Reviews
Microprocessor Articles |
Technical Articles |
How-To Guides |
Reviews |
Graphics Articles |
Misc.
|
Barton: 512 KB Athlon XP Reviewed
By Johan De Gelas on Monday, February 10, 2003 12:09 AM EST
In the shadow of its big brother is Barton, the first AMD processor with 512 KB of L2-cache integrated in the die. This exclusive 512 KB L2-cache works together with the 128 KB L1-cache (64...
|
Granite Bay: Memory Technology Shootout
By Johan De Gelas on Friday, December 20, 2002 7:56 AM EST
The newest addition to the Pentium 4 chipset lines has been Granite Bay. Granite Bay is not your average Pentium 4 chipset, using two channels of DDR266 can provide the 4.2 GB/s peak...
|
A Quick Look at the Fastest Apple PowerMac
By Johan De Gelas on Thursday, December 5, 2002 2:41 PM EST
While the Apple marketing might have lost all sense of reality, it doesn't mean that the fastest PowerMac can not be a powerful computer. I had a very brief encounter with their fastest...
|
3.06 GHz Pentium 4 and HyperThreading
By Johan De Gelas on Thursday, November 14, 2002 1:04 AM EST
Enter Simultaneous Multi Threading or HyperThreading as Intel likes to call it. The idea is to execute two threads, or tasks, at the same time on the same processor (read more about threads...
|
Faster Still: The 2.8 GHz Pentium 4
By Johan De Gelas on Monday, August 26, 2002 1:38 AM EDT
When we didn't hear anything special from Intel, I initially thought the 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 would be nothing more than a speed bump. But then Ken, a regular poster at our messageboard,...
|
Athlon XP 2600+ Reviewed
By Johan De Gelas on Tuesday, August 20, 2002 5:31 PM EDT
History repeats itself again, because today, AMD launches the Thoroughbred Athlon XP 2600+ at no less than 2.133 GHz!
And contrary to its 2200+ brother, this processor not only breaks the...
|
Matrox in the New Millennium: Parhelia Reviewed
By Brian Neal on Wednesday, July 24, 2002 6:54 AM EDT
Matrox's new Parhelia is an all-new design, incorporating modern features such as Direct X 8.1-compliant pixel and vertex shaders. The G550's 166 MHz 64-bit DDR SDRAM memory interface has...
|
0.13� Athlon XP: Your Next Upgrade?
By Johan De Gelas on Sunday, June 9, 2002 11:59 PM EDT
At last, AMD's 0.13� Athlon XP, codenamed Thoroughbred, has finally arrived
for the mass market. This new 0.13� Athlon XP has a model rating of 2200+ and runs at 1.8 GHz. It has the same...
|
Professional Grade Revisited
By Johan De Gelas on Thursday, May 30, 2002 7:23 AM EDT
The battle in the professional OpenGL market is heating up and NVIDIA is no longer satisfied with delivering budget cards like those based around the Quadro 2. With the Quadro 4, however,...
|
CPUs For Workstations and Small Business Servers
By Johan De Gelas on Friday, April 19, 2002 12:32 AM EDT
Workstation applications such as 3D animation, 3D rendering, finite element analysis, photo editing, and so forth are known to be very CPU intensive. These are exactly the applications that...
|
Pentium 4 Platform Shootout
By Johan De Gelas on Thursday, March 7, 2002 5:09 AM EST
In this series of articles, we'll go in search of the best platform for
the Pentium 4. In the first article, we will evaluate the current
state of memory and Pentium 4 motherboard and...
|
Socket A Shootout
By Johan De Gelas on Wednesday, February 13, 2002 8:40 AM EST
We've covered a number of workstations and professional applications lately, so we felt it was time to take a break from such systems and take a look at the Athlon / Socket A platform from...
|
Intel vs AMD: 2 GHz Northwood vs Athlon XP 2000+
By Johan De Gelas on Monday, January 7, 2002 5:19 AM EST
Intel has executed very well in the process technology department, and the Pentium 4 is now being produced on the company's new 0.13-micron process with copper interconnects as opposed to...
|
Professional Grade
By Johan De Gelas on Wednesday, January 2, 2002 8:40 PM EST
Our previous article focused on the CPU power of the best workstations
available, but this review will take a closer look at another equally important aspect of workstation performance,...
|
The Workstation Guide: Part 1
By Johan De Gelas on Sunday, December 9, 2001 2:50 PM EST
So this article is written for the creative people, who are searching
to build or buy an affordable number cruncher to run their favorite workstation
application. Maybe you already have...
|
In Full Force With Nvidia's nForce
By Johan De Gelas on Monday, October 29, 2001 11:21 AM EST
When the specs of Nvidia's nForce first became known, expectations ran
(and still run) high among hardware enthusiasts. Today, we present you the first retail board which is based upon...
|
Upgrading to eXtreme Performance
By Johan De Gelas on Tuesday, October 16, 2001 9:59 AM EDT
AMD's latest showpiece has been baptized Athlon XP, with XP standing
for eXtreme Performance... It is no surprise that AMD's latest
and greatest performs very well, as the Athlon XP is a...
|
The DRDRAM Evolution: PC1066
By Johan De Gelas on Wednesday, September 19, 2001 12:54 AM EDT
"Controversial," that is the least you can say about Rambus. The California
based company has engaged in a host of high-profile lawsuits against well
respected semiconductor companies...
|
i845: SDRAM and the Pentium 4
By Johan De Gelas on Monday, September 10, 2001 6:08 AM EDT
Today, Intel introduces the i845 chipset (codenamed Brookdale),
a new Pentium 4 chipset supporting SDRAM. With 256 MB PC133 SDRAM DIMMs currently selling in the neighborhood
of $25 to...
|
The New and Improved Duron
By Johan De Gelas on Tuesday, August 21, 2001 11:23 PM EDT
Subtle improvements such as larger TLBs and hardware data prefetch help give the venerable Athlon MP the edge against the Pentium 4 in many cases despite that chip's 40% clockrate...
|
Workstation Battle Royale
By Johan De Gelas on Wednesday, August 15, 2001 3:35 AM EDT
Today, the Dual AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz configuration goes head-to-head with the Dual
Xeon 1.7 GHz power of Compaq's EVO 6000, Dell's Dimension 530 and Fujitsu-Siemens Celsius 670. But this...
|
The Matrox G550
By Johan De Gelas on Tuesday, August 7, 2001 12:42 AM EDT
Matrox launched the G550 on june 19th 2001, but there were no samples
available. Today, the G550 is finally available and we present you the
first benchmarks run on the G550. We got some...
|
2001 Budget Video Roundup
By Johan De Gelas on Monday, June 25, 2001 6:07 AM EDT
Shopping around for the parts to your next budget PC? One of the most important
components of any PC today is the video card, as it has tremendous influence over how your system handles...
|
Athlon MP: Redefining the Workstation
By Johan De Gelas on Tuesday, June 5, 2001 8:36 AM EDT
No longer satisfied with being the company that produces the fastest
desktop processor, today AMD makes its first effort to set up a beachhead
in the workstation territory with the AMD...
|
SiS635T: A Tualatin Twilight
By Johan De Gelas on Wednesday, May 30, 2001 9:42 AM EDT
The SIS635T is SIS' first DDR chipset. Just like the SIS730, it is a single-chip solution. Internally, the "southbridge" and "northbridge" are connected by a 1.2 GB/s pathway. SIS calls...
|
GeForce 3 and Kyro II: Performance In-Depth
By Johan De Gelas on Tuesday, May 8, 2001 12:36 AM EDT
This time around, we are taking a bit more of a real-world approach to things. We examine how the performance of these accelerators scales with different CPUs, their performance in...
|
Technological Leap: GeForce 3 and Kyro II
By Johan De Gelas on Friday, April 27, 2001 11:58 AM EDT
Despite its name, the GeForce 3 is far more of a technological leap over its predecessor than has been the case with previous generations. In fact, the GeForce 3 is currently the only...
|
VIA's KT266: The Socket A Champion?
By Johan De Gelas on Tuesday, April 3, 2001 1:17 AM EDT
The VIA KT266 is rather late to the DDR party, but is one of the most
anticipated chipsets around. MSI sent us the K7T266 Pro (MS-6380) and
we are proud to present you with an in-depth...
|
The 1.333 GHz Athlon: A 1.5 GHz CPU In Disguise
By Johan De Gelas on Tuesday, March 20, 2001 7:32 AM EST
Athlons in anticipation of faster Pentium 4 processors from Intel. In this article, we will investigate the performance of this
new chip. Speed bumps are always just a little bit faster,...
|
Pentium III Motherboard Roundup
By Johan De Gelas on Tuesday, March 13, 2001 7:06 PM EST
The Pentium III may be slightly slower than the Athlon, but there are still a lot of people that prefer Intel processors to those from AMD. At Ace's Hardware, we love new architectures, but...
|
The KT133A Decision, Part 2
By Johan De Gelas on Friday, February 23, 2001 7:53 AM EST
While games are interesting and often very demanding, but many of us use our PCs predominantly
for our professional workload. In this second part we will investigate which "non-game"...
|
The KT133A Decision, Part 1
By Johan De Gelas on Friday, February 9, 2001 8:37 AM EST
With CPUs running over 1 GHz, while RAM is still running at only
133 MHz, it is clear that memory latency and bandwidth have become a
severe bottleneck for many applications. Is DDR worth...
|
2001 Hardware Upgrade Guide
By Johan De Gelas on Thursday, January 11, 2001 2:11 AM EST
There is no doubt about it, PC gaming can be an expensive hobby.
For the latest and greatest games, only the latest and greatest hardware will do. In this review, we show you no less than...
|
SiS730: Budget Duron Chipset
By Johan De Gelas on Monday, November 27, 2000 7:57 AM EST
SiS' first Athlon chipset, the SiS730, is a highly integrated
solution which combines both the northbridge, southbridge, and a
128-bit 3D graphics accelerator into a single 672-pin BGA...
|
The Next Generation: Intel's Pentium 4
By Johan De Gelas on Monday, November 20, 2000 4:39 AM EST
Finally, it is here! A brand-new seventh generation
processor from Intel. At last we will find out how good the new architecture
is that Doug Carmean, Michael Upton, Glen Hinton and...
|
DDR SDRAM: A Samurai Delivers
By Johan De Gelas on Wednesday, September 20, 2000 10:38 PM EDT
For months and months now we have waited. We have heard the
promise of new memory technologies repeatedly for years,
especially ever since Intel's Rambus DRAM debut with the i820...
|
Upgrade Decisions: Better CPU or Video Card?
By Johan De Gelas on Monday, September 11, 2000 8:10 AM EDT
We start off by assuming you have either a Celeron or K6-2 with a TNT2
video card, a fairly common configuration. We then test two different
video card upgrades and three video card...
|
Matrox G450: Budget DualHead Graphics
By Johan De Gelas on Tuesday, September 5, 2000 12:12 AM EDT
Alhough it has been quiet in Montreal since the launch of the
G400, Matrox has made it clear they are alive and kicking with their
introduction today of the G450. Matrox has become...
|
1.1 GHz Athlon: Ultimate Gaming?
By Johan De Gelas on Sunday, August 27, 2000 10:56 PM EDT
Every time AMD or Intel introduces a faster CPU, the hardware press
questions whether all that processing power is useful. So, we decided that for
this review we will focus on games. Are...
|
Cyrix III, An Alternative Approach
By Johan De Gelas on Sunday, August 6, 2000 11:01 PM EDT
You probably already know that Via's new Cyrix III, codenamed Samuel, is not exactly a high performance chip. So why devote time to a review of this chip? Because the VIA Cyrix III is...
|
ATI Back In Action: Radeon
By Johan De Gelas on Thursday, July 27, 2000 4:37 AM EDT
There is absolutely no doubt that nVidia has
been the
technological leader in the 3D-gaming for the past nine months. Kudos
to the nVidia
engineers, but we, customers and hardware...
|
Video Card Buyer's Guide: Top of the Line 3D
By Johan De Gelas on Saturday, June 24, 2000 9:12 AM EDT
...
|
AMD's Duron: Salvation For Tight Budgets?
By Johan De Gelas on Monday, June 19, 2000 1:20 AM EDT
Although the K6-2 is still a popular processor in OEM PCs, the K6-2
can not compete with Intel's low-budget offering, the Celeron. Today AMD is ready to launch a new attack on the...
|
Codename: Thunderbird
By Brian Neal on Monday, June 5, 2000 7:29 AM EDT
Codenamed Thunderbird, the new Athlon with ondie cache promises better performance, higher clock-speeds, and lower costs. Does it deliver?...
|
Evaluating Stability: The EPOX EP-7KXA
By Brian Neal on Friday, April 21, 2000 3:07 AM EDT
The EP-7KXA from EPOX was one of the first of the so-called "second generation"
Athlon/Slot-A motherboards, and as such, it has demonstrated great improvements
in stability over many of...
|
Video Cards: The Top Four
By Johan De Gelas on Sunday, April 9, 2000 5:13 AM EDT
From time to time we like to dream about the fastest things out there. While we await the next generation of computer gaming rockets with baited breath, wouldn't you like to take the...
|
Ultimate 3D Video Deathmatch!
By Johan De Gelas on Monday, January 24, 2000 2:49 AM EST
Yep, that's right. Your humble servant has been testing fourteen different
videocards, nine different videochips on five different platforms. More
than 200 benchmarks on 7 different games!...
|
The 1000 MHz Sys Cold Fusion
By Brian Neal on Tuesday, January 18, 2000 7:50 AM EST
The Sys Cold Fusion 1000 is the fastest single processor system in the world in integer performance as of January, 2000. How does it stack up? Find out......
|
Digicom Pro 2000 - Budget Athlon PCs?
By Johan De Gelas on Monday, January 3, 2000 12:20 AM EST
a small Taiwanese company, was so kind to send us one of the first boards
based on the Shinner design. The most remarkable feature of this board
is its price: less than $100!...
|
Counter Strike: Athlon 800
By Johan De Gelas on Monday, December 20, 1999 1:33 AM EST
Both Intel and AMD have caught us off-guard with their new 800 MHz chips.
Indeed, we weren't expecting these fast-clocked CPUs so soon....
|
Video and the Athlon, In Search of a Match
By Johan De Gelas on Thursday, September 30, 1999 1:59 AM EDT
AMD shipped the Athlon test units with Nvidia's powerful TNT2 chipset. A good choice, considering the excellent performance this duo has achieved in our benchmarks, but is there an...
|
Intel Coppermine 733 versus AMD Athlon 700
By Johan De Gelas on Tuesday, October 26, 1999 12:18 AM EDT
The engineers in Santa Clara continuously improve their P6-core (introduced in '95 in the form of the Pentium Pro), and squeeze more and more out out of the Al interconnect process...
|
Guillemot 3D Prophet and GeForce 256, a New Standard?
By Johan De Gelas on Monday, October 11, 1999 10:51 AM EDT
The impressive specifications of nVidia's Geforce 256 are nothing short
of revolutionary and nVidia's new baby has been the center of interest
of the hardware community the past few...
|
A Long Look at the GeForce 256
By Johan De Gelas on Saturday, November 6, 1999 1:24 AM EST
Nvidia's new offering is promising a real revolution: an integrated
transformation and light engine that can sustain 15 million fully
lit and filtered triangles per second, paired with a...
|
The i820 Chipset: Intel's Redemption During Stormy Athlon Times?
By Johan De Gelas on Wednesday, September 29, 1999 2:00 AM EDT
Just a few months
ago, Intel reigned supreme: Intel's fastest offering, the PIII-550 MHz was
100 MHz faster than their closest competitor's chip: the AMD K6-III 450.
Now, the tables have...
|
Clash of Silicon, The Athlon 650
By Johan De Gelas on Wednesday, September 29, 1999 1:59 AM EDT
Does AMD's promising new Athlon processor, also known as the K7, boldly go where no desktop CPU has gone before? Has AMD kept their promise, and is there more than just hot air to all the...
|
Pentium III-600, Intel's New Heavyweight
By Johan De Gelas on Wednesday, September 29, 1999 1:59 AM EDT
Next month, the Athlon will be on the market and anyone who has looked at the benchmarks that AMD has made public knows that Intel will be facing fierce competition. Intel would not be...
|
The Kids are Alright, A Review of the Last K6
By Brian Neal on Wednesday, September 29, 1999 1:59 AM EDT
The K6-III, AMD's last processor in the line that made them famous. It's been an interesting trip, and a rocky one as well. From stiff competition, limited market acceptance, and...
|
