This is the first Abit motherboard I've ever used for my personal computer. I'll be switching from the Asus P4PE motherboard. All equipment will remain the same except the board and memory. I'm upgrading my Mom's computer from a P3, 1GHz system and giving her my P4PE. I've no illusions about this upgrade. I was ready to skip the Intel 865 and 875 motherboards all together and I don't expect any real benefits except for the addition of the dual channel DDR and maybe a little better overclocking.

AcesHardware have snagged a AMD Athlon 64 FX that's clocked at 2.8 GHz and have thrown up some benchmarks for you're viewing pleasure! Here's a snip.

So there I was, quite impressed with the performance of the AMD Athlon 64 FX-51. Then I get a call from Denmark: "would you like to give a 2.8 GHz Athlon 64 FX a test run?

Intel will künftig auch Pentium-4- Prozessoren für Notebooks mit der so genannten Hyper-Threading- Technologie (HT) ausstatten. Das teilt der US-amerikanische Chiphersteller mit Deutschlandsitz in Feldkirchen bei München mit. Mit Hilfe von Hyper Threading, das bisher bei Desktop-PCs zum Einsatz kam, können Prozessoren zwei von einander unabhängige Befehle gleichzeitig bearbeiten.

Um AMDs 64bit-Architektur für die x86-Welt zu verstehen, muß man zunächst einmal einen historischen Exkurs zum Anfang der x86-Technologie machen. Vor 20 Jahren stellte die damals hauptsächlich für Speicherchips bekannte Firma Intel einen Mikroprozessor namens 8086 vor, der die eher theoretische Architektur des von-Neumann-Rechners mit einigen Änderungen in die Realität umsetzte. Bis dato wurden Prozessoren speziell für eine Aufgabenstellung entwickelt und konnten dementsprechend auch nur für diese Aufgabe eingesetzt werden. Ein auch nur ähnliches Problem konnte mitunter die Entwicklung eines komplett neuen Prozessors bedeuten. Von Neumanns Rechenmaschine hatte einen entscheidenden Vorteil: sie konnte für beliebige Aufgaben eingesetzt werden, indem sich durch ein Programm gesteuert wurde. Dieses Prinzip findet sich in allen heutigen CPU-Architekturen wieder; sei es x86, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS, ARM oder andere. [...] Den ganzen zehn seitigen Artikel bei K-Hardware

Thanks to Anton Nilsson at Nordic Hardware for sending over the Info:

In our review of the Intel Pentium 4 3.2 GHz Extreme Edition, we mentioned that it was an unlocked engineer copy. We surely hope that the 'real' P4 EEs will be unlocked as well, as this is a CPU for the enthusiast market. We do not have any information about regarding this, however, a piece of very interesting information about Intel's arch-rival AMD's enthusiast processor Athlon 64 FX and its multiplier is at hand.

We have the first photo's of ATi's upcoming Radeon 9800XT graphics card and possible the world?s first photo's of the forthcoming ATI R420 and the Nvidia NV40?

update: We now also have some Photo's of XGI Volari V8 Duo graphics card

Just spotted this bit of news over at Digit-Life.com

Troubled news come from our videolab. Currently there are multiple Radeon 9800SE models in the market that differ just fundamentally! So you can easily be fooled by unfair traders offering you a bad product. But let's put things in order. The clock speeds are 325/540 MHz and everything seems to be good, but! This card has a 128-bit bus! If you remember, we've posted a photo of PowerColor's 9800SE before. The trick is the PowerColor's model bases on 9700 Pro PCB with 256-bit bus. But Sapphire's 9800SE features 128-bit bus only. What you should pay attention to first: Sapphire's 128-bit 9800SE have black PCB, while PowerColor's 256-bit 9800SE have red PCB.

It's the 23rd September 2003 and the NDA's have been lifted off AMD's new Athlon64 processor in the shape of AMD's Athlon 64 3200+ and Athlon 64 FX-51 CPU's! Here's a list of sites that have posted their review! I'll add more links as I find them.

It seems that The Inquirer's little furry friend has scooped the finalised Spec's for ATi's soon to launched Radeon 9800XT and 9600XT graphics cards! and don't forget these babies come with Half -Life 2 inside.

Even though I knew at the time of my last story a week ago , I found it hardly possible to believe that the final clock speed is actually 412MHz for the GPU and 730MHz for memory.

Just spotted this bit of info at Nvnews.net.

This thread in our forums which presents two upcoming products from NVIDIA: NV38 and NV36. The pictures were taken from Computex 2003. Hwupgrade.it has the scoop! click on the Photo for more Pics.

During a meeting at the Computex 2003 exhibition in Taiwan Sapphire had a very interesting prototype to present, the Radeon 9800PRO MAXX! This card has 2 Radeon 9800PRO chipsets on it.

X86-secret have thrown up the second part of their AMD K8 - Athlon 64 vs. All! which includes benchmarks of AMD's Athlon 64 FX-51 and Intel's Pentium 4 Extreme Edition Processor! Here's a google translation as the sites in French.

The purpose of second part of our trilogy, this article is to compare the performances of Athlon 64 with its principal rivals. Having a final platform now, we can note the results of the new racehorse of AMD. After quickly having flown over the improvement brought by K8 architecture , we will present the platforms on tests as well as the various software used. As we wanted this test most complete possible, we compared Athlon 64 with Pentium 4, but also in Opteron and Athlon XP.

Intel is probably a bit disappointed with the overwhelming success of the 865 chipset... despite it being their own chipset, they would obviously want more buyers interested in the more expensive 875 chipset. But alas, things are getting so bleedin' fast that good enough truly is good enough (just hopefully not at the cost of quality). Thus, SIS wants to try and direct some of that budget-enthusiasm towards their new 648FX chipset. Let's see if it is worth your attention.

Nordic Hardware sends word they've snagged some exclusive Info from Abit on a new mainboard the KV8-MAX3 for AMD's upcoming Athlon64 cpu.

The specifications of the board are pretty similar to the ones of ABIT IC7-MAX3 with Gigabit LAN, SecureIDE, FireWire, S-ATA RAID (6 SATA-channels all together) and 6-channels audio. There is one big difference to the IC7-MAX3 though, and that is the integrated ìGuru-CPU we reported about earlier.

Loooking for a ATi Radeon 9800 Pro but not sure which brand to buy? then head this way to OC Prices, who have thrown up their six card shootout!

The Radeon 9800 Pro is without a doubt the dominant force in the high-end graphics card market. It has the performance ? without image quality cheats ? to run the latest Direct X 9.0 titles without having to reduce settings to an unacceptable level.

Just spotted this bit of news over at Rage 3D.

In what's gotta be a weird story, Anandtech is reporting that the RADEON 9800 XT which The Inquirer rumors to be a 415 MHz 9800 Pro derivative has hit store shelves before it's even announced. Anand is one of the more trusted names in the biz, so I guess the name, at least is confirmed.

Sound Blaster® Audigy® 2 ZS delivers 24-bit ADVANCED HD? audio quality playback with incredible 108dB SNR. It delivers the highest resolution audio playback with support for DVD-Audio at 24-bit/192kHz in stereo or 24-bit/96kHz in 5.1 surround in addition to industry leading standards, like THX®-certification and Windows Media 9: 24-bit multi-channel audio format.

The Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS also provides encompassing 7.1 surround sound for Dolby Digital® EX as well as DTS-ES supported DVD movies, any DirectSound 3D games, an improved Creative MediaSource Player and CMSS 3D virtualized 7.1 stereo music. Musicians will also enjoy true 24-bit recording and low latency ASIO support for the ultimate audio recording platform.

Xbitlabs have posted a rumour that Nvidia may have taped out NV40? Here's a rip.

Unofficial sources report that Samsung supplied some 10 thousands of its recently announced 1600MHz GDDR2 memory chips with extreme speed to NVIDIA for samples of the code-named NV40 GPU-based graphics cards.

The Inquirer hat gestern einige Spezifikationen des neuen S3 Grafikchips "Deltachrom" veröffentlicht, wenn die Daten das halten was sie versprechen, kann der Chip ein echter Herausforderer zu ATI und Nvidia sein.

Spezifikationen im Vergleich High End:

Unter mehr gibt es die Daten für Mainstream und Value

The Inquirer has an article about the new DeltaChrome S3 video card. Seems that the F1 model is going to give an hard time to ATI and nVidia thanks to a clearly superior peak bandwidth and a great Pixel Fillrate.