|Early Wednesday Morning
Tuesday, 31-July-2001 16:17:39 (GMT +10) - by Agg
If you can read this, then I guess Code Red didn't kill the internet after all. If you can't read it, then you won't see how wrong my sarcasm is. :)
TheInquirer have some info on new P4 chipsets from ALI and SIS, thanks Nigel.
A couple of very cool finished projects in the Case Modding forum - Rex's tiger case with amazing paintwork and Beannie's big red box. Also, bright blue keyboard LEDs and flush fan grills (scroll down, more pics here).
HardOCP checked out the Asus A7A266. This is an ALI-based DDR board that allows SDR or DDR SDRAM to be used with a SocketA processor. Linked from there is an article I hadn't noticed before, a DDR Overview, explains it pretty well.
Flacco pointed out an interesting article about chips for a buck, which talks about embedded devices using tiny network-capable chips..
Apparently ArsTechnica have an interview with some people involved with Final Fantasy (the movie, I presume) but their server seems to be down for me.. maybe Code Red related. :)
There's a new site hoping to be an index of hardware/overclocking links.. looks like some interesting custom software driving it all. They say they've added a lot of our articles but I don't see any in there.. quite a lot of other stuff, tho. Anyway, check it out here. Webmasters from that site, feel free to inhale links from our archive and the PCDB should go nicely in your Case Modding section too. :)
James sent in this article about GAME AI..
There's a Security Update for NT4, including all patches since SP6a.. thanks Shaun.
A couple of people sent in this Ninja story site which is kinda cool, a cartoon story about a little ninja kid wandering around, a little low on plot but I found myself watching all 4 episodes.
AnandTech have a roundup of motherboards that use the B-revision i815 chipset.. and hence support the new Tualatin .13 micron P3 processor.
Lucky I got to this link before Alchemy or he probably would have gone completely feral.. it's a modified car show. We all know Alchemy loves his Rice..
A more on-topic but equally over-the-top modification is this Kyro II job on ProCooling. Actually turned out pretty well.
Win some stuff by signing up for a newsletter on 3DSpotlight. No geographic limitations!
CSM have an article on the battle for portable power.. CPU power, that is.
5-way SDR SDRAM roundup on Overclocking.DK .. in English.
HyperTransport on a Mac site? Apparently so, this article covers this AMD/AMI technology, already seen in NVIDIA's GeForce chipset and probably coming to a PC (and Mac!) near you within a couple of years.
Speaking of which, Morjo notes TheReg linking an article about Overclocking a G4 Mac up to a gig. It's a resistor mod on the motherboard so fairly fiddling and moderately high fzzzt potential. They also say Processor makers test each chip at all speeds and sell it at the highest speed at which it will run completely without malfunction. which is not strictly true. If a manufacturer makes consistently high-speed-capable chips, some will HAVE to be sold as lower-speed units to avoid abandoning the lower end of the market. As you should all know, one of the major goals of overclockers is to find batches of chips that are currently being under-badged in this way, buy them cheaply then crank them up - safely and sensibly - to the higher speed and beyond..
Superintelligent racoons, lightning survivors and the latest in junkie fashion from who else but Wokket.
Thermaltake ramsinks on WildAndyC.
AKG K 1000 headphones on AcidHW.
DFI AK76-SN DDR SocketA motherboard on Digit-Life.
Foldable washable keyboard on SystemLogic.
Samsung DVD V-1000, it's a DVD player, it's a VCR, on IANAG.
Adonised fan grills on Bit-Tech.
Klipsch ProMedia 4.1 speakers on 3DSoundSurge, thanks Nicholas.
Altech Lansing ATP5 speakers on NeoSeeker.
Machine rounded cables on GideonTech, our cheapy version here.
Not doing the news is a very bad thing, because it doesn't let up. It just keeps on coming into the news box Energizer-style.. so there is a lot of news to get through. Better stop whinging and start it :)
First out of the box is this. Now by now most of you should be aware of my stance on rice. But is this rice? Sure, it is excessive and definitely not needed.. but then, so is a twin supercharged 350 chev - and that's definitely not rice. Maybe we need IsThisRiceOrNot.com? :)
Remember my reports on the AYHJAR TBirds from QGL? Well, it's going to get a lot bigger. The OC Cafe has gotten their paws on a 1.0GHz part that hits 1.5GHz no worries. They're calling it the new 300A, and I reckon that's about fair. They havn't trickled down to aus yet, even tho they will with time. An impatient forum member has already started a group buy from overseas if you just can't wait. Just talking to Agg about it, way back when he started OCAU he was selling celly 366@550 CPU's with a Slocket and Cooler for $225. At the time 550mhz was awesome, only the top-of-the-line P3 at a zillion times the cost could touch it performance-wise. Well, according to AthlonOC a AYHJAR has an average overclock of about 1680MHz, and a 1.0GHz part will sell for about $225 which puts it up there with the fastest available P4's.... at a zillion times the cost. Yep, new 300A for sure :)
The 1.2GHz Tualatin P3 CPU part is now out. For those who don't know, it's a 0.13u P3 CPU that needs only 1.475V to operate, and has all sorts of fancy features like a copper interconnects and 512k cache in the server/mobile variants. It also has an Integrated Heat Spreader, which is that bit of aliminium you used to see on the top of socket7 cpu's like K6-2's.. which makes it a lot harder to crunch the die. The catch, of course, is that it requires a new motherboard to operate, and with P4 already on the market I doubt Intel will be pushing it too strongly.. Anyway, reviews are a-plenty.. TheTechZone, Anandtech (who are calling it the future Celeron.. interesting), ViaHardware, The Register, Tech Extreme, HotHardware, and Accelenation.
TransmetaZone has an interesting article up talking about the Marketing of Megahertz. This is especially relevant in today's CPU world with the release of new CPU's that have higher clock speeds, but perform less operations per clock (P4 anyone?). It's not new tho.. Remember the "Pentium Rating" for AMD and Cyrix CPU's?
Rob wrote in with this article written by an IBM employee in regards to resolving PCI latency and conflict issues. It is written from a Linux perspective, but it's still highly relevant to users of other operating systems with the same problems.
Hypothermia is giving away FOUR EPoX 8K7A+ Socket-A AMD 761 mainboards. In true Hypothermia style there are no forums to sign up for, no questions to answer, or any stupid conditions. Just one email entry per day, per email adress and you have a chance and winning. Excellent.
Hmm, more virus alerts.. this time from Chris.
there is a little bug making its way around msn messenger at the moment. its a program called choke.exe', its about 41k in size, and auto-sends itself along with a message to whoever you are talking to that looks like this:"President bush shooter is game that allows you to shoot Bush balzz" hahaha all it does, once ran it messages the person with floods of ;), and plays 'George.W.Bush@Whitehouse.gov' is typing you a message in the bottom part of the window quite annoying. i cant imagine it would be harmful to a pc, just annoying to the person trying to have a conversation.
Accelenation have gotten their hands on the ECS K7S5A, a SiS735-based board. The SiS735 reference boards performed really well, so it'll be interesting to see how the retail variants fare. Sadly, this isnt a full review, just a comparison..
PCHardware have reviewed the Abit KG7-Raid, but probably more interesting is news I have that there will be a KG7-Lite variant of the board that has two less DIMM slots (bringing it down to 2), and no onboard RAID. This will give the board a street price of about $290au.. mmm, DDR for the masses.
Finally this afternoon, big news on the nVidia Crush chipset on X-Bit Labs.. apparently the yields on the southbridge didn't turn out to be all they expected, so the Dolby 5.1 sound is getting dropped for AC97 sound.. owch. The integrated network controller might be headed for the scrap heap as well.
Kanie Hedgehog 238M hs/f on CoolHardWarez.
Hercules GameTheatre XP on XtremePC.uk.
BayBus Guide at SlauTech.
Lite-On LTR-24102B IDE CD-RW 24X CD-RW on CD-R Info.
ATi All-In-Wonder Raedon on TechExtreme.
GlowWire case modding stuff on Radeonic.
HiSpeedPC AGP AirLift on JSI Hardware.
Lan gathering QGL was on last weekend and Alchemy snapped a few pics - click on them to enlarge:
Lots of people including a few OCAU readers..
Looks like Rex and Tunes from the PCDB? And two mystery others..
The LegoPC, owner unknown.
Fun was had. If you're in the sunshine state and want to get the details on the next one, head over to www.qgl.org.
|Tuesday Morn - Really Tired....
Tuesday, 31-July-2001 01:30:00 (GMT +10) - by YYK
Very quiet day for me at work...
"Alex Brak" shot me an e-mail on my post from yesterday in regards to the "Code Red" worm:
I just wanted to point out that the Code Red worm affects only NT and W2K IIS servers, and that a virus scanner will not stop it.
There are products that will stop it, but its essentially a bug in the Index Server of the operating system that allows the worm to funciton, and hence the best solution is to install the appropriate Security Hotfix from Microsoft.
For the hotfix that will prevent Code Red exploiting your box, visit here.
FYI, the microsoft site that regularly releases is here.
Thanks for the useful info. Alex, it is very much appreciated by us!!
Been a bit quiet in the PCDB lately, but there's a few machines with rheobus-like super-bright LED's added today - check out DrDeath's very bright box, cobra's more subtle green effort and CptViper's cool 6-way 2-colour baybus.
Spode's been modding a chrome orb while OCNZ put a Dragon Orb fan into a Super Orb.
Apparently some AMD users are in a world of payne (har har) when it comes to the new Max Payne game, according to this thread in the forums.
Interesting one from HeXa, I haven't checked it out yet but apparently this software can read temperature information from hard drives that support the feature.. ooooh, another fancy gadget for my system tray!
AnandTech have a review of the 1.2GHz Tualatin, the new Pentium3 processor.. thanks Daniel.
More bizarre stuff in ZZZ Online.
Zalman CNPS 5000+ socket cooler on 8Balls.
Shuttle AK31 KT266-based SocketA DDR motherboard on Accelenation.
FIC AD11 DDR socketA motherboard on OC.DK.
AMI MegaRAID 1600 SCSI RAID controller on AMDMB.
|Forum Record Broken!
Monday, 30-July-2001 12:57:18 (GMT +10) - by Agg
I noticed we were getting close to breaking the number of concurrent forum users a few minutes ago and with a concerted effort from the IRC channel we got there:
Most users ever online was 205 on 30th July 2001 at 10:51 PM.
The previous record of 201 has stood since the first full day of the new forums being open (6 weeks or so ago) when 1100+ people signed up in the first 24 hours and spent a while exploring the new forum software. Well done! :)
|Monday Arvo - Hey Hey
Monday, 30-July-2001 06:47:44 (GMT +10) - by YYK
These past few days have not being good for cables it seems with the Southern Cross and the Tasman 1 cables being cut. The Tasman 1 cable will be decommissioned as a result of the accident.
So much for the peaceful nature of space as the US considers “space bombers” for approval.
Telstra are saying “no more” to new ADSL subscribers… at least for now. Also people are getting a month’s free access, not too shabby.
The White House, Microsoft and the FBI are urging all to protect ourselves from the “Code Red” worm virus. We’re not too worried cause we’re all smart overclockers who own up-to-date virus checkers. Right?
Ever been told by your mum that you’re too close to the TV? This takes it to another level.
Something that most of us know, bananas make us sleepy…. Or is it sex? It doesn’t matter cause it’s both.
It seems Rambo’s gonna be back...
|Early Monday Morning
Sunday, 29-July-2001 15:49:26 (GMT +10) - by Agg
I think Stevo was PCDB entry #1900 - check out also this Klingon-inspired case from [RAG]Sting and Froodogs's cool key-start idea.
From Justin: I was just reading your news today and I thought you might be interested in my celeron 766. I does 1150mhz out of the box with original heatsink but with an 80mm case fan on the heatsink (shabby work no guides just roghly slapped on there with 1 hex head bolt. Any way I havn't checked out the batch number and considering this cost me about $120 i think it kicks ass.
On a similar note from V8R: i have installed about 15 or so celly 733's just in the last few weeks and all have hit 915 reliably, straight out of the box.. the ones i put onto the CUV-4X boards were able to hit 990 without a worry at all.. (the other boards only had standard FSB adjustments.. 66/75/85.. the CUV has finer adjustment and a better PCI deviser). More info here.
FiringSquad took an interesting walk down Operating System Memory Lane, with their look at the evolution of the PC OS.. thanks Robotmort.
Iroquois notes that Telstra shares have hit a 3-year low price..
From StratosFear, a tetris game that uses bleeding-edge 3D features.. no, I'm not kidding. :)
Nigel pointed out an interesting article about hard disk drive operations on TweakMax.
Apparently some virus products are not stopping SirCam, thanks Wokket. Hang on.. an on-topic news item from Wokket? Never fear, he also mentioned asian spider wrestling, mathematical wife optimization and of course stoner attacks ATM with crowbar.
I think my neighbours are annoyed enough about me starting the overclocked R6 in my car port from time to time, imagine if I had a jet engine.. but at least I'd have cold beer. Thanks Draffa.
Clear fans and some other stuff on MikhailTech.
AVGS AL-700 aluminium case on RipNet.
Bose Quietcomfort noise-cancelling headphones on ARP.
This news post comes to you live from QGL LAN. It's pretty damn good, I must say. There is a webcam thing happening as well, you might pick up a few OCAU shirts in it. Probably mine and sabretooth's :). BIG PIMPAGE (!!!) goes out to ^DrE^ and Mystro who brought me a complimentary can of Jolt Cola to persuade me to do the news. Thanks guys :)
Seems to be pretty quiet in the cool-stuff-to-read-about department tonight, so I 'spose I'll just chuck you what scraps there is left. Don't worry.. it's not ~that~ bad.
Slautech have part three of their guide to watercooling up. They are putting the system together in the rather-popular-but-now-hard-to-obtain-in-aus YY cube case. Some people have said that these cases are a bit too cramped for a decent H20 setup, but they seem to be getting by pretty well.
TechExtreme have a small article up that talks about the moving of the P4 down into the lower price ranges of the PC market. They reckon that a 2GHz part will be heading our way sometime this quarter, which is pretty impressive. It took a while to reach 1GHz, but 2GHz has flown right up to us. Moore's Law I 'spose. Anyway, part of the price decrease can be directly attributed to the introduction of the i845 chipset with DDR/PC133 support.
Oohh, YAY! A new TBird stepping is out. Just a few months ago we where all wearing construction worker get ups and dancing with people dressed as indians to the tune of A-X-I-A. Well OK, maybe it was just Sciby. Nevertheless, the new stepping, AYHJAR is good for an average overclock of 1668MHz from the stock setting of 1000MHz, according to AthlonOC. Not bad, not bad at all. They took this from a sample set of 75 chips as well, so definitely believeable figures.
TweakMax has a bit of a newbie article up covering three apparently popular questions: What is the FAT (File Allocation Table)? What does a disk defragmenter really do? What does a ScanDisk utility really do? Well, go and find out.. if you didn't already know :)
TechExtreme has news about Palm Pilots.. more specifically that they will be splitting their OS business from their hardware business. They are doing this to prevent a corperate split of sorts, and it will ineviteably promote better competition.. I bet this'll mean more Palm clones as well.
Gary wrote in to say that there is an online scanner for the SirCam virus here. Don't let a virus make a fool of you, go and run a scan now.
Agg wrote in to say Watercooling with a little case? Need a big radiator but can't fit it in?
Well, bolt it to the outside, then. Pretty cool system from Leon, I like the VU-meter on the front too.. Thanks Agg :)
I want to know where Wokket finds stuff like this on the 'net.. he hasn't failed to amuse in the past week. Part of his WTF files today include a stolen 300 pound fibreglass bull.. which is a case of only-in-america. He also sent in this article.. about a German guy hitting a CRAZY 169mph, that's over 270km/hr.. ON ROLLERBLADES. INSANE! Final article from Wokkett tonight is this American news article that talks about a woman sueing her local council to allow her to keep a Bobcat inside her residential home. And no, it's not one of those pieces of earth moving machinery, it's a real live bobcat. Hmm, I wonder why they wouldn't like her keeping that at home? Maybe because it might eat someone? Last OT thing comes from Draffa who pointed out this rather humerous comic about nudist colonies.
CaseAce GearGrip CRT monitor carryer thing on TacoNuts. I could use one of those soon..
Mushkin EMS3 PC133 SDRAM on Accenelation.
Tt Volcano/Mini Orb coolers on Digit-Life.
Tt Volcano 6u on OCNZ.
Top 10 Socketed CPU Coolers on ClubOC.
|Using a car rheostat for controlling fans!
Friday, 27-July-2001 18:08:50 (GMT +10) - by Agg
EdwardNott sent in an article about his case, which uses a dimmer switch from a Datsun 180b to control the fans.. :)
Click for the full article!
|Early Saturday Morning
Friday, 27-July-2001 16:08:19 (GMT +10) - by Agg
Chris had a bit of a rant about XP in the forums, I found it amusing.
Quick mini-rant about SirCam - I'm still getting lots of emails from people who have the virus. I don't really mind - in fact, some of the emails have really interesting-sounding files attached to them. However, you should be aware that, if you have SirCam, it will randomly email files from your "My Documents" folder to people in your address book. This could be embarrassing, yes? TheInquirer think so. Anyway.. more info here and a tool to remove it from your system here. Need a virus checker? Get a free one here - dunno if it's any good, I picked up a copy of Norton AntiVirus from a Hardly Normal bargain bin so of course I use that.
OneArmedMan says that he's seen Celeron 800's doing 1.1GHz out of the box - no batch numbers but they were Malay chips. Blue Draco says he's seen AYHJAR 1.4GHz Athlons doing 1705MHz under a ThermoEngine.. not too shabby either way.
Loki - OCAU's second server - is pretty much ready to be shipped off to the ISP. It's a dual P2-450, not the fastest machine in the universe but should be a very capable server. It'll be doing behind-the-scenes stuff for now, Odin will still be doing most of the work. Loki was mostly built from donated parts - I only had to buy the motherboard and rackmount case. The kind folks over at T.T.L. have organised a good deal for hosting, too. So thanks to everyone involved with that, hopefully it will fix our DNS problems as well as assisting with our continued growth in traffic. Expect a PCDB entry for the new box soon - it may end up hosting the PCDB in a few months, actually. :) Of course, it's another Debian Linux box.
AnandTech have a GeForce3 roundup, not sure if we linked that yet, can't see it in a quick scan of the news page. They also checked out a Creative Labs Nomad MP3 Jukebox with 30GB of space in it.. in a portable MP3 player! Wow. If your collection doesn't fit on that, seek professional help.
The Folding@Home Team continues to power ahead - I'm sure it was the addition of my girlfriend's C366 @ 550MHz that made all the difference. In the top 20 now and screaming up the rankings. I'm not ignoring our other teams, but I don't seem to get sent info on them very often. Funny message in the forums about Folding addiction too.
Tigger points out this watch running Linux.. think we saw that a while ago, but still, how cool is that?
This is pretty cool, a stick-figure FPS. I seem to get some mouse lag on it tho, but I am running a TNT2U at 1280x1024. It's from the guy who did that amazing stick-figure kung-fu animation and you're rewarded with more of the same if you make it all the way through the level.
Gaby corrected me on the 230CFM fan I linked earlier: I noticed that this fan from Jaycar is actually different from the fan here in the US which is 12V and much cheaper than the Australian 240V version - it also has a different blade arrangement. Jaycar want $90 for theirs but you're looking at maybe $50 total (including postage) for the fan from the US. Okey dokey.. a couple of options for those after a monster fan - note: earplugs not included.
Get back, he's got a giant potato masher! Let's hope he hasn't had a really bad day! Do I even need to tell you who those links are from? Wokket, of course.. :)
Soyo K7ADA DDR socketA motherboard on AwareMag.
Imation CD-RW 4x4x6 Burn-R USB burner on EverythingUSB.
Neon light case kit on OCrCafe.
Vantec Coolers, 2 compared on ProCooling.
Samsung Syncmaster 18.1" LCD screen on PCStats.
RumbleFX force-feedback headphones on GameSurge.
ECS D6VAA dual socket370 motherboard on HotHardware.
MSI K7T266 Pro-R SocketA DDR motherboard on AMDMB.
Friday, 27-July-2001 03:19:13 (GMT +10) - by Agg
I'm thinking about starting the mailing list up again. Go here and let me know what you think would be a good thing to include in future mailouts.
Rex's machine is looking very cool and nearly finished.
BladeRunner, he of the watercooled GF3, sent a link to more info in the HardwareCentral forums. His overall goal is to make a totally silent, while still stupidly fast, machine.. scroll down on that page and check out the HDD-cooling blocks. :) I also notice he's appeared in our own forums.
Dan's cooler comparison now contains no less than 44 coolers.
Accelenation have an interview with Scott Thirlwell from Abit.. As for the pink motherboards and happy faces, I am afraid, the day you see ABIT making this kind of board is the day I leave ABIT.
Privacy groups are trying to delay the launch of WindowsXP due to privacy concerns.
BSOD are overclocking GF2's..
UKGamer reviewed the DigiDoc5 thermal monitor and fan controller that we checked out a while ago here.
TE have some amazing computer stories, apparently.
2CPU have been playing with a dual Tualatin server.
On BBSpot, Microsoft is now bundling worms with their webserver software. "With the worm already bundled as part of the software, network administrators won't have to wonder if their system is infected. They will know. Thanks Manaz. :)
LWD have a gallery of custom Win2K Startup Screens.. some pretty cool ones there.
Ack, it's another one of those late-night-early-start news posts.. two in a row! But don't worry kids, I'll try to make this one a tad more, uh, readable? heh :)
There seems to be a bit of off-topic humerous stuff getting sent to the inbox of late. First in the box was this little add on LWD sent in by Tigger. Dean sent in this - the adventures of Ziggy the cable modem. Heh, 'nuff said. dami0n pointed out this amusing Penny Arcade comic. Not forgetting Wokkett with an air powered pogo stick.. and an (only in America) competition to find the fattest pigeon.
Back on topic now, if you where wondering what makes for a good (or indeed crap) performing heatsink, PCWorkshop have a guide up explaining the black art of heatsink design. Whilst Bit-Tech have a review of the Extreme Vice chipset cooler which looks a lot like the MOS cu cooler we covered in a roundup here.
Hothardware are giving away a VisionTek GeForce3 card.. all you've got to do is tell them why it should be yours. Free GeForce3's eh.. nice. If you can't win one tho, Anandtech has a GeForce3 roundup thing happening.. might be worth your time. Hmm, maybe you can read it and work out the best GeForce3 to win?
Anyone who bought a CUV266 (or indeed an AX37) as recently OCWorkbench has the PR on the Asus TUA266, an ALi DDR s370 board. If you're in the AMD world tho, like most of us these days, HardOCP has reviewed the A7V266. Seems to be the logical successor to the pretty-damn-decent A7V133.
Apparently there is some remote exploit hole thingamajiggy (not technical term) in telnetd. Which, for anyone silly enough to still be running telnetd instead of sshd, is pretty bad. apt-get install ssh ; apt-get remove telnetd.
Finally tonight, Darmok points out this ZDNet article which talks about the inevitable: Intel is moving away from RAMBUS.
KDS VS195i 19" CRT Monitor on ClubOC.
Thermaltake 6025A 60mm fan kit on SystemLogic.
Seagate Barracuda 36es 7,200rpm SCSI Drive on X-Bit Labs.
EagleB 0003 ATX Case on TheTechZone.
PC Mods Neon Light Kit on IANAG.
256Mb TwinMOS DDR DIMM on PCStats.
Thursday, 26-July-2001 01:21:12 (GMT +10) - by Agg
Was supposed to take my bike to the track today, but it's raining.. bah.
GamersDepot take a look at Athlon SMP courtesy of some Palomino (AthlonMP) CPU's and the Tyan Thunder K7 board, thanks Nigel. Don't forget, you (and a zillion other people) saw it first right here on OCAU.
Voodoo points out this bizarre case.. kinda cool, tho.
Wokket has been playing with an 80mm fan on a Taisol heatsink.
There's a new audio cd format which is designed around compressed audio files such as MP3's, thanks Klif.
I'm now getting 30 or 40 of those SirCam emails a day.. considering some of them have 3MB files attached to them, I am very happy to not be on dialup, and to not be using an ISP that caps my downloads.. anyway, Wired have some more info about the virus - it's competing with Love Bug in the popularity stakes at the moment. If YOU haven't updated your virus software, then YOU are probably one of the people sending me mails - get yourself sorted!
Your round at the pub? Out of cash? Lucky you brought that bag of dead magpies with you, then.. thanks (who else but) Wokket. :)
Apparently AOL is investing USD$100M in Amazon.com.
The big scary 230CFM fan we linked a couple of weeks ago is now available in Oz from Jaycar (follow that link), thanks Michael.
Futurelooks have a preview of the Nintendo Gamecube.
Dan's been playing with even more led thingies.
AOpen AK77Pro DDR SocketA motherboard on TBreak, thanks Andreas.
Asus V8200 GeForce3 card on MGON.
Cyber Cooler P-6600 socket cooler on MikhailTech.
TDK CyClone AI-241040 CDRW drive on Digit-Life.
DangerDen Maze2 waterblock on OCTools.
Gigabyte GA-7VTX on HardCoreWare.
P3 1GHz Socket370 CPU on NVNews.
Gainward GF3 video card on TrainWrecker.
Ack, it's one of those late-night-with-an-early-morning-ahead news posts. You know you love them..
]-[ellfire pointed out these counter strike flash movies that are apparently quite funny. I can't comment, havn't watched them. On the subject of games, I've been playing a bit of Max Payne recently.. not a bad game at all, but I don't think it really lives up to all the hype. Or maybe it's just a victim of my if-its-not-cs-it-sucks theory.
Also on humerous OT stuff, Paul noted these little, ok, REALLY little silicon etchings on microchips. There are more here if that sort of stuff does it for you. If not, I'm sure you might, for a moment, find some amusement in wasarrested.com.. even if it's only in tricking your mates. Cheers to Andrew.
Anantech has a WindowsXP RC1: revisted article up.. they wrote they OS off pretty badly in the original article - do they reign themselves in again, or did they find more things that suck? I don't know, I'm too tired to check. Off you go :)
For all the case modding mad men out there, ProCooling have a handy little guide on how to get your case as shiny as a car. A new car. That's seriously shiny. Almost that shiny.
klif sent in this article which talks about CRT technology picking up it's game to really take it to the new LCD technology starting to make a decent showing for itself..
Andys sends in this italian article that covers a few benchies on the Tualatin core, a 1.26GHz part with 512k of cache. It really takes it up to the Pentium4, and with a 0.13u die process it might be a decent overclocker as well. Proof is in the pudding.
Finally tonight, over in the forums I noticed a few case modding projects starting to come to completion: Rex has a fairly tricked out black blue and green system with more fan grills than you can poke a neon at, and it seems that he is going gold for his next coat of paint on his case. Holden "Tiger" Gold in fact.. that horn orangey color you see SS commodores in. Nice.
Asus A7V266 KT266 DDR board on AMD3D.
Thermosonic Thermoengine on SystemLogic.
Vantec CCK-6035D on GideonTech.
IWill BD133 S370 mobo on PCStats.
Spire 5E32B3 hs/f on FrostyTech.
Canon IXUS 300 + Photo Printer CP-10 on OCWorkbench.
Dragon Orb 3 on Tech Planet.
Wednesday, 25-July-2001 03:27:24 (GMT +10) - by Agg
David noticed that Telstra will recompense ADSL users for the chronic unreliability of the network this month. I wonder if Primus will do something similar for their customers..
Quick note from Andy re sound problems on A7V133 boards and WCPREDIT: When I upgraded to the 1005A BIOS on my board it enabled the PCI Master Read Caching in the Chip Configuration in the Advanced section of the bios. In the 1004 bios this couldn't be set to enabled and so i had bad sound. In 1005 and 1006 you can enable it but a friend of mine (les from previous posts) found that 1006 has it disabled by default. So with this enabled, my sound probs have gone away.
SystemLogic took a closer look at the performance of various types of IDE cables..
Old but funny, Tim sent in the AMD Moron article on BBSpot. I reckon someone in AMD's marketing department speaks Klingon.
OCAU hosted site InsaneHardware have launched a new site, AbitVP6.com, a support forum for that dual Socket370 motherboard.
PCHardware have a 15 cooler roundup posted.
G3D built a badass gaming rig.. no, really.
More anti-competitiveness allegations are levelled at Microsoft, this time over Windows XP, thanks Morgan.
I thought we might not have heard from Wokket today, but no, he snuck in a couple at the last minute about people collecting AOL CD's and people being banned from playing with sharks feeding on dead whales.. where does he find this stuff. :)
CaseAce GearGrip CRT monitor carry-handle on 8balls.
DFI CD70-SC Socket370 DDR mobo on Accelenation, using the ApolloPro266 chipset we checked out here.
Iwill KK266-R KT133A socketA motherboard on BlargOC.
Epox 8K7A+ socketA DDR motherboard on Radeonic.
Joytech Kyro 2 video card on PlanetSavage, thanks V8R.
SVK Golden Gate heatsink on IPKonfig.
Well, most interesting peice of news tonight is over on whirlpool. Telstra have finally came good on the poor service offerd up on ADSL and are offering customers a 100% rebate on their bill for the month of July, and 50% off for August and September as a concession for the poor QoS off late. Sure, they blame it on third party equipment, but with effectivley two months free ex-gratia, who's complaining? I havn't had very nice things to say about Telstra over the past week, but this definitely goes against the trend. Well done Telstra - it's good to see a Telco take responsibility for their actions. Thanks to Doug, Joel and Anthony.
Close second on the interesting list are these awesome ascii art pictures. I don't think I've ever seen better, they are seriously good.. there are four links there btw, and I noticed them over on come.to/kewn
Also good is FREE STUFF! over on ClubOC, including motherboards, coolers, mousepads and all that usual stuff. You've gotta go visit a sponsors page to enter, but that's ok. It's better than joining a forum you wouldn't otherwise join. And, they're also giving away more FREE STUFF on 3DSpotlight in the form of Duron 900's or 32Mb GF2MX cards - your choice! Reminds me.. must be getting near OCAU's second birthday. I wonder what websites do for birthdays..
PCStats have an article up talking about the upgrade paths to the P4. New motherboard, New Ram, New CPU. Nice simple path.. I really think Intel need to simplify their product line up at the moment.. there are cumine s370 P3's and Celerons at 66, 100 and 133MHz FSB, SECC2 P3 processors, Slot-2 Xeons, s678 P4 Xeons, s423 P4s and now the FC-PGA2 Tualatin CPU's on the go. Not to mention the upcomming s478 P4's which AOpen are being naughty about and advertising before they should. That's about 7 different chipsets for 9 different CPU brands, ignoring speed differences.
More rice again, this time in the form of North American Impreza/WRX's in a Future Looks article. It appears they havn't really caught onto the whole rice thing over at FutureLooks.. maybe someone needs to point it out to them - there is a lot of amusement to be had.
Denis has went to a bit of effort and asked a Swiss friend of his for a translation of the recent Microsoft add involving boobies. The text on the little menu bar apparently reads "Get Help: Push button guide" at the top, with the options of "Open Straight Aware" or "Break Apart". Heh.. the add has also been pulled from the MS site, it appears they don't like everyone getting their fix of west european soft porn care of them. Damn.
Hmm, here comes your daily dose of weird care of Herbo: a crooning child. Yep, it's damn weird. Blister in the Sun sounds like a whining cat.. and we all know how to take care of those, right? (30 seconds on high, mate) Wokket also chipped in this article which suggest that Van Gogh (that art guy) may of not cut of his ear as originally thought, rather that it may of been the result of a drunken sword fight with his mate Paul Gauguin.. 'spose that tops breaking my drunken breaking-a-window-playing-pool effort.
Martin pointed out this extremely well written and informative guide to BIOS modding. It covers things like adding different microcode for things like onboard IDE/RAID controllers, or adding support for new processors to an existing code base. Pretty involved stuff, but cool nonetheless. Very nice work Martin.. and as always I must issue the standard we-take-no-responsibility-for-turning-motherboards-into-ornaments warning. You can easily corrupt your BIOS if you recklessly toy with things like this. Be careful!
Finally tonight, B5Lurker pointed out this article which talks about more US Senators being unhappy with Microsoft products. Apparently the inclusion of Microsoft messenger, media and other related clients strikes a raw nerve. I can understand where they are comming from, as it's not so much what they are doing as how they are doing it.
KyroII Tweak Guide on 3D Spotlight.
Soyo K7ADA ALi MAGiK1 Socket-A board on Newsforge.
|Late Tuesday Night
Tuesday, 24-July-2001 14:44:32 (GMT +10) - by Agg
Well, I've got tonsilitis. Lots of penicillin smackdown for you, little invisible microbe thingies. Die!
Trippin' around the net, check out some awesome GeForce3 watercooling from BladeRunner.. firstly here on NVNews's forums, which leads to a thread here on HardwareCentral. Make sure you scroll down and see all the pics in those threads, really amazing work and great pics. The pics themselves attracted some discussion - BladeRunner revealed here that he's using a new Nikon CP995, the successor of the CP990 that I use (and love!). These have only just come out in Oz and are a smidge under the AUD$2k mark so I don't see myself upgrading anytime soon.. nice showoff macro pics in that last thread, tho.
Tim let me know that the OCAU RC5 Team is now ranked 250th overall in the world! Not bad at all.
Compex DS2216 network switch on NullPoint.
Shuttle AK31 DDR SocketA motherboard on Tech-Report.
Compex USB NIC on AMDPower.
Window Kit on LittleWhiteDog.
Windows XP RC1 on Aus3D.
ECS K7AMA ALI-based DDR socketA board on BlueSmoke.
Tuesday, 24-July-2001 03:38:12 (GMT +10) - by Agg
Well, there's no more putting it off, I've gotta go to the doctor about this tonsil of mine.. :( My prediction: "here, have some antibiotics".
Just got an email from eBay, apparently: All items that are listed on eBay Australia (i.e. in AU$) between 12:00:01 am AEST and 11:59:59 pm AEST on Thursday 26th July will be free to list. This will apply to insertion fees only. All other fees (including optional reserve price fees, final value fees, gallery and feature fees) will still apply. I dunno how significant a saving that is, but if you've got some stuff to get rid of, might be an ideal time. Otherwise, you could use the OCAU For Sale forum, which is free of any fees all the time.
No, you cannot overclock your cat with a microwave. Thanks to overl0ad for that handy tip.
AcesHW have an article on Intel's Itanium 64-bit processor.
Chris Nolan posted an interesting thread about the newer P3 Processors and motherboard compatability in our Intel Hardware forum.
PCStats have a technical article about flourescent multi-layer memory.
SourceMagazine checked out 11 useful notebook add-ons.
This from Wokket, a funny article on TheReg about MS (kinda) using sex to sell Windows XP. Funny ad, you can view it here.
Rizenet have taken a look at 6 heatsinks in a new roundup.
Plextor have done it again, this time launching their 24x10x40x CDRW drive.. even a 16X speed burner is amazingly fast, you've gotta wonder what the point is of going faster and faster.. the difference between a 20x burn and a 24x burn has got to be only a couple of minutes, surely? This drive does a full 74min cd in 4 minutes, anyway.
From BigDude: building a cheap terabyte-class fileserver, very interesting article.
Hercules 3D Prophet III on DansData, our mini-review here.
Hercules GF2MX on Bench House.
Creative Geforce 3 on BlargOC.
Benwin Flat-Panel Speakers on TE.
I have found more rice tonight. Well actually, mikeamp on IRC found it. It's very very amusing. I had a hard time explaining to my housemates why I was laughing so hard at a computer screen. If you're a fan of the whole rice thing, you're definitely going to have to go read this page.
Also on IRC tonight, a lot of people seem to be fairly interested in locating a russian bride. Hmmm, yes. Finally, we've written up some channel guidelines, which all-of-the-two-people-that-irc-and-read-the-news might want to comment on in the forums here.
Hmm, the Telstra saga continues. They are now claiming that their systems where not compromised at all, rather that it was a large number of users systems compromised by the SubSeven trojan. There is also more Telstra Saga over on Whirlpool..
IANAG have checked out the Samsung DVD-N501, a DVD/MP3 cd player that is also a gaming console. Albeit, not much of one. More of a pack-in feature rather than a must-have, but interesting nonetheless. It has been a while since alternative consoles have been on the scene.. and they seem to die out pretty quick these days. Dreamcast anyone?
For your daily dose of the weird, Wokkett points out The Creative Vulgarian's Lexicon, a guide to help you swear more effectivley. He also noticed this article that claims chocolate that tastes good can have such a positive effect on the male body as to releive stress. Don't mind if I do :) And without stating my opinion on the matter, DF points out this thread in the forums dealing with the Christian belief system.
Finally tonight, HWextreme have a rather handy guide on what you should do if your work on the 'net gets plagiarised. I know it's happened to quite a few hardware sites, and it's a risk anyone takes when they publish material on the net.
Intel Wireless Mouse on EverythingUSB.
Thermosonic Themoengine on IPKonfig.
AOpen R-25W Wireless Mouse on Neoseeker.
IWill KK266-R KT133A/RAID board on TheTechZone.
KDS RAD 5 15" LCD Screen on ClubOC.
IWill KK266 KT133A board on PCStats.
|Apollo Pro 266 - DDR for Socket370
Monday, 23-July-2001 10:23:44 (GMT +10) - by Agg
I checked out a couple of motherboards based on this chipset from VIA. Of course, the main thing it brings to the socket370 platform is the use of DDR memory. We've seen DDR bring impressive results to AMD-based systems - can we expect the same on Intel's side?
click for the full review!
6 more SirCam virus messages today. Update your virus software - yes, you! Got some in Spanish too, which was a refreshing change. There's a guide here to removing it from your system if you have it.
It's cooler comparison time over at Adrian's Rojak Pot, with 10 coolers on a P3.
3DReality have a mind-wobbling 42-way video card roundup posted. Better get the comfy chair and a couple of Viking bars for that one.. thanks Nigel.
Leo had some trouble with KingMax 256MB PC150 modules (reviewed here) and Abit's KT7A motherboard. He says In summary if using the Kingmax 256MB PC150 modules on a KT7A motherboard set the DRAM memory timing to fast or turbo and even use CAS 2 to fix windows registry errors. MD strength should be Hi.
Skeptilence notes that Australia is officially the second-best place to live in the world. I guess nobody told them about Canberra.. :)
Leon sent in more info in the FBI losing laptops and weapons saga..
Here's a sexy case, thanks Hoopstar - or you could go the whole hog with this quad 900mhz xeon box on eBay, ta alchemy. Both dwarfed by Big Daddy Kahuna of course. :)
Still not happy? Consider some shiny colourful stuff for your case, then.. or some glowy stringy stuff, even.
There's an article about high-performance DDR and how to keep it happy on LostCircuits.
Memphis has a pretty cool machine - but check out this awesome lan box!
Funny pic on HardOCP, putting orbs to good use.. thanks LoneWolf.
Gainward CARDEXpert GeForce3 on digit-life.
Gigabyte 7DXR DDR SocketA mobo on NewsForge - did well in our 3-way AMD760 roundup.
Silver Mountain on WildAndyC.
Acorp 6A815EPD i815-based dual socket370 motherboard on Digit-Life.
Thermaltake coolers on BlargOC.
Hercules Prophet 4500 Kyro II based videocard on MaxReboot, thanks Nigel.
Iwill KD266 socketA motherboard on OCNZ.
It just keeps on getting worse and worse for Telstra Broadband subscribers.. I doubt they are creating any product loyalty as it is. Anyway, throwing more fuel onto the fire is this article Antony sent in that covers some security issues with the Alcatel ADSL modem Telstra has been issuing ADSL subscribers with. Admittedly other ADSL subscribers issue the same modem, so it's not just restricted to Telstra subscribers. But it is another thing for them to worry about. This is not to say all is rosy in the Optus@Home world either.. apparently there was a security issue with the SURFboard SB3100 modems allowing a remote exploit to reset the modem. Thankfully, Optus rolled out a firmware update for the modem that has patched the exploit. I can't find any links to info on it, but all the pieces fit.
Oh, I almost forgot. Bigpond Cable passwords have also been hacked. For real. Yep, all of the usernames with corresponding passwords have been compromised, and are in the public domain - not just on someone's hard drive. So might be time to change your password if you're a bigpond user. That's if it hasn't already been changed for you.. Fun Fun Fun. Not a good time to have anything to do with Telstra at all really. Ready for privatisation my left testicle. More info here, thanks to Alex, Skitza and Morgan. Talk of it in the forums here.
More doom and gloom news, but this time on a humerous note. Hugo sent in this picture of a recent netsplit that occured on the oz.org network where the #overclockers irc channel is hosted. It's a big one :) For those that don't know, a netsplit happens when one (or more) IRC servers split away from the others. In that picture you can see that it is melbourne.oz.org splitting away from router.oz.org (the central server all the other servers sync with). Also, IRC servers are usually grouped into networks such as the oz.org one to share server load and allow a larger group of people to converse.
SysOpt has a handy little guide to recovering your BIOS if the flashing process goes horribly wrong. This might be one to read and/or print out, because reading it without a BIOS is, as I understand, a tad difficult.
The guys over at procooling are pretty keen on getting a Peltier/Water cooled t-bird happening, and have discovered a limitation holding it back: clamping pressure. Y'see, most attatchments use a single nylon bolt or similar to hold the pelt/waterblock onto the slug. Problem is, whilst the the T-Bird is only happy with a max of 16-24lb of pressure on it's core, the pelt wants 150-300lb. Bit of a difference..
Iroquois has pointed out that ExtremeTech have a 14 case roundup thing happening.. and looks to be a pretty decent idea. I wonder if, following the recent rash of cooler roundups (like our's here) case roundups are going to be the Next Big Thing.
Digit-Life has an article up talking about the Home PNA 1.0 and 2.0 standards for using telephone wires as network infrastructure. Which reminds me of the Wireless Community Net for Brisbane being discussed in the forums. It'd be even cooler if it wasn't so expensive.
Finally, a trio of reviews has popped up over on dansdata, and top of the list is an Acer CRW 2010A IDE CD-RW which boasts a 20X write speed. Which is pretty darn quick, and cops the usual interesting-and-lengthy going over from dan including a look at why it's not as fast as you think it is. He's also looked at an external firewire box for 5 1/4" devices, the FireWire SkyBox, and finally some DiscSaver CD cases which look really nifty but are only available in the US at the moment. They also burn well, once you get them going. Go read, it's interesting.
The Funnel fan adaptor on IPKonfig. Our reviews here and here.
ADI L712 17" DVI LCD Display on Accelenation.
DFI AK75-EC KT133A mobo on MikhailTech.
Infinipro Aqua Cool Deluxe Kit on 2FastCPU.
Cooler Guys Wind Tunnel 3 case on ClubOC.
Medium-Sized Cooler Roundup on RojakPot.
AVGSAL600 Aluminium case on Ripnet UK.
HiSpeed PC AGP AirLift on OCIA.
Saturday, 21-July-2001 02:21:16 (GMT +10) - by Agg
It's easy to get swept up in the competitive spirit of the distributed computing projects OCAU readers participate in, but remember to make sure you have permission to run it on the PC's you're using. Dave McOwen is currently facing hefty fines and maybe even prison in what seems to be a massive overreaction by the state Govt of Georgia in the US. On a more positive note, our Folding@Home team is racing ahead and is now in the top 9 teams for rate of production and the top 25 overall!
Poly sent word of yet another IIS security problem. This is why we use apache under debian linux. This particular one is nasty though, as it permits DDoS attacks, which could affect us regardless of what platform we're using. So if you run an IIS machine, get yourself sorted! Fortunately, this one seems to be targeting the white house, thanks Iroquois - but TheRegister reckon it's no big deal.
Tech-Report say that whinging about XP's licensing won't do any good, while Iroquois found the system requirements for it - 300MHz with 64MB RAM and 2.5GB HDD space.. hmm, 64mb sounds a bit painful.
There are some privacy concerns regarding the potential takeover of C&W Optus by SingTel, thanks VooDoo.
This from Mort, who noticed a security feature on Compaq EN desktops: There's a small solenoid with a pin through it mounted on the inside of the case. In the BIOS there is a setting to lock the case. When you set the lock to enable, you hear the pin "click" on the next reboot and you can't get the lid off. Go back into the BIOS and set the lock to disable and another reboot sounds another "click" and you can get the lid off again. Pretty cool idea. I'd like to see an option like this on Asus and Abit (and other) motherboards, would be most helpful for big LAN parties I would imagine... Yup. You really don't want to forget your BIOS password, though. :)
There's an interview with Matrox on SystemLogic and an interview with Iwill on Accelenation.
Al points out this article on nForce, NVIDIA's new motherboard chipset with integrated GF2 graphics.. reads like a big press-release more than a review to me.
I just got another 2 messages generated by the SirCam email worm/virus. Update your virus software!
Bit-Tech have some blowhole templates to download.. not exactly sure what those are or how you're supposed to use them. Anyway, remember a normal CD is a perfect template for a 120mm fan. :)
There's a new Netscape Navigator out, thanks Iroquois.
Klif sent in this funny video about the secret workings of Microsoft!
Guru3D have compared a bunch of detonator versions.. they also have a detonator destroyer which sounds nastier than it really is.
On the list of "things I don't want to do to my PC", running the CPU at 99C has got to be well up there with "breeding rabbits inside my fulltower".
Thermaltake Dragon Orb 3 socket cooler on AMDZone.
Thermaltake Dragon Orb 3 socket cooler also on GideonTech.
NAPA DAV310 CD/VCD/MP3 player on OCNZ.
Wicked 3D Glasses on HWExtreme.
Seagate Cheetah X15-36LP, apparently fastest drive to date on StorageReview, thanks Andys.
Silver Mountain socket cooler on AMDWorld.
Shuttle AK11 kt133a-based SocketA mobo on HotHardware.
Epox EP-8K7A socketA ddr mobo on xbit.
Samsung Baby-Yepp MP3 player on PCStats.
Hmm, there's a scheme brewing to stop the copying (or ripping) of music from a CD to a HDD. Agg's prediction: like every other copy-protection scheme, this will fail if enough people are interested in finding out how to get around it.. and there are. Information wants to be free, maaan.. thanks Mikel.
Interesting thing from Klif, a USB touchscreen controller that displays your character's inventory of items in games such as Quake 3 on its touchscreen. This allows for you to quickly select from all of your available weapons by simply touching its image on the ID-75.. sounds very useful for CS.
A few people pointed out that there's some new powermacs out, including a dual 800mhz jobbie. Warning: Apple marketing has been known to make people who actually do know what they're talking about splutter in disbelief.
TE have an interview with some AMD marketing people about how they view the internet for marketing..
Wokket, ever on the lookout for the truly bizarre, sent in this umpire's nightmare, everyone on the field having the same name (Patel). Speaking of which, Judge Patel has ruled that Napster be nuked, according to BBSpot. Further, there are now snipers roaming Stockholm.. it's a really bad time to be caught wearing a bunny suit.
Thrustmaster Ferrari Force-Feedback Wheel on MGON.
PC Chips 817LMR motherboard on MrPCPro.
GlobalWin 802 socket cooler on BSOD.
2CoolPC system coolers on GideonTech.. our reviews here and here.
Dragon Orb 3 socket cooler on ComputerChaos.
Abit SA6R "pictorial guide" to this i815EP motherboard on RojakPot.
SUMA PLATINUM K2 KyroII-based video card on Xbit.
X-10 Wireless Camera you've seen all the popup ads for, on TE.
Mini copper orb socket cooler on Rizenet.
I've gotten a few emails with this as the body lately:
Hi! How are you?
I send you this file in order to have your advice
See you later. Thanks
The subject is always different, but there's always a file attached, usually based on the subject of the message, but a .com or .bat or .exe. I'm not in the habit of opening mysterious executable files that get emailed to me by strangers, so I asked a couple of the senders what the file was. In both cases they didn't know what I was talking about. Warning bells should be ringing now! Sounds like yet-another-outlook-virus.
Update: Danny points out this story about the virus.
Hmm, quite a bit happening on the scene tonight, so I better be quick and get it on the page. Here gooooes..
Anandtech has taken a look at ATi's next generation SmartShader technology which is basically the name their marketing guru's gave for the vertex and pixel shaders. Which are all a part of DirectX 8.0 and 8.1.. so it's nothing big, just means they are comming up to par with GF3. In their own same-but-different way.
Hexus has taken a look at the difference between 32Mb and 64Mb GeForce2MX 400 cards.. and to sum it up, it's not worth it. Sure, you're getting double the ram for an extra $30 maybe, but the $30 is probably better spent on more system memory, or the price difference between a 1.0 and a 1.2GHz T'Bird.. or whatever. Still worth a read tho, especially if you want more than my take on it.
Gerald pointed out this rather alternative hs/f attachment method over on overclockers.com.. and whilst the author says it was intended to make it safer/quicker/easier to attatch heatsinks, I think it'd do the oppposite.. springs give a lot more oppurtunity for the hs/f to move around the CPU core and crack it. Which Is A Bad Thing.
A reader over at OCworkbench.com had a bit over trouble flashing their bios.. apparently the power went out mid-flash, and not only did the flash fail (as you'd expect..) but the BIOS chip actually fried as well. Owch.. lucky it has a dual BIOS. Which made me think.. a sort-of-dodgy-but-not way of providing a dual BIOS would be to just ship a second (spare) BIOS chip with the board.. it'd make it easy flashing experimental BIOS because you'd always have the second one to swap over. As for the costs, I doubt BIOS chips (in volume) by themselves in a little static clamshell would cost more than a whole 50c..
Kazashi pointed out a rather old but interesting article that talks about why the Human eye can actually perceive the difference between 70fps and 30fps, even though 27fps is supposedly all it needs. Good read, especially to put your mind at ease over the thick wad of cash that you transformed into a GeForce3 :)
EXHardware has checked out the HiSpeedPC AGP AirLift, basically an inverted fan adaptor (reviewed here) that goes on the back/top of your AGP card and sucks all the hot air towards the PSU and out of your case.. slight problem being your CPU is often in the way, and the hot air gets blown over it on it's quest for freedom. Oh well. SystemLogic has done the same
DSLWebServer has a quick guide up to making a 5/7/12V line splitter to allow you run your case fans at lower voltages. Which makes them spin slower/quieter. Which can be good.
Finally tonight, Lombers from CaseJunkiez has taken a look at the Vantec FCE-62540D cooler, which is basically a rebadged FOP-38 with a YS-Tech 7k-rpm fan instead of a Delta one.. the good thing about it is the price, which is a tad under $30. Very good performance for cooling on the cheap, and a better clip to boot.
Compex PS2208B Ethernet Switch on Tweakmax.
Hercules Prophet 4500XT KyroII on MGON.
Hercules Prophet 4500XT KyroII on Tech-Report.
YS-Tech NFD126025BB-2F1 40CFM Fan on IPKonfig.
USB DiskOnKey 32Mb on EverythingUSB.
Thermalright SK-6 on ProCooling.
Thermaltake Memory Cooling Kit on AwareMag.
Gigabyte 7DXR on NewsForge. Our 3-Way Article here.
Phil from The Computer Hospital got his Windows XP CD and sent over some pics.. in case you were wondering:
click images to enlarge..
Thursday, 19-July-2001 03:05:17 (GMT +10) - by Agg
Didn't have net access for about 12 hours last night, thank you Telstra.
I notice the Mambo PC has been updated, a window and some other goodies to go with the awesome paint job. Dr-Ben's machine is pretty cool too.
A new beta of DivX 4.0 is out now, thanks Herbo.
Matex points out this Microsoft Wine on Ebay.. the mind boggles.
3DSpotlight take a look at Windows XP.
AMDMB have a copper heatsink roundup happening.. while Accelenation have updated their heatsink roundup with a couple more sinks.
A lot of people sent this in but it's not as big a deal as it sounds.. XP will ship with Java support turned off. You can just turn it on if you want.
Manaz sends word that the desktop Palomino may be in a slightly thinner package - still SocketA, but not as tall, which might have an effect on which coolers you can use on it. Grrr!
Intel i815EPEA2 motherboard on TheTechZone.
Creative Labs GeForce3 video card on Guru3D.
EyeModule 2 digicam on PCStats.
D-Link DI-713 wireless gateway on SourceMag.
Apacer 256MB pc133 SDRAM on 8balls.
Samsung SyncMaster 955DF 19" monitor on DansData.
DFI AK76-SN AMD761+686b DDR socketA board on HotHardware.
Acer 2010A CDRW on CDRInfo.
Wednesday, 18-July-2001 05:36:05 (GMT +10) - by Agg
First thing I noticed today was Jake's Celeron 466 @ 933MHz in the PCDB. If that's not some kind of joke then it has to be one of the most heroic overclocks ever - getting a Mendocino Celeron over 700MHz is pretty much unheard of. I got my best-of-the-bunch C366 to 682MHz (after the original peltier and watercooling experiments that started this site off) .. I tried for a long time to get my C466 to even POST at 700MHz.. 2.6v core, sanded to full copper and with a watercooled 72W peltier on board, no joy, not even a peep at 700MHz. If this new 933MHz system is genuine then my hat's off to you, Jake.
Electic points out new disposable mobile phones.. I hope they're recyclable..
Need a little more airflow in your box? Matt suggests this 235CFM one. Maybe mount two pointing down and have a hover-case.
After you've been running one of those for a while, you'll probably have some wicked dust action happening inside your case - GideonTech have a guide to cleaning it all out.
Dell kinda screwed themselves with a recent free-shipping deal, thanks Haroc.
SourceMagazine pit a couple of CDRW drives against each other.
Accelenation have benchmarked pretty much all the SocketA chipsets for your comparison..
Andypoo points out this interesting site that can tell you what was the UK or US Number 1 pop song on a given day, such as the day you were born.
Apparently the Windows XP RC1 activation code is not as secure as MS would have hoped, thanks Blue Draco (and the 3 other people who sent it in while I was typing this news update :) )
OCOpolis have a shim shootout..
PCStats got themselves in the position of having no heatsink on their Athlon and, unsurprisingly, it toasted itself. Easier to do than you might expect.. damnit.
Hogwash notes that Intel are not having a great time financially at the moment.. info here and here. Sure, the market is down at the moment, but a 76% drop in income? That's gotta sting.
ProCooling have been having a play, but not a lot of luck, with water chillers.
Abit TH7 P4 motherboard on HardwareMania.
EPoX 3SPA3 i815EP-based socket370 board on Rizenet.
SUMA Platinum GeForce3 on Digit-Life.
Biostar M7MIA RAID SocketA DDR mobo on SystemLogic.
Addtronics 7896 with modifications on ArsTechnica.
Hexus have been playing with a pretty serious machine, this article started as a review of the Iwill DVD266-R dual Socket370 DDR motherboard but includes a new Chenbro chassis and some other goodies..
HardOCP have been busy today too, with 2 reviews up - firstly the Morpheus GeForce3 video card, also the much-anticipated Abit KG7 socketA DDR motherboard. ViaHW checked out the Abit KG7 too.
Can't get your head around all the buzz-words and CPU terminology? ExtremePC have a CPU Glossary which may be of some help.
OCNZ have been overclocking their Leadtek GF3.. as if it wasn't fast enough already.
CDRInfo have a 3-way DVD-ROM drive roundup. Picked myself up a 16X Pioneer yesterday, not had a chance to play with it yet..
Not heard much from JC's for a while, but he's back with a transcript of an AMD conference call.. lots of info from the chip giant.
Who needs fan adapters when you can just bend out your heatsink fins to accomodate an 80mm fan? Thanks overl0ad.
Win y'self a Duron 900MHz on 3DSpotlight.. they say there are no geographic restrictions, cool.
Tech-Report dug up some pics of a 128MB GeForce2 MX400.. woo.
SP USA SilentPC Pro S case on SystemLogic.
AOpen AW744 Deluxe sound card on NeoSeeker.
CoolerGuys Window Kit on TweakTown.
Power Cooler PCH 137 socket cooler on ChillBlast.
Chaintech 7SID SiS735-based (new chipset!) SocketA DDR motherboard on OCWB.
Innovision GeForce2 MX400 video card on OCOnline.
Swiftech MC462 socketA cooler on OCShoot.
Crucial DDR SDRAM on AMDWorld.
|Tuesday Midday.. ish.
Tuesday, 17-July-2001 02:41:51 (GMT +10) - by Agg
Hmm, my tonsils are swollen this morning, that can't be a good sign.
I just joined the Folding@Home Team and my main workstation (Athlon 950MHz) is pumping out the units now. I wasn't really sure how to join up or get it all going but Postal has made a tutorial which explains it all really well.. so you're out of excuses now. :)
I'm not normally much of a fan of sports-shooting, but I think the sport is going to experience a surge in popularity real soon now.. with the arrival of the Swedish Bikini Team. Not just pretty faces apparently, but crack shots too - thanks JimX.
PCHardware want to tell you about their new testing methodology for hardware..
From Frumpy - scientists spending lots of time and money to find out why shower-curtains get sucked in and stick to you in the shower. Riiight.
DrR0M, pretty much in a league of his own when it comes to loony cooling, has had a go at supercooling his GF3.
MrPCPro reckons if you modify the cable on your Klipsch speakers you get better sound from them.
Dan has checked out some cheap webcams that don't suck. Warning: review contains extreme closeup of Dan's nose.
Digit-Life have looked at some GF2 MX200 & 400 cards from YUAN.. which apparently are growing on trees over there or something (?).
Bit88 Universal Sound Enhancer on AcidHW.
Elsa Gladiac Ultra GF2U-based video card on Accelenation.
MSI K7T266 Pro Raid KT266-based SocketA DDR motherboard on RizeNet.
There's been a shocking murder in the QLD computer industry - as reported here the owner of a computer shop was stabbed to death while working back one night late last week. The report doesn't say who it is but the strong rumours, most notably from Mozz over at TechWatch are that it was John Chan from Queensland Computer Group, whom Mozz knew personally. No clues yet as to a motive - apparently John was well respected and much loved in the community. My sympathies to the family and friends involved in this senseless tragedy.
Update: This report confirms the victim was John Chan of QCG.
Hmm, OCCafe have reviewed the Cyber Cooler NK-360. A notebook cooler. Sort of fits into the same category as a monitor cooler, which aimed firmly at people who over accessorise ~everything~. Probably a little bit more useful is this little device which I noticed on voicerecognition.com.au, a new OCAU sponsor. It's a flat power cell which clips/sits on the bottom of your laptop and acts as a secondary battery.
SystemLogic has a little bit of a rant up covering the costs of upgrading to a P4 system. When the price is put in comparison, it is pretty scary difference, but all things being equal its dirt cheap. A joke among friends lately has been that soon SDRAM will be appearing in breakfast cereal boxes. The scary thing is, it's so cheap I contemplated buying a stick just to photograph it in a box of wheaties.. HEH.
MeriX has pointed out this article over on The Reg highlighting just how ruthless Microsoft is.. They’re going after a South Australian company that provides PC's free of charge to poor and disadvantaged children. Apparently it's time they coughed up for all the software licenses, or else. Better get to them quick before it's actually worth Bill Gates' time to pick up those $1,000 notes he's been dropping.
Agg found this interview with Andy Thomas, the aussie astronaut. Pretty interesting read, might be worth having a scroll through. It's on mycareer.com.au, but somehow I doubt Mr Thomas picked his career out from a touch screen at centrelink.
Now this is pretty cool.. Steinberg, the creators of Cubase VST and other almost industry-standard audio editing/creation apps are optimising their software for the AMD processor. It'll be interesting to see what the difference turns out to be.
2FastCPU are running a competition to cool down your summer. Or, err, our winter. With Lexmark toner cartridges no less. Just what you needed, yes? Does not say anything about it being open to aussie residents, but then nothing is said about it not being open to us either. So if you want toner..
For all users that have somehow "obtained" a copy of WindowsXP build 2505, electic has an updater that'll take you up to build 2509. Mmm, beta updaters for unreleased beta software. All you need then is a pre-release motherboard and a CPU with a cracked core for the ultimate in Dodgy Computing™.
Ranky pointed out that you can now buy dirt on ebay. Just what you needed? Be sure to make sure that its disease free dirt. I/we take no responsibility if you purchase this dirt and then later find out it isn't good dirt. Sorry.
Samsung Sycmaster 150MP 15" LCD Screen on NeoSeeker.
GlobalWin WAW38 P4 cooler on TheTechZone.
Senfu Copper Air Cooler on CoolHardWarez.
1CoolPC Socket AHO cooler on GideonTech.
Digit-life have posted part 2 of their monthly Hardware Digest for July. Notebooks, PDAs, IAs, Multimedia, Peripherals and Digital Phototography in this edition.
Frazas has updated his PCDB entry to show his modded Voodoo5 (the bottom 4 or 5 pics).
Ages ago we had an article on thermal fan control. Bit-tech have looked at controlling other things via temperature - including neon lights.
We're always hearing how such-and-such supercomputer or Beowulf cluster is now the 20th-fastest in the world etc. Well, in my wanderings I found Top500.org that lists the top 500 computers in the world, in terms of sheer computational grunt. The current (June 2001) list is here.
Beannie wants the world to know of a new Half-Life mod called The Opera.. oh, alright. Supposed to be pretty good - looks like you get to be Chow Yun-Fat in a John Woo film. :)
Robomort has posted a guide to recovering a corrupt BIOS chip in the forums..
AMDMB have posted a recommended system guide.. DDR-based Athlon 1.4GHz system, somewhat unsurprisingly. :)
3-way copper cooler shootout on 8balls.
Hmm, turns out at least one of the Darwin Awards stories is true.. thanks JimX.
Transcend TS-AKT4/A KT133A motherboard (in spanish) on Noticias3D.
Romeo Case on OCOnline.
Olympus Camedia C-700 digicam on Digit-Life.
|HighSpeedPC Fan Expander
Sunday, 15-July-2001 14:09:20 (GMT +10) - by Agg
Alchemy checked out the HighSpeedPC 80mm Fan Expander. This is similar to the aluminium fan adapters we saw a few months ago, but it's made of plastic and it's being sold in the US, so it's easier to get.
Click here for the full review!
The on-topic news this evening seems to be very slow, so luckily there is a lot of off-topic interesting stuff to post. Top of the list is my Dad's 50th birthday comming up on Tuesday.. I doubt that he reads this page, but still gotta say it anyway.. happy birthday Dad. Moving along..
Apparently Red Bull, that heavily caffeinated and excellent-with-vodka "energy drink" can kill you, or so the world's media will have you beleive. This from IRC: "Red Bull ... it gives you wings" ... yeah, little wings on your back, and a harp too ...
A B-I-G congratulations to the Wallabies who won last night's series decider against the Lions. Probably one of the best games of Rugby I've seen in a while, and best wishes to Rod Macqueen who bows out as coach.
Heading back on topic, Slautech have reviewed a Thermosonic ThermoEngine with a delta 60mm fan strapped to it. Nothing out of the ordinary you'd think, except of course for the fan. It's not the normal 37cfm unit, it's instead a taller unit boasting an insane 43cfm. Sort of taking the whole turbines-on-heatsinks thing to a new level.. of noise, and admittedly performance as well.
Pengo noticed this job while poking around Headhunter.net.. The position is entitled Imperial Administrative Assistant, and it involves screening phone calls from telemarketers and includes benefits such as kicking ewoks. Wookies need not apply.
DangerousDog has a guide up to modding the +5V line on IWill KK266 motherboards. Apparently the VCORE mod for this board results in low +5V voltages, so you have to perform another mod. I'll take this moment to say mod's like this not only void your motherboard warranty, they may also void your life insurance. Take care :)
Detanator version numbers just keep on getting higher and higher.. almost seems like a bad case of version-number-ricing on nVidia's behalf. They are now up to version 14.20 and available for download from IPKonfig.
Going against the trend of 4cyl rice comments I've been making of late comes this showing of some big aussie muscle.. Some guys did what every owner of a 300kW HSV GTS should do.. take it out on a quiet highway in the NT and see how fast it goes. In this case, 270km/hr.. which isn't too shabby at all. Comes via hphero.com.
Brisbane's QGL Lan is on again, taking over ANZ stadium's volleyball courts for the 28th and 29th of this month. I'll be making a much more concerted effort to get to this LAN, as I'm keen to offer smackdown where smackdown is due. A few people on IRC/forums have been suggesting an OCAU-only LAN, so how about wearing your OCAU shirt, writing OCAU all over your case in black nikko or comming in Agg's favorite pink OCAU g-string to show you're a community member.
I found this over on HardOCP.. it's a keyboard/mouse combo whereby the keyboard is a split, and the right portion of the keyboard features an optical sensor on the bottom allowing you to move it around and use it like a mouse. Looks to be a pretty cool idea, even if it's probably too akward for acurate gaming. Best part of it all? The inventor is an aussie!
It appears that the Ausgamers F@H team has begun to pull infront of us.. which is just not on. To give people less reasons to not help us whip their ass, p0st@l has written up a guide for installing Folding@Home and getting it going. If you didn't think searching for a cure for cancer was a good enough reason, beating Ausgamers might of been the one you were looking for..
Finally today, Dave from Razor Prices has let me know that he's finished a new html-only version of his site. For those that missed the original post a few weeks back, Razor Prices is a new aussie site that lists 16 retailers (4 more have recently been added) price lists, allowing you to search their database for the lowest prices. Apparently a few people were not too pleased with the use of Flash on the site, hence the new html-only version. The site is pretty handy for those whom price is the deciding on where to purchase, and something the aussie market has been lacking of late.. so give them your support!
Shuttle AK31 KT266 DDR board on AMDWorld.UK.
Vantec CCK-6035D all-copper hs/f on IPKonfig.
DDR SD-RAM roundup on Accelenation.
AMD SMP under Linux on GamePC.
Sunday, 15-July-2001 07:50:48 (GMT +10) - by Agg
I noticed microsniper's latest PCDB entry while looking for entry #1800. It looked so amazing I emailed him and asked for more info. Here's what he had to say:
I only wanted to give a preview of my system to PCDB viewers as it is currently still in development due to finish in about 2 weeks.
Here are the details:
The white donut thing is a Toroidal PSU, I made it myself. It gives out approx 18V DC 20Amps 300W. I use it to power 170W 24V pelt. There are 2 more PSU's, 400W Leadman and 300W Aopen, that is total of 1000Watts in the system. ;)
There are total of 3 radiators, 1 mounted internally on top of the case and 2 mounted externally ( because I ran out of room inside ) in a custom made radiator housing. All radiators are cooled with 120mm fans. I used 170W peltier on CPU, 120W peltier on GPU and 80W peltier on north bridge. All cooled with dual water pump. All fans controlled with DigiDoc5.
Since the system is still under construction I won't brag on about how much it can overclock yet. :) but Initial testing with a Thunderbird 950 with KT7A-RAID showed good results.
Here's a couple of pics, there's a heap more in his PCDB entry:
Click either image for the full entry!
Looks pretty amazing - keep us posted! :) You can see his earlier efforts here and here - interesting stuff there too.
|Early Sunday Morning
Saturday, 14-July-2001 15:55:35 (GMT +10) - by Agg
The FrontX Multimedia Ports thingy is getting a bit of coverage today, here on AtlantaOC and here on My-Rig. We checked it out ages ago here.. pretty cool if you're after that kinda thing.
G-Cards have a guide to speeding up your boot time. Half their images aren't loading for me..
Ah! I first saw this as a word doc, but someone has made it into a web page. The first time I heard these was at work and the whole helpdesk was literally screaming with laughter, so hopefully you'll find it funny too. Fun with the airport announcements desk, thanks Martin.
Vindaloo points out that GoFish, an Australian auction site, has gone down the gurgler.. cute/sad logo on their page now.
DPReview have checked out the Nikon D1X. This is the digital camera I'll buy when I win the lottery.
Mouse Bungee on HWExtreme, our review here.
Lian Li PC60 aluminium case on OCSHoot.
Hercules Prophet 4500 Kyro2 based video card on Accelenation.
Compex DS1216 10/100 LAN switch on GideonTech.
ABIT Siluro T400 review on digit-life.
CoolCaseMods Manhattan custom case on BlargOC. Dissapointingly not a modified AST Manhattan server case like Wildemere's.
Saturday, 14-July-2001 09:22:11 (GMT +10) - by Agg
Not a whole lot going on out there. The PCDB passed 1800 entries last night - Menthu_Rae was the lucky number. Viking's machine is pretty cool (is that a RheoBus I see?) but Joe_Stalin's is one of the tidiest, coolest boxes I've seen in a while. Some nice work there.
Microsoft have jumped into the online music game now, thanks Kazashi.
Raven pointed out this cute/funny trailer for an upcoming movie, Ice Age. Little furry guy running around.. pretty amazing graphics.
Mr Bill points out someone who takes their racing sims a little too seriously.. nice setup tho.
Swiftech MCX370-0A (new model) cooler on ClubOC.
Asus V7700 Pro video card on MGON.
Coloured fans on Bit-Tech.
DFI AK76-SN SocketA DDR motherboard on Inside-HW.
Dinner time, more in a bit.
This from Mr Bill: I dont know what to say about this except I am really offended..
click to enlarge
Agg is off building testboxes tonight. Which means there are reviews coming, I can smell them. Coming. In testboxes. News.
VoidYourWarranty have looked at some Flowmaster Water Cooling Kits.. and it's not just a pretty name either, it features 1/2" fittings and tubing in the system. Mmm, that'll be a bit of flowrate. For those that don't know water cooling, flow rate is like RAM. You cant get enough, especially at these prices. I spoze there is an exception to the rule tho.. put those firehoses away.
FutureLooks has put away their crystal ball and instead turned their focus on sputnik 7.. a website that is apparently good for wasting time. For all those office workers on Monday who manage to read this post (if you're bored you no doubt will), then I 'spose this is one way to kill an afternoon. I was bored today and found chicks suck, and no, it's not a porn site. It's someyunguys ranting about not being able to find a woman, and altho essentially depressing it's pretty amusing at times. He makes some good calls on lots of things. Write down and say it to your mates type good calls.
3D spotlight have taken a look at CPUfx's water cooling kit, featuring an aluminium reservoir and a copper waterblock.. sounds like a good source for a battery effect. Running water thru copper and then aluminium all day is bad.. makes for galvanic corosion, which is also bad. Bad Bad Bad.
Nicholas sent in this rather humorous guide to securing your PC against theft. It dosn't mention it on the page, but I also beleive it would be successful in securing your PC against hackers and all sorts of Internet nasties.. might start a trend eh?
VooDoo pointed out that there are several handy tips from Tyan in the comments section of this review on AcesHardware. Problem is, I bet the ratio of AMD-SMP-Dreamers to AMD-SMP-Users is pretty shocking.
GlobalWin CAK38 on IPKonfig.
AMD SMP on Digit-Life.
Herc Prophet 4500XT 64Mb Kyro2 on HotHardware.
MiniJam Springboard MP3 Module on PCStats.
EPoX 8K7A + 1.33GHz AXIA on AMDWorld.UK.
Ace 112 MultiMedia Ports, similar to the FrontX ones we reviewed here.
Cyber Cooler P10,000 hs/f on OCcafe.
Thermalright SK6 on procooling.
If you're wondering where the AusGamers game servers went, they've been shut down.. their sponsor cannae take it, cap'n!
OcPrices compared the OCZ Gladiator and ThermoSonic ThermoEngine socket coolers.
Rizenet have been playing around with water cooling. Some of those photos look like they're underwater. :)
Slautech have a guide to using a holesaw to make a blowhole.
Arctic Silver II thermal paste on BSOD.
Epox 8K7A SocketA motherboard on NeoSeeker.
Tyan Thunder LE dual Socket370 mobo on 2CPU.
IBM DeskStar 60GXP 61GB HDD on TechnoYard.
Western Digital Caviar 400AB 6000rpm HDD on xbit.
AVC 212AHO Skive (?) heatsink on FrostyTech.
|Early Friday Morning
Thursday, 12-July-2001 16:21:48 (GMT +10) - by Agg
Dean let me know he's updated the Team OCAU Folding@Home page with a new scheme.. check it out, very nice new logo. However, the stats show that we're being whipped by AusGamers! If you've got idle CPU cycles then sign up and help find cures for diseases and other cool stuff.. it's a holy grail of modern molecular biophysics, apparently. And we're being beaten by AusGamers.
Interesting Korean waterblock appeared in the forums..
IRC network efnet, similar to but much larger than the oz.org network we use for our own IRC channel, has been crippled by a sustained series of DDoS attacks on their core servers - in the order of 3GB/sec. Not cool. I don't understand why people destroy things that are given to them for free. More info from Ben: This site shows current server status.. someone's seen the funny side.
Senfu, famous for their watercooling gear (that we checked out here, here and here), have branched out into air cooling. CHW have reviewed a new copper cooler from them.
Greg pointed out this web searching methodologies site. This is not a skim-readable site so I've not looked into it too much.. but it looks interesting. I find google an excellent search tool, but there's still an art to sifting through the huge amount of fluff out there..
Daemon has updated his PCDB entry.. I do like a tidy blowhole. Makes mine look pretty dodgy..
Dan from DansData blew up some fast stuff and bought himself some slow stuff to replace it. The story unfolds here.
Napster's taken another severe kick in the ribs in their legal battle.
FrontX Serial and USB ports on EXHardware.. our review of the base unit here.
Panaflo 92mm fans on TechWatch.. these are good 'uns.
Zalman CNPS 5000+ heatsink/fan on OCCafe.
Fan Expander on DreddNews.. basically a fan adapter.
Airlift Video Cooler on 2FastCPU.
Plextor 16/10/40A CDRW on AwareMag.
Lazer cut fan grills on IANAG.
Kenwood KDC-MP8017 car MP3 player on TheTechZone.
PC Geiger on AllTechBox. These things are getting a lot of press lately, seem pretty cool
DFI CS62-TC Socket370 motherboard based on i815EP stepping B (support for Tualatin) on PCHW.RO.
Klipsch Promedia 4.1 speakers on FlamingShrubs.
Star Trek: Away Team game on FutureLooks.. hope you don't have to play Ensign Ricky. :)
Thursday, 12-July-2001 02:14:11 (GMT +10) - by Agg
People are reporting better scores in the Reflex Tester thing from yesterday by clicking Start, then holding down Stop until the colour changes, THEN releasing the mouse button. Is this cheating? Maybe. If you do it in the Geek Olympics you're risking a lifetime ban. Anyway, stop sending me your high scores! Especially the 5MB .bmp screenshots. Go brag in this forum thread (or this one) if you must, but be aware the current record is pretty low. :)
Mmm, gotta get me one of these tshirts. Speaking of which, I know I said the OCAU tshirts would be on sale this month and they probably will, but I'm busy with other stuff right at the moment.. keep an eye on the news page (you're looking at it now). When the magic ponytail reappears, shirts will be back on sale. Should have some case badges soon too. We're also going to have a kickass giveaway soon to celebrate OCAU's 2nd birthday.. some SERIOUS prizes happening if all goes to plan.
Wokket's been watching the X-Files too much.. unless this Microsoft Conspiracy stuff really is true. You can wade through the instructions yourself, but it may just be a complicated way of someone getting you to trash your system by deleting important stuff. :)
Here's a funny (long) article on the evolution of a Linux user, thanks Michael.
Min points out someone taking their AMD Fanboy status a little too far.. with an LED Logo thingy.
Apparently Intel are having problems with the 2MB P3 Xeon chip.
OCOpolis compare a couple of fan adapters.. we checked some out a little while ago here.
Digit-Life have their monthly mobile roundup posted.. some interesting gadgets there.
Interesting article about yet-another-napster-clone here, thanks Christian.
ABIT Siluro MX400 video card on BlueSmoke.
IBM 60GXP 40GB IDE HDD on TweakTown.
Serial LCD on BlargOC.
QuietPC 300W PSU on Bit-Tech.
Molex 371660003 Silent Heatsink (never heard of a noisy heatsink..) on FrostyTech.
Ok, I think that this takes the cake. It most definitely has to be the craziest fan I've seen in a case. Sure, there is that PVC monster, but does that do 35,000cfm? I DONT THINK SO. ahem.
All I have to say to this is HAHAHAHAHA. Microsoft is copping it hard in regards to their product activation system for WindowsXP. Before it has even been released it has been not only cracked, but decrypted as well.. meaning that it's another piece of bloatware easily disabled by anyone who knows where to look on the 'net. I wonder if MS will do a DeCSS and try to sue everyone who proves how unsecure it is by posting the methods. Dave sent in the link. If you don't want to read electic's blurb, the actual page is here.
HardOCP have tracked down one of those Expresso MicroPC's that ArsTechnica had a look at a while ago.. gives a whole new meaning to microcomputer. Think box of 10 blank CD's, then think celeron 700 using all industry standard interfaces. Pretty swish, I must admit.
Electic have a short blurb up about a new BIOS for GeForce2 GTS cards.. 3.15.01.02.00. Yes, that is the full version number. Thats a lot of point releases to go through to get to version 4 :)
From the self proclaimed king of off-topic news items (Wokkett, duh) comes the Biblical Curse Generator.. heh, made me laugh.. Behold, thou shalt be pursued into the mountains by sex-mad baboons, O ye Amalekite dog!
deejay sent in this article over on AustralianIT.. Telstra is to face a class action against them in regards to the poor quality of their ADSL service... All I can say is about time. Not only do they have to cop a 3Gb cap now, but the mail servers are constantly down, not to mention the news server and the auth servers, and the actual service itself. Not what I call quality.
CaseJunkiez have reappeared out of the middle of nowhere with a review of the OCZ Gladiator heatsink.. a thin copper job with a turbine strapped to it that's making a decent showing for it of late. I think you can get this one in aus as well, albeit it branded as a Thermalright SK6. I think.
Guru3D have released version 1.2.1 of their Detonator Destroyer, a tool that fully uninstalls nVidia det drivers. Sounds darn cool to me, especially for comparing performance differences between different sets. They are also hosting Q3Bench Beta 2.00, a must-have if you're benchmarking performance under Quake3. It changes the screen res and color depth and all that for you and automatically runs the tests. Very handy.
I have been asked this question more recently than any other. "Should I buy a Palomino or TBird?" Well I tell you what, we put the data together and you can now answer that for yourself, but of course we are still going to give you our two cents. I've been asked it as well. Better head over to HardOCP and find out.
Fwoar, this is pretty hardcore.. EPoX have released a new BIOS revision for the 8K7A that allows a 1/5 PCI divider, taking away the PCI bottleneck in FSB overclocking.. the results? One user has achieved a 180MHz FSB. Pretty decent. I've thought for a while that Via should release a chipset that allows the user to change PCI/AGP dividiers themselves.. even if they sold it at a small price premium, I reckon OCers would still snap it up.. FSB overclocking brings a lot of fringe benefits in increased memory bandwidth.
Generic 512Mb RAM on G3D.
AVC 112BJO hs/f on FrostyTech.
Windows XP RC-1 on The TechZone.
Antec SX1030B case on Max3D.
PowerCooling PCH075 on M:6.
Wednesday, 11-July-2001 03:23:05 (GMT +10) - by Agg
JimX sent in this reflex tester.. I can't seem to get below 0.221 seconds!
Daniel says you can win stuff in this Creative Labs contest.
Nemes1S's tidy blue box turned out pretty well.
MickyD noticed this 7-way GeForce3 Roundup on TomsHardware - while I was there I noticed this watercooled case they have on review, too.
GetRight 4.5 is out now, thanks Squirrel.
Apparently AMI have almost finished their BIOS for motherboards using NVIDIA's nForce chipset.
Coupla game reviews: MS Train Simulator and Police Tactical Training.. on Gamitopia.
AnandTech have an article detailing the painful transition to XP.. this is part of their new IT Computing section, focussing on corporate/enterprise issues.
Speaking of which, there's a new Star Trek series called Enterprise. Set 100 years before Kirk had his Enterprise, it stars Scott Bakula.. there's an interview with him about it here. I have to admit.. I've not been a big fan of anything Scott Bakula has done to date..
Accelenation have an 11-way heatsink roundup happening.. check out our 21-way roundup here. I've got 4 or 5 more sinks here, so might do a little roundup next week sometime.
Samtron 76E 17" Monitor on 8balls.
ADDA 50.0CFM and 31.4CFM 80mm case fans on HWExtreme.
Mushkin Rev3 SDRAM on OCIA.
PC Geiger (cool gadget) on OC.DK.
GlobalWin FAC08 chipset cooler on Mikhailtech.. our chipset cooler roundup here.
Dragon Orb 3 socket cooler on FrostyTech.
This news post is from Manaz, even though it's appearing under my (Manaz's) name. It's a long story...
Yes, it's been a while, and I may have gone slightly mad in the meantime - but I think I can get straight back into it - just like riding a bike, you never forget...
Digit-life have had a look at the efficiency of the Intel ATA drivers - these are as opposed to using the ones built into your operating system when using a motherboard based on an Intel chipset.
Do you know what 802.11b is? OK, I'll ask another question. Are you interested in wireless LAN technology? If so, knowing what 802.11b is would probably go a fair way towards satisfying your curiosity, and FutureLooks have an article all about it for you.
Do you know what USB 2.0 is? Probably - but I bet you don't know everything about it you'd like to know. EverythingUSB have updated their USB 2.0 FAQ.
Would you like to win a 900MHz Duron? 3DSpotlight are giving some away, you have to subscribe to their newsletter to enter. More details here.
RivaTuner has been updated - the latest version is v2.0, RC5.1, and you can get it here, on the Guru of 3D website.
Firestone pointed out that Akiba PC Hotline! (sporting a new look?) have spotted 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz retail boxed Xeon processors for sale in Japan - for around 42,000yen and 49,000yen respectively.
On a humourous note, do you remember Snuffleupagus from Sesame Street? Don't blame me for the link, blame Wokket. :)
DragonORB3 on 2FastCPU.
Rounded IDE & Floppy cables on TacoNuts. Our guide to doing your own is here.
HandEra 330 (PDA running Palm-OS) on The Tech Report.
Hercules 4000XT video card on MGON.
ATi TV Wonder VE video card on SystemLogic.
Samsung Yepp (personal MP3 player) on IANAG.
AOpen KB-Media Keyboard on neoseeker.
|Tuesday Midday #2
Tuesday, 10-July-2001 02:36:16 (GMT +10) - by Agg
This news post is from Alchemy, even though it's appearing under my (Agg's) name. It's a long story. :)
Don't you love it when you get woken up by a phone call. A phone call asking if you can come into work. I don't, if you do you're strange. On a different note, I got lots of people correcting me about spelling, comprehension and other errors in yesterdays post. Admitently, I was in a bit of a rush. Apparently too much of a rush.. I'll take it easy today. Thanks for all the corrections tho, if you don't correct me I'll never find out..
Guru3D sends word that their GeForce Tweak Utility has now been released in version 3.04 form. New to the fold is a "profile manager", which will let you go from easy-she-goes to yah mule. Or from default to overclocked, if you don't follow my western movie terminology.
Bit-Tech is having a giveaway that alot of you might actually be keen on entering.. they're giving away one of those CyrstalFonz LCD Displays for case. Pretty trick peice of gear, I must admit.
Plextor are taking their hipo CD-R's to an enitrely new market - laptops. Having a superfast plex in your desktop is something special, now one in your laptop too? Aww.. they're twins. Other tech industry news on electic, AMD is teaming up with Agilent to lower production costs. Dosn't mean that they're using Articoolers tho.. just some sort of technology sharing agreement.
Looks like OCZ will be following the trend they started with GF2MX-series boards, and will be manufacturing their own series of GeForce3's. The OCZ MX's are quite a decent board, probably one of the better MX's. It's an only-in-america thing tho, as there isnt a local distributor.
Wow, this is pretty big.. OCWorkbench have some pics up of a supposed 1.1GHz "Morgan" (Palomino core) Duron. 1.1GHz is alot of clock for a budget processor, but then they they've always been good for a gig anyway ;)
More Big New Special™ stuff on akiba.. a Panasonic DVD-RAM/R drive has been released. Sort of like a DVD-RAM drive, but that can also write DVD-R's. So you can use it to make discs that can be read in normal DVD drives (DVD-R) and use it for hard-drive like storage (DVD-RAM). Very cool.
Zalman CNP series hs/f's on G3D.
Zalman CNP 500+ hs/f on Radeonic.
|Burnt AT Power Connector
Tuesday, 10-July-2001 02:29:02 (GMT +10) - by Agg
This from DF: I was cleaning dust out of one of the boxes in my house when I decided to unplug the power connector just for the hell of it (fiddling) when I saw the burnt plastic casing of the plug. As the picture shows, the bun marks line up with the 5v wires to the power connector (red wire) indicating that it was getting hot due to high current density (lots of electrons, not enough metal, metal gets hot). This explained that problem where it would not boot all the time (inrush current, that's what I thought anyway), when really it was a bad connection. I pulled out the little metal tab, and sure enough it was a blue metal colour. I filed it clean, and bent the tab so it would push harder against the contact on the mobbo. The fact that this mobbo physically had alot of components plugged into it AND it was a Cyrix 233 would of contributed to this problem somewhat..
click to enlarge
I am amazed that this thing still worked properly (this thing is a CD-burning machine) without any problems, though I do recall bumping the wire while the machine was on, and it totally killed it. Now you see why the atx power connector was invented - it allows for 6.3amps per contact..
ProCooling check out the results of slapping various fans onto the Swiftech MC462 cooler.
TheTechZone have an article on what they reckon were the Top Ten Most Earthshaking Hardware bits.
AllTechBox took a look at MemTurbo2, a memory optimization program.
Feeling a little run down? Need an energy boost? You need HIV, a new energy drink in Germany.. someone in marketing is going to get lynched for that one, thanks Wokket.
HardwareOC have been experimenting with watercooling and made one of those "Bong" Coolers, an evaporative tower-cooler using a shower head.
The massive, ever-expanding GeForce FAQ has been updated again..
Dan checked out some LAN gaming stuff from Everglide.
PCHardware have Part 2 of their networking guide posted.
Firestone sends word that PCWatch have reviewed the 1.13GHz Tualatin P3 cpu.. hope it's better than the 1.13GHz Coppermine was. That article is in Japanese but here's an auto-translated one via babelfish, thanks to DrR0M for the fish-handling instructions.. that page takes a few seconds to come up 'coz it's translating the whole thing on the fly.
OCShoot updated their VapoChill article.
New stuff from the PCDB - casemod has a couple of fairly "standard" modified cases, GlitterKill has a very cool paint scheme, up close it looks like it was done with a marker pen? Interesting idea.. and Squalor looks like he's modified a RAID tower or server chassis or something, unusual machine. Don't forget you can vote for PCDB entries in 4 categories.. see the overall high-scorers here.
EPoX 8K7A+ SocketA DDR board on Accelenation.
GlobalWin CAK38 socket cooler on GideonTech.
I updated the Rheobus Review to reflect the fact that the price dropped from $125 to $119 before the review was published.
Also, some info from Tom that answers one of the questions I had about the unit (namely, the exact reason for needing the large heatsinks): The potentiometer (aka pots) are used to control transistors. If you were to try to run a fan motor with just the the pot shown on the the rheobus, it would die. The transistor has two jobs in this setup. First, it varies the voltage out to the fans. Second, it ramps up the current. If a transistor was just used to control voltage, there would be no need for a heat sink. The transistors on the board have the "hefty heatsinks" because they are amplifying the current out to the fans. Thus, there is alot of power running through the little transistors.
Finally, here's another pic of the unit in action.. I took a bunch and quite liked this one but couldn't find anywhere to use it in the review. It's the same as the other "cover" shot but with no flash:
click to enlarge
Hmm, the pains of procrastination. Left news alone last night because there wasnt much of it (and because it was too cold to type - 3deg!!) and now there is heaps. Oh well, here it comes :)
Shanib points out more info about the PS2 crossing over into the realm of the PC with the release of a 40gb IDE hard drive, LCD Screen, Network Adaptor and other goodies for the system. There already exists a keyboard/mouse combo, and no doubt more is comming. Sharp readers will note that a Linux developer kit for the PS2 was released in Japan a few weeks ago and featured the HDD and NIC, so it's not an entireley new concept. You can read more here (in Japanese), with pics here thanks to Mike.
ClubOC have some cool, no REALLY cool (their caps, not mine) case lighting things in review. Just a normal neon and some of that glowire stuff that CaseJunkiez had a go out a while ago.
Umm, apparently Virtual-Hideout were down. No one told me. But they did tell me that they are back, so now you know, thanks to Mako.
Slautech are going through the watercooling grind. What waterblock to use, what radiator to use, what coolant to use, how to mount it, all that stuff. Good to read if you're thinking about water cooling and want to find out how to do it, and do it well.
IQHardware are giving away the CoolerMaster case that they reviewed yesterday. Pretty spiffy looking aliminium case too. Thing is, it's in German.. but they will ship anywhere across the world. Hate to think of postage tho.. owch.
Alpha wrote in to say that he's seen PC2400 DDR memory around a few places, and that it might be starting to become common. Realtime was probably the first place in aus I know to start selling the stuff.. For those that don't know, those DDR numbers used for specifying ram speed are basically the clock speed it runs at (133mhz ddr in PC2100's case) multiplied by 16. It's the maximum burst transfer rate, or something like that. Big numbers for big boxes. It means that PC2400 ram is effectivley DDR PC150 memory, so good for FSB overclocking.
GideonTech have added 20 new case mods to their case mod gallery. This gives me the perfect oppurtunity to pimp the PCDB which is going strong at a tad under 1800 entries. Incidently with the numbers, in the short time that the forums have been reopened we've reached over 2,500 members.. thats pretty damn impressive. In case you missed it, we reached the first 1,200 in the first 24hrs! Go forums!
Regular readers might remember an iPanel-type thing that I posted a while back.. but instead of monitoring temperatures, it monitored activity on the PCI bus and other bandwidth-info stuff like that. Well, a German Site, Hardware-Test has reviewed it, and in english too (scroll down to the 2nd half of the page for the English version). Wonder how long until it makes it to aus.. looks pretty neat.
I'm not sure if this has been posted before or not, but last night I found a guide to modifying your GF2MX for better image quality. Only for the slight of hand mind you, despite the low price of GF2MX's we still don't want you turning them into wall hangings.
Digit-Life have their June 2001 Storage Digest up.. and I think the thing to take from this month is the incredibly low prices on hard drives.. I mean, $220 for a 7,200rpm 30Gb seems to be about the (low price) norm.. which is just insane. I've got two of them ;)
Michael sends word that that a new BIOS (v8.1) is now out for the Soltek SL75-KAV meaning the board now supports palomino and morgan based processors. Incidently, those Soltek boards are not half bad if you're looking for a cheap duron based system.
Finally today, a review of the black-in-a-wooden-box GF3 card from 3DPower, the guys some said were about to re-release old 3dfx technology.
FrontX Multimedia Ports on Bit-Tech, our review here.
EPoX 8KTA3 on Ripnet.
Logitech Cordless Mousman Optical on G3D.
eyeSCREAM 3D Glasses on PhearPhactory.
SW212 12/8/32 IDE Burner on PC-Stats.
Millenium Thermal Gladiator hs/f on FrostyTech.
Abit Siluro MX400 64Mb card on Max3D.
Slautech reviewed the 60-to-80mm fan adapters that we checked out a couple of months ago.
This is on a geocities site so take it with a grain of salt, but apparently there's an external pack for the PS2 that contains an Ethernet port and a 40GB HDD.. further blurring the line between consoles and PC's.
Digit-Life have posted their monthly hardware roundup for June.
From Christian, some disturbing news about stolen mobile phones..
This week's issue of ZZZ Online seems to be out a day early..
Epox 8KHA KT266-based DDR Socket370 mobo on AMDMB.
Cooler Master ATC-201 (in German) on IQHardware.
Globalwin FBH20 HDD cooler on Mikhailtech.
|VIA C3 Retail Box
Saturday, 7-July-2001 18:42:32 (GMT +10) - by Agg
Fiona from VIA sent us a pic of the retail box for their new C3 processor. I've got one of the older C3 (667MHz) powering my "TV-Out" box at home.. does the job nicely and perfect for building a silent PC around. Hopefully we'll get to check out one of these new ones as they become more readily available..
click to enlarge..
The VIA C3™ processor is fully socket 370 compatible, and is currently available at speeds of up to 800MHz. Built using the industry’s most advanced 0.13 and 0.15 manufacturing processes, the VIA C3™ processor features the world’s smallest x86 processor die size of only 52mm2 to optimize power consumption and heat dissipation properties. Additional features include up to 192KB of full speed cache, 100/133MHz Front Side Bus support, as well as MMX™ and 3DNow! instructions for enhanced multimedia and Internet performance.
BTW, Happy Birthday John. :)
It's nearly 4am and there are still 30 people in the forums.. :)
Andrew points out some very unfriendly mail from Microsoft to its customers..
Wokket sends word of some unfriendly fish in PNG..
Win y'self some stuff over on WildAndyC.. no forum-posting required. :)
PC-Critic have an article up about memory bandwidth..
Zalman CNPS3100 socket cooler on M:6 (?).
Twister HDD cooler on 2fastcpu.
Mini-neons on Bit-tech.
Thermalright SK6 copper cooler on Tech-planet.
Saturday, 7-July-2001 04:23:48 (GMT +10) - by Agg
Akiba have a review of the Palomino (AthlonMP, Athlon4) processor, comparing it to the Thunderbird (current Athlon). It's in Japanese of course, but use the magic fish and you'll be right. I tried to make a ready-to-read English babelfished link for you but it didn't work, any pointers from experienced fish-handlers appreciated. ClubOC have a review (with overclocking) of the 1.2GHz AthlonMP too. To see them in SMP action check out our in-depth preview of the Tyan Thunder K7 mobo with 2 Palomino's on board.
Pull up the comfy chair and dig into Digit-Life's 35-way i815 motherboard roundup.
Boney's system is pretty cool, nothing too unusual but a fair bit of work and a good result overall.
There's a petition to get more driver support for 3DFX cards.
There's been some weird stuff happening in the US stockmarket with AMD shares, according to this story and the 2 below it on IANAG, thanks Imitation.. more info here on Electic.
Holy flaming apples, Macman!
Xbit have a guide to voltage tweaking and extreme overclocking of your GeForce3.. I reckon you'd have to be brave AND greedy to be attacking a GF3 with a soldering iron.
Moddingzone have detailed their latest case-mod project.. some serious hacking going on there, nice finished system.
Dell finished their AMD survey and made a decision about whether to use AMD chips in their systems..
FrontX Multimedia Ports on Radeonic.. our review here.
Samsung 170MP 17" TFT screen on PCStats.
Samsung SyncMaster 171MP and 770TFT LCD monitors on HWExtreme.
Geargrip CRT monitor-carrystrap on OCOpolis.
Had a b-i-g night last night, and it's really starting to catch up with me now. I think this news post will be the last productive thing to come from me before tommorrow.
gbh over at globalskunkworks.com sent in this prime peice of japanese overclocking madness. 1.33GHz AXIA, A7M266 and liquid nitrogen. 189MHz FSB, 2174MHz CPU clock. Craaaazy.
SysOpt has taken a look at the current crop of 3d graphic benchmarks and breaks down the specefic tests to help you evaluate your system's performance. Pretty handy..
Meanwhile, Digit-Life has posted their monthly driver and 3D accelerator comparison, and have checked out a whole host of technical sounding things that are terribly hard to comprehend in my present hungover-as-heck state.
OCnz has reviewed a heap of those power coolers that seem to be making a lot a bit of a stir lately. I reckon there is a lot to be said for cooling that is quiet.
DarkWing pointed out a highly technical but incredibly usefull article about fan speed control. Probably one best to read when you're feeling a bit intellectual, well worth one (a read) tho..
Maximum3D wrote in to say that they're having a few DNS/Domain problems lately and it means that their usual URL is out of commision for the time being. You can temporarily find them at max3dgamer.com while their issues are being resolved.
Finally tonight, Agg pointed out that all of failed telco One.Tel's assets are going to be auctioned off soon, program here. 750 TFT screens, fwoar. I want one.
KDS AV-7TF 17" Flat Screen CRT on PCStats.
Hitachi CM810 21" Monitor on PCStats.
Compex USB NIC on Rizenet.
1.2GHz AthlonMP on ClubOC.
Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 KyroII card on SystemLogic.
EvergreenTech Performa III 850 CPU upgrade thingy on GideonTech.
The Aust Govt has proposed yet another ludicrous Bill demonstrating its limited understanding of the Internet industry in Australia. This whole "Cyber Terrorist" thing strikes me as such a scapegoat.
A few interesting new goodies appearing on AkibaPC. Among other things: Tualatin CPU's and motherboards, USB2 to IDE converter, a Lian-Li case with a factory window kit or "clear panel" as they call it.. saves you attacking yours with a dremel, I guess.
TheReg note that AMD updated their CPU roadmap.. interesting stuff, including a server version of the Duron line? Weird.
A couple of cool ideas in Splog2's custom case, removable tray, air duct over the CPU etc, nice work.
Dan has updated his review of the InfiniPro watercooling gear to include their new pump.. not a lot better than their old one. Whoopty, as they say, doo.
Bit-Tech have an article about CPU cooling.. they take a look at water-cooling and see if it's worthwhile. There's a lot of watercooling stuff in our archive if you're after more info.
Tech-Report reckon that Napster is dead and it ain't never comin' back.
Seems some Cyrix cpu's (old ones) won't work with Office/WindowsXP.
OCWB have pics of a Morgan (new Duron) 950MHz and Celeron 900Mhz engineering samples.
Apparently Scully is leaving the X-Files. Well, [rant] that won't bother me at all, because the X-Files is rubbish these days anyway. Enough with the stupid alien invasion, government conspiracy bollocks, bring back fluke man and the fat vampire and other cool single-episode plots. A couple of weeks ago I got 3 minutes into an episode before Krycheck began spouting about "human replacements for the alien invasion" and off went the TV.. [/rant]
Mouse Bungee on OCClub - our review here.
RomTech Trios HDD selector on HotHardware.
CompuNurse thermal probe on GideonTech.
|Early Friday Morning
Thursday, 5-July-2001 14:05:27 (GMT +10) - by Agg
The big news in the Oz Telco market is that the ACCC is taking Telstra to court - no, not over the 3GB cap thing, which I'm sure will dissapoint a lot of you. It's alleged they tried to deceive One.Tel customers.. thanks to JWR and ReaX for those links.
ExtremeTech had a contest to see who could build a PC the fastest.. check out America's fastest geek.
Wokket pointed out a really interesting article about the undoing of RAMBUS.. and it was pretty much all their own fault. Awww.
StaticMP3 bolted together two fulltower cases and made a cool system.. looks like an AS/400 or something. :)
Compu-geeks have an article about smart tags.. not so smart, evidently.
ArsTechnica have an article comparing the P4 to the G4e.. heavy going from the ars-masters.
Apparently even the American Constitution has something to say about Napster.. thanks WAZ.
Visiontek GeForce3 video card on HardOCP.
Biostar M7VKF KM133 based SocketA motherboard on PC-Critic.
Handera TRGPro PDA on SystemLogic.
Enermax EG465P-VE PSU on IANAG.
Samsung SyncMaster 570b 15" LCD on NeoSeeker.
Iwill KD266R socketA motherboard on OCWB.
Thursday, 5-July-2001 07:10:11 (GMT +10) - by Agg
I checked out the RheoBus kit recently. It's an interesting bit of electronic trickery that fits into a drive bay and gives you very fine control over the speed of fans - lots of fans. With 4 ultra-bright blue LED's on the front, it also looks pretty cool:
Click here for the full review!
Thursday, 5-July-2001 01:36:44 (GMT +10) - by Agg
New RAM seems to have fixed the server problem nicely. A few other BP6 owners said they noticed lockups after 24 hours or so with all 3 memory slots filled too. Anyway, let's see if we get another 200-day uptime. :)
Mako sends word that CloneCD 3 is out.. just the thing for making archival backups of your valuable commercial software.. and copies of your Linux CD's to give away to friends. :)
Mikhailtech have compared a few slot coolers. I checked out a couple of these a while ago.
OCMOD have updated their LCD Status article..
Interesting one on xbit - they have a benchmark comparo using Photoshop, comparing P4/Rambus with P3/SDR, Athlon/SDR and Athlon/DDR.
Rizenet have added 11 case mods to their Gallery. Remember, new pics are added on a daily basis to our PC Database - you can check the latest additions using this link.
From G, a parody of that recent Steve Gibson open-ports-are-the-end-of-the-internet article. Beware, geek humour. :)
Sound Enhancement Gadgets on DansData.
Zalman CNPS3100 cooler on 8balls.
Mouse Skatez on HWExtreme.
Epox EP-8K7A+ AMD760-based motherboard on PCHardware.
Modified Lian-Li PC2 case on OcOpolis.
Today seems to be one of those days where everything is slotting into place.. spent a bit of time quietening down my PC - now it's almost as silent as my linux firewall. Excellllllent. Even WinAmp is picking out the songs I like best. Woooo.
If you're looking for a review of a certain computer-type product IANAG is out to help, they're slowly but surely building up a review database. Now I have somewhere to tell people to go to (apart from the obvious..) when they ask me where reviews are.
Komson sent in a probably one of the most simply worded yet gobsmackingly effective email's I've seen in a while.. Dear sir, I just overclocking AXIA 1 GHz Thunderbird.It can do through 1723 MHz@2.4 volts. I use supercooler and do thermal acceleration. The entire result is here.. off you go then :)
Extreme Overclocking have their montly heatsink roundup out for the month of July. New to the fort this month is the Tt Dragon Orb 3.. there's also a new Volcano Tt heatsink due out soon (not in above review) featuring a copper insert and a 7,000rpm fan. Might be one to look out for. Cheers to Dean from PCCA for the headsup.
For anyone who owns a laptop this might be an interesting one.. Futurelooks have reviewed a peice of software called Computrace that embeds itself in your hard drive and alerts a central security server of your laptops presence, should it ever go missing. Cool.. altho there are a few technical difficulties in it. Low level hard drive format? Bye bye software. Laptop surfaces in Russia? Good for the laptop. Bad for you.
Dogg points out some more of those stupidly amusing guides to doing simple computer tasks.. Text isn't in English, but the pictures tell all the story. Removing your video card and Defragging your HDD.
ProCooling have taken a really decent look at the Tyan Thunder K7.. the writer actually purchased the board for his own personal use through the normal retail channels, and is obviously pretty chuffed with his new bit of gear. It's probably one of the best reviews I've seen of the board/platform.. not as sterile as others have been. They also cover overclocking on the board, but in the manual change-the-mult-via-the-L3-bridges method. Still isn't a world first review tho.. ;)
Finally, HardOCP has been over at the CPL judging the case mod event. Seems the event is living up to it's professional title, as the case mods are first class. A yellow beast with car-show quality presentation took out the crown, followed by the lighting extraganza case we linked to on the HardForum the other day with a microwave case coming in third.
IWill DVD-266R DDR SMP P3 board on Hexus.
GlobalWin LAC08 hs/f on Bit-Tech.
Soyo K7ADA on IANAG.
AVC Soul Player MP3 CD player on The TechZone.
Thermosonic ThermoEngine on Tech Planet.
GlobalWin WBK38 on OCtools.
Front Blowhole HowTo on CoolHardWarez.
Wednesday, 4-July-2001 02:05:59 (GMT +10) - by Agg
Amy has posted some (large) pics of his/her test bench in the forums.. some people take this hobby waaay too seriously. :)
Ronnie has a custom water-cooled setup posted into the PCDB..
If you're a WindowsXP user with a 3DFX card and are concerned about the lack of driver support, someone called Crunchie has whipped up some drivers that apparently work. I'd be backing up my data first..
A couple of people mentioned that the OCAU Genome @ Home Team is doing pretty well too, so I added them to the site menu at left. I think that's all our teams now.. so now you have no excuse for idle CPU cycles. :)
Iroquois points out this furby hacking/rebuilding article.. pretty funny.
Hercules Prophet 4500 Kyro2-based video card on HardOCP.
Enermax 456-PE PSU on MrPCPro.
Morpheus GeForce3 on Guru3d.
Chaintech CT-7KJD socketA DDR (AMD760) motherboard on xbit.
Thermalright SK6 socket cooler on GideonTech.
Suma Platinum K2 Kyro2-based video card on Digit-Life.
Seagate U-Series 6 80GB HDD on Tweaktown.
Epox EP-8K7A+ socketA DDR mobo (in spanish) on Noticias3D.
Tuesday, 3-July-2001 15:54:06 (GMT +10) - by Agg
Andypoo noticed a desperate message over on MPU about AusGamers being thrashed by Team OCAU at Folding@Home! Go team. :) I've added a Folding@Home stats URL to the site menu at left.
TheColdShop have a 7-way cooler roundup posted.
Hypothermia are giving away more cool stuff.
AcidHW have a budget video card roundup.. coupla MX400's and a KyroII.
Erm, don't try this at home - Akura points out a tale of a kid making a nuclear reactor in his backyard.
Microsoft are trying to exclude Linux use via their licenses.. seems a nasty tastic and their explanation of why is flimsy at best.
Impressive figures on OCUK of their Athlon 1.4 @ 1.6GHz..
Mike notes this 100Mbit wireless LAN technology.. seems to be infra-red based.. 100Mbit through thin air is impressive indeed.
Another chapter in OCShoot's watercooling adventure..
Power Cooler PCH141 socket cooler on NeoSeeker.
CoolerGuys CPU Shims on Max3D.
Yamaha CRW2200E 20/10/40 IDE CDRW drive on HardwareOne.
Vantec FCE-62540D socket cooler on SystemLogic.
Globalwin CAK38 socket cooler on IANAG.
Asus P4T, popular Pentium4 motherboard on CPUReview.
Coolermaster DP5-6H51 socket cooler on Tech-Planet.
Shuttle Ak31 KT266-based Socket370 DDR mobo on OCWB.
Tuesday, 3-July-2001 05:55:26 (GMT +10) - by Agg
Now this is a cool-looking case. Nice job, DaveK! While I'm in a PCDB-spamming mood, check out Hydra's tidy black box and I note McGoff, he of the Turbine Case, has a new project happening.
There's another Athlon-based supercomputer, this one with 78 processors, making a name for itself..
BSOD have a couple of copper heatsinks in a shootout.
Microsoft are not making friends with some new features of WinXP.
Transmeta have found themselves in some hot water too, with a class action suit filed against them.
MadMike has been playing with a 3D Web Browser he discovered and has some (large!) screenshots here and here.. neato. Offtopic - in one of the screenshots I noticed this article saying The Crystal Method have a new album coming out - about time! :) UPDATE: Marzi reckons this browser will open a zillion sites and use up a lot of unnecessary bandwidth. There might be a way to tell it not to open so many sites but if you're on a limited download ISP you might want to skip this novelty browser..
We've seen this before but it's pretty cool - Alex sent the link to the DVD Window Mod.
TekHeads modified Lian-Li case on Bit-Tech.
Zalman 5100 Plus cooler on Bit-Tech.
Iwill KD266 ali-based socketa motherboard on Accelenation.
Ricoh MP9200A IDE DVD/CD-RW on CDRInfo.
Glacier 2 cooler on GideonTech.
Hmm, 2.20am, Counter-Strike servers are starting to empty out, I still don't feel like sleeping, even tho I've got to be up at 6.30. Newwwws time~!
Moleman from lostuniverse.org pointed out to me on ICQ that Enermax now make cases in addition to pretty decent PSU's. Colored shiny aluminum cases in fact.. don't look to bad either.
The TechZone has taken a look at an Abit Siluro T400, a 64Mb MX400-based card with TV-out. Funnily enough, it's the much older Kyro1 that seems to be winning the budget performance stakes at the moment.. it's also a lot easier on your wallet. Lacks TV-Out tho, which for some is a bit of a killer.
Draffa pointed out that DoD 1.3 is finally out. DoD makes for a good alternative to CS, and it's not a bad game in it's own right either. Ausgamers have a mirror of it as well.
Intel just wound up the heat on AMD another notch, with the release of the P4 1.8GHz processor, reviewed on Anandtech. On it's release one of the main forecasts was that as clock speed ramped up the processor would (forseeably) become a lot more competitive. 1,800MHz is sure a lot of clock cycles.
Yet another stupid auction (YASA?) over on sold.com - someone is auctioning off a deed to 117 acres on the moon. The better educated among us will know that international treaties prevent anyone from owning the moon, so all you're buying is a peice of paper with silly fonts on it along with your name on a website. Thanks Rick :)
elvis pointed out a really usefull aussie price watch search engine thingo - razorprices.com.. good for finding the cheapest price on all sorts of computer hardware from online aussie retailers. Pretty swish interface as well - good work to whoever made the site.
The case ricing, err, modding, phenomenon seems to be getting bigger and bigger.. bit-tech.uk have checked out a LED chaser thing-o.. not sure why you'd want to spend the money tho.. I mean, unless you've already got a 1.44GHz Athlon, GF3, Lots and Lots of DDR, a DVD-RW, Plasma Screen.. list goes on :)
Arasta pointed out this article on ninemsn that talks about Telstra unbundling the local loop.. not too sure of what it means, but I'm sure there will be bungles (ha ha ha).
As expected, the "Palm Clone" that was on RojakPot the other day is definitely too good to be true.. Greg points out that he obviously misread a few things..
... The device turns out to be Elitegroup's device, and Adrian's informant appears to have read a garbled translation of the original 51Digi.com article. So, 'EPD 30' becomes 'USD 30' - ie. 30 US Dollars. And 'Mine OS' becomes the PC-Chips' device's 'MiniOS'. Somewhere along the line the EPD 30's 4MB of RAM has become 8MB, which is what Adrian's source says the PDA will contain. Adrian tells us there's nothing about the device on PC-Chips' Web site... heh.. oh dear.
The Guru of 3D has visited the creative factory in Ireland and taken a few photos of the production line. HEH.. easy on the irish jokes.. hmm, nah.. Why did God invent whiskey? So the Irish would never rule the world..
Antec EasyUSB kit on MikhailTech.
Thermosonic ThermoEngine on PC-Critic.
A friend asked a bit of a curly question today, he has several historical ICQ installs and wants to import all the old contact info and conversations into his current install.. I've no idea, does anyone else? Let me know.
Bit-Tech have a nice little guide to the infamous 7-volt trick posted.
Digit-Life have updated their IDE CDRW Roundup..
Agent_D sends word of a new humanoid toy/companion robot and a review of the film A.I.. Also, Dell are asking their customers if they want AMD CPU's.
Someone's auctioning 177 acres of land off.. so what? Well, it's land on the moon.
Kazashi pointed out this mouse mod gone crazy..
HotHardware checked out the 1.8GHz Intel P4 CPU.
That's about it.. apart, of course, from the latest issue of ZZZ Online.. self-cleaning windows, what'll they think of next. :)
Iiyama i91A monitor on Max3D.
Cyber Cooler P-5500 socket cooler on 2FastCPU.
Epox 8K7A KT133A SocketA mobo on VYW.. our review here.
This from Dylan: I see you are quoting memory scores for the 7dXR, i include my own sandra bench, this is what i run with all day including AGP4 enabled, this is at 155 FSB with Crucial PC2100 2.5, i believe at these settings these are the highest scores on the web,i do not overclock my DDR voltage and all three dimms are populated, no use of any WPC hacks either.
click to enlarge
Not too shabby..
Our server has been a little unstable since I upgraded the RAM a week ago. I'm thinking either having 3 different sticks was bad or just filling all three slots on the BP6 is bad. I vaguely remember something from the BP6's heyday about 3 full slots causing stability problems. Anyway, we're now running 2x 256MB sticks of Corsair PC133C2. Of course, on a BX-based board we don't need the high speed of the Corsair, but the stability, reliability and compatability are essential. Thanks again to Realtime Systems for hooking us up with the Corsair goodies. Fingers crossed that it fixes the problem!
Monday morning at about 11am I'll be taking the server offline for a few minutes to change the RAM config, hope to fix this instability problem. It's not load related from the new forums, seems to be a specific hardware error making the machine lock after a while. Lets hope a more sensible RAM configuration fixes the prob!
Greg sends word that a couple of "alternative" web browsers have new releases out, Opera 5.12 (Windows) and Mozilla 0.9.2.. those links are Australian mirrors.
Here's an article about GPRS, aka mobile internet devices, thanks KyocEr@~*.
Mashee notes ReactorCritical claiming WinXP has no native 3DFX support.. could be interpreted as a fairly nasty tactic from NVIDIA if it's true.
HotHardware went to PCExpo2001 in New York..
Here's a program that combines all the instant messenger programs into one client.. with no ads. Neato, thanks Snuffy.
HWExtreme have an article about LCD Technology.
Iwill KD266 ALI M1649-based SocketA mobo on AMDMB.
1.4 Ghz AYHJA Y T-Bird socketA CPU on ChillBlast.
CoolPC Acrylic Window Kit on Radeonic.
DFI AK75-EC KT133A SocketA motherboard on Inside-Hardware.
MSI K7Turbo-R Limited Edition KT133A SocketA motherboard on digit-life.
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