November 1999
Yesterday I mentioned the article over at Tom's Hardware about building an
Athlon overclocking card that would negate soldering on the Athlon's PCB. Well the
device requires a bit of experience with electronics to build though not terribly
complicated but low and behold Trinity Micro has introduced the first (that I know of) pre-built
Athlon OC card that is now for sale. I have no experience with the device but I
believe they are taking orders and I think it will run you about $75 (US) with no doubt a
bit of a wait. I myself have been waiting for the Athlon mobos to mature a little
before I get on the Athlon bandwagon but I have to tell you that after modifying a
friend's Athlon with the soldering technique even at $75 the Trinity Micro device has a
lot of appeal. I am sure that we will see lots of duplicate devices springing up all
over so hopefully the price will come down a bit but considering Trinity Micro's is
hand-built $75 is not all that bad. Special thanks to Doug P. who let me in on the
availability of the device.
|
Trinity Micro's Athlon
overclocking card now for sale. |
James N. was kind enough to let me know about a "SoftFSB"
type program called "BUSRacing"
specifically for MSI boards.
Get a little more detailed info over at Clocking Files which is a new
site worth checking out anyway.
Back in August
I had mentioned a plexi-glass cased system that I had seen at a P4PLan LAN party which had given me the
inspiration for my own project which is currently under construction. Well thanks to
Deth from P4PLan I found out that the gentleman who constructed the original has a site up with a few
details if you would like to tackle a similar project.
For those of you into the Athlon action and considering the Asus K7M mobo
or already have one please be aware that the location of the ATX power connector may limit
your choices for a heatsink. Fortunately PLYCON Computers has done a great article on the subject
and test fitted the more popular choices to see what works and what does not.
Keeping with the Athlon theme today I wanted to let you know that The Tech Zone has good information
including pictures if you want some help tackling the job of removing the Athlon's case and heatsink.
I dont usually put up blurbs about Tom's site but he does have a good article on building an
Athlon overclocking card that uses the "Gold Fingers" edge connector on the
Athlon's PCB. Some electronics skills are required and the project is a little above
my capabilities I think but hopefully somebody will be bringing a similar device to market
soon. The most difficult part to get seems to be the edge connector plug so I have
included this link for information from AMP who has them.
Now some Non-Athlon info...
If you are worried that that shiny new PIII you just bought
may not be what it is marked as then Intel has a Processor
Frequency ID utility that you may be interested in. Unfortunately it only works
with the PIII so the rest of you are not gonna benefit from it.
Agg from Overclockers Australia let me know about this interesting pic...
|
| 3Dfx Voodoo5 9000 AGP!
(shhh, it is a joke picture) |
Everyone have a great day and for those of
you traveling this Thanksgiving holiday please be careful.
Please forgive the lack of updates but I am currently
taking some classes for my full-time job at the Fire Department and trying to spend a bit
more time with my family around the Holidays.
I have been gathering the required materials for my plexi-glass cased
liquid cooled LAN system and doing a little research in regards to using and building with
acrylic. I have also desperately been trying to come up with a method of producing
the needed components in volume so kits may be offered to construct my UH X2 PPGA cooler.
Unfortunately again production of such specialized low volume parts would
cost too much to be practical and it looks like a marketable UH X2 will never be
available. Dont worry though because the modifications required to produce the
UH X2 are very simple and the parts are readily available so I will probably write a
construction article outlining everything in great detail. I also plan on including
a template which can be printed out so the fan shroud can be reproduced accurately with no
special tools required.
Gary from over at Overclockin.com
has been busy and has a few interesting articles to checkout. He has some hot SL35D action going on and some information
regarding some new (to me at least) heatsinks and other cooling componants available
from a company called CoolWhip.
Though Gary does not cover it check out the liquid cooling system at the
CoolWhip site.
3Dfx has announced preliminary information regarding their
next graphics cards the Voodoo 4 and 5 including up to 128MB of video memory. Get a
few more details from the new site Hardware
HQ.
Well the LAN party hosted by P4P which had previously been postponed
by severe weather a few weeks ago got under way last Saturday and was a complete blast.
Even though I am definitely not very good at the first person shooter games I
still have a lot of fun being a target. These get-togethers are a really good time
and an excellent opportunity to share and learn some hardware knowledge with others.
If you have thought about attending a LAN but are a little shy then dont worry
cause there are a lot of new friends to be made. Saturday's LAN got off to a slow
start because of some network troubles but when it got straightened out the frag-fest was
on. Thanks to PCNut Computers I
had a bunch of very cool hardware prizes to give out some of which were raffled off and
others awarded for tournament prizes. Everybody had a chance to win something
regardless of skill level since some creative ideas for games were thought of such as the
Quake 3 Arena Suicide tournament. The object was to see who could jump their
character to his/her death the most often in a given time period. Keep your eyes on P4P's site for the next LAN event
announcement.
|
| Some of the P4P LAN prize
winners. |
Speaking of gaming the new Quake III Arena demo TEST is
out including bots for practicing. I played a little today and I have to say I
really am impressed. Go to Planet
Quake for download locations and other Quake information.
Proton
Computers is giving away a Celeron 366 PPGA tested stable @ 605 MHz along with an
ALPHA PFH6035 H/S (YS Tech fan) and a MSI 6905 converter. Go get yourself entered in
the giveaway.
I got word on "not just another hardware site"
last week I wanted to let you folks know about. Very professional and high quality
news, reviews, and other information at PC
Mechanic. Also be sure to check out their affiliate Maximum 3D for the latest in today's
hottest gaming action.
Overclockin.com
has been running their Athlon 500 at 800MHz! Get the details from Gary here.
I will be starting work on my plexi-glass cased self
contained liquid cooled LAN system soon. Here are some of the cooling system's
components such as the 12v pump, water block, and large 16 pass cooler. Stay tuned
for construction details including parts sources...
Man, talk about a deal! With all the action
revolving around AMD's Athlon processor lately this couldn't have better timing. PCNut is running a special on the ASUS K7M
Athlon motherboard for on-line orders and at $173 it is definitely a good buy. The
ASUS K7M Athlon board is already considered the "first choice" for basing an
Athlon system so don't miss out on this limited opportunity if you have been considering
building a high performance Athlon system. The stock wont last long at this price so get
on over there and put an order in fast.
Something I came across yesterday but forgot to mention
was a little detail concerning the Athlon motherboard SOYO should be releasing soon.
If your interested here is a PDF
file from SOYO's FTP site concerning the "SY-K7AIA". Man what is up
with the poor location of the ATX power connector on some of these Athlon boards?
Looks like another challenge if your interested in a large heatsink.
|
SOYO's SY-K7AIA Athlon
motherboard |
For the "Bubbleboy" email virus update patch go
to Microsoft's update site here. If you don't know about this new email virus or you want
to learn more check out this info from ZDNet.
My review of the SOYO
SY-6BA+IV is now up. I had a few problems last week with the system but it
turned out to be a power supply going bad. The 6BA+IV is now my favorite mobo so if
you are in the market then I highly suggest giving PCNut a call and ordering one of these sweet setups for yourself.
I'm taking a couple of classes related to my fire department career right
now which is taking up a lot of my time so news updates may be a little less frequent for
a while.
It is rumored that AMD will be demonstrating a 1GHz Athlon at Comdex next
week. Stay tuned for the details...
I got word a few days ago that version 4.12 of MotherBoard Monitor is now
available so go pay my pal Alex a visit here.
3D Spotlight
came up with a well written guide for tweaking your modem.
If your interested in getting another view on
the GlobalWIN FDP-32 heatsink then see what Overclocking Extreme has to say about it. Here is my PPGA Cooler Shootout
article if you want to refresh your memory about what I thought.
If you are interested in starting your own home network then see what 2CPU.com came up with concerning Server Building 101.
Overclockin.com
has a new look so go pay them a visit and tell Gary I said "hi".
I got home from work the other morning with the intent on
finishing my SY-6BA+IV review since I have now had a couple of weeks to make sure it is
running smooth and I couldn't get that machine to boot up. The green mobo power LED
would light up and the fans would spin for a split second but thats it and I noticed a
"burning" smell. Well I didn't have time to mess with it till this morning
and it seems that the power supply bit the dust since it is working fine after changing it
out to a new one, perhaps all those peltier experiments pushed the old power supply a
little too hard.
I got word from Ian over at 2CoolTek that he has done his own cooler comparison testing. Ian
made a "test rig" based on a TEC to supply a thermal load to the heatsinks which
is a method I have considered in the past but not followed through on. The info
makes for good reading so go check out the article here.
|
2CoolTek's TEC based
cooler testing setup. |
For those of you interested in obtaining
Abit's new version of the BE6 called what else but the BE6-II then go pay Outside Loop Computers a visit since
they should have them in stock starting today. They also are having a blowout sale
on their remaining stock of Celeron 300a processors at 540MHz with most of them at 2.0
volts.
Overclocking
Extreme has some brief info up on modifying a Viper 770 TNT2 by adding a larger
heatsink and fan to the core chipset.
I heard from 2CPU.com
and they have a new look if you have not checked them out recently.
3D
Spotlight has posted a review of Videologic's Vortex2 based soundcard the SonicVortex2.
Because of the low price of this A3D 2.0 capable soundcard it should be
a consideration for every serious gamer out there.
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Copyright © 2000 by John Bogush
