I was think of buying a new video recorder after Her in Doors broke the last one. Then I saw the Thomson TiVo PVR player but the only thing putting me off was the fact that the TiVo harddrive was 20gig which is good for 12 hours worth of playback. I needed something bigger.

So I did some digging around and I found a great article @ Washingtonpost.com called Breaking It Open, Making It Better!

People with the curiosity and technical expertise often crack open the cases to find out what goes on inside those mysterious gizmos -- and sometimes make them work better.

Two products in particular have become popular with hackers lately: the ReplayTV and TiVo "personal video recorders." These VCR-like machines save and play back television programming using hard drives rather than videotape. By adding a larger hard drive to a Replay or TiVo, a hacker can double or even quadruple the number of shows their PVR can record -- a $250 drive can boost an older Replay box's capacity from 20 hours to 80. Some hackers go even further with tricks like adding an Ethernet card for networking to a computer or enabling PAL-format video output for use in other countries.

Bill Gervasi technology director at Santa Clara, California based Transmeta Corp. and representative of the JEDEC [Solid State Technology Association] said in a presentation at JEDEC conference today that DDR400 will become a boutique memory in his opinion. He said JEDEC "may or may not" ratify DDR-400 as a standard. But the organization is well under way to develop the specifications for DDR-II, which will offer 3,200-Mbytes-per-second data transfer rates. DDR-333 - the latest JEDEC approved standard - will be the mainstream memory of 2003 and it is expected that DDR-II will step right into the gap after it. Source: Silicon Strategies

Many expected ATI to show off their GPUs in development at CeBIT 2002 but were disappointed by the canadian based company. The Inquirer now speculates that this was due to ATI concentrating in their integrated chipsets A3 & A4 similiar to Nvidia nForce products. Furthermore it is to be expected that ATI is targeting Nvidia's NV30 chipset - which is rumoured not to be entitled GeForce 5 - with their R300 GPU as a competitive product. Maybe Taiwanese CompuTex in June 2002 will be chosen as a presentation platform for R300. Additionally to add to the confusion of R300 specifications some websites claim to have learned of them. As little is known about the true capabilities of the new ATI GPU we advise that you'll take these with a on of salt. If you're interested nonetheless hit read more...

Just saw this @ NvMax.com

Darkcrow via pcpop found a unique switch on a Gainward TI200 which switches the card's deviceid to report a Quadro. With no software hacking or hardware modifying there is no way for the Nvidia drivers to think otherwise.

For the screenshot of the card and more info hit read more.

Infineon today announced that it released first engineering samples of new high density DDR SDRAM modules. These new modules are unregistered and the 1GB module is targeted @ high-end PC's and workstations whereas the 2GB module is aimed for the server market. The new modules are the industry?s first commercial high-density modules based on monolithic (single-chip) 512Mb memory components. Infineon will again showcase these @ Jedex Conference.

TheInquirer.net are reporting that they have found a chip that Intel denied existed as recently as two weeks ago and which has turned up in Japan. Guess what? They also have a review of it! Here's a byte from their review: FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF OUR SAMPLE Pentium 4 2.4GHz chip - due for launch any day now - are pretty good. The Northwood part is built on a 130 nanometre (0.13µ) process which gives benefits in terms of power requirements, heat output and the amount of real estate available on the die. The shrink from 180nm means that the on die L2 cache is 512K - double that of the earlier P4 Willamette parts. At full power the 2.4GHz Northwood has a thermal design power of 57.8W (2GHz Willamette 75.3W) with a core voltage of 1.5V (down from the 1.7V of Willamette) and our sample peaks at 38 degrees C after six hours of 100 per cent CPU utilisation running the SETI client in the background. Not bad considering exactly the same heatsink is used.

The Game Developers Conference in San Jose California turns out as a jewel of a news source this week. The Microsoft DirectX Day is held during the GDC and is intended as a presentation and discussion platform for developers. In a recent lecture held by Charles Boyd, personal business group product manager @ Microsoft, it became clear that DirectX 9 will cause another stir in the 3D hardware scene and that surprisingly Matrox will be among the first to have new technologies implemented into their products. Read more...

You heard it right, Sony plans to turn the Playstation 3 into a distributed computer. Satisfying customer demand that they want a gaming platform that far exceeds that of current hardware.

As you may remember we were the first site to post a working set of the 6.13.10.6052 beta drivers for the ATI Radeon series. Initial findings showed that these are the most recommendable ones for most users. As with some beta sets before the 6052 include reference for the R300 GPU... Read more...

VR-Zone has done a roundup on 6 different brands of DDR333 SDRAM. The contenders are Micron, Kingston, KingMax, Nanya, TwinMOS and Winbond. We have put these memories through a series of high FSB overclocking tests. IWill XP333 was used to test the max FSB these RAMs can go while EPoX 8K3A+ was used to test out the max FSB these RAMs can achieve under most aggressive memory timings. Some of the DDR333 memories are able to attain over 210Mhz and some are able to run over 190Mhz at CAS2!

T-Break has received the Gainward GeForce4 Ti440 Ultra/700XP and have setup a nice gallery in their forums. Benchmarks will follow tommorow.

The PCI-SIG (PCI Special Interest Group) is the industry organization that owns and manages the PCI Local Bus specification as an open industry standard. The organization defines and implements new industry standard I/O (Input/Output) specifications as the industry's local I/O needs evolve. Currently, more than 700 industry-leading companies are active PCI-SIG members. The PCI-SIG's board of directors is composed of the following companies: AMD, Compaq, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Phoenix Technologies, ServerWorks and TI. Companies involved have now agreed on the next PCI stepping version 2.3. This new standard aimed for migration to low-voltage designs and therefore support for 5 volt-keyed add-in cards has been removed. Read more...

Abbas has posted some pictures of Creative's Upcoming Jukebox 3.0 MP3 player on T-Break.com forums.

Looks like OCZ will have some DDR400 Memory available in April. Also known as PC3300 RAM this memory is bound for serious speed. Ahead of time this is because their press release is from April, 8th 2002. OCZ Source: I Am Not A Geek

You just have to love CeBIT. It seems one of ATI's production partners namely Club-3D has jumped the gun early by revealing the specifications of ATI's successor of the Radeon 8500. If you geeks need to take a closer look, read more.

Now that they've finished the move to their new domain, Envy News has posted thier first new piece - a Northwood P4-2.0 GHz Upgrade column. This witty editorial depicts a true 'field story' on the upgrade and boasts plenty of great picts. Here's a link to this month's latest "Yur Pal Mitch" editorial, titled: Northwood

Silicon Integrated Systems Corp. (SiS), a leading core logic and graphics supplier presented a first sample board utilitzing their new SiS336 chipset: Actually there is a new range of 33x chipsets from value to high-performance. Read more for the GPU specs, a pic of the sample board and an overview.

Just got word from Visionary@vr-zone.com about SiS brand new SiS645DX chipset. Here's what he's saying:

SiS645DX chipset is one of the highlights by SiS at CeBIT where this chipset will provide 533Mhz support for Pentium 4 and of course DDR333 support as well. VR-Zone has a chance to take a look at the SIS645DX reference board from SiS and we have evaluated its performance under DDR266, DDR333 and even DDR400 modes. More interestingly, we have tested out the 533Mhz FSB support on this chipset by using a 533Mhz P4 2.4Ghz (18x133) processor.

Abit has announced their new MAX motherboard series at CeBIT 2002, Hannover - Germany. As of now there are two of these new feature packed motherboards that Abit has given information about: the Abit IT7 i845E-chipset for Pentium 4 processors Abit AT7 with VIA KT333-chipset for AMD Athlon CPU's Read more...

We reported earlier about the problems of some users running their Audigy soundcard here. According to ExtremeTech Creative engineers were now able to pinpoint the problem which is not associated with the soundcard itself but rather a specific PCI bridge chip used in at least one motherboard from Soyo Computer Inc. and a PCI glitch in PCs manufactured by Dell Computer Corp. This information was passed along by Steve Erickson, vice-president of audio development at Creative Labs, Fremont, Calif. Read more...