Saturday News

Posted on Saturday, 29 November, 2003 by Ryszard

If you've been keeping one eye on the enterprise sector recently, you'll have noticed Sun Microsystems (I type Sun Microsoft every time, without fail) and AMD getting cosy with one another. But while they're undoubtedly working together, are they working fast enough to bring product to market that both companies seem to desperately need? The current EETimes Buzz column by Rick Merritt argues they aren't.

DriverHeaven (I know them well, when we get review samples from them that are being passed on, they always arrive in pristine condition) have taken a look at one of the rarer 9800XTs to surface in recent weeks. Visiontek's board is nothing more than the reference board with a Visiontek bundle, but it's worth a peek. Here's a snippet.Check it out in full here.

Finally, sticking with rare cards justing hitting retail, TrustedReviews take a brief look at Leadtek and MSI's 5950 Ultras.

Downtime

Posted on Friday, 28 November, 2003 by David

I would like to put a quick thank you out to Alex and Paul for resolving the server issues we were suffering, the backup configuration had filled up the drives with the hourly backups!

New Review @ HEXUS

Posted on Friday, 28 November, 2003 by Ryszard

AOpen aren't a manufacturer we cover that much at HEXUS, their KT400A board the last component of theirs to feature in an article here. That changes today though. I managed to snag their GeForceFX 5950 Ultra board to put through the grinder. Here's a snippet.Check out the full article here.

Friday News

Posted on Friday, 28 November, 2003 by Ryszard

Apologies for no news yesterday, I had a few sherberts for lunch and then some testing of a rather good Albatron motherboard for most of the afternoon. The net effect? I was asleep by 9pm. Normal service is resumed, here's all the good stuff I missed yesterday.

Carrying on the grand internet news propogation tradition, here's a link to a story that explains it better than the parent item they based their story on. Want to know all about DRM hooks in upcoming BIOS', that your PC will use to deny you access to stuff? Click here.

Got a desire for a multi GB DDR400 setup, you have more disposable income than you know what to do with, and 512MB sticks don't cut it any more? Transcend will hook you up for €485 a shot..

3DCenter take a look at low precision ATI filtering issues here and offer up some conclusions on what the future generation of graphics hardware needs to do properly, with no corners cut.

Finally, before I get back to testing, here's a review of a board I've been keen in taking a look at, the Chaintech ZNF3-150, Socket 745 Athlon64 and nForce3. [H]ardOCP do the talking.

Halo Review @ HEXUS

Posted on Friday, 28 November, 2003 by Ryszard

Something different for you this morning, to break up the monotony of hardware reviews. One of our forum moderators and all round good egg, Deckard, has offered up his critique of the PC version of Halo. Hold on to your XBox controller, he's not impressed.Read the full article here.

Adverts

Posted on Thursday, 27 November, 2003 by David

You may have seen a few adverts popping up on to the site, fear not we are not going to become flooded with them, neither will we advertise companies which are not relevant to you. We have a nice team of companies which support us closely and we are pleased to add DFI to this list.

Please remember these companies are the ones which keep HEXUS free for all you guys - it isn't much to ask from you but to remember they are looking after us, so can you guys make sure you look after them.

No need to shut down just pull the plug....

Posted on Thursday, 27 November, 2003 by David

... I have just been reading an interesting article in 'New Scientist' on computers (I often check out the technology coverage, since there is often reasonable thoughts and debate). Anyway this article states that software has now been developed to be more reliable if it crashes rather than if you run it properly. They did some tests and the truth of a the matter is systems can restart quicker if they need to do a scan disk and the other checks, compared to if you have shut them down properly before.

Servers, Ratings, and Forums!

Posted on Thursday, 27 November, 2003 by David

Well, it looks like our upstream has finally sorted out all of the issues with the connection and our backup solution is now in place, and sending the backups to the right destination (rather than filling the hard drives up.)

We have had some interesting conversations with some of the retailers out there and we should soon see big adoption of our ratings system. We have got a few more tricks up our sleeves, but at the moment we would like to test the solution fully with what is in place now.

The reviews are still flooding out, and the community is growing from strength to strength in the forums, we look forward to seeing you over there.

Biostar M7NCG 400 and K8NHA-M Review @ HEXUS

Posted on Thursday, 27 November, 2003 by Ryszard

Need power in a small package, but want to build your own box, without going mainstream with a Shuttle or something similar? Biostar have the motherboards you'll need, each mATX and based around AMD's CPUs, Tarinder took the Biostar M7NCG 400 and K8NHA-M for a spin.Find the full review here.

Thursday News

Posted on Thursday, 27 November, 2003 by Ryszard

Early morning news brought to you by the letters Y, A, W and N, and sponsored by alcohol and caffeine, your favourite way to start the day.

Saw this on Slashdot, part of the OSDN keiretsu that will eventually take over the universe. Sendmail's Chief Technology Officer (I think that's what a CTO is), Eric Allman, interviews Peter Ford, the man at Microsoft that's responsible for the MSN Messenger IM network. They chat about a bunch of stuff, not all of it technical, so it's well worth a read. Ever wondered about the social side of IM and how it's replacing the telephone, or wondered about wireless IM protocols on upcoming smart phones? No? Read it anyway.

One of my favourite sites, Hot Hardware, take a look at both new ASUS Radeons, 9600XT and 9800XT. Here's a snip.Looks like they came to the same conclusions, at least about the 9800XT, that we did. Check it out in full, here.

Seen those Liebermann press releases recently and wondered if it was all just a load of *insert favourite expletive* ? So do the TR news comment faithful. We wait for The Inq's review of the utterly daft laptop with baited breath I guess. Which still wont mean they are shipping that rebadged Sager design in any kind of quantity, but at least we'll be able to laugh at the battery life.

That's your lot, I'll dazzle you with Newspro excellence a bit later on.

New Review @ HEXUS

Posted on Wednesday, 26 November, 2003 by Ryszard

It's time we poked another review out of the database I think. Time. See what I did there? Anyway, continuing with our look at full boxes, I managed to snag Time's top of the line desktop machine, the AMD Athlon64 FX-51 equipped Platina Viper FX. Here's a snippet.Check it out in full, here.

New Review @ HEXUS

Posted on Tuesday, 25 November, 2003 by Ryszard

If there's one thing you see a lot of around the web, it's reviews of fan controllers and mousemats. Not to be outdone, our very own Craig took a look at one of the better fan controllers out there, the Akasa Fan Control Pro. Here's a snip.Short and to the point, take a look here.