hey there everyone! =)
well we've been pretty busy the last little while at PCStats and we have a lot of stuff for
you guys to check out! Our forums are doing very well and
if you have any questions whether it's hardware or software just ask them
there you're bound to get a quick answer. Or if you just want to chat
about the latest gossip be it Serial ATA, R300 or T-Bred drop us a line here .
Max recently looked at some of the coolest removable IDE racks around,
the Vantec EZ-Swap HDD Racks. With a neat LCD
display that tells the temperature of your hard drive, master slave
settings and even beeps when the internal fans fail Vantec has set the bar
higher for everyone else.
On the videocard front, the MSI G4Ti4600-VTD is one of the finest
GeForce4 Ti4600's out there with 128MB of BGA DDR RAM backing up the GPU
which has 63 million transistors it simply blew our minds with its blazing
performance.
One of our writers David S. Jones looks at the technology behind Firewire and
USB, tells us the strengths and weaknesses of both and which one is
more likely to survive the hard battle.
One motherboard we were very interested in testing was the Epox
8K3A+. Would they be able to "wow" us like they did everyone else
online? You bet, the 8K3A+ was one of the best KT333 based boards we've
ever tested and you might be interested
in taking a look at why we liked it so much.
I've had varrying amounts of
luck with removable hard drive racks; some worked, some created bad bits,
and others just sat there grinning back at me as I brought down the
hammer. I guess you could say it goes like this; cheap hard drive rack
work most of the time but break easily, mid-level hard drive racks work
well but cost too much for what they do, and brand name hard drive racks
just don't exist. Or that was the case until Vantec
entered into the market with their EZ-Swap
removable (but not hot swapable) IDE hard drive racks.
Its brother unit, the MRK102FD
comes with all the bells and whistles, and although knowing the
temperature of the hard drive is cool, it is really something which most
consumers will not know how to change. The small fan is not going to
provide heaps of cooling and that means options are limited. The added
master and slave settings by the LCD panel are really cool and I could see
several uses for that just in the realm of everyday testing. Most of all,
these drives just look a lot better than their standard OEM counter parts.
If Vantec can keep the cost of these units to good levels I think they
have a pretty
worthwhile removable IDE hard drive rack on the market.
Article Link: https://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1112
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MSI
G4Ti4600-VTD
We've always found good comfort in MSI's videocards because they
never come decked out with cheap gimmicks in an effort to lure
customers - rather MSI's videocards tend to compete on reliability,
overclockability, and competitive prices. MSI's highest-end
card right now is the G4Ti4600-VTD
which is based on nVidia's GeForce 4 Ti4600 GPU.
MSI has one of the better software bundles out there with their
Ti4600, they include three full game titles; No One
Lives Forever, Aquanox and Sacrifice, a seven game demo CD,
WinProducer & WinCoder, MSIDVD and MSI's 3D!Turbo software.
It's quite amazing that they
can bundle so much software while keeping a low
price. Also included in the package is a five prong splitter
cable which takes care of the VIVO option the G4Ti4600-VTD
has. If MSI had just included a DVI to analog converter for a second
VGA monitor the card would have been near perfect! Speaking of
which, let's take a closer look at this extra-long GeForce 4 Ti4600
and some of the things which make it a killer!
Article Link: https://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1113
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"FireWire." Like so many innovative
Apple technologies, even this product code name exuded a cachet signifying
The Next Big Thing. But something happened a few years ago that suppressed
the widespread support for FireWire in favor of the much lesser Universal
Serial Bus (USB). FireWire has since found its niche in digital video
cameras, but with the recent introduction of the new high-speed USB 2.0,
many are now wondering aloud if FireWire will survive.
Article Link: https://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1104
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Epox 8K3A+ Motherboard
 Even though Epox was one of the
first mainboard manufacturers to produce a motherboard based on the
VIA KT266A chipset the 8KHA+ remains one of the finest boards
out there, and one which continues to enjoy a fiercely loyal
following. When Epox announced the release of the KT333-based 8K3A+
many wondered if they would be able to reproduce the successes they
had enjoyed in the past.
With the new 8K3A+,
you can now set your CPU voltages all the way up to 2.2V, which
means performance
users have more room to breath, and tweak! Obviously only the
more extreme overclockers would use those options (they can cause
longevity issues with the processor), but it's nice to know they are
there.
Article Link: https://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1117
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