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hi there, ati radeon 9700 benchmark news! now
that we have your attention check out c. angelini's "unofficial"
firsthand report on ATI's R300 in this weeks High Tech Low Down.
This week we are all about roundups, and the first on the copping block
is our look at 10 integrated motherboards. Next in line are a small armada
of DDR RAM, and just to keep things rounded, a guide to
videocard installation for newbies. Also in this weeks list of
super-amazing-cool-fantastic things to check is our review of a Mt.
Rainier compatible CDRW from Samsung, and a look at Kingston's new
EPOC memory technology.
Don't forget to read Colin's Tips
for this week and remember
there are three more MSI Bluetooth Motherboard Prize Packs to be
given away, to three lucky newsletter subscribers!
Faced with the purchase of dozens of new computers,
government agencies, schools and businesses need to find ways to keep
costs down while still getting the equipment they require. "White box"
systems based on integrated motherboards offer one of the best ways to
lower the price of a new PC, as long as the application is right.
Businesses looking to build workstations for high-end applications will
obviously have to side with more expensive computers, but for the majority
of standard office work System Administrators on a budget are well served.
The integration of many different components (videocard, soundcard, network interface card)
allow manufacturers to lower costs and sell a
product for less than if all four equivalent technologies are sold
separately. In any case if
we take the example of a school purchasing 50 new computers it is cost
that factors in most importantly, with performance and features battling
it out for second place.
Article Link
 We all know that memory is one of the most
important things in a computer, yet when people are buying it they often
choose the cheapest parts. Overclockers have scoured the world
trying to get their hands on the best memory available so it is to them
that we look for insight. Today we're going to be pitting seven sticks
of DDR RAM against each other in a huge battle royal to see who will be
victorious. We're only interested in the overclocking numbers and
our combatants are all 256MB in size.
The sticks in no particular order are;
Generic PC2100, Crucial PC2100, Crucial PC2700, Corsair XMS2400, OCZ
PC2400, OCZ PC3000, Mushkin PC2100 and KingMAX PC2700.
Article Link
So today we have another burner in the SW
series; capable of writing CD-R media at 40X, rewriting CD-RW media at
12X, and reading standard CD-ROM's at 40X. The SW240 packs 8MB of buffer
memory to prevent the occurences of buffer underrun errors along with
Justlink/BurnProof. The drive also supports the new (Mt. Rainier)
CD-MRW standard. What is CD-MRW you wonder, well it stands for "CD Mount
Rainier Rewrite" and it is a new optical storage media standard that makes
CD-RW disks as handy, and as easy to work with as 1.44Mb floppies are.
Article Link
Colin's Weekly Tech Tips
By: Colin
Sun |
 Setting Comfortable
Refresh Rates
After prolonged periods of time in front of the computer, do you get headaches or eye strain? Many times this problem can be traced to the monitor running at a low refresh rate. Luckily this is a rather easy fix. Click on the "Start" button, go to "Settings" and then "Control Panel". Once you're inside there, go to "Display". From there click the "Settings" tab and then the "Advanced" button.
Here in Win9x based OS's go to the "Adapter" tab and you should see the "Monitor Settings". Under that should be a number followed by the "Hertz". The sweet spot is 75 Hz or above and in general you want to get that number as high as possible.
In Win2k/XP OS's you want to click the "Monitor" tab. There you'll see "Monitor Settings" and you should do the same as what's written above.
When you press the "Apply" or "OK" button your monitor will blink and you should be set.Now you be able stay in front of your computer for long periods of time and not have any problems!
For more insight into the world of tweaks, Colin's Tech Tips are archived for your reading enjoyment right here!
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PCstats
Issue No.48
Circulation 125,700
The High Tech Low Down
With C. Angelini |
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The curtains have lifted on the R300 graphics
processor and the results are in - unofficially.
ATI is keeping exact performance numbers under wraps for a few more weeks for some reason, but relative to the GeForce4 Ti 4600, ATI's high-end board should deliver more than twice the frame rates with the most intensive visual settings. I was able to attend ATI's launch event in San Francisco,
where ATI divulged the technical details of the R300 chip, the
RADEON 9700 board that would house the new "Visual Processing Unit",
and the mainstream RADEON 9000. After the festivities I was able to
log a little personal time with the RADEON 9700 to run my own
benchmarks and it was certainly a surprise to see an
ATI card consistently running between 30% to 120%
faster than NVIDIA's fastest product. After my benchmarks (and a night on the town), I had an off-handed conversation with one of ATI's engineers, who assured me that the R300 "is nothing compared to what we are working on..."
Of course, NVIDIA will answer back in a few months with the NV30. Expect to see eight pixel pipelines and 256-bit memory bus (just like ATI's R300), along with DirectX 9 compatibility. The graphics market is about to get interesting!
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