[H]ardNews 1st Edition

NVIDIA Goes 0.11 Micron:

NVIDIA Corporation today confirmed that it will be one of the first semiconductor companies to manufacture select up-coming graphics processing units (GPUs) at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s 0.11 ìm (micron) process technology. NVIDIA will combine TSMC’s 0.11 micron process with its own innovative engineering designs, to deliver high-performance and low-power consumption in a graphics processor.

SiS Launches SiS965:

SiS, a leading supplier of core logic chipsets, today announced the launch of its newest south bridge, the SiS965, supporting PCI Express and integrated Gigabit LAN and featuring support for up to 4 SATA ports. The new PCI Express standard is phasing out the standard PCI slots that have been the basis of the PC hardware I/O system for the past decade. With PCI Express, users can expect their PC’s to be upgradeable to the next generation of high-performance peripheral devices designed specifically for the higher bandwidth that PCI Express offers, such as Gigabit LAN cards and Capture cards.

TwinMOS 1GB SecureDigital:

TwinMOS today announced the 1GB SecureDigital card offering a highly secure data storage solution for users of today’s high-speed, high-capacity electronic devices. The small-sized Flash card is the newest addition to a wide array of products found in today’s market. Yet, various product reviews have ranked the SecureDigital card as one of the leading solutions that will drive the Flash card sector, where users of portable, wireless and broadband devices are on the rise.

[H]ardNews 10th Edition

Sarasota Speaks Up:

One of Florida's own has thrown their hat into the ring on the Infinium Labs threats to HardOCP.

[H]ardNews 9th Edition

MS Anti-Span Initiative:

Microsoft announced its anti-spam initiative today. Bill Gates is calling this “Caller ID for e-mail”. The new system will “spot” good e-mail instead of just trying to filter the bad. Thanks Joe Alpert.

Dubbed "Caller ID for E-mail," the system would allow computers to recognize whether incoming e-mail is from a legitimate Internet address. The project is intended to foil spammers who routinely falsify their sending location in order to fool recipients and hide their identities, a trick known as spoofing.

HP + AMD = Servers:

AMD and HP are getting in bed together, the offspring will be a partnership that will yield Opteron servers for HP. Obviously a big win for the folks at AMD.

Hewlett-Packard announced three servers using Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron chip and a long-term partnership with the chipmaker, but strenuously argued the move doesn't undermine servers using another processor: Intel's Itanium.

[H]ardNews 8th Edition

DDRII A Dud?

The crew at x86-Secret have are saying that the DDRII tests they have seen are showing DDRII performing slower than regular DDR of equal speeds. This of course can be blamed on DDRII being in its early stages, but you would at least expect performance on par with the mucho cheaper DDR we have now. Thanks to John Bryan for the linkage.

Our Russian friends having received for now several weeks of the platforms Alderwood (i925), we have been able to examine the performances offered. At present, force is to note that platforms GDR-II 533 are approximately 5% to 10% less powerful than the old good i875P coupled to Dual GDR-I 400. These weak performances are due to the aspect "Beta" of the various elements of the system.

FREE Processors:

I have rounded up a bunch of 2.8GHz “C” processors for this weeks giveaway at my alter-ego site Hypothermia. Make sure you throw your name in the hat to try to win one of these processors. You have four days left to win one.

After the last contest being somewhat of a downer (41% of our regular entries) I concluded that you guys just weren't too interested in the 400/533 FSB stuff anymore...so I pulled a bunch of strings and got six new 2.8GHz "C" 800MHz FSB processors for this next giveaway. Now I KNOW you guys will dig on these bad boys, so click the damn pic and get in it to win it!!!

[H]ardNews 7th Edition

MSI GFFX 5950Ultra:

R&B Mods has stepped away from the case modding long enough to review the GeForceFX 5950Ultra from MSI. MSI has a history of making really good cards that come with equally good bundles. Let’s see what the R&B guys thought:

This MSI kit is very good since you get tons of software and games to play with. There is only one flaw and that is that the card is BIG! The cooling takes up a lot of space and you need 2 PCI slots open to fit this monster into your computer.

Sapphire 9800XT:

Fire up your translator and head on over to Dark Tweaker for some Sapphire Radeon 9800XT review action. The review has to be good, hell…they say LUST in the first 5 words.

diese Woche hatten wir wieder Lust, eine Grafikkarte zu testen. Da es derzeit keinen Sinn mehr hat, 9800 pro Modelle zu holen, haben wir uns die 9800 XT von unserem Lieblingshersteller zum Testen geholt, Sapphire. Wir hatten schon eine 9800 XT bei uns im Test, ihr könnt euch erinnern? Die Hercules, die recht gut zum Testen war, gute Werte erreicht hat und sich auch recht gut übertakten ließ.

FBI Searches Web Host:

If you are a web hosting company and the FBI shows up with a subpoena, you better get that data fast or they’ll be carting off your servers.

"After several hours of attempting to track down, inspect and audit the terabytes of data that we host, the FBI determined that it was more efficient (from their point of view) to remove all of our servers and transport them to the FBI local laboratories for inspection," the statement continued.

Art De’Crapper:

Stewart King sent me a link to a outdoor toilet made of one way mirrored glass. Not sure what is “art” about that, but you know this is going to be abused.

An art exhibit of a usable toilet enclosed in a cube of one-way glass is seen across the road from London's Tate Britain Museum. The person inside the outhouse can see passersby while remaining invisible to them.

[H]ardNews 6th Edition

Prescott Overclocking:

How about a solid 1GHz OC on a 2.8GHz Prescott? Legit Reviews has a Prescott overclocking article posted today that shows their 2.8GHz CPU hitting 3.75Ghz. Pretty impressive stuff. We did our own write up on overclocking the Prescott which can be seen here for comparison.

While Intel has admitted that the first generation of Prescott will not offer a "huge" performance increase over equally clocked Northwood processor they did hint that once clock speeds get above 3.6GHz the processor would be impressive. So, we wanted to see how well the Prescott overclocks and the results are in.

The Sound Of Silence:

No, we are not talking about that an old Simon and Garfunkel tune, well…the Bit-Tech guys might be fans, but the editorial is actually about quieting your PC.

Fast-forward to the present, almost two years later - I'm running a 2GHz computer and my PC room is a lot quieter. I'm no longer listening to a set of fans breaking the sound barrier and don't have to fight for oxygen with my PC.

[H]ardNews 5th Edition

Sapphire 9600XT 256MB:

Overclocker Café takes on the Sapphire Radeon 9600XT 256MB card in their latest review. The OCC crew try to answer the age old question “do you really need 256MB of video memory?”. Eventually 256MB will be the norm and we’ll all be asking ourselves if we really need 512MB of video memory.

As far as the Sapphire card itself, it is a solid performer. Our comparison card inched it out from a performance standpoint about everywhere. The differences were only a few, a very few I may add, frames per second.

NVIDIA Round-Up:

Digital Daily has a NVIDIA GPU round-up posted that includes cards ranging from the GFFX 5200 up to the current king of the NV hill, the GFFX 5950. There are a few last-gen cards thrown into the mix for good measure.

Presenting consolidated tests for NVIDIA video cards produced in 2003. Impartial figures only. The purpose of the tests is to show the performance differences observed in solutions presented for each pricing range.

DIY PC Remote:

GideonTech has a guide to making your very own DIY PC remote. This is one of those cool “work really hard to make things easy” kind of how-to articles.

What's nice about a PC remote is that although it takes some work to get set up, the possibilities of what it can do are only limited to your imagination. Changing resolutions, opening applications, and locking your computer through windows are just examples of what is capable with a remote control and a little intuition.

[H]ardNews 4th Edition

VoIP 911 Call:

VoIP has been highly debated over the last few months. Everyone wants to make sure they get a slice of the pie at the same time making sure it doesn’t slice into their existing pie. Well the FCC got involved last month and set down VoIP rules but now we are looking at issues like 911 calls made over the internet. What the?!?!

Emergency call centers must be able to track 911 phone calls made over the Internet, the head of the Federal Communications Commission said today. FCC Chairman Michael Powell said the commission would deal with the issue as it develops rules for new technology that converts phone calls to data and sends them across high-speed Internet connections.

I imagine a system crash or BSOD in the middle of your 911 call would suck.

[H]ardNews 3rd Edition

DangerDen RBX WB:

Ninja Lane has posted a review of the DangerDen RBX water block. DangerDen has long been a producer of some of the best blocks anywhere so water cooling enthusiasts will certainly want to give this review a look.

Waterblocks are a fairly complex to design though the concept is pretty simple. You run water though a metal block to provide a heat exchange between the heat source and water. In the case of computer cooling water is used to cool the CPU, (or GPU, chipset etc..) and is then routed to a radiator for a final heat transfer.

DFI Vs. ABIT:

I’m telling you, everybody loves a good fight. So when HotHardware decided to pit the DFI LANParty NFII Ultra B against the ABIT AN7 we tuned in to see which NFII Ultra was crowned champion and which board ended flat on its back on the canvas.

It's obvious from an enthusiast point of view that the DFI LANParty NFII Ultra B motherboard offers an all around package that is hard to beat. While the ABIT AN7 doesn't have all the bells and whistles its competitor had, it shines as well where it matters most, in performance.

PC HDTV:

Want to add HDTV capabilities to your home theater PC? This add-in card looks like and inexpensive HDTV solution. I don’t have any first hand experience with this card, so let’s look at what HTPC News had to say about it:

The FusionHDTV 3 is DVICO's newest revision of their popular FusionHDTV line of HDTV tuner cards. These cards have become popular among many HTPC enthusiasts for it's combination of features and low price point.

[H]ardNews 2nd Edition

Hyper-Threading And Linux:

By now everyone is familiar with how Hyper-Threading works in a Windows environment. But what about Hyper-Threading on a Linux box? 2CPU is here with a write up to answer that question.

Anyone who's ever set out to perform Linux benchmarks quickly realizes the difficulties involved in such an undertaking, not only with the availability of quality benchmarks (or lack thereof), but also in the way the test system(s) are configured. Most of the Linux benchmarks that I see on hardware review sites are simple things like kernel compiles or povray... maybe a game benchmark or two.

Rundown On SP2:

The 200 page word document that lists changes in upcoming Windows XP Service Pack 2 can be found here. Even though the document is 200 pages long, the download is a mere 554KB.

This document specifically focuses on the changes between earlier versions of Windows XP and Service Pack 2 for Windows XP and reflects the current thinking of Microsoft about Service Pack 2 and its implications for developers. Examples and details are provided for several of the technologies that are experiencing the biggest changes: Remote Procedure Calls (RPC), Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), Windows Firewall (previously called Internet Connection Firewall or ICF), and Execution Protection (NX). Future versions of this document will cover all new and changed technologies.

MS & The UN:

No one complains about the 1 billion MS is giving the UN, they are just pissed about the travel expenses for the UN paid by MS. I say give me the money and I’ll sort this whole thing out. Thanks Wicker Bill.

Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, won praise in January when he trumpeted a company agreement to give $1 billion in software and cash to the United Nations as part of a job-training program for the developing world.

[H]ardNews 1st Edition - PR Flack

AMD Introduces Alchemy:

Advanced Micro Devices today announced the AMD Alchemy™ Au1550™ security network processor, designed for customers to address the critical need for security in wired and wireless applications. The processor accelerates networking and remote access applications such as gateways and network attached storage (NAS) units, wireless access points and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) environments. Enhancing the high-performance, low-power and high-integration functionality of the AMD Alchemy Au1500™ processor, the Au1550 processor enables customers to integrate leading-edge security functionality provided through SafeNet, a leader in private and public network security solutions that set the standard for VPN technology and secure business communications.

ABIT Bulletproof Technology:

ABIT is proud to announce its participation in this year's CeBIT Exhibition, taking place in Hannover, Germany. As a leading manufacturer of quality motherboards, video cards, server products and barebone systems, ABIT's full product line, as well as a few surprises, will be on display. At the event, ABIT will be introducing its BulletProof Technology concept: "BulletProof Technology represents the advanced durability of ABIT products," says Scott Thirlwell, ABIT Marketing Director. "Our combination of quality, stability, reliability, and engineering makes ABIT motherboards a compelling platform for PC enthusiasts to base their systems on."

[H]ardNews 11th Edition

PT880 Review:

The second Soltek PT880 review that we have seen today, this one at ClubOC. I would suggest you folks in North America beware though as Soltek no longer has a support office here. Yes, that means RMAing a board to Taiwan. The PT880 is proving to be somewhat of a value though.

Although most of the benchmarks are a little below that which we have seen with i875 based motherboards, the VIA PT880 chipset is brand new and still in it's infancy. As always with VIA, they continue to tweak their chipsets and work very closely with manufacturers to build better bios revisions to increase performance. It's only a matter of time until VIA closes the performance gap with the i865 and i875 boards.

I personally doubt we will see the PT880 become a performance crown contender, but at $60+ a board at NewEgg and ZZZ, that is not always the primary need.

Corsair XMS4400:

That's 550Mhz to me and you kids! All over at TechPC.

When it came to maximum stable speed I could get this memory to run at 280MHz was the highest I could run Memtest 86+ at before errors started to occur. Because of the way the memory's SPD is programmed and PCB is designed lowering the frequency will still not enable you to use much lower latencies, for example your never going to get this down to 2-2-2-5 at 200MHz.

Which is the case with most PC4000+ Ram.

Cooling:

Laptop Cooler @ HardwareGuru - Asetek WaterChill @ OcPrices.

Etc.:

9600XT @ JSI - BIOStar K8T800 - Plextor DVD @ BensCC - Picture MSG @ FutureLooks

Modding:

Chenbro Case @ Hardware Pacers