Wednesday, September 03, 2003

Daily mailbox: EOC, HardwareZone, MonkeyReview, Bjorn3d, Legion Hardware, 3DCenter, I4U — Cormac @ 19:31 

Mushkin PC3200 Level II Dual Pack @ EOC

"Dual channel memory controllers have definitely become a basic requirement in the last few months. Chipsets such as NVIDIA´s nForce 2 and Intel´s 875, 865, and E7205 all support dual 64-bit memory controllers. The tough task is finding memory that will overclock well in these systems."

Read more at EOC.

HWZ review: Gigabyte RADEON 9600 PRO 128MB (GV-R96P128D)

"Focusing on the Gigabyte RADEON 9600 PRO (GV-R96P128D), we find it to be a well-built card, with adequate cooling (plus super-bright blue LED lighting behind the fan), good RAM chips to allow overclocking and finally, a good game bundle comprising of three full games – Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, and Will Rock. With reasonably good performance, DirectX 9 support, dual monitor capability (DVI-I to DB15 adapter included), the Gigabyte GV-R96P128D is priced very competitively at S$315."

Read more at HardwareZone.

2 Port KTI USB Pocket KVM Switch @ MonkeyReview

"I’ve always been intrigued by the functionality offered by KVM Switches, the main one being the fact that I could have my Work System & my Gaming System connected without having to move from one end of the room to the other, as well, the fact that I could use my larger monitor for both tasks really appealed to me. The fact remains to be told; KVM switches haven’t always been known to be the most compact or wallet friendly. Though, by looking at the KTI Pocket USB KVM Switch, we’d be hard pressed to come to those conclusions."

Read more at MonkeyReview.

CrazyPC Stealth Case Mod Review @ Bjorn3d

"I can´t stress the high quality of this mod job enough. The laser cut Stealth design is a flawless, and just having a laser cut side panel is pretty cool in my books. Plus the job on the top window was top notch as well. The black molding and acrylic look great, and the fan hole was cut precisely. I had no issues with any of the modding aspects of this work of art."

Read more at Bjorn3d.

Abit KV7 @ Legion Hardware

"The overclocking abilities of this motherboard really are amazing. Right out of the box I was able to run DDR400 (CAS2 2-6-2) on a 400MHz processor FSB. When overclocked the system performance was boosted considerably. When running on the 436MHz FSB games such as Quake III Arena saw a healthy performance increase, in some cases more than 30fps. SiSoft2003 Sandra reported an additional 500MB/s on the memory bandwidth which would be responsible for the extra frames per second in Quake III Arena."

Read more at Legion Hardware.

3DCenter.org News: CineFX (NV30) Inside *world-exclusive*

"To the general public, no detailed description of the GeForceFX´s architecture is readily available. nVidia makes sure to provide people with colourful charts and empty ad speech, but has not officially released anything more tangible or specific than said marketing material. This is doubly sad, as the internal workings of modern graphics processors have changed significantly over the past years: Current GPUs use less "fixed" units which could be described quite easily with a few parameters, and concentrate more on "flexible" units, resembling a CPU´s approach.
We were able to secure detailed information on the construction and internal make-up of the CineFX (as used in the original GeForceFX) and CineFX II architectures, including drawbacks and advantages compared to ATi´s R300 and R350 GPUs.
Note: Should the first three pages of the article be too technical and too complicated for your liking, still be sure to have a look at page 4 (bottom) and following. You will find an easy to understand performance analysis of the CineFX architecture and a comparison to ATi´s R3x0 part."

Read more at 3DCenter.

I4U News: Exclusive ZVUE! First Look

"On Thursday August 28, I become the first person outside of Hand Held Entertainment to actually hold a working, wire free, battery powered (4 AAA) prototype of the coolest personal consumer electronics digital device of the 2003 Fall selling season, the ZVUE!, portable video player. Although, the 9th floor town down San Francisco office was filled with bright sunlight, the 2.5” TFT color screen was crisp and clear. Suspension of disbelief is possible. Listen to our exclusive audio interview with Hand Held Entertainment founder and visionary Carl Page."

Read more at I4U.

Vantec IceBerq 4 Reviewed @ myWORLD Hardware

"Vantec has emerged as one of the main manufacturers for heat sinks and fans. Cooling the computer system had always been their primary objective. However, with the graphic industry heating up faster than our expectations, Vantec is not backing off from this one..."

Read more at myWORLD Hardware.

Bluetake BT200 Bluetooth Printer Adapter Review @ JSI

"The BlueTake BT200 Bluetooth Printer Adaptor, allows you to connect your parallel port printer to a computer that is Bluetooth enabled wirelessly the BT200 is very simple to use as it acts like the existing parallel cable so you don’t need to install extra software just make a few simple changes to your already installed software."

Read more at JSI.

Bjorn3d reviews the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256 MB

"One of the perks of working on a hardware website is the opportunity to try out the high-end stuff you never would be able to afford to buy. I´ve been running a ATI 9800 Pro 256 MB in my machine for some time now and today released a review of it complete with lots of benchmarks and game screenshots."

Read more at Bjorn3d.

3DCenter.org News: GeForceFX 5900/Ultra Roundup

"We here at Hard Tecs 4U take a look at the GeForceFX 5900 /Ultra cards from AOpen, Asus, Gainward, Leadtek und MSI in comparison to the Radeon 9800/Pro cards from Sapphire".

Read more at here (in German) or this Google translation.