[H]ardNews 1st Edition

9600XT Review:

ViperLair looks at the ATI Radeon 9600XT today and puts it through many paces.

Great Performance, Plays leading edge games well in High Quality mode, Good Overclockability, Good cooling / low noise, VPU Recover, Bundled with HL2

Our review is here for comparison and does evaluate actual gameplay when using the card.

ATI Filtering Analyzed:

3DCenter today takes a look at ATI and what they do, as far as "tricks", when it comes to filtering mipmaps and textures.

ATI have traditionally cut corners in the texture filtering department. Take, for instance, R200 (Radeon 8500): on the one hand quite sophisticated - for its time - pixel shading, support for overbright lighting (and apparently increased internal color precision), on the other hand there are disadvantages when it comes to texture filtering, in particular when using anisotropic filtering ("AF").

I would remind you guys to keep in mind that your gaming experience is really what matters...to most people anyway. Of course those of you that have been called on to fight the video holy wars in forums around the world are not included in that statement.

MSI OCing:

Steve points out that MSI is giving lessons on overclocking their boards using their utilities now days. Nifty.

Below is the setting of FSB 350MHz. As long as you set CPU ratio as 8.0x and set DDR Clock as 466MHz, then the OS should be as stable as usual. Should the OS fail to reboot, please try again. If the system is unstable, please lower the FSB. Try 330MHz first.

Comdex Sucked:

HardcoreWare lets us know that they gave themselves time to sober up before they wrote up ,their Comdex Coverage, and yes they too, thought it sucked.

NF3 Locked?

RojackPot has an article that looks into whether or not the nForce3 chipset really has an unlocked PCI bus as stated by NVIDIA.

He suspected the nForce3's PCI bus was not locked because his friend killed a SCSI card after using a high FSB! If the nForce3 had a PCI lock, the PCI bus would have been locked at 33MHz and the SCSI card would not have been killed even with the system bus running beyond specification.

I have seen the tool they used to measure PCI and I am not sure if it actually takes a sampling from the bus or pull information from the BIOS. I am sure we will hear more on this next week.

Cooling:

Thermalright SP-94 HSF @ CTZ - CoolerMaster Thermal Compound @ OCersClub

Modding:

PreModded Case @ 3DXtreme - Mouse LED Modding - FrontX Panel @ CreativeMods

Etc.:

DVD R-+8X Burner @ ClubOC - Alternative Browsing @ IceTeks