News

Tweaknews sure has a good relationship with Samsung...

Would you like to watch TV on your computer? Do you not want to buy a separate card to get this feature? Perhaps you are in the market for a new monitor? Well, look no further, you have an option. This monitor has been hooked up to Tweaknews.net's test rig for the past two weeks. When testing hardware, I use it as a normal monitor and I go about my daily tasks. When I move back to my workstation to write a review as I am doing now, I turn it into a normal TV. It's great! I usually just keep the news on in the background while I work away pecking at my keyboard. Man, what are they going to come out with next? A DVD player built in? Perhaps a small printer? Who knows? If you have a budget set aside for a monitor and a TV card, maybe this monitor is for you. If you have even more set aside, you can go up to a 17 inch monitor with the same capabilities or if you are loaded, try the new 24 inch beast!!

Explain to me what an 'upgrade' package is!

Betting that consumers who want to upgrade their own PCs will choose the easiest hard drives to install, Seagate has added a new instruction booklet and has printed the installation instructions directly on the drives. Previous kits offered separate installation instructions. I forget that I know a lot about computers so this stuff may seem trivial to me, but to my parents lets say, this may be a great thing.

News.com reports that Hiroshi Yamauchi is stepping down from CEO.

His departure comes at a challenging time for the game maker, with its flagship GameCube home console entangled in a fierce three-way battle that includes Sony's PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox.

The Inquirer has learned that the Parhelia is only a 4x AGP part. Yeah, big deal, it'll still be a good card.

Matrox said that one of the reasons why its chip is AGP 4X part is because it is shipping Parhelia before broad AGP 8X introduction and this is something that we can agree, since Intel hasn't launched its AGP 8X hardware and the brood of Chipzilla chipsets is mighty indeed.

The INQ has some info on a new part (maybe) from ATI dubbed the RV280.

Perhaps just for as long as the Radeon 7500 sells well, ATI will keep the RV250 genie in its bottle, and we expect Nvidia to perform a similar trick with the Geforce 4TI 4200, introduced in April and in very limited supplies indeed, even a month after its introduction.

We've also heard an Eva Glass style whisper that ATI is working on one more card codenamed the RV280 that we will speak about again, but that's likely to be supported by AGP 8X too.

I was amazingly shocked by this news- I only wish they had gotten busted for spyware first.[PAGEBREAK]
Kazaa, the company behind a popular file-swapping Web site, said it will fold because it cannot afford to defend itself against copyright infringement charges brought by the major studios and labels.

The Dutch company maintains it has not violated any copyright laws by enabling customers to copy and share music and movie files by computer. But Kazaa lawyers said Friday that the firm cannot afford to defend the charges.

"Plaintiffs have engaged in Rambo-style litigation," Kazaa said in a court filing Friday, complaining that the studios and labels are using hardball legal tactics to squash it.

The collapse of Kazaa, however, is not expected to slow trading activity on the company's network, one of the most popular file-sharing sites in the world. Kazaa said it has sold the network to another firm that the music and film industry has not sued yet.

The Web site and the software behind it are now owned by a privately held firm called Sharman Networks, based in Vanuatu, an island in the Pacific.

Lawyers for the seven major Hollywood studios and five major record companies and music publishers said Kazaa is playing a corporate "shell game" to dodge responsibility.

They contend that Kazaa's two founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, continue to be involved in the operation of the Web site and made substantial money from the sale.

DansData has produced a very long and informative review about CPU coolers with a short history. They included water-coolers and fans in this report. Read this if you're thinking about buying a new cooler.

The Tech Report handles a DFI motherboard based on the i845B (Brookdale DDR). What a screwed up name.

What the NB70-SC lacks in features, bells, and whistles, it makes up in solid performance, stability, and the Intel name on the chipset. Unfortunately, our review of the NB70-SC comes in a little late, despite our discovery of some interesting limitations of AC'97 on-board audio. The next iteration of Intel processors and chipsets, which will use a 533MHz front side bus, is already upon us. The NB70-SC's performs quite well as is, but performance-sensitive users would be well advised to see what kind of performance can be leveraged from a faster front side bus.

tBreak has reviewed the new i850E board.

After looking at the P4R533, it really does seem that Iwill is starting to focus on the high-end/server market rather the home-desktop market. The performance of the board is amazing and so is it's stability- definitely two features that will appeal to the high-end market. On the other other hand, overclocking and onboard features weren't exactly the best we've seen- also something that the high-end market is not that interested in. If you're not the overclocking/tweaking type, then the P4R533 will be a good choice.

Yahoo is throwing in the towel for auctions in Europe. They will fully endorse eBay for all European transactions.[PAGEBREAK]
Within the next several weeks, Yahoo will stop accepting new listings for its auction sites that serve France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Additionally, it will close its auction site that serves the United Kingdom and Ireland. The company will promote eBay's sites for each of those countries via banner ads and text links.

Read more at news.com

Legion looks at the Athlon variant of the legacy free Abit motherboards.

Out of all the KT333 boards tested here at Legion Hardware over the last four or so months the AT7 MAX has just became the all time favorite. This has happened for so many reasons, performance being one reason however not the biggest. There is little performance difference between the slowest KT333 board and the fastest and this is because of reasons beyond the motherboard manufactures control. So in the end performance isn’t a key element from KT333 boards, however what is a key element are features and lots of them. Abit’s AT7 MAX packs more features than any other KT333 board we know of. By phasing out inferior technologies such as ISA, serial and parallel ports it makes room for all the newest features that will take us into the future. Unfortunately all these features won’t come at a small price as the board retails for around $160 US however the price tag is easily justified considering you get a high performance KT333 motherboard with all the features imaginable.

[H]ard does the IT7, the legacy free Abit board for the P4.

ABIT did their homework, and it shows, from the layout and design to innovative new features. The performance of the IT7 is nothing short of fantastic. This combined with the great overclocking ability of this board, features and outstanding flexibility, makes the IT7 not only the easiest board to recommend to anyone looking for a Pentium4 board, but the easiest board to recommend to anyone buying a new motherboard, regardless of platform.

Digitimes reports that new chipsets from Intel and VIA are coming soon. And, this is VERY interesting. (In bold).

Seeing Intel’s foray into the low-price market, VIA has decided to confront the new competition by updating its P4X266A chipset. Quoted at as low as US$18, the P4X266E is equipped with VIA’s latest south bridge chip, the VT8235, which allows the product to support USB 2.0. In forthcoming versions of the VT8235, the Taiwanese chipset designer also plans to add serial ATA and 802.11b-support functions. Serial ATA, this is going to be a good year for storage.

Tom does 11 cards for you to pick one.

The competition in the shape of ATi has been relegated to playing performance catch-up for the time being. Although cards based on the RADEON 8500 are much cheaper than the big GeForce 4 Titanium boards, they will soon find themselves competing with the smallest member of the GF4 Ti family, the 4200. This card will offer only slightly lower performance than its big siblings at a highly competitive price. Yet, as always, the competition isn't just sitting on its thumbs. Matrox has just announced its Parhelia, and within the next few weeks we should see some more announcements of new and very promising products.

All new and in-your-face.[PAGEBREAK]
The screenshots on this site are better than porn. If you're into FPS I definitely recommend you check out Sony's brand new official site for PlanetSide. Here it is

Here's a little something for you Max Payne fans.[PAGEBREAK]
While there is almost no public information out about this game yet, Remedy has announced plans for Max Payne 2 to be released sometime in 2003 (can anyone else predict a delay here?). You know you want to see what GameSpot has to say!

VR-Zone has a review another XoXide premodded case. These look damn good.

XoXide have outdone themselves with the C-6 Black hawk case. It has everything you need : tons of case fans, a window, motherboard tray, stylish looks etc. Now I know what everyone is thinking, "A case like this must come at a high price?". Well guys, you're wrong! This case is retailing for a sale price of 124.99 $ over at XoXide. This is a great deal, for a fully modded case with a window. For any of you users out there who want an excellent modded case, but do not want to go through the hassle, time and effort to make one yourself, I suggest you go over to XoXide and pick one up.

Want TFT at 19"? Well, Tweaknews reviews Samsug's variety. OMG, I want one!

I have been using this monitor for the past month and I have to say, I will miss this monitor when it leaves. I no longer have any headaches, no dry eyes from screen flicker and I have yet to rub my eyes since its installation a month ago(Mind you, I will rub my eyes when it goes back to Samsung. =( ). I never have enjoyed a computer component as much as I have enjoyed this monitor. Yes, I know it costs a considerable amount of money, but if you have the money, it's worth it hands down. The one other drawback is the gaming. Although games do look beautiful on this TFT, ghosting is apparent. I hope soon in the future, Samsung will release a LCD of this size that will have a fast enough response time to wipe out the delay in rendering frames at 100+ fps and allow some of the gamers to take advantage of the new technology. And that's the reason I don't get TFTs...

Ouch, remember that easy passwords are easy to guess...

Retrieving the password file from one of the health care company's servers, the consulting firm put "John the Ripper," a well-known cracking program, on the case. While well-chosen passwords could take years--if not decades--of computer time to crack, it took the program only an hour to decipher 30 percent of the passwords for the nearly 10,000 accounts listed in the file. [PAGEBREAK]
Read more at News.com

Please sign this petition. We all want new BIOSes .

AMDWorld reviews the Athlon varient of the SS series of small PCs.

No quote because their site doesn't allow highlighting, which is very stupid.

Hardwarezone reviews the P4T533-C based on the i850E chipset.

Overclockers would be a little disappointed with the P4T533-C as it did not come with the basic overclocking features. If you are looking for 1MHz FSB step adjustment, you'll be disheartened as the P4T533-C only had only a handful of FSBs to choose in the BIOS. Moreover, the FSB tweaks have been grouped together with the PCI ratio and at certain ratios, you are only given a couple of choices. However, if you're only into light overclocking, the board still supports voltage tweaking through the BIOS setup.

MS will hand out tablets to each attendees today at their CEO Summit.

At Microsoft's CEO conference, the more than 100 attendees will receive beta versions of tablet devices, a Microsoft spokesman said. The Tablet PCs will be used in conjunction with smart cards, identifying each CEO with his or her specific machine, and will provide access to slides and other presentation materials. The executives will be able to take notes on the devices using the pens, and save the information through a Universal Serial Bus "keychain" storage device, the spokesman said. These seem like a step in the right direction.

VR-Zone reviews the Iwill i850E motherboard with PC1066 Rambus support.

IWILL P4R533-N is performing extremely well at PC1066 mode and once again it prove that i850E should be made to run at PC1066 and not PC800 with the new 533Mhz Pentium 4 processors. However, IWILL P4R533-N at PC800 mode is hit by high memory latency that suffer a little in performance and score lower performance than SiS645DX and Intel 845G at DDR333 mode. Therefore when getting an Intel 850E board, be sure to par up with a good PC800-A RDRAM and run at PC1066 mode and you will definitely get the best performance out of it and make your money worthwhile.

If I had an XP I'd do this as well. Xbit does the Athlon XP at 166mhz FSB.

So, we saw that the performance can be improved significantly by simply increasing the bus frequency of Athlon XP processors. When we switch from 133MHz FSB to 166MHz FSB (with DDR333 memory used) the performance gain makes 7%-15%. It's a pity that AMD will never take advantage of this opportunity. And it could be of real help especially taking into account that the competition between AMD and Intel has got even tenser after Intel had introduced 533MHz bus.

ExtremeTech has compared 4 professional workstation level video cards. Read it here.

Copper HeatSink Review

I went to compusa to get my $5 from JK2 because it went on sale, and I got a free Rumble Robots and my $5, not a bad trip to there!

Then I went to Software etc and picked GTA 3 up!!!! Expect a review in a few days!

Overclockers gives their opinions on the cheap chips of today and tomorrow.

Dresden will start making Hammers and Austin will stop making Durons the last quarter of 2002, but most production at Dresden will continue to be Athlons. It's unclear how long Palominos will be around. On the one hand, low-speed Throughbreds will be cheaper to make. On the other hand, you have .13 micron refitting expenses that will have to be recaptured within about a year. I suspect AMD would prefer to go .13, but will play it by ear, and if business isn't too good, they can live with the Palominos.

News will be dry from me today and tomorrow because I'm running out and getting GTA 3 RIGHT NOW!!! So hopefully Warlock and Subj will start cranking out even more news for you guys .

Anandtech does the i850E and the i845G.

As far as integrated graphics go, the 845G is a bit of a disappointment. While it's sufficient for the corporate and low-end consumer markets it's difficult to say whether Intel's new 845G will be enough to power future Microsoft OSes that make extensive use of DirectX in their UI (e.g. Longhorn). For now, Intel is doing only the bare minimum to keep their feet in the graphics pool but there will come a time where Intel will either have to get with the game or get out. With today's GPUs becoming more and more CPU like, it would make sense that Intel would want to dabble in the very lucrative market however in doing so they must not only become a graphics manufacturer but also a software vendor. A rarely publicized fact is that software engineers outnumber hardware engineers at all of the major graphics manufacturers (ATI, NVIDIA, etc...) which illustrates the importance of drivers and software support when it comes to graphics processors. It will be interesting to see what approach Intel takes in the future when high-performance 3D graphics matter to much more than a handful of professionals and gamers.