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unfortunately, wineX doesn't see the same performance boost (windows2000 beats it):

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/02q2/020531/wind ows_gaming-05.html

funny how the frame rate is capped at 50 for all resolutions though. it seems more like something is artificially keeping it there.

_f

Tom's Hardware is currently running a feature entitled How To Select The Right Case For Your Computer which takes modding potential into consideration, even suggesting the Directron/Super Flower - 201S as a sort of "pre-modded" option for those of us too busy playing games or just too plain lazy to put in the necessary work ourselves.

Tom's Hardware is currently running a feature entitled How To Select The Right Case For Your Computer which takes modding potential into consideration, even suggesting the Directron/Super Flower - 201S as a sort of "pre-modded" option for those of us too busy playing games or just too plain lazy to put in the necessary work ourselves.

Anyhoo, enough about me... you need to Google more often. Several helpful links:

Hot Spot - How Modern Processors Cope With Heat Emergencies - Goes over different bad things that can happen. It seems newer CPUs are designed to know when it gets too hot and will hang themselves to protect the hardware.

The Heat Sink Guide: Maximum CPU temperatures - Gives ya the maximum temperature before your CPU's inards are like melted butter. But it seems 60 degrees celcius is ok (140 degress fahrenheit).

Seriously man, whip out your Google when you don't know what to do
... or do you run Windoze? j/k :)

It is nice to know what's coming, but Q3 2003 is a long ways away, and the modules being ready doesn't necessarily mean there will be a chipset ready that supports them. I'm still waiting for P4 motherboards to support 333Mhz DDR. Tom's has a review of the VIA P4X333 here, but we haven't seen any motherboards with this chipset yet. The VIA KT333 chipset currently has around 16 Athlon motherboards shipping with 333Mhz DDR support.

It is nice to know what's coming, but Q3 2003 is a long ways away, and the modules being ready doesn't necessarily mean there will be a chipset ready that supports them. I'm still waiting for P4 motherboards to support 333Mhz DDR. Tom's has a review of the VIA P4X333 here, but we haven't seen any motherboards with this chipset yet. The VIA KT333 chipset currently has around 16 Athlon motherboards shipping with 333Mhz DDR support.

Intel clearly labels the P4 line with its true clock speed. No false advertising there! Just think that a P4 2.2Ghz machine is 50% faster than an athlon 1.5Ghz, now for the same price! Not only that, I don't have to worry about my heatsink falling off!

he may not be quiter than your fan but the screams of pain from his webservers from a good slshdotting wont.... btw try their other server...
here

I have tried several times going to the posted URL at the top of the article, but all I get are 404 errors.

Here is a better link that will bring up the article directly:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/02q2/020521/ind ex.html

Sigh...

And yet another misguided AMD fanboy... check out the facts here.

Just look at the cheap junk Intel's putting out now a days. Rip the heat sink off, and they keep running. I'm sorry, but a processor just isn't doing its job unless you can cook a potatoe on it in under 30sec.

Unlike other /.ers, I'm willing to back up my boasts!

Link

Your concepts are right, but the numbers are a bit off...

The fastest IDE drives on the market are still maxing out at around 50 MB/s. The WD, Maxtor, and IBM drives all hover around here. WD gets the edge due to cache, but it doesn't really change the diskbuffer speed.

The Maxtor they used would certainly get it's ass whooped by the WD drive you mention - it's a 5400 rpm model and has a max transfer rate in the 40 MB/s range. Ouch.

Funny thing though... of the three companies mentioned above WD is the only one that doesn't publish the actual drive to cache transfer rates. Both Maxtor and IBM publish maximum rates, sustained rates at outer diameter, and sustained at inner. WD only publishes the cache write speed (~75 MB/s) which is meaningless. Benchmarks show the WD drive to have read transfer rates at the same speeds as Maxtor and IBM though.

It's becuase the 4400 and 4600 are so freakin huge! Compare these:

This is a 4600. It's Big.
This is a 4200. In the article they say the differences between boards. Enjoy.

Look junior, as a friendly suggestion, next time do a little bit of research before you start flaming other people's suggestions. Included in that research should be actually reading the articles that you point to. That way, you might realize that the problem Toms Hardware found was because they completely removed the HSF, not because it was using a passive cooling method. Additionally, Toms Hardware's main beef with the Athlon was the fact that there was a lack of thermal protection, which turned out to be a flaw in the mainboard specs, not the Athlon or the HSF.

Feel free to be as skeptical as you want, but my Zalman flower cooler has been keeping my Athlon XP 1700 plenty cool for several months now -- CPU temps range in the 40C-50C range, even under the heaviest of loads like kernel compiles (and KDE3 compiles).

If you'd bothered doing any research before slamming my suggestion, you'd discover that the way the Zalman (and most other passive heatsinks) work is by placing a 80MM case fan somewhere near the passive heatsink, just like you yourself suggest.

BTW, there's no reason to go with the YSTech fan -- you can obtain 20+ CFM with a Papst or a Panaflo, both of which are rated at 25dB(A). The YSTech fan comes in closer to 40dB(A).

--kurt

On a modern CPU.

On a modern CPU.

General-Purpose Inkjet Printers in Review
Inkjet printers by the four leading manufacturers jockey for position in the $100-$300 range. They offer some attractive features, such as 20 pages per minute printing, separate cartridges, six colors and resolutions over 2400 dpi. Read on to find out the extensive results from over 20 tests, including quality, speed, cost per page and all the rest.

Canon Photo Printers: S900 and S9000
Canon 2002 is turning out to be even more aggressive than usual! The old S800 series has been replaced by six new printers. Two of these really stand out: the S900 and the S9000. The new series of printers still uses six cartridges, but the number of nozzles has doubled and there is a new border-free printing function. In order to be as thorough as possible, we not only compared them to the S800, but also to their rivals from Epson and HP. The following tests look at speed, quality and photo costs, in detail.

General-Purpose Inkjet Printers in Review
Inkjet printers by the four leading manufacturers jockey for position in the $100-$300 range. They offer some attractive features, such as 20 pages per minute printing, separate cartridges, six colors and resolutions over 2400 dpi. Read on to find out the extensive results from over 20 tests, including quality, speed, cost per page and all the rest.

Canon Photo Printers: S900 and S9000
Canon 2002 is turning out to be even more aggressive than usual! The old S800 series has been replaced by six new printers. Two of these really stand out: the S900 and the S9000. The new series of printers still uses six cartridges, but the number of nozzles has doubled and there is a new border-free printing function. In order to be as thorough as possible, we not only compared them to the S800, but also to their rivals from Epson and HP. The following tests look at speed, quality and photo costs, in detail.

Yes, Durons are fabbed at Fab 25 in Austin, Texas. However, by the highly scientific process of glancing at any AMD processor, you will find the code words "ASSEMBLED IN MALAYSIA".

I am told this is Malaysian for "Assembled in Malaysia".

Granted, I don't think most sweatshops are up to the task of packaging processors, as a couple of water molecules will kind of screw them up. And I doubt the people working for AMD are getting slighted by local standards - their work environment must be clean because of the job done there. But saying that AMD processors are not made in Malaysia is obviously wrong, as the die that is fabbed in Austin is packaged there.

Been spending too much time by the memepool, have we?

Article here, covering MS decision to move windows longhorn GUI onto the graphics subsystem. This will up the min hardware specs and should (did?) create a ruckus on the GPU front. The AMD vs Intel war does not look like it's slowing either. Games in a couple years will probably put all of today's stuff to shame .

DivX is just a codec, most of the media stuff I download is using it. But I do agree that there will be a "second coming" in the tech sector. Some of the reasons are covered by THG on the MS WinHEC conference. MS is going to move longhorn GIU, connect the PC to the TV and a few other in-home multimedia devices. This will bring out a new generation of higher power graphics cards (the 3Dlabs card yesterday possibly first in that series). MS is going to try and make use of UPnP and later IPv6 will add to that. In less then 4 years you might be upgrading the firmware for your microwave, coffee maker, and main kitchen controller over the internet. Let's throw in a big screen TV, DVD writer/recorder, 500 disk DVD changer, and some voice recognition household stuff. Might not happen tomorrow but it's far from over.

Who said anything about .NET server or Longhorn Embedded? Those product families have always had key differences from their mainstream counterparts (that's the entire point of their existence), and there's no reason to expect that practice to cease. If the Longhorn GUI doesn't work for those platforms/markets, it won't be used there. Period. That doesn't invalidate the coming demands of the Longhorn GUI in the consumer desktop space though.

See this thread for further discussion 3DLabs Launching New GPU and these articles linked from it Tom's Hardware on 3D Labs Announcement and Anandtech on 3D Labs Announcement

Ph34r the coming of Longhorn, for it shall make you obsolete beyond your wildest nightmares! :-P

As for 3D acceleration in your Palm, I do believe PowerVR's MBX just might be your solution, or at least the beginning of the market. So it appears MS is not creating the "Xboy", PowerVR and ARM are. I mean really, who'd want increased power in a mobile computer anyways? Go figure.

- JavaJones

It won't be until Creative Labs has fully acquired 3Dlabs, and is ready to announce its P10 boards for Christmas 2002 that we will know how the P10 is going to impact the mainstream desktop and the gamer, although 3Dlabs is convinced that the Creative P10 boards will be competitive with Nvidia and ATi products on the market at that time. Knowing Creative's sales muscle and reach, a Creative graphics board needs only to be competitive, and not necessarily better, in order to be a viable alternative to the two horse race we have right now.

However, there are some concerns. Creative has tried repeatedly to establish a strong foothold in the graphics business and has been pulled in and out of the market , particularly in North America. 3Dlabs has been aiming to find a way into the mainstream with its technology for a number of years and has repeatedly fallen short of delivering a competitive product. Can this marriage work?

I'm confused.. you say you have 2 drives, striped, and then talk about copying big files between them? IF they are striped they are one volume, and you can't copy things between them.

That was a mistype on my part, and what I meant to type was that while I have two 60GB drives off of a RAID controller, I haven't taken the plunge and striped them yet. As such they're both hanging as the single drive on their own bus, on two separate buses obviously.

I think the only reason IDE is more cpu intensive

It should be pointed out that while this is constantly restated, repetition doesn't count as evidence. It was ironic that just prior to seeing this debate, I saw this page which shows significantly higher CPU utilization for the two SCSI drives (mind you, they're extremely high performance drives, however they're not of a scale that would justify the difference between them and the IDEs). Each new time I replace my workstation I go through the whole IDE versus SCSI debate because I want to go with what's best (SCSI just has an air of superiority around it, much like Honda enthusiasts feel about their 115 lb-ft of torque VTEC engines : Enthusiasm, again, doesn't indicate that it's rational or based on any truths), but it seems that, firstly, it's extremely hard to find cold hard facts on the matter (i.e. basic metrics. Most of the evidence is anecdotal or based on uneven systems), but secondly that a lot of SCSI enthusiasts are very emotional about it. I have zero faith in anyone's personal opinion about the "feel" of one over the other: I remember back in the BBS days when a program made the rounds that promised to "convert your 386 to a 486!" and people would argue with me and ASSURE me that, yup, it made their system that much faster and smoother. A little persuasion and predisposition goes a long way when it comes to subjective measures, which is why I usually discount them.

Most "Joe Blow"s would indeed rather a 60GB drive over a more expensive 18GB drive when the only superiority of the 18GB drive is hypotheticals and religious zealotry. Thanks, we're all stocked up on crazy, but I think I'll use my brain and go for the superior solution (obviously IDE on workstations).

The FUD comes from the SCSI camp. SCSI is not realistic on workstations anymore, and even the much vaunted "lower CPU usage" is a claim that isn't demonstratable in real world use.

Personally I think SCSI is cheap for cheapo Joe Blows : My workstation only runs on fiber connected triple redundant NAS. I'm 31337, right?

Toms hardware has a review of Western Digital's new drive, the WD1200JB. 8 megs of cache . The article claims that the drive performs at par or better then Seagate's Barracuda ATA IV. IDE has come along way.

I want one!

Toms hardware has a review of Western Digital's new drive, the WD1200JB. 8 megs of cache . The article claims that the drive performs at par or better then Seagate's Barracuda ATA IV. IDE has come along way.

I want one!

And that "old" RNT plays Dungeon Siege nicely.

Yeah, I'm sure 640*480 with low textures and 3 frames a sec is great.

Take a look at how shitty even a tnt2 compares to any card from the last couple of years.

Your old "RNT" is outdated.
Upgrade your hardware.

Tom's hardware already reviewed this card on April the 9th. You can find it here.

Gerb

This looks like a good product but I think I will wait a bit on it. The product in almost the same category (almost because it's also a video card) is the ATI Radeon 7500 All-In-Wonder card. It's 200 bucks and has pretty much the same features, my favorite is the wireless (non-IR) remote. It's 200 bucks but I needed a vid card upgrade so it worked out well.

Here's the review for the 7500: http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q1/020122/

Another card that have been around for a long time is the ATI TV tuner (I have had two version of this) and it's always worked really well, just lately they have introduced the scheduled recording to compete with the TiVo, et al...

Check out the Sub $200 Video card roundup on Anandtech and VGA Charts on Tom's Hardware.

The former has more commentary and a wider range of benchmarks. The latter has a wider range of cards.

And yes, you could bump up performance by turning off options, but, uh... you can turn it back on by spending another $10-25 too.

The games that give the top end cards problems are generally those with really shitty engines. Everquest, for example, has one of the worst engines I know of. But that doesn't change the fact that it's one of the most popular games out there, and that if you're an EQ player you are concerned PURELY with how the system will perform in EQ, not whether or not the code is well written.

It's quite a nice coincidence that tomshardware just had this article

I think it'll show you that if you're buying a new computer, and want to play the latest games at a decent resolution and framerate, a 2 MX just isn't sufficient. Of course my definitions of decent may differ from yours, but I don't think 1024x768 is unreasonable.

WinHEC
or
Brazil

Microsoft staffers spent a long time hand carving this imposing statue of BillG at the entrance to WinHEC. Based on Native American folklore from the Northwest apparently it wards off government lawyers. :)

Add this to the long list of Microsoft presentation blunders. A too hot for TV MS bloopers tape is due out soon.

Quite a few people take them apart and put larger HDD in them. HERE are several pictures of the guts. It looks pretty full to me, because in addition to the HDD, there are 4 AA batteries, the power management and recharging circuitry, the decoding and audio processing stuff, an LCD, buttons, jacks, etc.

Actually Gold is significantly worse than copper in thermal conductivity (it's a better electrical conductor) you can see a cpu cooler review here discussing this. silver however is marginally better.

Tom's Hardware has an excellent comparison of 14 LCD monitors, in case you are thinking about getting one. The first part is also a really good guide to wheter you want an LCD or a CRT, plus a simple explanation of what to look for. Outstanding piece.
First part is here
The second part can be found here

Tom's Hardware has an excellent comparison of 14 LCD monitors, in case you are thinking about getting one. The first part is also a really good guide to wheter you want an LCD or a CRT, plus a simple explanation of what to look for. Outstanding piece.
First part is here
The second part can be found here

This article over at Toms does an excellent job of describing the technical differences between CRT and LCD.

He also has a recent roundup of the current LCD players and what to look for.

C.

This article over at Toms does an excellent job of describing the technical differences between CRT and LCD.

He also has a recent roundup of the current LCD players and what to look for.

C.

Paul.

There's nothing else happening?

Tomshardware has also posted an article today putting it against the latest Athalon XP.

Tomshardware has also posted an article today putting it against the latest Athalon XP.

these guys obviously did a lot of research. from the article (on Gigabyte):

Stability

Their boards are being focused on reliability and stability. The dual bios option is just one sign. From personal experience, I've noted their boards to have a high degree of stability. They aren't extremely stable, but they are far above average. Their stability during their performance market days was questionable.

Rating: 7.5/10

funny. a review from Tom's Hardware pissed all over the dual bios saying it caused more problems than it fixed, making stability a very touchy issue.

Seems to me this article was written by a couple of DIY'ers who've heard the term "overclock," but never "benchmark." Oh, and as for history???? I sure as shit hope they don't tell everyone to run out and buy a 3Dfx board "because they were the original high-end 3D graphics board maker" ;-)

We are badly in need of facts from someone schooled in heat transfer and/or geology

I'm no expert in heat transfer: I slept through most of the (7AM!) Thermodynamics course I took back when I was a student. I decided to bone up on it, however, the book is lodged in the middle of a stack of textbooks holding up one side of the shelf that my monitor rests upon. So, instead I'll bullshit my way through it. Just think of the earth to a big computer: the crust is the CPU, the atmosphere is the heatsink and the seas are the liquid cooling system God put in so He could overclock the world.

After thoroughly reading Tom's Hardware Guide, HardOCP, and a bunch of other sites on the web, I can say with all the authority of an expert in a completely different science making a bad analogy that we just need to shave a few mountains, apply a nice, thick layer of thermal compound and put tall enough (must reach beyond the atmosphere) heatsink/fan combos on top. Or maybe the Overclocked Jesus can turn the seas to liquid nitrogen and save us all! Of course, I'd never have a taste of fried halibut again, but I'm willing to make sacrifices.

If, in fact, there is a global warming trend, which I'm not inclined to dispute as there may well be, just what can we realistically do to prevent it? At this point, I'd suggest adapting, since there's only one other certain solution...

The XP speed rating needs a lot of bashing. If they want to abandon the MHz rating for CPUs, AMD should come up with something more meaningful, not an arbitrary number that they claim means something about the relationship to Intel CPUs.

AMD will not allow motherboards that tell you the actual clock speed to be certified with the XP logo. This is a Microsoft style bullying technique.

Every CPU I've bought since my first 386 has been AMD. My next one will be Intel. Even if I'm paying more for the same performance, at least I know what I'm getting, and it's not some arbitrary number to come out of marketing.