DOCUMENTS SEEN @ THE INQUIRER show that the SIS 655/963 Pentium 4 dual DDR 333 chipset is likely to be in volume production in November.

The chipset, which includes a 533MHz system bus and has an AGP 8X/4X interface, will support up to four DIMMs of unbuffered DDR memory at either 333 or 266 speeds, with a maximum density of 1GB per module.

Abit has issued their latest FAQ dealing with crackling noises on Soundblaster Live! cards and corrupted data transfer using their VIA based motherboard range. They recommend altering BIOS settings as well as 3rd party PCI Latency patch by programmer George E. Breese. Quote: You may meet the following situations: Copying files from Iomega PEERLESS MEDIA drive to on-board IDE hard disk may lead the computer hangs, or the files may be corrupted. Creative Sound Blaster Live! (5.1) Series sound cards have a crackling noise while playing music with AT7 / KT7 / KT7-RAID / KT7A / KT7A-RAID / KR7A / KR7A-RAID / KR7A-133 / KR7A-133R / KX7-333 / KX7-333R motherboards. It is very slow to copy files from on-board IDE hard disk to another disk, the data may be corrupted, even leads the computer to be halted. Read more...

What do you do, when you have a old Radeon 7200 (like me), 7500, 8500 or any other ATI card and want to upgrade it to another ATI card (most likely 9700 if you are like me)?
You might ask friends or some bloke at a hardware shop to trade with you and the person always responds with a much smaller amount than you expect (which makes you think it will be better if you donate it to your cousin). Or you go to ATI.com, get the new card and test it on your system and then get a good price on your old card from ATI. Wait... there is a catch though (I heard you say "Isn't there a catch?").

Both Seagate and WesternDigital have announced there will be 1-year warranty on their harddisk drives. This limited warranty will take effect from October 1st 2002. Update thanx "FC" for this one Maxtor has joined... and actually started the party. If you read/previous the above news and said fine where is the Maxtor's dealer number?; then read this "Effective October 1, 2002, all Maxtor desktop drives will carry a one-year standard warranty". Ouch... Hit read more for links.

From Intels Pressroom:-
"Retaining backward compatibility with the older AGP 4x technology, AGP 8x doubles the graphics bandwidth of the AGP interface to 2.1 gigabytes per second (GB/s) which is designed to benefit applications on today's most popular workstation platforms. It is expected to impact the desktop market segment in 2003 as desktop applications become more bandwidth-intensive. "

We've been hearing all kinds of good things so far concerning the new ATi Radeon 9700 series graphics cards, but can it possibly live up to all the hype? Come join TweakTown as they take a look at this beast and tells us once and for all if it has what it takes to become the next champ, or the next chump!

According to a report at the japanese magazine Nikkei.Net Interactive (login required) ,which was published today, Fujitsu is going to recall about ten million internal harddisk drives which were manufactured during September 2000 and September 2001. If the recall process is limited to Japan is not known. The report states that the RMA process will be free of charge for customers. The whole conversion is said to cost about 85 million Euro, which was confirmed by Fujitsu spokesperson Bob Pomeroy. He also said that customers like IBM, Hitachi and NEC were concerned. Rancho*: I also own 2 Fujitsu drives and had intermittent problems with complete drive failures... Update: It seems there have been translation errors. The correct amount of HDD's is 300.000. Also there are numerous reports about failing Fujitsu drives outside Japan. Read more...

Following on from the Radeon 9700 PRO review Beyond3D has posted a review of its 'low end' baby brother the Radeon 9000 PRO, being largely based from Radeon 8500's architecture. Here's a snip.

Max Payne has previously shown to receive a reasonably healthy boost in the lower resolutions from a card with strong onboard geometry processing. Here we can see that the 9000 PRO performing very closely to the 8500, indicating that it's T&L performance is still quite strong in comparison to 8500. This could indicate that 9000 PRO's Vertex Shader units are more powerful than 8500 or that 8500 was not able to run both its processors in parallel in all cases.

INQ reports the Palomino MP cores under 2000+ will be phased out by the end of September, and the cores replaced by Thoroughbred cores, it appears.

Slower Palominos will still be available for the next six months but won't be shipped into the channel after the end of this month.

Big Thanks to TweakTown.com and Rage3D.com for this information. All quotes by Cameron Wilmot of TT.

One of our readers sent me a link to the Rage3D forums where they say that ATI are fully aware of the Radeon 9700?s AGP 8x problem and has a solution for those of you experiencing problems with their new graphics cards after what we reported on the problem yesterday a couple of posts below.

According to ATI, they are now receiving and testing these 8X AGP boards. They are ALSO finding the 9700 does not work at all or works intermittently at best on these boards. Engineering indicated most of the boards already shipped have this problem.

The nice peeps over @ Hardtecs4u.com have sent word that they have got their grubby hands on the latest AMD Processor roadmap. The roadmap shows that the ClawHammer is delayed to Q1 2003...

Just got word from YoungCrow @Darkcrow.co.kr that he's just finished his Matrox Parhelia Review! and here he is trying out some Surround Gaming!

I was thinking of buying a Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz with the price drop! you can now pick one up for £210 inc Vat and out pops Motherboards.org with a new review AMD Athlon XP 2600+ vs Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz! Here's a snip.

I hear it almost every time I am out consulting a job, someone will say is that AMD 2100+ a 2.1GHz CPU or a 1.53Ghz CPU with a complete blank stare on their face. This time we see AMD coming at us with a new .13 Micron solution called the 2600+ (actual clock speed 2.13GHz). AMD has slated this chip to be the killer of the Intel 2.53GHz P4, which is the current affordable high end CPU that dominates the market.

Tecchannel.de have posted what they claim to be the real details for AMD's upcoming Hammer CPU! Here's a quick translation.

AMDs respected processor generation "hammer" is to set yardsticks in the 32 and 64-Bit-Welt. Legends and rumors climb around the CCU we present to you the facts to the Interna of the x86-64-Architektur in the detail.

After last night's story!

Come on peeps get signed up for this Bad ass card! we've had 68 peeps sign up and 1,868 views! so now's your chance to sign up ! the more people that we get the cheaper the card? all will be revealed in a day or so. This just in from Crow @Darkcrow.co.kr a screenshot of the Hercules 3D Prophet 9700 Pro!



Don't she look sweet! she could be sitting in your PC.

If I upset anyone for not posting Links to T-break.com! That's were the screenshot come from! I just thought that people would use the links on Darkcrow.co.kr to click on T-break's Hercules 3D Prophet 9700 Pro Preview! anyway my Apologies.

Just remeber that this Preview was done on a sales sample that the local Hercules distributor passed on to T-Break

The inquirer.com reports Microsoft might be getting into PC hardware business with the help of FIC.

Just got word from Crow @Darkcrow.co.kr that ELSA have lunched the GLADIAC 525 Ultra! I bet you thought they were dead? well ELSA Europe are but ELSA Asia are still alive and kicking! This card is based on the Nvidia Geforce4 TI4200 and is using 3.3 ns MBGA Ultra-speed Memory! This is the first 128mb Geforce4 TI4200 card I've seen that use's this type of memory.

This time INpact-Hardware brings us more information about yet to be announced ABIT OTES card. The site is in french so for the translation on what it says, click on Read More.

AMD Announces Technology to Enable Ten-fold Performance Leap in Future Transistors

AMD AMD today announced it has fabricated the smallest double-gate transistors reported to date using industry standard technology. AMD's research breakthrough could foster the placement of a billion transistors on the same size chip that currently holds 100 million transistors, enabling a vastly richer computing experience. Click on Read More for more info.

At the IDF Intel broke their own clock frequency record when they managed to overclock a future P4 to 4.684 GHz - only for a moment though - Windows XP returned a familiar Blue screen of Death shortly after. However @ 4.1GHz the system appeared to be running well.
Pics and more @ www.Tecchannel.de