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It would have been nice to see a compariosn to an nForce system,
but let's at least see which KT60 board is the best among thsm, at
least what VR-Zone thinks. Take a look. VIA had been
holding the performance crown on the AMD platform with its “KT” series
chipsets until about half a year ago when Nvidia’s Nforce 2 hit the
market. The Nforce 2 had VIA beaten both in terms of performance and
features. For the next few months, VIA had remained relatively low
profile. VIA, however, proved that it is still up for a fight by coming
up with the KT600 Northbridge and the VT8237 Southbridge recently.
Source: VR-Zone Hardware - More Information
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Well. it looks like this cooler got beat, hands down. But, the
cost is enormous to get such low temps from its competitor. Take a
look at what Tech Mods had to say. From the test
results the BH-625 got outperformed by the SLK-800U, but not by much.
It was a 5-6 degree difference between the idle and load temps, and
lets just look at the facts as well. The BH-625 is small, pure copper,
more RPM, and has 37.61 cfm airflow. While the SLK-800U is bigger, pure
copper, less RPM, and has 75.7 cfm airflow. Well the only thing the
BH-625 beats is the higher RPM, but let me say that the Smart Fan II is
one of the best cooling fans you can get, but the SLK-800U has a much
higher airflow and has a better cooling fan attached to it.
Source: Tech Mods - More Information
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Not much on comparison in this review, but let's see how it did with an older CPU. Take a look.
One of Gigabytes
newest offerings, the GA-7N400 Pro, is based on Nvidias new nforce 2
ultra 400 chipset which is definitely going to be a favorite among
overclockers. The only difference it has compared to the original
nforce 2 chipset is official 400mhz fsb support. It of course comes
with all of gigabytes typical features, which include Xpress3, Dual
Bios, and Easy Tune 4. Also, it has Gigabytes attractive blue pcb and
fluorescent green, blue, and orange slots, which will surely be loved
by people with windows on there case.
Source: SubZeroTech - More Information
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It's about that time again...what's new and exciting on the Amdmb.Pricegrabber.com front you say?
Those of you waiting on Athlon 64 for your
next upgrade are going to have wait a bit longer, but perhaps you might
find some of the current Opteron products useful for now? The Asus SK8N nForce3 Professional
motherboard is fast becoming one of the most popular Opteron
motherboards, and if rumors are true about the upcoming Athlon 64, it
may hold that crown into the desktop launch as well. It is now priced
around $220 or less, so it is becoming a more viable option for
enthusiasts. And, if you would like a processor to run on the board,
you are currently left with Opteron's like the Opteron 240 at around $275 or even the new, 2.0 GHz Opteron 246 with a price tag of $900 in Retail form or $830 in OEM form.
The Athlon XP line is still going very strong, and its easy to see why. The Athlon XP 2500+ Barton processor is now the best selling component on the Pricegrabber service, by passing even the Asus A7N8X Deluxe, the best selling motherboard and #1 in the list for several months. And now, the Shuttle AN35N nForce2 is fast becoming a favorite due to its low price, around $70.
As for graphics cards, ATI seems to still be the most popular selection for our readers. The Saphire Radeon 9600 Pro tops the list and can be found for under $135. The new Radeon 9800 Pro is becoming very popular with a price tag under $320 in some OEM cases. Finally, the MSI GeForce FX 5600 rounds up our list today coming it at under $165 with all the bells and whistles!
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!
Source: Amdmb.Pricegrabber.com - More Information
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Looks like AMD will hold the Price/Performance crown for quite
some time with engineers looking to made bold strides like this one.
Take a look. The remarkable
thing about KASY0's price/performance is that, while network hardware
is often the dominant cost for a system of its size (128 plus 4 spare
nodes), less than 11% of the system cost went for the network hardware.
The AMD Athlon XP 2600+ processors were more than 35% of the total
system cost; memory was 21%. Even more significantly, the network
design technology that made this possible can be applied with similar
benefit to cluster supercomputers with thousands of nodes. KLAT2's
network was the world's first Flat Neighborhood Network; the enhanced
version used for KASY0 is the world's first Sparse Flat Neighborhood
Network (SFNN). KASY0 also is the first supercomputer to have its
physical node and switch placement optimized by a computer program. FNN
design technology and tools have been freely available and used by
various other groups; so too will the new SFNN technology be freely
available.
Source: Aggregate.org - More Information
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Once again, it seems the KT600 is no match for the nForce2 Ultra
chipset as it continues to outperform VIA's reigning crown jewel, the
KT600. Take a look at what OCNZ had to say. It is 5% slower
than Nvidia's nF2 Ultra400 on average. In extreme cases, i.e. Q3A demo,
the gap is as wide as 14%. In terms of overclocking, KT-600 is no match
for Nvidia's nF2 due to the lack of PCI and AGP locking
Source: Overclockers New Zealand - More Information
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Looks like this cooler performs fairly well, it jsut hasnt been
compared to a high performance cooler either. Let's take a look. TR2TT is a
Thermaltake company making its name known with CPU coolers. The TR2-M4
is very similar in design to the Cooler Master Aero 7 coolers. Check
out our review to see how the "X Blower" HSF performs.
Source: Bjorn3D - More Information
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dont hold your breath as I suspect this one wont hold its mustard to anything but a retail heatsink.
It uses a fin
design that places it in the “Skive Fin Series” of coolers. The design
is touted heavily on the box and is claimed to outperform the
traditional extrusion coolers by over 30%. The advantage of Skive fins
is that they are cut from the same block of metal as the base. This
makes for an unbroken pathway for the heat to pass up into the fins.
The Golden Crown features 33 fins on either side of the cooler and a
total of 66 altogether.
Source: 3DVelocity - More Information
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Bjorn3D takes a look at the Lite version of the Aero 7 from CoolerMaster. Let's have a look/see.
The Cooler Master
Aero 7 Lite is a large aluminum/copper-core heatsink with a huge,
turquoise, squirrel-cage blower on top. Cooler Master's unique blower
design has a couple of advantages: It's efficient (since there is no
"dead-space" underneath) and it's quiet. This unit also has a manual
adjustment knob that can be mounted on either the front or back of a
computer case
Source: Bjorn3D - More Information
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Guru of 3D takesa look at Gigabyte's 7NNXP Nforce2 mainboard and puts it through its paces. Let's take a look.
I feel safe to say
that the mainboard is one of the most feature packed Athlon XP
mainboards to date. It comes at a steep price though. But hey, you will
get a lot for that money. Four USB 2.0 ports, two LAN ports (one
1000/100/10 Mbit/sec and one 100/10 MBit/sec), also onboard Dolby
Digital sound. The IEEE 1394 FireWire and next to the IDE ports an
additional RAID and Serial ATA controller. That's the true power of
this mainboard. Then there is DPS technology, Dual Power System. Once
inserted it'll give the mainboard a 6-phase power circuitry instead of
3-phase.
Source: Guru of 3D - More Information
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Let's see what SubZeroTech has to sayabout DFI's nForce2 Ultra LanParty board.
DFI Lan Party
series has caught a lot of peoples attention lately. First off these
packages are packed with extras all geared towards the normal Lan Party
goer. This is not all though, these motherboard packages are also
designed for hardcore enthusiasts as well, featuring some amazing BIOS
extras for overclockers, some UV reactive parts on the board for the
modders and excellent performance for all. The past two Lan Party
boards we've looked at, the KT400A based board and the i875p based
motherboard. Both boards excel in all of these aspects. DFI since has
released the nForceII based board for the Lan Party series, will this
board keep in line with the other Lan Party boards?
Source: SubZeroTech - More Information
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Our friends at Hard|OCP
have posted up their coverage of the Quakecon 2003 LAN gaming
convention. There are lots of photos and lots of good information to
check out. Handing the mic
over to fellow hardware guru Anand Lal Shimpi of Anandtech fame, the
discussion shifted to processors. Over the course of the next 60
minutes, both the AMD and Intel platforms were covered at length. Here,
speculation over the design and package of AMD’s upcoming Athlon64 was
debated as well as the functionality of current Intel chipsets with the
upcoming Prescott cored P4. Credit must be paid to Anand for walking a
fine line on many of these topics as they were all loaded questions
that flirted with NDA material. Overall, everyone came away from this
discussion with a firm idea of what the CPU market looks like over the
course of the next few months.
Source: Hard|OCP - More Information
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Welcome to this edition of Bits & Pieces™! I have one
itsy-bitsy, teeney-weeney, complaint about work. Okay, maybe it's two
if you count it right... My mouse and keyboard. At home, I have a
split "natural knock-off" keyboard and an old logitech wheel mouse --
both of which I absolutely adore. Of course, at work, I have neither.
I cannot tell you how many times I try to use my non-existant wheel to
scroll down a page. The keyboard isn't so bad, but when I get home, I
have to "learn" the position of the keys all over again. We are such
creatures of habit, aren't we? LOL
Can you imagine spending part of your wedding night in jail? No? Then don't go beating up the bar staff!
Price Grabber Deal of the Day: 16MB HP LaserJet 4 5 6 Series DesignJet 750 700 330 430 450 SRS for $11
HARDWARE REVIEWS
MODIFICATIONS
GAMES
MISCELLANEOUS
Did you remember to check out the last edition of Bits & Pieces ?? :o)
Source: Amdmb.com - More Information
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The cooler looks good, Im not sure how well it performs due to lack of any comparison, but its a start.
Today we take a
look at one of the latest heatsink fan combo offered by Thermaltake the
Silent Boost. With its all copper construction and unique fan design
the Silent Boost looks like it's sure to be a good performer.
Source: Techtastic - More Information
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Here's another review of AOpens nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboard
If you are looking
for an nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset motherboard then this AOpen AK79D-400
Max offers you decent AMD system motherboard with good basic features. For the performance, overclocking and features we award the AOpen AK79D-400 Max, 1 Gold medal & 1 Silver medal.
Source: A-1 Electronics - More Information
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I guess some duallies will handle AGP as this one certainly
will. Looks like the Opteron server cpu is going into a workstation to
me. The Thunder K8W
(S2885) delivers the best performance for powering digital content
creation, productivity, 3D gaming, and other multimedia applications.
Powered by the AMD Opteron™ Processor with the scalability of 32-bit
and 64-bit support, this platform supports AGP 8X / AGP 8X PRO 110W
slot, eight DIMM slots for 16GB of PC2700 DDR memory with ECC, Gigabit
Ethernet, integrated Serial ATA, FireWire, and six-channel audio with
SPDIF support. With many onboard features, the Thunder K8W (S2885)
offers the best in high-end workstation platforms.
Source: Tyan - More Information
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Looks to me like the AMD processor is running cooler than the
Intel. I guess AMD CPUs arent quite as hot as some might think. There are times
when you want a quiet system. That's when watercooling comes into the
picture, but you might not have the time nor the skills to build one.
That's when Corsair comes into the picture- they make superb memory and
have now also taken a shot at making a watersystem alond with Delphi.
This kit is easy to use for everyone and only takes about 15 min to
install. Is it quiet though? Can it coold down your system? Let's have
a look.
Source: R & B Mods - More Information
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Once again the limitations of VIA chipsets shine through, at least in their current incarnation
Okay, let's forget
that the KT400a ever happened. Moving right along to the KT600, VIA is
hoping to produce a low cost solution to compete with the NFORCE2
chipset. Going with a single channel memory controller will help keep
costs down, and as we've seen in the past, dual channel doesn't give a
huge performance boost on AMD CPU's right now anyway. But what about
overclocking? We ran into some pretty nasty issues with this chipset.
It's not Gigabyte's fault though, so check out the whole review if you
want to know if this KT600 board is worth considering!
Source: hardCOREware - More Information
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Welcome to this edition of Bits & Pieces™! Short and sweet
note tonight as I'm runnin' behind (what else is new these days,
right?). You'd think, with Ron leavin' early to get some overtime in,
that I could get more done, but tonight that just wasn't the case. Oh
well... there's always tomorrow. :)
Virus Alert!
We got hit with this one yesterday at work and it took most of the day
today to get everything back up and running. Hopefully y'all will have
better luck in avoiding it than we did.
Price Grabber Deal of the Day: 256MB Memory Stick for $75
HARDWARE REVIEWS
GAMES
MISCELLANEOUS
Did you remember to check out the last edition of Bits & Pieces ?? :o)
Source: Amdmb.com - More Information
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Amdmb.com News
Our own Alex Hames (Namek) has written a system build guide for
AMD-based computers. If you are new to building your own PC, you will definitely want to check out this article!
Building your first
computer system can be a daunting task. With the help of this guide
and our forum members, we can help you get on your way to building this
computer and many more in the future. This guide will help you decide
what type of computer you want, what components you need, and what
software to need to run on your system to suit your needs. You’ll need
to decide which parts are right for you and decide how you’re going to
use your system.
Source: Amdmb.com - More Information
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Okay, it's really late, and I'm really tired. So, without a big introduction, be sure to check out my Quakecon 2003 coverage with lots of pictures and info from AMD, NVIDIA, VIA and more. Time to sleep!!
Source: Amdmb.com - More Information
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Just got back from Kyle Bennett's HardOCP
workshop at Quakecon 2003, and it was quite a success. There were close
to 900 in attendance and with speakers from NVIDIA, VIA and even Anand
of Anandtech.com, you can see why.
I'll have pictures of the whole show as
well as a write up on this years largest LAN gaming convention after
the completion of the show this weekend. Stay tuned!!
Source: Amdmb.com - More Information
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