Uwe Scheffel

The popular "DivX" MPEG-4-Codec takes on a professional look with a new start-up, new developers and marketing, plus a cool Web site and a product that millions are using. On the streets they call it the "MP3 of video." But is it strong enough to survive?

Intel's support helped to make the DivX codec considerably faster, primarily due the SSE optimization. Athlon XP owners can also enjoy the benefits of this improvement, provided that they use the proper utilities.

The Pentium III Tualatin with 0.13 micron process is now available with a double-wide L2 cache. The 512 kB helps the Tualatin reach higher speeds.

The successor to the Matrox RT2000 is now available for $999. This video editing system targets hobby filmmakers and semi-professionals, adding compatibility with any 3D graphics adapter as well as Windows 2000 support.

Recently, all the talk about NVIDIA has been around nForce and Xbox. However, the company's core business is still PC graphics boards. After a few delays, the long-awaited GeForce3 cards are now hitting the shelves. We tested boards from Asus, Elsa, Hercules, Gainward, Leadtek, MSI and Visiontek.

Whether in the design department of a multinational company or in a small engineering firm - no designer can make do without a workstation equipped with a powerful OpenGL graphics card. Among the non plus ultra of graphics cards - the Elsa Gloria III, based on NVIDIA's Quadro2 Pro chip, ATI's Fire GL4 and 3Dlabs3Dlabs's Wildcat II 5110 - competition to attract customers is stiff.

Although NVIDIA dominates the 3D chip market, the Kyro II finally offers an alternative to mainstream products like the GeForce2 MX and GTS. Hercules is offering this competitive graphics card at cut-rate prices.

Matrox was the first with Dualhead. Then came GeForce2 MX Twinview by NVIDIA. Now ATi is the third producer in the trio with a graphics card capable of supporting two monitors. This product, marketed under the name Hydravision, even offers support for monitors with different resolutions.

7 new socket A boards from Acorp, ECS, MSI, NMC, QDI and Transcend join the test field of a total of 23 KT133 boards. Three of them have surprises in store.

VIA's KT133 chipset has been joined by the 686B-Southbridge. Finally, the first boards from AOpen, Biostar, Luckystar, MSI, and Soltek offer the long-expected UltraATA/100 feature for hard disks.

A new workstation graphics card equipped with 64 MB DDR SGRAM challenges NVIDIA's Quadro2 Pro. We let both graphics cards fight it out on our Athlon, Pentium III and Pentium 4 test platforms.

In the price range between 150 and 200 dollars ATi tries to re-assert itself. With the 32 MB version of the Radeon card the graphics specialist offers a typical mainstream product, which tries to compete with GeForce2 MX and Voodoo4 4500.

Platforms with VIA's KT133 chipset are now more cost effective than boards for Intel processors. Currently the Duron offers the best price/performance ratio. Additionally, the Athlon is the winner of the performance competition.

In this test we compare the 32 MB version of this GeForce2 GTS graphics card with the competitors Aopen PA256 Pro, Asus AGP V7700 Pure, Elsa Gladiac and Leadtek Winfast GeForce2, that are all based on nVidia's newest offspring.

With GeForce as the performance leader in the game market, Nvidia is now pushing into the workstation market. In our test the Quadro competes against OpenGL cards from Diamond, 3Dlabs and Evans & Sutherland.

Pentium IV Willamette 1,5 GHz, Itanium, Timna, Serial ATA and USB 2.0 are the news. But behind the scenes of the Intel Developer Forum strange things happened.

MPEG, video capture and video editing characterize the new trends on the market. The first all-in-one boards have finally become available at reasonable prices. We will take a look at the Voodoo3 3500TV, the Marvel G400TV, ATI's All-in-Wonder 128, the Erazor III Video from Elsa and the AGP-V3800 Ultra Deluxe from Asus.