[H]ardNews 9th Edition

Ugly VidCard Underbelly:

As the World Renders. You gotta love it, even if you hate it, sure keeps things interesting.

Suffice it to say, Nvidia looks like crap here, and deservedly so. They have been working feverishly to discredit ATI at every turn for years, and they have been pretty successful at it. HOWEVER, it would not be so easy if ATI did not keep shooting themselves in the foot. Besides, ATI uses the same kind of back-end pressure that Nvidia does, so they are both bad in this area.

Mental Note...

...to self. "Have friends kick my ass if I even buy another IBM hard drive."

IBM today introduced the world's fastest desktop hard disk drive with IBM-exclusive technology called "tag 'n seek" for its childlike simplicity. Known technically as tagged command queuing, "tag 'n seek" technology enables the new IBM Deskstar 180GXP to perform nearly 25 percent faster than its predecessor and widen the Deskstar performance gap over competitors by up to 20 percent. IBM begins shipping the Deskstar 180GXP in volume today.

I wonder if it will RMA itself? Or keep you up to date with your current class action lawsuit status for all those other IBM Deskstars that failed? Wishful thinking. Thanks Xerxes.

No DOOM in St.Louis:

Well hell, Donahue is a TV talk show host, doesn't that make him an expert? Just about as much as being a webmaster makes you a master of anything.

However, veteran talk show host Phil Donahue has long spoken out against violent imagery in video games. In 1972, he invited Long Island mother Ronnie Lamb to bring her message to his show and launch her campaign to ban video games. Twenty years later, Donahue took up the cause again on his MSNBC program, lambasting MIT professor Henry Jenkins -- one of the researchers who filed a brief in the Missouri case -- for his defense of video games.

MSI 648 Reviewage:

I have been beating this board around the test bench here for a few days now and capped it last night with a flash gone bad. First time that has happened in a while. All my hotflash attempts have left me high and dry. Let's see how the 648 Max from MSI did over at BenchHouse.

MSI made sure to produce this board without cutting any corners, which is a rule in most cases with non-Intel chipsets. An advanced BIOS and many advanced options can guarantee you that this model will not be outdated when the next generation of Intel chipset based motherboards appears. All in all, MSI 648 Max is the logical choice for all users who don’t want to spend a lot of money on a motherboard. On the other hand, SiS 648 will generously give extraordinary performance and many features of the southbridge in return.