Seasonic Super Tornado 400W PSU Review

Dec 31 2003 @ 05:05AM by MikeC

BigBruin takes a look at a 400W PSU from Seasonic.

"Seasonic has produced a superb and reliable power supply. The consistency of the 3 power rails is without a doubt comparable to some of the more well known power supplies on the market today. In my opinion the Seasonic Super Tornado is truly ?The advanced choice for gamers and over-clockers?, as printed on the front of the box."

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Chaintech ZNF3-150 Motherboard Review

Dec 31 2003 @ 05:03AM by MikeC

IPKonfig has a review out of Chaintech's nForce3 motherboard.

"The latest motherboard from Chaintech not only brings support to the Athlon 64 technology, it also brings style to the world of motherboards. Of course, Chaintech is known for its colorful motherboards and style. We have been happy to have a closer look at its latest motherboard, the Chaintech ZNF3-150 equipped with the nForce3 150 Northbridge chipset, plus a few extras."

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Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9800 XT Review

Dec 30 2003 @ 06:46PM by MikeC

HotHardware reviews Sapphire's Atlantis Radeon 9800XT.

"If you look at the Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9800 XT in the proper context, you can help but like it. At roughly $430, the Atlantis 9800 XT isn't cheap, but it is less expensive than similar cards, and only slightly more expensive than some 5950 Ultras (Asus = $480 / ATi = $435 / FX 5950 Ultra $410). Sapphire has also done a good job with the card's bundle, including their proprietary Redline utility and one up-to-date game along with a voucher for Half Life 2."

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Scythe Kamakaze Heatsink Review

Dec 30 2003 @ 06:44PM by MikeC

BigBruin has a review out of the Scythe Kamakaze heatsink.

"Cooling remains one of the main problems encountered by today's computer society, but as time goes on the thermal solutions available have gotten better. The battle between low temperatures and low noise is one that is continually fought. A new Japanese manufacturer, Scythe, might well have found an edge in this fight with their new Kamakaze heatsink."

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5 Ghz P4..

Dec 30 2003 @ 05:01PM by ace

Yep you read that right. 5255 to be exact. The guys over at Tom's played with some liquid nitrogen and brought the temperatures way down, like -200 C down. Probably not something that you or I will be trying at home any time soon unfortunately but be sure to check out the pictures they have throughout the article as they have a lot of really nice pictures of the entire process.

 

Happy Holidays

Dec 24 2003 @ 03:00PM by MikeC

The staff at AllAMD would like to wish all our readers a happy and joyous holiday. May the new year bring in peace, fortune and happiness to all.

 

Locked AMD processors

Dec 23 2003 @ 08:42AM by ace

Saw a newspost over at [H]ardOCP regarding locked AMD processors. Apparently all Bartons/Thoroughbreds after week 43 are clock locked as well as Athlon 64s. The enthusiast FX chips are the only ones that are not locked.

In the same post a link was provided to this thread over at Overclockers Forum where they are starting a list of what processor codes are locked and what is not.

Kind of a bum deal for the enthusiast but I can understand AMD's position of wanting to impede their low end (low cost) CPUs from cannibalizing their high end chips. Compound that with bastards who sell overclocked systems to consumers who do not follow this closely and one can see the conundrum that AMD is in.

 

Athlon 64 3000+ Reviews

Dec 22 2003 @ 10:41AM by ace

Noticed a couple reviews for the steathily released Athlon 64 3000+. The first one is over here at Anandtech while the second one is at the home of the JumboTron® Graphs, AmdZone. Lots of numbers on both sites with numbers that are especially interesting on Anand's. The 3000+ is *very* fast in gaming benchmarks especially compared to the 3.2 from Intel; the benchmarks it falls behind in are very minor while it pulls out very significant leads in other games (check out the UT2k3 number differences). Long story short, the 3000+ is a steal of a deal at about $220. Those who are still Christmas shopping and are in the market for a new computer should see if these can be overnighted (one to me and one to you)

 

Interview with AMD's Henri Richard Part 2

Dec 22 2003 @ 09:51AM by ace

Part 2 of an extensive interview with AMD's VP of worldwide sales and marketing is up at The Firing Squad. He clears up some things with AMD's market positioning with the many lines of 64-bit products. Here's an interesting tidbit -

When the FX 53 will be introduced the FX 51 will essentially be end of life and so on. So the whole purpose of the Athlon 64 FX brand is to always be the fastest thing out there and therefore, you know, price point is probably going to always stay up there because it is the premium part for the people that don?t want any compromises.

The rest of the article is well worth checking out. FS does not pull their punches with the questions they ask and the answers they get are pretty extensive, not your usual marketing claptrap.

 

Athlon64 3400+

Dec 22 2003 @ 09:44AM by ace

The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB. But the Inquirer has linked to an Icelandic site that does talk about the unannounced Athlon64 3400+ Here's a snip from the translation from the Inq

On the performance front, the only machine they have seen with a comparable performance was a Athlon FX reference PC from AMD

Link to the Icelandic article is here and the Inquirer link is here

 

Nimble V5 Digital Media Mini PC Review

Dec 21 2003 @ 10:10PM by MikeC

Christmas approaching fast, don't know what to get that elusive person on your list? Got some cash to blow? BigBruin might have the solution for you: A Digitan Media Mini PC.

"Miniature is a good word to describe the V5, as it measures a mere 7.7? tall, 2.1? wide, and 7.7? deep. Inside the compact silver housing one finds such key components as a 733 MHz VIA processor, 256MB PC2100 DDR memory, and a 30GB hard drive... Its odd for me to know an entire ?PC? fits in a box about the size of the one my last hard drive came in."

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Soyo KT600 Dragon Ultra Platinum Motherboard Review

Dec 21 2003 @ 10:08PM by MikeC

Tweaktown takes a look ath the KT600 from Soyo.

"Don't be fooled, the Athlon XP processor is still going strong despite the release of the expensive and not yet mainstream Athlon 64 processor by AMD. Today we've got the Soyo KT600 Dragon Ultra Platinum motherboard on the test bed which is based on VIA's KT600 chipset for the Athlon XP. If you cannot afford the Athlon 64 platform, pay very close attention to this motherboard!"

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ATI All-InWonder 9600 PRO Review

Dec 21 2003 @ 10:07PM by MikeC

Beyond3D reviews the AIW 9600 Pro from ATi.

"The Tuner is capable of accepting up to 125 UHF analogue channels from a terrestrial aerial or cable/satellite set-top box for TV display, which is common with other All-In-Wonder products, however with the All-In-Wonder 9600 PRO ATI have decided to add an FM radio input as well. The tuner on the All-In Wonder 9600 PRO has two inputs - one for the TV UHF signal and one for the FM radio signal."

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DFI Infinity 875 Review

Dec 21 2003 @ 10:06PM by MikeC

Metku Mods reviews the DFI Infinity 875 motherboard.

"So what do I think of DFI Infinity 875 as an overclocking motherboard? Answer is simple; I'm going to put this motherboard right to my OC rig. It is clearly the fastest and most overclockable platform that I have tested so far."

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Thermaltake Aquarius III Water Cooling System Review

Dec 20 2003 @ 05:54PM by MikeC

TweakTown reviews the Aquarius III water cooling system. This external system looks impressive but doesn't seem to do the job of a real watercooling system. On the bright side, it looks like this thing is whisper quiet.

"With Christmas only just around the corner, there may be no better time than now to look into PC water cooling as an interesting gift to spice up a computer for friends or family. Today we've taken a look at the Thermaltake Aquarius III water cooling system. Read on and find out if this is the right gift or not!"

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Interview with AMD's Henri Richard

Dec 19 2003 @ 10:23AM by ace

FiringSquad has quite an extensive interview with Henri Richard, AMD's Senior VP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing. There are a few gems inside the article including this one:

FiringSquad: So you acknowledge that AMD has looked into multi-core CPUs? Henri Richard: Well, we?ve announced it, but I?m not telling you that tomorrow morning on the desktop that [we?ll have it] but we have stated clearly that we are working on multi-core CPUs on Opteron and as you know Opteron, the natural destination of Opteron ends up in the FX range. So it?s easy to assess that AMD will announce the official you know, Opteron multi-core product. Sometime down the line later you?ll find a multi-core desktop product because it?s the same core.

There is some other neat stuff in there regarding his views on Hyper-Threading, 64-bit software support and some stuff not directly related to AMD. Check out the rest of the article here

 

Shuttle to use ATi IGP

Dec 19 2003 @ 07:19AM by MikeC

Looks like Shuttle, makers of SFF PCs, are going to be using some ATi tech for their new SFF PC named Zen. They have already announced using the 9100 IGP on their ST61 XPC. Their new system will be Prescott ready and should be announced in mid January.

"The machine is styled the ST62K in Shuttle-speak, where T=ATI, 6=P4, K=chassis. Sample units are already finished and we learn it will be announced sometime the in middle January."

The Inquirer has the article.

 

ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe Review

Dec 19 2003 @ 07:14AM by MikeC

Viper Lair reviews the P4C800-E from Asus.

"The ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe is one such example. On paper, it has the makings of a dream motherboard. 800FSB Pentium 4s are supported, as well as all the good stuff we've come to expect from Canterwood based motherboards. It doesn't end there though, as ASUS also throws in an Intel CSA-based Gigabit LAN controller, a Promise SATA RAID controller, and some unique overclocking options. Add to this their rep for making quality boards, and things are looking good for the P4C800-E Deluxe."

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Catalyst 3.10

Dec 18 2003 @ 12:03PM by ace

ATI released their Catalyst 3.10 Drivers yesterday if you guys missed that. There's a boatload of fixes as well as performance increases in a bunch of apps

Performance in various 2D applications has improved by as much as 3-6% across the entire RADEON product line. Comanche 4 framerates have also improved by approximately 5-7%.

Here are the full gory details on the fixes. One very interesting note is OpenGL Shading Language Support. This adds the same sort of functionality as Microsoft's HLSL (pixel shading and all the fancy DX9 kind of stuff that developers had to code in assembly before HLSL) and I believe that this is a part of the OpenGL 2.0 spec.

 

Athlon 64 3000+ Benchmarks

Dec 18 2003 @ 09:45AM by ace

This is a couple days old, but over at the Inquirer, they have compiled a list of benchmark numbers for the Athlon 3000+ from Hard Tecs 4U's review of the 3000+.

As you can see, Athlon 64 won eight of the nine benchmarks, and one of them by 27%. For those who need superior gaming performance than a 3.2 GHz P4, but at less cost, these benchmarks indicate that the Athlon 64 3000+ is the way to go.

Not bad for a $220 chip eh? Might have to pick one of these babies up once the holiday finances are sorted out. We wont bother ripping off the numbers a second time so go check them out here

 

Athlon 64 3000+ Musings

Dec 18 2003 @ 09:34AM by ace

Kyle over at [H]ardOCP takes a look at AMD's ninja like release of the Newcastle based Athlon 64 3000+. Featuring 1/2 the cache (512KB) of a regular Athlon 64. Here's what they are making of the situation

We find it sort of odd that AMD would sell a crippled A64 3200+ to the public after all the hard work that has been put into marketing the brand and features. If AMD did in fact have a large volume of A64 3200+ CPUs that failed to pass muster with 1MB of L2 cache, but with at least 512KB of it operational, what would they do with them? We are suggesting that is exactly what we are seeing happen. AMD could very well be turning "dead inventory" in cold hard cash/cache

The rest of the article is worth a read. Lots of speculation which everyone always likes :D

 

BFG 5900 Non-Ultra

Dec 18 2003 @ 09:20AM by ace

Over at Neoseeker there is a review of the BFG 5900 Non-Ultra up. It pulls in pretty good performance numbers comparable to a 9700 Pro and the best news is that you can find it for about $200.

 

Buffer Overflow No More

Dec 17 2003 @ 05:11AM by MikeC

The Inquirer reports that Microsoft is working in conjunction with AMD to utilize some of the Athlon 64's code to prevent buffer overflow exploits in a new 64-bit operating system. Kudos to AMD for thinking this up.

"Mike Tarsala claimed that will give the edge to AMD over Intel, which has similar features in the Itanium microprocessor, but not in the Pentium 4."

Read the article

 

VIA EPIA CL10000 Mini-ITX Motherboard Review

Dec 17 2003 @ 05:07AM by MikeC

ViperLair reviews the Mini-ITX motherboard from VIA.

"I do think the CL10000 does have some interesting potential, even for power users. The size of the CL10000 will make it very easy to install almost anywhere. Though I haven't seen it, I've heard stories of them being installed in cars, but I'm certain many of you can find more creative applications."

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VisionTek XTASY Radeon 9800 XT 256MB Review

Dec 17 2003 @ 05:03AM by MikeC

Bjorn3D reviews the Radeon 9800 XT from VisonTek.

"It's time to turn the focus on the VisionTek Xtasy 9800 XT, which is a 256MB card just like the 5950 Ultra. Also just like the 5950 Ultra, it's basically just an overclocked version of its father. In this case, that father is a 9800 Pro, which has a VPU core clocked at 380MHz and memory running at 340MHz (680MHz DDR). The XT flexes its muscles a little harder and runs at 412MHz core and 365MHz memory (730MHz DDR). In addition to being clocked higher, the XT features a new and improved cooler design. It's a lot more interesting design than on the basic 9800 Pro cards."

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