• Sapphire-ATI's Pentium 4 board reviewed
• VIA said to push back KT400A and P4X600 production to 2003
• AMD postpones 90nm products to 2004
• PCI-SIG to develop PCI-X 1066 spec
• AMD 2400MP to arrive next month
• Console makers to ship games on DVD

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Bitboys has long been a mystery within the graphics industry. Many consider them a joke, few are loyal followers. Yet behind all of this a real company exists. They are, without question, a company of truly dedicated people who strongly desire to do something good. How do I know this? I used to work for them. For nearly a year I was employed at their Dallas office, until shortly before it was ultimately closed down. This experience has provided me with a sufficient amount of insight in the company and its history to relate the real story behind Bitboys.

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Soyo take every opportunity to show the world they can't be outdone in terms of style and features. This is the current flagship Socket A board from Soyo. Based on VIA's KT400 Northbridge chipset and is aptly given the name SY-KT400 DRAGON Ultra Platinum. The marketing dudes at Soyo have even worked a meaning for DRAGON and it goes a little something like this :-

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Of course, in the spheres where the GeForce4 Ti 4200 and Ti 4400 (and the cheapest samples of Ti 4600) are thriving ATI has nothing to offer. The flagship RADEON 9700 Pro is still overpriced, but are there many customers out there willing to buy a card at $350-370? The largest profits are pouring into the pockets of companies manufacturing Ti 4200. This processor is still beyond any competition in its price niche.

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With all the rage about various graphic card engines over the last few months which has been spurred on by the recently released ATI stable Nvidia have found themselves under the spotlight. However manufacturers are still going to great lengths to promote NVIDIA based products and this card we have here is a prime example based on the new NV28 which as a few enhancements over the older NV25 engine primarily found on the TI-4200 family of cards.

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Speed and data security are the main arguments in favor of RAID systems. Be careful with onboard controllers, however; their features are rather limited.

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CATALYST™ DX9 BRC0 display drivers are to be used in conjuction with Microsoft's DirectX9 Release Candidate (RC). This driver is currently a Beta Release Candidate (BRC) and is being provided to permit users to experience the most advanced graphics capabilities available. Please keep in mind that this driver is a Beta Release Candidate and may have outstanding bugs at present (Please refer to the errrata notes for known issues).

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ABIT has been a leading manufacturer of motherboards for quite some time now. They have provided some of the best boards for the overclocking community as well as just great boards in general. Recently ABIT released the IT7 MAX 2 featuring serial ATA. The ABIT IT7 MAX 2 motherboard is brother to the IT7 MAX. Essentially, it is the same motherboard but this one has serial ATA.

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Corsair "Extreme Memory Speed" memory modules hit your PC like a bottle of Viagra. XMS3200-C2 RAM is factory certified to run on a 200MHZ bus with a CAS latency of 2, 1T command rate, and 3T timings on the Precharge and RAS-CAS delay. These timings can be set very aggressively on a 166MHZ bus at CAS:2 and 2T Precharge and RAS-CAS delay. 512 Megabytes packaged on a 6ns - 32M x 8 DDR SDRAMS Dual Inline Memory Module. The memory is integrated with an aluminum heat spreader, either black or platinum colored. Though some companies are trimming down their warranties, Corsair still offers a lifetime warranty on their XMS memory modules.

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I need a cold cathode for my new case! Well, apart from what I've just said to be true, sometimes even computer cases have a bit of a "fashion trend" to follow. There's no real use to have a case with a large side window, if your viewers can't even see what is inside it. Our friends at Lux-Design sent us a nice looking cold cathode light kit, and seeing as that I am in need of some interior lighting, I took this opportunity to see how well this product works.

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What we have now is a full frontal shot of the case, minus the front panel. The front panel is secured by the four plastic grips that you see in the corners. They hold onto the plastic pegs on the panel securely, yet it doesn't require too much work to pop the panel off. No, you're not seeing things; those are more thumbscrews surrounding the internal 3.5" bays. Yet another way Lian-Li has designed this case to be easy to work on...removable 3.5" drive cage.

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The month turned out to be quite controversial. On the one hand, no products were actually released. On the other hand, MicroProcessor Forum held in October had certain consequences. But let me start with the current events instead of the future plans.

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The Taisol Heatpipe CMK702151A provides above average cooling performance while maintaining a very low noise level. For the moderate overclocker, and even the casual gamer this heatsink would provide more than adequate cooling while allowing you to actually enjoy your game, music, etc. Because of the unique, somewhat unorthodox design, I was suspicious of it being able to perform decently when I started this review... but at the end I was thoroughly convinced of the cooling capabilities.

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