Thomas Pabst

Two days ago I was supplying you with my findings and thoughts of Intel's new Super-CPU. At that time I assumed that the instability issues were caused by the lack of a micro code update. Today I received this update, but the instability remains. I also found another well-known hardware reviewer who ran into similar problems. This raises one serious question. Is Intel shipping faulty processors?

After the shameful defeat in the Giga Hertz race Intel is now trying to leapfrog AMD. By squeezing the last bit of performance out of the well-known Coppermine core Intel created a very fast processor. The fact that it is the most unreliable and instable CPU Intel has ever released equalizes the fact that it will hardly be available.

ATi's new Radeon chip has been released a bit ahead of schedule, and now it will have to show if it's smart HyperZ technology is able to beat NVIDIA's forceful GeForce2 GTS. The card with the most new features will have to stand up against the gladiators from 3dfx and NVIDIA. Will shrewdness win over pure muscles?

The riddle has been solved. We are proud to announce that we can now present all the right settings of the little copper bridges on the new AMD processors for each clock speed. We've also got some suggestion on how to open or close those little bridges. Overclocking Thunderbird and Duron will now be a lot easier than it used to be with Athlon and it will work on any motherboard.

All those many different GeForce2 GTS cards might already bore you, but Gainward has got something special for the performance freaks with big wallets. The CARDEXpert GeForce2 GTS/400 comes with 64 MB of 5 ns DDR SDRAM, which runs at up to 472 MHz . The chip was nice enough to do 233 MHz as well.

Understanding 3D-cards is not quite as simple as many people are suggesting. The first requirement for sensible 3D-card evaluation is a good understanding of 3D-benchmarks. This article about 3D-benchmarking is supposed to point out the bottlenecks of current 3D gaming solutions.

So you think that fiddling a bit with the bus clock of Duron or Thunderbird deserves the name overclocking? Find out how easy it is to alter the clock multiplier of those processors! Stand in awe to see Duron run at 950 MHz and Thunderbird go up to 1100 MHz!

Finally AMD has launched its low/mid range processor by the name of Duron. Its Athlon inheritance makes it very strong. In fact Duron wipes the floor with Intel's Celeron processor and gets even close to Athlon and Pentium III.

We were able to collect i815-motherboards with final silicon at Computex2000 and put them right to the test here in Taipei. Find out if Solano is indeed the new killer-chipset. Will it be able to beat BX133?

'Smaller and Faster' is the motto of AMD's new Athlon processor with 'Thunderbird' core. AMD's new processor is coming with 256 kB on-die and full-speed second level cache, which boosts particularly the integer performance of the new Athlon. We've put this CPU through our test suite and can tell you that we were rather pleased with the results.

Once Intel makes sense, it produces good products that the market wants instead of patronizing consumers and forcing them to use RDRAM. We tested a motherboard with Intel's upcoming 815 chipset and found out that Intel is still able to kick some real butt once it remembers that customers want to be taken seriously.

If you think you already know everything about Intel's MTH-disaster you might be very wrong. Not Intel is the company that's suffering from this issue; Intel's partners are the ones that are hit really hard. If you own an MTH-motherboard, make sure you read this article! If you don't, it's still worth to find out about 'Caminogate2'.

If you are the owner of an Athlon platform based on VIA's Apollo KX133 chipset, desperately trying to run Windows 2000 reliably, we can give you some help. We explain the reason behind the strange device-numbering problem and can offer you a new beta AGP-driver for Windows 2000.

After 36h benchmark marathons, no sleep and tons of writing I can finally present you my delayed, but epic GeForce2 GTS review. Does the fastest 3D chip available blow everything else out of the water?

Finally there are more and more Athlon motherboards with VIA's Apollo KX133 chipset becoming available. Before our big KX133 roundup goes online Tom had an in-depth look at two interesting contenders and tested them under Windows 98, Windows NT and Windows 2000.

What is happening in the processor scene this year? Tom gives you some insight of what we can expect within the next 8 months.

With a very small 'operation' you can modify a Promise Ultra66 controller into a FastTrak66 ATA RAID-controller and benefit from its high performance. We put this self-made device to the test.

The Giga-fight isn't quite over yet. Giga-Athlon was still able to make a good figure against Giga-Pentium III in SPECviewperf, but so far we hadn't used the Giga-RDRAM chipset i840. Find out what Giga-i840 is able to throw into the equation!

The truth about AMD's and Intel's new processors running at 1 GHz. We compared the two on a wide variety of platforms, of course even including good old BX.

This time we showed no mercy. We included the good old BX-chipset and ran it at 133 MHz FSB. It had to stick up against no less than Intel's great i840-chipset and of course i820 and VIA's Apollo Pro 133A as well. The results we found are rather shocking.

After our latest test of the VIA Apollo Pro133A chipset, we found a few interesting things that we would like to add. Read about the AGP-driver, UDMA66 and PC133 SDRAM.

Which chipset supports Intel's latest Pentium III processors best? Is it Intel's 820 chipset with the super expensive RDRAM? Is it the same chipset, but with the cheaper SDRAM? Or might it not be VIA's Apollo Pro 133A chipset in the end? We'll show you which it is.

Soon FC-PGA/Slot1 adapters will become available, but for those who cannot wait we supply detailed information how to 'recycle' your old 'slocket' card.

Does AGP1x vs. AGP2x vs. AGP4x make a significant difference in performance? We tried to find an answer on two different platforms for each, Pentium III and Athlon.

To satisfy the big 'super bypass'-fans, you can now see the comparison between Apollo KX133 and Irongate with enabled 'super bypass'.