Thursday, July 31, 2003

Daily Mailbox: EOC, I4U, 3DCenter, HardwareZone, NewsWare — Cormac @ 15:01 

GigaCube Radeon 9600 Pro Game Buster @ EOC

"GigaCube has been around since 1990. They provide gaming solutions and all of their video cards are solely based on ATi´s chips. Their goals are simple, "strong creativity, straightforward, and success." Today we have the opportunity to take a look at one of their video cards, the Radeon 9600 Pro Game Buster. The 9600 Pro is a budget/performance graphics card. It is targeted at the mainstream market for users who want DirectX 9 and 8x AGP support, but do not necessarily need the fastest gaming card on the planet. The card is a little different from the others we have reviewed. The heatsink also has some LEDs giving it some zing for end-users with window modifications on their case.

Read more at Extreme Overclocking.

I4U News: New Minolta Dimage XT Biz

"Minolta Japan releases the DiMAGE Xt Biz. A small digital camera optimized for business use. The DiMAGE XT Biz features a voice and text annotation feature. The bundled software makes it easy to mark up photos and email them. The 3.2MP Camera measures 20x85.5x67mm and weighs 120g."

Read more at I4U.

3DCenter News: aTuner 1.5.36.4490 + rTool 0.9.9.7b

Both 3DCenter tweak tools for nVidia graphic cards (aTuner) and ATi graphic cards (rTool) have been updated:

aTuner 1.5.36.4490:

• support up to driver version 44.90 (works also with 45.20) http://www.3dcenter.org/atuner/

rTool 0.9.9.7b:

• support up to driver version 03.6
• can force a full trilinear filtering on all texture stages (ATi control panel filters under anisotropic filtering only texture stage 0 trilinear, all other texture stages bilinear)

Read more at 3DCenter.

HWZ review: Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 160GB (SATA)

"Although its seek performance degraded only ever so slightly, the drive is no slouch when it comes to the IOmeter benchmark. In fact, its performance was not affected at all as it remains to be as fast as the 120GB counterpart. Because of this, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 is currently the fastest SATA drive (although upcoming contenders from Western Digital and Hitachi could seriously thwart their position). Those thinking of setting up RAID arrays using SATA drives would not be disappointed with its high throughput and quick response times."

Read more at HardwareZone.

The Xbox Fiasco! @ NewsWare

"The joke is infact that its not enough to build a better product. A product could be good, if its not supported by a development team then it never becomes anything. It looks to me that Microsoft doesnt know what development teaming is. Put something on the market against an attractive price and the PR-machine does her work! To get Sony-developers work exclusive for the Xbox isnt however happend. Although Microsoft the money has for it to get all external developers, did they let Sony do their job."

Read more at NewsWare.