[H]ardNews 5th Edition

AOpen AK79D-400 Max:

PCStats has a little nForce2 mainboard review action posted today. The gang seems pleased with the AOpen AK79D-400 Max nForce2 board and had very good overclocking results to boot.

Even though AOpen motherboards are not known for their overclockability like brands such as Epox or Abit, we had quite a bit of luck with the AK79D-400 Max. While maintaining the most aggressive memory timings we were able to hit a nice 223 MHz FSB. Lowering the memory timings gave us a result of 234 MHz!

Gigabyte Radeon9800Pro 256MB:

What do you do to improve on an awesome card like the 9800Pro 128MB? Do what they did with the Gigabyte Radeon9800Pro and slap a total of 256MB on the card. It might not drastically improve performance…but what the hell, if you are gonna go big, you might as well go all out.

As one can tell from the benchmarks above, Gigabyte R9800Pro 258MB is one of the fastest gaming cards on the planet. Its performance is even more astonishing when overclocked to 442Core/782Memory, where it scored 14094 in 3DMark2001SE at a resolution of 1024*768*32bit with 4xFSAA and 4x Anisotropic filtering. On the flip side, it is also one of the most expensive graphics cards on the planet.

VIA and SRI Team Up:

VIA has teamed up with SRI to develop a platform in which a team of small robots is based on. The robots or “Centibots” are used in search and rescue, they can be deployed as a unit, they will map the area and then search it. Very cool stuff, definitely worth checking out.

VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator and developer of silicon chip technologies and PC platform solutions, and SRI International, an independent U.S. research institute, today announced a live demonstration of "Centibots", SRI's Linux-based robots, at IDG's LinuxWorld 2003 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from August 5-7. Demonstrations will be held at the VIA booth 1776, and at the "Taste of Linux Theater" event held at the show on August 6, the Centibots will navigate a course to find a hidden Linux penguin doll.