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nForce2 Motherboard Roundup
Hello,
Happy holidays to everyone celebrating July 4th! Sometime in the next few days
PCstats.com is going to be getting a well deserved update and
changing its' look. You'll have to check www.pcstats.com over the next
few days to see the new redesign, but for the moment here is a
sneak preview of the new PCstats.com logo!!
This weeks edition
of the PCstats.com Newsletter is packed full to the brim with cool
hardware reviews; to start with we have a massive 11 motherboard nForce2
roundup I'm sure you'll enjoy. We compared nForce2 motherboards from
Albatron, ABIT, Asus, MSI, Soltek, Eopx and FIC to find the best of the
bunch. It wasn't much of a surprise that...... oops, I shouldn't spoil the
surprise, so read the roundup right here.
Two
nVidia GeForce
FX5600 cards from the likes of Albatron and Prolink were put through
the benchmarks to
shows us what they are made of, so I'm sure you gamers will want to
have a look at these two videocard reviews. Also, this week we have some pretty
interesting insight on desktop graphics backgrounds in the Tips section, and what
to expect from the new Intel Prescott and AMD Thorton cores in
the HTLD. There's much more to go through, so sit back and enjoy -
and most of all, have a great weekend!
As a newbie to
the chipset market, nVidia's original nForce chipset struck out pretty
badly despite being fast for its time. The reasons for the failure were
simple, the first nforce chipsets were expensive and bogged down by delay
after delay which caused a very late release to market. Despite a bit of a
delay at the release of the nForce2 chipset, nVidia appears to have
learned their lessons well and have not made the same mistakes twice.
Consequently, the nForce2 chipset is enjoying widespread popularity among
consumers. There are
many reasons why nVidia's nForce2 chipset has proven successful so far; it
delivers excellent performance, it's aggressively priced and most
importantly it's an extremely stable and reliable platform.
Before we take a look at the nForce2
motherboards we have rounded up I think a quick little recap of the
background info is a good idea. There are many reasons why the nForce2
chipset has put up such stiff competition. First off, the chipset has a
very powerful memory controller which supports dual channel DDR memory -
which in theory doubles the available memory bandwidth to the processor.
nVIDIA also implemented a more advanced DASP (Dynamic Adaptive Speculative
Pre-Processor) on the nForce2 which acts like the prefetch logic built
into a Pentium 4 or AthlonXP processor.Dual
channel DDR, sounds impressive doesn't it? There are two independent 64bit
memory controllers built into the nForce2 Northbridge and when two DIMM's
are installed into each separate memory controller, the nForce2 runs them
in parallel which doubles the amount of bandwidth available to the
processor. Unfortunately feeding an Athlon processor with more bandwidth
than it requires is a bit redundant. Read
the Rest...
 Based on DirectX 7 Hardware, the GeForce4 MX was
closer to a GeForce2 class card than the DirectX 8 GeForce4 Ti's were. nVIDIA,
being the smart company that they are, noticed this and you can bet
that there's no way they'll make the same mistake twice. Enter the GeForceFX
family of cards. It's nice and refreshing to see that all
GeForceFX's are DirectX 9 compatible, not just the top of the line FX
5800/5900 class cards. That feature is probably the main reason why
so many retailers tell me even the budget FX 5200's are selling well.
Today we're going to be checking out not a budget FX 5200, rather
Prolink's mainstream GeForceFX 5600 Ultimate Golden Limited 256MB
videocard. Don't be fooled by the internal NV31 core
code name, the GeForceFX 5600 GPU is slower than that of the NV30 (FX
5800), but faster than the NV34 (FX 5200). The Prolink GeForceFX 5600 Ultimate Golden
Limited is probably the fastest stock clocked GeForceFX 5600 on the market
right now, and comes equipped with a massive heatsink for looks. The speed
comes thanks mainly to the faster TSOP-II Samsung 3.3ns DDR RAM which the
card uses. The card supports dual monitors and comes
packaged with a DVI to analog converter. For those of you who dabble in
multimedia, the Prolink GeForceFX 5600 Ultimate also includes a Philips
7114H VIVO chipset. To take advantage of that, Prolink have been good
enough to includ the necessary breakout box which has S-Video in, S-Video
Out, Composite In and Composite Out. Read the
Rest...
Visit the PCstats.com ShoppingList Page
for
the July 2003 Budget $599, Mainstream $1500, and Performance $2500 System
hardware recommendations!!
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| NoiseControl Novibes III HDD
Isolation |
|
Archos MP3 Jukebox Recorder
Review |
|
Noisecontrol have made it their
business to make your computer dead, dead silent! In the old days hard drives used to be a big
source of vibration and mechanical noise. The spindle and the
read/write heads would often sound like they were grinding away like
sandpaper on wood. Things have changed remarkably in just the last
few years, but some hard drives can still be sources of annoying
vibration and noise. Noisecontrols NoVibes
III (via www.chillblast.com
) takes a different approach and suspends the drive with large
rubber belts to isolate it from the frame which can sometimes
resonate the sound a drive makes into something much larger. Read
the Rest... |
|
 There
are many MP3 players out on the market to choose from. Generally
these portable music players fall into two categories, high capacity
harddrive-based storage and low capacity flash-based storage. The
Archos Jukebox 3000 MP3 player definitely falls into the high
capacity category. With 6.0 Gigs of space it will easily store
anyone's MP3 collection, and a whole lot more. The Jukebox features
jacks for Line out, Digital line out, Earphone jacks, full size USB
port and a Mic in. The buttons a have a nice reassuring click to
them when pressed. The fit and feel of the player is really solid.
The screen is packed full of information and is backlit along the
lines of a cell phone.
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Colin's Weekly Tech Tips |
By:
Colin
Sun |
Today: Background Desktop Images Suck
Resources |
Pretty looking backgrounds can
really liven up a computer screen... but it is possible to have
a bit too much fun with wall papers. Even if you select a JPG as a
background, Windows converts the file into a BMP file which
obviously can take up a lot of system resources. Luckily if you take
advantage of Window's Active Desktop capabilities you can shrink
that file back down to size.First, right click anywhere on the desktop (not on an icon)
and go to properties. From there click the Desktop tab then
Customize Desktop. Go to the Web tab and click on the New button.
Locate the picture you want as your desktop (animated gif's work as
well!) and then click the Ok button once you're finished. Make sure
the Lock Desktop Items box is unchecked then press Ok twice. The
image that you have selected is now in a window, drag it so it's
centered or covering the entire screen then right click and go to
Arrange icons by and select Lock Web Items on Desktop. That's it, now you have a background that does not eat
up much system resources. =)
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| Colin's Tips Archives | PCStats.com Forums |
 Albatron
made quite a name for themselves back in the GeForce4 era. Who could
forget the awesome GeForce4 Ti4200 Turbo line? Albatron has done
what they set out to do, and have become a major player in the videocard
industry within one generation. Now that the GeForceFX is upon us we were
quite excited to discover what Albatron would potentially do with their
videocards to make them stand out from the rest of the pack. If we look back into history
you'll remember that nVIDIA lost some Ti4600 sales to the GeForce4
Ti4200 GPU which offered great bang for the buck. It's a good bet that the
same situation wasn't going to be allowed to develop for the new
GeForceFX's! The differences between
budget/mainstream GeForceFX 5200/5600 GPU's and their more expensive
brethern (FX5800/5900) is more than clock speed. Using less transistors
(75 million for the FX5600 as oppose to 125 for the FX 5800 and 130
million for the 5900) nVIDIA is able to build a simplified core for a much
lower price.Read the Rest...
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PCstats Issue
No.93
Circulation: 259,235
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|
The High Tech Low Down |
| By: Chris
Angelini |
|
Tensions have to be running high over at AMD. June has come and gone without a sign of faster Opteron processors (we were expecting 2GHz chips by now). Furthermore, the nForce3 motherboards I was promised two months ago haven't yet arrived, leaving a gaping void where I'd hope to see workstation boards equipped with AGP slots. The problem, according to one of AMD's prominent enterprise partners, continues to be in regards to ramping up the processor's frequency. If AMD hopes to compete with Intel's much-anticipated 'Prescott' core later this year, it had better hope someone at IBM is making headway with that silicon-on-insulator technique it has been talking about for so long now.
Never mind the high-end headaches, though. The real news this week is down low, where the Duron used to reside. A new core, 'Thorton' is reportedly emerging, intended to supplant the existing 'Thoroughbred' processors at the 2000, 2200, and 2400+ ratings. Equipped with 256KB of L2 cache and a 266MHz front side bus, these will be mainstream chips, to be sure. But we're still not sure how a 'Thorton' with 256KB of L2 cache differs from a 'Thoroughbred ' with the same vital statistics.
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