• "Hammer" to hold 100 million transistors
• State e-tax plans worry taxpayer groups
• Intel: Next Itanium to run at 1.5GHz
• Report: AOL execs hid dubious deals from accountants
• New worm, Winevar, packs a punch
• Firm pays $1.6 million in Net scam case

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As the resident cheap-o at guru3d, the Fortissimo 3 (the FF3) is a hard bargain to beat. It is tough to get excited about a sound card these days, since motherboard manufacturers simply give them away for free. Some motherboards even have tubes. Hercules’ FF3 definitely has got something to get excited about: 8 channels of sound. It's got to be some record or something. It was also impervious to crashes. Are you excited yet?

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The roundup will concentrate on a few key issues with the cards. These cards being aimed at home users, therefore the emphasis being on ease of use and price rather than pure quality, we are testing them... in our home, with a standard indoor TV antenna. Bearing in mind that the 10 year old Sony 21" Trinitron using the same aerial, picks up four UK terrestrial channels (BBC1, BBC2, ITV, Channel4) with no visible interference, it would be interesting to see what the TV cards could make of the same situation.

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With that big 667mhz FSB label right on the box, its clear that Albatron stands behind this board as an overclocking champ. We certainly have no reason to doubt them, as the last Albatron board we tested, the PX845G Pro II was able to make 190mhz FSB. Can Albatron deliver another knockout with the new i845PE based PX845PE Pro IIS? Lets find out!

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Yes we did it again, some more Nvidia drivers leaked for the Driverheaven board members, this time we have our hands on newer sets for both Windows 2000/XP and Windows 98/ME.

Both 41.09 sets are dated 18 Nov 2002, and are so hot I havent had the chance to test them

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There are three brick walls that any overclock will hit which can be compensated for. As was previously discussed, the first obstacle to overcome is heat. This is the easiest obstacle to overcome, simply by employing some form of cooling solution. That can be as simple as a CPU cooler upgrade, or as complex as a state-of-the-art phase-change cooling system. The other scenarios that will hinder your overclocking progress need some understanding of motherboard and CPU design. After explaining how the system works at stock speeds we will identify why it hinders higher overclocks, and then describe how to compensate for it. This article will address higher front side bus values and their effect on the entire system, while a future article will look at processor design and how to compensate for running a CPU beyond it’s designed frequency

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Having witnessed Intel's implementation of Hyper-threading Technology on their newest 3.06 GHz Pentium4 processor, we asked Damon how AMD plans to play the ball game. Damon frankly replied that AMD has no plans to implement a similar type of technology on their CPUs for several reasons.

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When we look at the multi-texturing fill rate, the 9500 PRO takes off from the normal 9500 and is now much closer to the 9700 PRO. Multi-texturing on the R300 requires multiple clock cycles to achieve, so here 8 pixels per clock are not trying to be squeezed through the memory bus. In this sense, the 8x1 (pixel pipelines by texture sample units per pipeline) design on 9500 PRO is acting more like the 4x2 design we've seen on other 128-bit cards such as Radeon 8500 or GeForce 4 Ti.

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Want more? No problem :

ATI RADEON 9500 Pro Performance Analysis @ Hot Hardware

ATI's Radeon 9500 Pro - Now Shipping & Faster @ AnandTech

ATI's Radeon 9500 Pro graphics card @ The Tech Report

RAM is a hot commodity for hardcore and performance hungry users alike. Sometimes, there's confusion about whether RAM can actually give you a performance boost or not, as in the case of DDR400 performance results from tests like our KT4 Ultra and Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra reviews, but here we found that that increasing your memory bandwidth with faster, low latency RAM can lead to measurable performance increases.

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The good people over at PCToys.com have joined in on the fun and sent us a ton of cool stuff to be given away in our Annual Christmas Giveaway! With so much stuff being donated, the giveaway is now extended all the way through the New Year! I guess this is now a Christmas / New Year Giveaway... Free stuff rules, who cares what we call it!!! Here is a list of the prizes that will be given away over the next two months:

December 2002 Prize List
Sponsored By Overclockers Hideout
Clear Project Box
Chrome 45
Z4 Intercooler Kit
Renegade™ Water Cooled Case

January 2003 Prize List
Sponsored By PCToys
DDRMAXX Memory Heatspreaders (4 Winners)
MobileMaxx Removable Hard Drive Racks with extra tray (3 Winners)
Stealth Cooling Fans (4 Winners)
Dual Cold Cathode Light Kits (8 Winners)
Vantec 470w Stealth Power Supply (1 Winner)
Vantec Nexus Multi-Function Panel (1 Winner)

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The case we are looking at today is the V770 ATX blue and silver coloured case from Verre. Over the years, the way PC cases are made has changed dramatically and today's cases have turned away from just housing your motherboard, components and various drives, to being more fancy with colours, fans, neon lighting and all aluminium constuction.

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So you just bought your new case with really big windows on top and on the side panel, and you're wondering what to do with it? If interior case lighting isn't your fancy, then you can consider getting some neon glow wires and create some wireframe art for other people to see. What's so special about neon wire is that it can be shaped to just about anything, and the light is visible from any angle, so you can really let your creativity shine.

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The version released today is 1.0-0248, and introduces some advanced capabilities and support including:

-- Added PCI ID support for nForce2 MCP2-T and MCP2-A to the i810_audio driver.
-- Cleanup of spec file and Makefiles
-- SRPMs and tar files now use local system's i810_audio.c file, and complain if not there (this makes them more distribution independent)
-- Changed code to compile properly with gcc3.X and gcc2.X
-- Added support for Mandrake 9.0 and Red Hat 8.0
-- nForce2 support for network driver

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Having this new mill was going to prove invaluable for making the Radeon 9700 cooler, due to the more cluttered layout of the ATI card having components around the ram chips on the PCB, some of which protrude higher than the ram.....
I decided to tackle the hardest block first, this being the frontside ram block, needing to fit in an area most cluttered for surface mounted components, along with space allowance considerations for the VPU block, it wasn't going to be as easy as past block builds..

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