VHJ: News

A Time for Family

With the recent death in my family, it is time for us to focus on what is important. My wife and I will not be tending the site over the next few days. Although our site has grown exponentially since we launched only four months ago, and some of our articles have had quite a bit of industry influence, I have personally been unhappy with the quality and frequency of my articles. It has been difficult to work fulltime testing CPUs while tending the site on the side. Doing so has taken a great deal of time away from my family, and with the events of the last few days I feel a greater need than ever to reevaluate my priorities.

I have high expectations for my articles, but I have simply had neither the time nor the resources to devote to the rigorous, in-depth coverage that I feel our readers deserve and this leaves me with a feeling of unfulfillment and regret after every piece I have published recently. Those who have followed my career from Tom's Hardware and InQuest no doubt see the decline in the depth of my analysis. I do not know how to remedy this situation without taking even more time away from family and work.

I want to thank Joel, Spencer, Nils, and Phil for their invaluable help over the last few months. They have added greatly to the site. My wife Kathy, of course, has helped to keep the site and me together through chaos.

This site is about passion, honesty, truth and objectivity with the focus on computer related high technology. I continue to believe there is a place for us and our growth seems to support this. I simply do not know how under current conditions I can balance the site with the other, more important obligations I carry.

We will revaluate our situation after Thanksgiving. But for now, it is time to give thanks for what really matters. Thank you, Lord, for my family.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Van

The proven, simple and cost effective Kentron memory technology allows twice the bandwidth of normal DDR systems. Whether the rumor that VIA will pick up this design we cannot confirm, it is good to see this technology get more attention.

It appears the operating frequency of the nVidia GPU has been reduced from 250MHz to 233MHz. The GPU was originally announced at 300MHz. If I am not mistaken, nVidia's site has only been updated to the 233MHz speed in the last few days.

To see an interesting rendition of Episode I, telnet to towel.blinkenlights.nl. In Win2k, click "Start|Run..." then enter "telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl" and hit "OK".

The document was copied nearly verbatim from famous 10-easy step humor piece "Weekend Scientist: Let's Make a Thermonuclear Device." The original article appeared in a 1979 edition of The Journal of Irreproducible Results.

More Xbox

Although you have to purchase an extra kit to play DVDs on the Xbox, out of the box the game console will rip and encode music directly to the hard drive which is a nice feature. Microsoft charges $30 for a DVD kit that includes a remote control. Normally this would anger me, but the Xbox is so feature-packed I won't complain much.

Some people have wondered why we didn't take the heat sink off the nVidia GPU in our recent article since it appears to only be attached with a clip. The problem was that the thermal compound used had very strong adhesive qualities and we were exerting so much force trying to remove the cooler that we were afraid that we might damage the system if we persisted.

The memory used in the Xbox turns out to be "Samsung 136, K4D263238M-QC50." Reading this designation was very difficult because the markings on the DDR SDRAM chips were faint. This memory is only 128Mb = 16MB per chip. Since we found only two chips on the topside of the motherboard, this means that two other memory chips must be on the reverse side. We have since verified that this is indeed the case. In fact, the empty pads we noted in our original article are the bottoms of the two other 128Mb chips. (Thanks to "CityZen" for help.)

According to Samsung's product data, this memory appears to operate at 200MHz. This might explain Microsoft's original infatuation with the AMD Duron which also happens to have a 200MHz front-side bus.

Although Intel informally told us several months ago that the Xbox CPU's FSB would be 133MHz, this would mean that the memory would run asynchronously in a fractional harmonic (200/133). Since this would be inefficient and yield only mixed results, the BGA Mobile Celeron might only have a 100MHz FSB and performance would not be impacted much (yielding a more favorable 2/1 ratio). Ah, but the 733MHz CPU speed would not be possible because the multiplier would not work, so the FSB must be 133MHz like we originally concluded.

Quick gaming impressions: Halo is fantastic. It is somewhat reminiscent of Half-Life, but the graphics in Halo are much, much better. Halo is a very engaging game, although it starts off a little slowly. Dead or Alive 3 looks very, very good -- quite a bit better than even Soul Caliber or Tekken TAG Tournament. DOA3, however, is not a very meaty game, but fighting games are not usually very deep anyway. Still, I much prefer Halo. The graphics in cartoony Cel Damage are fantastic, but I cannot be very positive about the game itself. CD looks cute and is humorous, but it is very tedious to play. The two football games, Madden and NFL Fever, are pretty much the same as they are on other high-end platforms -- this is a trend we'll likely continue to see for some time from companies who want to play the field among different systems. It simply takes too much time and effort to exploit each platform. Nevertheless, I expected Microsoft's Fever to look better than it did. The only advantages these two football simulations seemed to exploit from the Xbox is generally smoother game play.

John Jones was a good man; may he find peace in Heaven. God, please grant my mother strength.

"Repeated testing of products containing 733MHz and 800MHz Itanium processors revealed that these CPUs do not meet standard reliability tests. Other Intel OEM boxes containing these Itanium CPUs also have failed the standard test suite. The issue has been credibly determined to be an Itanium issue, not an OEM system issue."

As we have been reporting for months, our sources have told us that Intel has been counting the days before it could jump the leaky Rambus dingy and endorse DDR SDRAM.