware
• Tom's Hardware
• The Tech Zone
• Thresh's FiringSquad
• Review News

--

Sharky's

They say it all, and my tests back them up... Jdc

What was that said before? Something about sold on marketing? (: This one's been taken, hook, line, sinker. Anyway, here's what I've heard:

#1: The 'Triple' FPU is actually still lagging on the benchmarks. I can't remember but I think that was on SharkyExtreme

#2: Tom Pabst has been in bed with AMD forever, he repeatedly said that AMD was going to bury Intel with the next latest and greatest as far back as the original K6 (which blew).

#3: The '200' MHz bus is simply a dual 100. Just the same as Matrox's DualBus technology isn't 256 bits, simply 2x128.

#4: All of AMD's talk about full speed, 4 or 8 megs of cache.. Just remember this: When they talk about it being cheap, they mean the 1/2 speed 512k of cache. But as soon as it's convienent, they'll go back to talking about 8 megs of full speed cache. That won't come cheap. (As before, that's called good marketing, avoid the whole truth)

Anyway, I'm done.

Today, the best performing TNT2 card, out of the box, is the Hercules Dynamite TNT2Ultra. It is manufacturer-guaranteed to run at 175MHz core setting. Every other TNT2Ultra being manufactured today is only guaranteed to 150.

Even the Hercules TNT2 standard is clocked at 143, which is close to the speed everyone else is running ultras.

Visit some of the gaming sites, including AnandTech and Sharky Extreme, to see reviews of this and other cards.

http://www.sharkyextreme.com/news.shtml#2080

not a very informative one, though..

The TNT/TNT2 and Voodoo3 don't REALLY use hardware bumpmapping, they use "embossing".

From 3D Gaming website "SharkyExtreme":

"Most other 3D cards (the Voodoo3, TNT2 etc...) use the conventional embossing method to simulate bump mapping- which really isn't all that big of a deal."

" Basically, a TNT2 or Voodoo3 will 'counterfeit' bump mapping because embossing is NOT the real deal..."

See " http://w ww.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/reviews/video/matrox _g400max/g.shtml" for the context and more information.

PS: Both TomsHardware and AnandTech (as well as many other respectable hardware sites) have said exactly the same thing.

-- Tom Joynt

Linux doesn't run any worse overclocked than Win95/98 (the crash standard). Linux will do an abrupt reboot if the processor is incorrectly overclocked. Win95/98 will hang or crash during boot. WinNT will give a BSOD before it gets to the log-in prompt. I know this because I had my Celeron333 improperly o'c to 500 before I saw the SharkyExtreme way of properly overclocking a Celeron. Now, I can watch full screen Quicktime 4.0 trailers without skipping. (Oh yeah, those new Linux kernels compile rather rapidly, too...)

Sharkey Extreme's "news" section is also good. The URL is http://www.sharkyextreme.com/news.shtml .

I'm mainly interested in chip news and graphics news, though. For more general news or for specific news on other topics, you'd have to check other sites.

>I don't know of any mother board that has even 2 AGP slots, so a board with 4 isn't avail.

I b'leeve the Metabyte approach is to use a single AGP board, and the other board(s) PCI. They connect via a special feature connector. Check out this article.

For your first question, look at the ATI All-In-Wonder 128. I believe Sharky Extreme did a review of it, including its MPEG-2 capture abilities.

There is some talk that the K7 may have problems as well at Sharky Extreme, which given AMDs finacial situation could be very bad.

Of course, Merced is likely to be late and slow too.

There's a review on Anandtech, and there was another over on SharkyExtreme. They were both pretty positive.

Bah!

Bah!

Oh, and before I forget....

Bah!

The K6-3 has ONBOARD L2 cache. It's going to be slightly faster. Note: I said SLIGHTLY. The K6-3 reviews I've seen have shown they're faster than equivallent P2's by only a VERY slight margin. A couple points one way or the other does not a spanking make. Definitely not what I'd call "considerable".

Wait till there's solid benchmarking on OFF THE SHELF procs for both the K6-3 and the new Celeron-A's. Don't start blathering on about vapourwares until then.

Anyhow, I stole the following quote from off the site.

The K7 is AMD's Xeon

And that's about DEAD ON. The price point that AMD is looking for with the K7, while not quite on the level of the bleeding-edge Intel chips, is aimed at a CONSIDERABLY higher strata than the current K6-2 and 3 chips are. Besides which, you're going to have to buy, in ADDITION TO THE PROCESSOR:

1. A new motherboard
   
2. A new case
   
3. Brand new RAM to accomodate the K7.
   

Do the math. Intel's STILL going to come off cheaper.

In addition, you're probably going to see a LOT of complaints (similar to the launching of the LX chipset) and compatibility issues with the K7 arise early on.

The only people who are probably going to wind up buy the K7 are those poor sods who must ABSOLOUTELY have THE fastest setup of the moment.

I have better things to spend my cash on.


Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!