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After reading Tom's in-depth analysis of RAMBUS vs SDRAM months ago, I concluded that RAMBUS was a zombie duck...

Thanks Tom, for getting it right *once again*

Asus originally cancelled its k7 motherbaird after intel called them. THey decided to bite the bullet and and ship it

is this true? can anyone confirm what he said?

Tom's Hardware did a review of some Athlon motherboards when the chip first hit the market. He claimed that Asus had a nice Athlon motherboard design, but decided against production. Shortly afterwards, Asus announced they would produce it after all, citing "customer demand" or some such thing.

The conspiracy people claim that Intel was pressuring the motherboard makers to avoid the Athlon, and that Tom's Hardware caused enough complaining that Asus decided to risk it anyway. That is pure speculation, of course, but Intel has been caught in strong-arm tactics before...

Actually, there is a VERY VERY nice HOWTO on how to overclock your Athlon to 1050 Mhz here . I do find it silly that you can clock it up to 750 with no additional cooling and that extra 50 Mhz requires a portable super-freezer. My guess is using the cooler (which is available seperate on kryotech's site.. The Kryotech Renegade) you could slap an Athlon 1050 in the box and have no stability problems whatsoever.

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This is an older article. The one that REALLY impressed me was when they tested three popular 3D cards in this pupy.. Take a look at this link

Dude... I wasn't making my own certified Toms Hardware type of benchmarks... I was merely protraying that the PIII had twice the VRAM and that both the cards did OpenGL.

From the review I've read of Rambus/i820 chipset on Tom's Hardware Page, it has the highest latency of all the currently available memory types for PC. The review said it has enormous bandwidth capability, but the latency is so high that you really don't get any speed/performance increase. The fact that it's only available in 8bit and 16bit don't really help either. Here's a good guide on Tom's Hardware about latency vs. bandwidth. It's worth a read.

From the review I've read of Rambus/i820 chipset on Tom's Hardware Page, it has the highest latency of all the currently available memory types for PC. The review said it has enormous bandwidth capability, but the latency is so high that you really don't get any speed/performance increase. The fact that it's only available in 8bit and 16bit don't really help either. Here's a good guide on Tom's Hardware about latency vs. bandwidth. It's worth a read.

From the review I've read of Rambus/i820 chipset on Tom's Hardware Page, it has the highest latency of all the currently available memory types for PC. The review said it has enormous bandwidth capability, but the latency is so high that you really don't get any speed/performance increase. The fact that it's only available in 8bit and 16bit don't really help either. Here's a good guide on Tom's Hardware about latency vs. bandwidth. It's worth a read.

http://www5.tomshardwa re.com/releases/99q2/990622/index.html

Why does it have to be /.? Do you believe Tom's Hardware and AnandTech are biased too?

Huh? Did not know that... Who make this boards? Why Apple do no sell them?

Anyway.. why does not Apple compare there new G4 to a 800Mhz Kriotech Athlon (which cost $2200, can use much better video cards and other hardware)

Sure G4 is a fine processor. But Apple's marketing drivel is annoying. It is so clearly exploits people without a slightest clue about computer usage, its sickening.

There is an update to Tom's Hardware Guide detailing the latest developments re: the ASUSTeK board.



"Cake or death!" (E. Izzard)

Tom has proven himself dumber and more blind to the facts over and over again in the past few months, just look at what he had to say about the PGC technology introduced by metabyte, and look at their reply(at the bottom)...

The site gets updated like once a yr. and there's not enough technical stuff. Not a personal thing, just a lame site. Check the "Overclocking Guide" if you doubt me.

From the Athlon info at Tom's Hardware it looks like the processor has fewer pipeline quirks than the Pentium line, so K7-specific compiler tricks would be less important. Of course anything big on 3D graphics (or any other FP or Integer matrix applications) should check if it's a K7 and make use of the new, improved 3DNow instructions.

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I thought TNT2 was a much better chipset according to the review Tom did.
What could we use this for that TNT2 can't replace?

The rule appears to be... it all depends on the low level format of the drive which balances transfer rate and seek time. (remember you may have more than one disk plate)

Eg0r

You can find some good stuff on this new K7/Alpha archicture here.

Last week The Register posted a roadmap (leaked by Compaq, apparently) of projected SPECint95 scores for Alpha, Coppermine, and Xeon, and it don't look good for Intel. Merced rates a sorry little x at the end of the chart (turning in a SPECint95 of 46 to the 1Ghz 21264's 60); while rumor has it Willamette (Intel's all new 32-bitter) will clean up, it doesn't make the chart since it's not scheduled to arrive until Q3 next year--and that's without factoring in Intel's rather unimpressive punctuality of late. And while the SPECs weren't posted, let's not forget that Alphas have traditionally humiliated Intel chips on floating point performance. Now, take the K7^H^HAthlon (*yech*! Who came up with that one?)--with its available 2MB L2 cache and 8-way (or was it 16-way?) SMP--apparently beating Xeon performance for a whole lot less on the low end, and the new 21264 Alphas creaming them on the high end...add 64-bit Win2K for the Alpha...and finally the fact that Intel's IA-64 architecture is by all accounts late and underwhelming (at least until McKinley shows up in 2001 or 2002)...and suddenly Intel's server CPU cash cows look like dubious purchases for at least the next 2 years. As for the desktop market...the Athlon (gawd that's an awful name!) has to be the CPU of choice for cheap workstations and expensive gaming boxes; the K6 is already the fastest chip for non-FPU apps. The only reason I can think of to get an Intel CPU would be a Celeron for some cheap gaming--they still overclock a bit, but only if you're willing to run your bus at an unorthodox speed. Meanwhile, Intel's having a hell of a time getting memory companies to make Rambus DRAM that works; until then, Camino, the chipset for their new .18 micron PIII's with 256k full-speed cache, is dead in the water--it's already been pushed back until November. Oh, and nevermind that (according to Tom's Hardware at least) RDRAM's benefit over PC133 looks to be negligable. The longer they spend fitzing around with RDRAM, the longer their stuck with a 100 Mhz bus, while the K7 (so sue me) and Alpha get 200Mhz. All of which has me wondering...in a couple of months, after the K7 becomes cheap enough to get into budget boxes...what possible reason would any computer buyer anywhere have to buy an Intel CPU (at least until Willamette)?? Oh, almost forgot. They make the internet go faster.

This one is where Tom's Hardware rated the major 3D cards, including a few TNT2 cards, Voodoo3 and ATI

Check out Tom's Hardware and Ace's Hardware for TNT2 reviews. As far as I remember, the Hercules cards were the best performers.

According to Tom's Hardware the 133mhz bus thing only provides incremental improvements over the 100mhz bus, and at astronomically higher prices. BTW, when is the 200mhz bus/K7 combo supposed to come out?

Over in his Computex recap.

In it, he says that so far the K7 is looking like a "clear winner" and that for once, its floating point performance beats Intel's. He does, however, also mention that AMD has strange practices when it comes to production, and says they need to step it up it they want the K7's performance to be timely.

>Checking out the Cyrix page http://www.cyrix.com >and looking at a couple of the performance tests >show the Cyrix MII as performing better than a >Celeron

I hate to break it to you, but Cyrix makes the shoddiest chips on the market, bar none. I don't think even IDT is worse. Their chips are 1) SLOW, 2) Highly unstable. Last I heard, the only major manufacturer using them is Packard Bell (how fitting). There is NO WAY a cyrix chip will beat a Celeron 300a (the Celeron with cache) or better, or even a properly (read "over" -- Celerons are the most overclockable chips on the planet) clocked Celeron 300 without cache. Don't believe all you hear from a company's own website. Benchmarks can be weaseled to say anything anyone wants. Personally, I check Tom's Hardware Guide before making any hardware decisions like that.

Some of the comments I've seen hit it on the head: The Brand + Model + Revision of Motherboard you buy is key for ANY system (esp. a server).

Myself I don't like buying anything I haven't researched to death; I also really want to hear what other people's experience has been with the stuff. (note: people I trust... not some script kiddie; though on /. you can usually tell which are which)

Checking Tom's Site and Ars Techina to see what they think doesn't hurt either.

As far the Power-Always-On feature you want well, 3 things:

1) I would not recommend any soldering at all as your warranty will most likely go out the window. This can be a very bad thing in a corporate environment.

2) Most high quality Motherboards come with either a CMOS or Jumper setting (or combo) which tells the PS what to do when power is applied.

3) A good case goes a long way... both in ensuring you have a quality PS, and that you won't slice your fingers when you need to work on it. (Can we have a poll on how many times we've done that? :) ) You'll want to make sure the PS is compliant with ATX 2.01 to be on the safe side too.


As far as personal choices, I'm a big fan of both Supermicro Motherboards and Cases - my personal fav is the SC-701a style case - it's a beauty! but unfortunately its soon to be discontinued... :(

Anyway, just my $0.02 (which is worth even less as its Canadian...)

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.

Check Tom's hardware... he rates one of their boards as being the most stable socket 7 board out there. I've personally purchased three dozen computers based on Acer AP53, AP58, and AX59Pro motheboards for my customers over the past two years, and I've had no complaints at all. Most of these systems run NT Workstation 24/7 and get rebooted once a week at the most.

I ran Debian on a used AP53 with a Cyrix 166 and went two months without a reboot.

Don't knock hardware you don't have any experience with. Acer makes fine stuff.

before you make that decision for the Viper 770, you'd probably better visit Tom's Hardware

With the TNT cards, he liked Asus and Hercules the best, and cautioned against the Creative card...
food for thought. mmmmmm. foooood.

which, of course is Tom's Hardware

I honestly can't remember which Voodoo2 he liked, though. They don't compare in all-round performance to a TNT (or TNT2)...

also, important.
never forget PriceWatch

Ps-As for quality, The only "errata" I've experianced is that my chip seems to be running one more MHz than it's supposed to. I can live with that.

According to the Dirk Meyer's presentation given at the Microprocessor Forum last October (and this is the only extensive dicussion about the K7 AMD has given that I can find), the K7 does use Alpha's EV6 bus technology to run the bus at 200 mhz, but the chip itself utilizes many x86 technologies, including 3 parallel x86 instruction decoders and the support for up to 8 MB of L2 cache (not mention SMP). All of this will utilize a x86 structure as far as the software is concern; Win98 (just an example) and Linux should run fine out of the box; you'll just have to worry about the hardware. I seriously suggest you read the about link; it gives a good bit of information about the chip itself (although, remember this was in Oct. of 1998, and it could be different, hopefully better).

-G.

Go to Tom's Hardware read. -Be enlightened.

Its a clamshell refrigerator with a compressor which encloses the CPU... -And yes you might say that it is overclocked. But then again, if AMD doesn't "call" it overclocking... then it ain't.

The TNT2 chipset is actually a TNT chipset made a lot smaller (0.25 micron)

Bit by bit, we're getting closer to the true desktop metaphor (I want my desktop to be 8K x 4K @ 200dpi and 90Hz :-)

Check out Tom's Hardware he just put up an article on his work with a Kryotech case and a Celeron 400.

Had the beastie running looped Timedemo1 for a straight WEEK!


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

Check out Tom's Hardware he just put up an article on his work with a Kryotech case and a Celeron 400.

Had the beastie running looped Timedemo1 for a straight WEEK!


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

Tom's Hardware also has a great OC blurb up right now.

Sweet Jesus is that fast.

Well, performance is a more murky area (try the recent Tom's Hardware reviews of the PIII versus AMD. As for price: Intel PIII 450mhz is about 430 UK Pounds, and and AMD K6-2 3D-Now! 400mhz is about 120 UK pounds. I'm sure these prices equate roughly to the US ones - the major point is that AMD are much much cheaper.
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me

Tom's Hardware Guide loves the K6-3!

Go to Tom's Hardware Guide

"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

That's the reason Intel claims for locking the multiplier and adding a PLL (in Celeron 350+ models, supposedly) that halts the chip unless the clock frequency is "appropriate". We're meant to believe it's just an unfortunate side effect that hobbyists also can't knowingly overclock their own chips. Tom's Hardware goes into some detail on this.

If Intel wanted to let people overclock (rather than have to pay more for chips with conservatively higher tolerances) while stopping resellers from lying, they would have made overclocking easily detectable. They'd rather prevent it entirely- imagine that.

Speaking of Creative Labs Linux support, this may be a touch off topic, but...

I was looking at thier "Graphics Blaster RIVA TNT AGP 128-bit graphics engine, 16MB sdram. 250MHz DAC. Support Direct X and Open GL. Retail Box AGP" which seems to be around $120? Looks like Tom's Hardware did a decent review on this thing, if I am reading it right, but didn't say it was al that great. Anyone use one, and can comment on it's preformance in Linux, and just how well supported it really is?

I notice a lot of comments about DVD and 3-D sound possabilities... Would be interesting to see it happen, would be great. I would love to buy a new Linux box twards the end of the year that can "do it all" multimedia wise... ;-)

Yesterday Tom of Toms Hardware had a little editorial and he ranted a bit about AMD's problem getting the K6-3 out the door. Pretty interesting.

Even more interesting was something a saw a while ago about AMD development. It seems the people working on the K7 are not the same people who worked on the K6. The K6 was developed by the NexGen guys AMD bought out. However, the NexGen guys have already moved on and are working on what will presumably be called the K8. Of course that will be competing in the Merced world, god only knows what that will be like.

"By now we are pretty much at the end of the sweet days of overclocking. The upcoming Intel chips Katmai and the socketed Celeron will not allow any form of overclocking anymore and it would be no surprise if even the well known Pentium II and Celeron chips we know now, will soon also be equipped with Intel's new overclocking protection. AMD seems to consider the same, so that there will be hardly any new chip available that will allow us to tweak its performance by running it faster than it is supposed to."

Read his Overclocking Special