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Videocard Compatibility & Chipsets
Hello,
With just over two weeks a of shopping before
Xmas, now is certainly the time to start making your lists, and checking
them twice. In this weeks newsletter we have several really cool
bits of gear which might just make perfect gifts - the best of which is a
small aluminum MP3 player from Samsung called the YP-700H. I
have a long commute to work, and with 128MB of storage and an FM-Tuner, this player
gets high
marks. IWill show their Xmas spirit with the all-red Hyper
Threading enabled P4HT-S motherboard; and to power it you should really be
considering a PSU with a little bit of kick. The Antec 430W has those
qualities, and a nice set of low-noise fan controls.
Since ATI is the focus of C. Angelini's
High Tech Low Down column this week, and because we're getting lots of
video card related questions, I've also included two vintage reviews for
you to read. The first is
a roundup of GeForce Titanium cards, and the second is a review
of the bright red ATI Radeon 9700 Pro. Speaking of which, the Tyan Radeon 9000 is a relatively new entry, and up for grabs from our
sponsors Tiger Direct for under $90.
FREE Stuff Alert!! Our friends at Abit have a contest
going with loads of really cool prizes. Enter right
here. Don't forget to read Colin's Tips this
week, and let me know what you think!
 With portable MP3 players, the one thing often overlooked by consumers is size. Don't
get me wrong, features like storage space, removable media support, battery life and the design
are important. Samsung's
Industrial Design team haven't been in the dark on this notion, and so to make
it easier for us to pack away the YP-700H in bags, knapsacks and jacket pockets
they have added a remote and nice long cable. Protecting the soft aluminum
exterior is belt case made from real suede leather which adds a touch of class
too. There is space inside this case for both the YP-700H and its external,
secondary AAA battery back-pack, but I'm not sure how "pocket friendly" this
makes the player. Once encapsulated in the suede cover the controls are
unreachable, and so the YP-700H remote control becomes a life saver. Behind
the YP-700H's sly Indiglo display, and aluminum skeleton, rests 128MB of built
in memory. To keep the music going even longer, this MP3 player also packs in a
1mm thin, Smart Media flash memory slot
for extra storage.
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Red is the colour of roses, fast
cars, and in this case an i845PE motherboard from the folks at Iwill. In
celebration of the overwhelming use of the colour red on this motherboard, we
here at PCStats.com just felt compelled to write this entire review in red. Red,
red, red! IWill want to catch your attention as
you browse around the store shopping for a motherboard, and by colouring the PCB
this bright colour they have built one of the flashiest motherboards around - I
mean even the PCI and AGP slots are red! Based on Intel's i845PE chipset which supports 533MHz HyperThreading
Pentium 4 processors, the P4HT-S offers a good value to consumers looking to
move up to speeds of 3.06GHz now or in the future. Hyper-Threading is a technology which has remained dormant
in the Pentium 4 processor for a while now, and only with Pentium 4-HT 3.06GHz
processors has Intel decided to finally turn it on.
Read the
Rest...
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Power supplies are one of the most basic
building blocks of a computer system, and they are also one of the most
important . We've generally had pretty good experiences with Antec's power
supplies around here, so today we'll be looking their TruePower 430W
model. I'm sure from your perspective a power supply looks
like is a pretty bland thing - after all, it's really just a metal box with some
circuitry inside that you install once, and forget about. Apart from the odd
noisy fan, or a motor seizure which causes overheating, there really isn't much
to worry about, or is there?
Read the
Rest...
| MSI Titanium Videocard Lineup
Review |
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ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 8X AGP
Videocard Review |
 While MSI is
best known for their bright red motherboards, they also produce a
lot of performance oriented videocards. In this GeForce Titanium
lineup review, we're going to look at three new models from MSI
you'll want to pay attention to.
As many of you already know, with the release of nVidia's GeForce
"Ti" series line of graphics processors, things have gotten quite
confusing in the video card marketplace. There's the regular lineup
GeForce 2 and GeForce 3 videocards and now there are also the
GeForce2 Ti, GeForce3 Ti200 and GeForce3 Ti500 video cards to
contend with. It's almost as confusing as watching a 50 year old
trying to buy an action figure for their grand kids.
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When ATi didn't counter nVIDIA's GeForce4 Ti
GPU release with a new product of their own earlier this year many
people speculated that trouble was afoot in the same way that Matrox
has been faltering. To counter the gossip, ATI publicly stated
that they didn't see any value in revising the old R200 (Radeon
8500) core to compete against nVIDIA's new offering.
Instead, ATI engineers quietly
concentrated their efforts on completing the next generation R300
core.
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| Colin's Weekly Tech Tips |
By:
C. Sun |
My Secure WinXP Hard Drive |
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There's a very neat trick in which you can setup ownerships on hard drives within WindowsXP. This is extremely useful if you have important or sensitive data on a certain drive and do not want anyone else to access it!
Go to your "Control Panel" and click the "Administrative Tools" icon. From there go into "Computer Management" and then find "Disk management". Once you're there, right click on the disk which you want to claim ownership on and go to "Properties". Click the "Security Tab", then the "Advanced" button. You should see an "Owner" tab and when you're inside there, select the owner you'd like.
After this is done, only that user will be able to access the HDD and your data is secure. Please keep in mind, you must use a NTFS partition to use this trick!
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| Colin's Tips Archives | The PCStats.com Forums |
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PCstats Issue
No.67
Circulation 173,000
The High Tech Low
Down
With Chris
Angelini |
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ATI clearly has a hit on its hands with the RADEON 9700 Pro. The performance is unmatched, its feature-set is unparalleled by any other retail product and better still, it can be found for as low as $299 online. Sound too good to be true? To some degree, it is.
I began testing the RADEON 9700 Pro with a motherboard centering on Intel's i845PE chipset - no problems. Then, I substituted a VIA P4X400 platform, again, with no problems. During the course of testing, I came to the conclusion that the 9700 Pro simply does not get along with SiS' 648 Pentium 4 chipset and VIA's KT400 Athlon XP chipset. In some instances the system would reboot. Other times, I couldn't even get a video signal.
To make a long story short, I've received information from several reliable sources claiming the problem lies with the 9700 Pro; more specifically, with a capacitor missing from the first board revision. The situation has apparently been rectified with a subsequent hardware revision. So, if you've got one of the aforementioned platforms, exercise caution before purchasing a board based on the R300 Visual Processing Unit.
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