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and a "heat pipe" instead of a fan!

Actually, the heat pipe doesn't replace the fan, it just lowers the number of fans used in the system, since the case and processor fan can be combined.

Tom's Hardware has a review of one of these things (not the same model though)... have a look.

I actually run UT2k3 at 1600x1200 32 bit colors, all options in their higher quality, and get zero stutters, and it usually goes at 40-60 frames per second, wich I think is OK.

Like him, I have a P4 2GHz, running XP w/ 1 Gb RAM, but I guess they key is really the GeForce 4 Ti 4400.

So, if that guy w/ a P4 is whinning about his piece of crap, he should upgrade his video board, that is what makes most difference to high-end 3d games. It actually may make more difference than the CPU itself. You can see in Tom's Hardware Guide that the performance of a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 is twice the GeForce 3 Ti 4200.

what about Crusoe? what's the status of the Crusoe processor and why don't they take advantage of this opportunity and jump into the market?

What about Crusoe indeed!

This was true. Tom Pabst of Tom's Hardware Guide did a video of taking the heatsink off of an AMD machine and watching the CPU fry.

In response to that AMD started putting on die thermal sensors in their CPUs and motherboard manufacturers added C.O.P. (CPU Overheating Protection).

So if you have a recent AMD CPU and motherboard with C.O.P., it isn't an issue.

They still aren't as good as Intel where the CPU slows down in response to overheating, rather than completely shutting down. But it is a large step in the right direction and should keep AMD users from frying processors.

And those heating elements will burst in flames a second after you remove the pot from them.

Alienware's 51m is located Here
It comes with the Radeon 9000 pro standard now, and optionally you can get the new P-4 3.06 GHz With HyperThreading.
Hyperthreading is worth it, and this laptop is ideal not just for gamers, but since adobe runs faster on a P-4 with H/T eanabled (see the Tom's video for proof -- 3.06 H/T enabled beats a 3.6 noticably and visually in how long it takes for software to get back to you so you can actually start editing that video/image etc)
I'm really glad to see the Gamer's PC vendors getting into the notebook market seriously though. It's about time serious PC users could get a laptop with Today's cutting edge technology, instead of last years technology from places like dell.

...do I fit a GeForceFX into one of these babies? :)

shit. nevermind about the $1200 thing. i was reading this at the same time.

By all appearances and specs, this case is either the Shuttle SS51G, or the recently released SB51G. According to most of the reviews I've seen of Shuttle's "XPC" line that these fall in, they're all fairly quiet and well cooled.

No, I don't own one, but the reviews have convinced me, and it's gonna be my next case. Take a look at the Tom's Hardware review for an example, or the more recent one from Extreme Hardware. Check 'em out, they're cool -- literally and figuratively :)

The Cyrix processor Lacks a FPU.

Then what's the FP Unit and MMX/3D Unit in this block diagram? The pdf datasheet referenced in the Tom's Hardware review mentioned that the floating point unit runs at 1/2 the speed of the rest of the CPU. That's probably one of the reasons, they suck compared to a Celeron. But hey, it only dissipates 12W.

I remember back in 1998 I was working at a company developing a revolutionary (at the time) graphics unit, and they brought in a guy who was head of digital israel to be the ceo. The chip was expected to run pretty hot, but outperform anything currently on the market by an order of magnitude. He left a month later, with one of his claims being that no one would ever accept a consumer graphics card with a fan on it! Having your new ceo bolt after a month kinda kills investor confidance, and the single largest investor got limp dicked and pulled out, bringing the company down. What a loser.

Yeah, I remember that company, they were called FourFold Technologies. I read an article about them back in 97 I think. This is the best link I could find about them. FourFold is mentioned about 2/3rd way down the page. This was in 97 when Mathew Kallis was ceo, before they brought in the guy from the Israel branch of digital, his name was Avraham Menachem if I remember correctly, although don't quote me on that. Israel Seed was their main investor.

That is a pretty big fan, isn't it? Too, bad. Nvidia is something like a $2 billion company now, and FourFold would have had the market Nvidia now has, if the guys at Israel Seed hadn't pissed themselves. By the way, I heard that when Israel Seed pulled out of FourFold and brought it down, the company had just raised about $1 million, a big chunk of which it still had in the bank, and that most of the money got burned in the process of shuting down / breaking up the company. Dumbasses from Israel Seed destroyed the company and didn't even get anything out of it in the end.

Actually, your best bet as far as price/performance goes is probably the GeForce4 TI 4200 64MB which is going for $109 on pricewatch.com, as compared to the GeForce4 TI 4600 which is going for $210 dollars yet only gives you an extra 15% gaming performance.

I've seen a lot of post saying.. "big whoop my computer does this too so what!"

Well thats not the freakin' point.. My computer does a lot of this too.. but I don't want the damn thing in my living room sitting in my entertainment center.. its big its bulky and out of place right next to other nice ergonomic entertainment center pieces. This thing is SMALL and also very QUIET (liquid cooling! from what the site says.. I personally still wanna see it desected though). This thing looks like a game cube or XBOX things that are acceptably fit into an entertainment center.

Now the second point is building it yourself. I'll agree it is probably a bit cheaper but.. I personally and a friend have been looking for parts for this very type of thing. I think Shuttle makes a bar bones kit. Plus if you look on Tom's Hardware they have an article specifically for this. Now after looking at that article it seems a bit further over the general populace's heads to make something such as this... for really (after my own pricing and such) not all that much more. By building I think you could save about 200 or so dollars.. but then again its not quite warrantied is it.. and it doesn't have the liquid cooling to make it quiet does it?.. ok well thats all I have.

This resembles a system very similar to that on Tom's Hardware, seen here...

and it doesn't run that crappy XP.

Ok, I don't have the nifty remote, but I'm sure you can get one after market. Or get the All In Wonder 7500, like Tom did, and get a remote.

There are instructions for this @ Toms Hardware.

More flexibility on the configuration, etc, and you don't have to support any vendor (like Microsoft or Intel) that you don't want to.

Running Linux would seem to be required if you want to take full advantage of the processor... AFAIK, PPC2002 apps and certainly the OS aren't optimized to make use of anything past the SA1110 chip. Tom's Hardware did a review of the new chips and how well they deliver versus the old ones.

I think that the big thing missing from this device is integrated 802.11b. So you can't connect to anything without cradling. Though it does tack alot onto the old pricepoint. The Toshiba e740 is a better PocketPC system, though pricy. Of course, if all you want is the basic email / calendar / address book, you can't beat the Blackberry.

I'm surprised that noone other than Sharp has really pushed a linux device. If you make all communications TCP/IP, then you can handle connections over USB, firewire, 802.11*, WLAN cards, etc. Network stuff and data entry still seems to be the key stumbling blocks.

Yeah, Linux lacks a consumer-oriented front end, but you'd have to reimplement that for the form factor anyway. All the libraries and components would still be there.

The screenshots have been replaced since this article was posted. The original screenshots were on a white background with a much higher quality rendering.

(original fairy head seen here)

Also of note:
this screenshot vs this screenshot

The screenshots have been replaced since this article was posted. The original screenshots were on a white background with a much higher quality rendering.

(original fairy head seen here)

Also of note:
this screenshot vs this screenshot

I, have yet to see one last element to be fullfilled by nVidia, of which is secondary to their excellent stability and performance in their Linux and freeBSD GLX drivers; may you opensource the drivers so that more ornamental and experimental computer platforms be supported and 3rd party developers may refine and extend functionality for optimum market placement?

My hat is off to nVidia, the NV30 is the greatest bag of marbles I ever hope to purchase in the future. May I say to their only true competitor ATI (yes, excluding Matrox and Parhelia), your lack of support in the opensource world, especially in the implementation of functional drivers from Tungsten Graphics, will hurt you.

May I add, the Matrox Parhelia is nowhere to be seen in comparison of performance to the GeForceFX's (NV30) *performance*. The Parhelia is to the GeForceFX as was the G200 is to the GeForce2; nowhere in sight. Alas, I have a few Matrox graphics accerlators in my machines and Matrox has clearly left nVidia behind in functionality of drivers; Matrox is obviously interested in ideologies of flexibility with stability.

GeForceFX (NV30) will be my first actual purchase of an nVdia product.

This is to both of you...

Power consumption is also reduced by a full 36% according to NVIDIA.

Says Tom's hardware on this page.

Although I somewhat agree about these marginal speed increases. As I don't buy the latest and greatest. I upgrade when there is a substantial increase at an affordable price. I still see this as a good thing. I would much rather see technology getting better little by little at frequent intervals rather than not at all. I don't think these companies could afford to develope a 25% increase product everytime. The amount of time that would be involved would increase much more. Second as I stated above the consumer does have the choice to wait for dramatic increases or upgrade every 6 months.

Awesome

Is that a leafblower onboard?!!! Game gamer lameo's!

This is some sort of sick joke, right? It's like having a Harrier jumpjet in your PC!

i too thoroughly recommend the logitech Z-560's. i bought some 2 days ago and am thrilled. prior to my purchase i'd spent days combing the net for reviews of computers speakers in your price range, and the praise for the quality and value of these speakers is universally glowing.

perhaps the best review i can direct you to is this one - a comparison of 13 4.1/5.1 systems around your price range. it really helped me.

cheers from oz

The parent comment is important, but it is easy not to see the importance.

First, see the Tom's Hardware article about RAID (mirroring/striping) controllers referenced in the parent comment: Fast and Secure: A Comparison of Eight RAID Controllers. As is usual for Tom's Hardware, the article is a bit confused. Apparently it was written hastily.

Motherboards now often have integrated mirroring/striping controllers, so the cost is low. Even Intel has a mother board with an integrated mirroring/striping controller now. In a 2-drive system configured as a mirror, the heads of each drive are moved independently to read data more efficiently than a single drive. Read performance is excellent, and write performance the same as a single drive. Since most systems do more reading than writing, the overall performance is excellent.

A mirror is far more reliable, since if one hard drive fails, all the data can be recovered from the other drive, and the system keeps running until the bad drive can be replaced.

In systems in which there are only one or two users, SCSI is slower. SCSI is only faster when there are many simultaneous users accessing storage.

Extreme solutions such as 15,000 RPM drives and SCSI and RAID 5 are appropriate for e-mail servers, but the noise and expense and lower reliability of the single drives doesn't make sense unless the computer is a server of some type.

Hard drives with a high rotational rate are not necessarily faster at providing data than those with a slow rate. The bottleneck is often the time it takes to move the heads, and the time it takes to present the data to the CPU, not the latency of waiting until the data is under the head.

RAID controllers can do striping, or mirroring, or both. When they do both, 4 drives are required, but read performance is high. Having more than one read head and being able to move them separately is very efficient. A 30,000 RPM drive would still have only one head mechanism.

It is good to see other companies entering the market. Promise Technology was one of the first with low-cost mirroring controllers. Promise is, in my experience, an unbelievably backward company. The products work well, but Promise has sold products with poor setup methods for years. For those who remember DOS programs, the Promise setup user interface is like a DOS shareware program written by a novice programmer who is considerably worse than average in user interface design.

Promise Technology is also known for the poor quality of their manuals. (The company says the manuals are being re-written.)

The parent comment is correct. For most applications, a RAID controller with mirroring, or mirroring plus striping, is excellent.

As of now, it's simply expensive to make very high RPM hard drives. Cost is the reason I didn't opt for SCSI, and I'm glad I didn't. The higher rotational speeds offered in SCSI drives offer only marginal speed increases, and they usually only come in small sizes (18 GB). RAID is the answer to higher performance with hard drives.

My experiment with IDE RAID-0 turned out wonderfully. For $160 I got what amounts to a 160-gig drive that was 2mb/sec slower than a 15k RPM SCSI drive (according to SiSoft SANDRA) That was from two plain old 7200 RPM 80-gig IDE's. When Serial ATA get's big, setups like this will be even easier, since the main limitation with IDE RAID is the number of drives you can attatch to the board.

• Potentially faster
  
• Easier to plug in thanks to smaller cables
  
• More reliable, interference in the cable cancels out, like a ballenced XLR microphone lead.
  
• Longer cables, so you can plug drives in at the top of a tower case
  
• Backwards compatability, use your current IDE HDD with the new controller
  
• Hot plugging
  

Of all the things that a motherboard (or more specifically the collection of microchips known as the chipset) connects together the connection between the memory and the processor is the fastest the most important to performance. No other link, except between the processor and the motherboard even comes close in importance. Also, another issue that comes up is what is known as latency. Latency is the delay the system experiences when it requests memory access. It's not just how much data you can transfer, but how quickly you can have it after you ask.

For all those reasons it almost always makes sense, especially at today's prices, to have all the same memory modules in your system and the fastest memory your system can support. Even if you are able to recycle memory I would avoid doing so unless stability is an issue as many technical issues arise when DIMMS are mixed and matched.

See this article from Tom's Hardware.

Sadly this trend won't go away anytime soon. When you pack that many transistors running at ultrahigh frenquencies in a tiny package you have to pay somehow.

I wonder if the relatively recent (October) change in hard drive warranties was a pre-emptive move on the manufacturers part realizing that they could ship these just-good-enough drives with severe early mortality rates and get away with it.

I don't see Fujitsu in the lineup but I know very little about hard drives, so far all I know one of the manufacturers Tom's Hardware reviews actually applies to them.

Are there any tweaks/optimizations in the kernel for the xscale processor? It appears pocketpc 2002 from microsoft can't take advantage of the extra power; here's hoping linux can....

Perhaps the original poster was trying to link to this article. The article is about the Radeon 9000 Mobility, but it includes a Radeon 9000 vs. Radeon 7500 vs. GeForce performance comparison.

It might be usefull to link to chips actually used in the laptops mentioned.

I was really interested in getting a Sony Picturebook. This was about 4-5 months ago, when the latest ones had not yet hit the United States. I asked a client of mine, who is Japanese, to get me pricing. He obliged, but only after warning me about the Transmeta processor. "It doesn't work well when you try to run multiple applications," he said. "Everyone says it's slow."

I asked him who had told him that. He said it was the Sony rep at the store where he bought his Vaio. Uh-oh.

I knew a Transmeta 867MHz processor wouldn't perform as well as an Intel 867MHz processor, but I did some digging and was shocked to figure out how much slower it really is. Check out these benchmarks from Tom's Hardware. The Transmeta 600MHz processor got stomped by a "vintage" PII/366MHz notebook. That's terrible.

To me, small size and battery life rank higher on my list than pure performance. Still, the Transmeta processors run so slowly that the only way I could justify buying one is if they had 5+ hours of battery life. But they don't -- the PictureBook is only advertising 2.5 hours of battery life. Compare this to the (admittedly larger) 3.7-pound IBM X30, where Walter Mossberg put one through the grinder and got 3 hours and 29 minutes of battery life. IBM is claiming 5+ hours in BatteryMark for the same laptop.

Transmeta did one thing, and that was to get Intel turned on to the fact that consumers want good battery life in notebooks. I think the quote from the article puts it best: "Intel's focus on battery life happened because Transmeta pressured them into it... forced them to do something different. The good news is you've got a giant to acknowledge you but the bad news is you've woken the giant."

Right now, the giant is still stomping Transmeta, and I doubt that tablet PCs will really put Transmeta back in the running. Whatever Transmeta can come up with, Intel has proven that they can match. Transmeta might make initial inroads, just like they did on subnotebooks, but eventually Intel will again wake up, and this time I don't think Transmeta will survive.

In battery mode, it showed that the CPU is only half as fast as it is when running on the mains.

See, it *IS* in the article!

actually,

Mobile cpus have a pretty good bit of modificaton over desktops cpus, primarily designed to reduce heat. cuz the cooler it runs, the faster it can run safely in a laptop enclosure.

1. basic voltage reductions/optimizations
2. some mobile cpus can switch off idle units
3. mobile cpus generally have different on chip
cache sizes than their desktop equivalents
4. the ability to change speeds/voltages on the fly

Tom's Hardware talks about some of this stuff in this article.

Most laptops run from 2 to 4 hours without AC. Mine runs over 2 hours at 2/3s speed. The laptop mentioned in the article runs 2h 47m. I'm not sure what's wrong with your laptop or why you posted without RTFA, but those are your problems not mine.

I've been very happy with the ATI Radeon 9000 that I got a few months ago for $70. Taking a look at some benchmarks, in most tests it outperforms the GF4 MX series cards, and on a couple benchmarks, the GF4 Ti series too.

I like to play games, and I like to play newer games, but paying $400 for a video card is just *insane*

What do slashdotters thing about this pricing?

Frankly, I think that you are smoking waaaaay too much crack.

The price on the high end of the consumer market has slowly crept up in the last five years, from about $200 for the top-of-the-line 3dfx Voodoo when it came out, to about $300 for the top-of-the-line nVidia GForce 4 today.

But on the low end, the prices are as cheap as ever, while the performance on the low end is simply incredible. A GeForce4MX for $75 today is going to be faster than the best $250 card you could buy two years ago.

There are two reason why you can't walk into BestBuy and get an old TNT2 Ultra for $35. First, because just handling quality control and returns makes it not worth their time to sell you a card that cheap. Second, because despite the fact that the TNT2 was fair to decent two years ago, it is just butt-slow by comparison today. The only people buying boxed 3D cards are gamers, and they're just too smart to do something that stupid.

If you want to see how performance has improved in the last few years, check out this Tom's Hardware guide to VGA cards. And you're asking why someone wouldn't sell you one of the cards near the bottom of the chart? The question you should be asking is what kind of moron would be stupid enough to buy one of them?

The true fact in the matter is that intel are going to rely almost entirely on the marketability of a big number with the P4, as it's handling is rather unimpressive when compared to such ordinary designs as those from AMD, which clock poorly, yet crunch happily.

I disagree. Intel's strategy of designing for higher clock speeds has given them a much more scalable chip, and that is evidenced by Intel's ability to increase the clock speeds frequently while AMD is struggling. And if you look at the last Toms hardware review (its a couple of weeks old), the P4 2.8 GHz pretty much tied with the Athlon 2800 (they both won about 14 benchmark tests). But that is much less meaningful when you realize that Tom was testing an Intel chip that has been available for 2 months with an Athlon that won't be available until December. If you compare the 2.8 GHz P4 with the fastest available Athlon today, the P4 beats it in over 90% of the benchmarks (I'd imagine that a comparison between the 3.06 GHz HT chip and the Athlon 2800+ would be similar). So Intel's strategy is working for performance, and it is more marketable to boot.

And there is a lot of research right now about the optimal pipeline depth, and the conclusion was that the current pipelines are not deep enough. The optimal pipeline depth for the x86 architecture is around 40-50 stages.

http://systems.cs.colorado.edu/ISCA2002/FinalPaper s/hartsteina_optimum_pipeline_color.pdf
http://systems.cs.colorado.edu/ISCA2002/FinalPaper s/Deep%20Pipes.pdf

BTW- thanks to fobef for these links- I read them yesterday on /.

Yes, they are slowly improving, but modern PCs are still behind where workstations were years ago, and a modern Intel based server is well behind a SPARC based machine.

The bus and memory bandwidth has improved pretty much in lockstep with the CPU computational ability. While it might be nice on paper to have 16GB of memory bandwidth, and it might look good on a ridiculously synthetic memory bandwidth benchmark, in practicality such a imbalance would be just a monstrous waste of money: Generally processors actually do something with the data that they're processing, so the two factors have to balance: You need a system design that can keep the processor satiated. In the Athlon world such a situation was demonstrated superbly recently with the ramping up of the memory subsystem speed, DDR ramping up from 266Mhz to 400Mhz...what improvement did it demonstrate? Virtually none. The processor simply had no real need for the additional memory bandwidth, though I'm sure it will as they come out with the next generation.

Intel and AMD will spend their money on whatever generates the most ROI. They have collectively spent literally billions of dollars convincing Joe Public that CPU Mhz is the best way to measure the speed of a system - they aren't going to throw that away. A competent manager with R&D dollars to spend will therefore spend them on increasing Mhz.

While I have spent considerable effort in the past disputing the Mhz-is-king myth (especially in regards to the P4 versus the Athlon), I think you're promoting just as false of an claim. CPU speed DOES matter. By your claims, shouldn't these benchmarks show no improvement as the CPU power ramps up, given your claims that it's starved for throughput?

Manufacturers, driving by consumer marketing which believes that higher Mhz == better product, are optimizing in the wrong areas. If they want to talk numbers, they should be pushing fast memory and buses which are actually a useful measure of a machine's performance, not CPU Mhz which isn't.

So you're saying that they should be increasing memory bandwidth and bus speeds? What a clever idea. You should write a letter to them because clearly they just haven't caught on...oh wait, yes they have.

If they want to talk numbers, they should be pushing fast memory and buses which are actually a useful measure of a machine's performance, not CPU Mhz which isn't.

This is as much bullshit as claiming that only Mhz is a measure of a machine's performance. Obviously it's a combination of all of the systems in the machine, and the large CPU manufacturers aren't stupid (i.e. they want their machines to show up at the top of the benchmarks): As the need arises they increase bus and memory bandwidth accordingly, and for "cutting edge" needs they produce chips with huge L2 caches (though the cost/benefit is out of whack. A P2 2.4Ghz with 2MB of L2 would get trounced by a 2.6Mhz with 512MB of L2 cache, disputing your claims that CPU speed doesn't matter. Large cache chips only make sense if you can't get a faster CPU: In that case the only option they have is to increase the cache). A dual-channel RAMBUS solution isn't going to make a P4 1.4Ghz any faster than it would be with a single-channel: The CPU will never demand that memory bandwidth. Indeed, this was one of the original problems with RAMBUS: The extreme throughput it offered simply wasn't necessary for the early P4s, leading to a lot of the early naysaying about its usefulness. Of course we all know that it because the crucial point for P4 performance as the clock speed accelerated.

Sorry, but your post reeks of "armchair CPU designer" : It's all so clear and so obvious. I mean, it's not like Intel and AMD have a lot of extremely clever people who seek the best balance between all of the systems...is it?

Manufacturers, driving by consumer marketing which believes that higher Mhz == better product, are optimizing in the wrong areas. If they want to talk numbers, they should be pushing fast memory and buses which are actually a useful measure of a machine's performance, not CPU Mhz which isn't.

So you're saying that they should be increasing memory bandwidth and bus speeds? What a clever idea. You should write a letter to them because clearly they just haven't caught on...oh wait, yes they have.

If they want to talk numbers, they should be pushing fast memory and buses which are actually a useful measure of a machine's performance, not CPU Mhz which isn't.

This is as much bullshit as claiming that only Mhz is a measure of a machine's performance. Obviously it's a combination of all of the systems in the machine, and the large CPU manufacturers aren't stupid (i.e. they want their machines to show up at the top of the benchmarks): As the need arises they increase bus and memory bandwidth accordingly, and for "cutting edge" needs they produce chips with huge L2 caches (though the cost/benefit is out of whack. A P2 2.4Ghz with 2MB of L2 would get trounced by a 2.6Mhz with 512MB of L2 cache, disputing your claims that CPU speed doesn't matter. Large cache chips only make sense if you can't get a faster CPU: In that case the only option they have is to increase the cache). A dual-channel RAMBUS solution isn't going to make a P4 1.4Ghz any faster than it would be with a single-channel: The CPU will never demand that memory bandwidth. Indeed, this was one of the original problems with RAMBUS: The extreme throughput it offered simply wasn't necessary for the early P4s, leading to a lot of the early naysaying about its usefulness. Of course we all know that it because the crucial point for P4 performance as the clock speed accelerated.

Sorry, but your post reeks of "armchair CPU designer" : It's all so clear and so obvious. I mean, it's not like Intel and AMD have a lot of extremely clever people who seek the best balance between all of the systems...is it?

finally they'll see that clock speed does make a difference Clock speed is something Intel uses to bolster their performance claims and give people an excuse to upgrade to the newest model. Clock speed tells very little about the performance of a computer. Look at AMD's athlon. Many reviews like the ones on tom's hardware show that running Windows on a "slower" athlon yeilds better performance than a comparably clocked P4. If you meant that finally, if apple runs on x86, there will be a better benchmark between Windows and MacOS, you would be more accurate. Until that happens you are comparing two different fruits.

My only complaint is that I can't use the computer at the same time, and that nView doesn't seem to let you play the video full screen on one monitor and use the other monitor for other purposes. Do you just use "Clone" or do you have something else set up?

At home I have a Gainward GeForce2 MX TwinView ViVo Golden Sample - see the review at Tom's Hardware. It's got TV-in *and* TV-out (ViVo), but the TwinView is what really sold me. You can set up multiple monitors using different resolutions, no matter what device you are connected to, such as two RGB monitors or a monitor and a TV (like I have.)

I forget which nView setting I have now, but have it configured for a 1280x960 resoultion on my 19" CRT and a separate 640x480 display on my TV. The Windows taskbar only shows on the CRT, but the TV has a mirror of the background and I can drag windows on to it. I usually leave Winamp running on the TV, but the coolest part is that it automatically scales video to full-screen on the TV. Like the other reply noted, any video window open on my main desktop will run fullscreen on the TV, whether it's in the foreground or not. Definitely worth looking into, as I'm sure Gainward has a newer GF4 card with similar functionality.

We went DivX 3.11, 4.0, 5.0, and XVid, etc. This player can play DivX 4.0 and 5.0, but what about 5.03, the upcoming version? Or DivX 6? What about XVid, or old 3.11 movies you have kicking around?

But video is only a small part of the puzzle. Of the hundred or so DivX "backups" I have, only half have MP3 audio. A big chunk have ogg (and ogg is probably the most popular for new movies), and a few have AC3.

My point boils down to this: I spend alot of time watching movies encoded in DivX. I even do some encoding. With a PC that is almost infinately upgradable, with all the DivX sites out there offering support, I still have trouble playing some movies.

Some machine with hard-coded firmware is not going to make the grade.

If you want to watch DivX on your tv, then get one of these things. That's what I did - it's a stereo, DVD player, and it plays DivX in all it's formats. It sits under the TV, is plugged into the 100 megabit network, and makes life very simple. We don't even have cable any more.

From what I've seen, those YS Tech TMD fans aren't too great. They just spin too fast to be quiet. It's a shame, because the increased blade surface area should mean higher efficiency.

Anyway, the next-generation fans I'm truly drooling over are the ultra-quiet fans from Verax. A power supply with a Verax fan was a part of the Tom's Hardware Power Supply Roundup and they liked it a lot.

However, at $48.00 in the US for one of these babies, I don't think I'll be splurging yet. I thought I was nuts for buying 5 Papst 8412NGLs at $20.00 each.

Ian

• contrast ratio
• viewing angle
• color
• pixel response time

Sexy LCD 17" Monitors - Part I

Comparison of 17" LCDs: The Heavyweights Enter The Ring - Part II
Cheers

Sexy LCD 17" Monitors - Part I

Comparison of 17" LCDs: The Heavyweights Enter The Ring - Part II
Cheers