I scanned over Tom’s Hardware Guide for the first time in a while yesterday. First of all, DDR-333 RAM is available now… if the chipset supports it, of course. The Intel i845 chipset now supports DDR RAM… only 266Mhz, though. Still, their article on 19 motherboards using this chipset shows it’s pretty badass. Because Socket478 is the new standard for Intel processors, you can use anything after the Northwood series in these… from 1.6-2.5GHz… and, because of the common BIOS options (backup TwinBIOS, monitoring, and huge voltage adjustment gaps), some of these mobos can even OC to 3GHZ+! A couple of things about the DDR: 4 memory “rows” are supported (a row being one side of a RAM module), and the max BW is over 500MB/s more than Intel’s former RAM, RDRAM. Most of these mobos have 6 PCI slots, 4X AGP, a CNR slot for expansions, 3 USB 2.0 ports, and an int feature that supposedly uses a security card put in a slot, kinda like DirecTV satellite receivers. Abit’s BD7-RAID, Gigabyte’s GA-8IRXP, and Soyo’s Fire Dragon won the compo. Finally, I found that USB 2.0 has a max BW of 480mbps (60MB/s)! That’s 40x faster than normal USB; 80mbps (10MB/s) faster than FireWire; and, according to a baud stat Snake found, 2,083x faster than original parallel ports.
I went and totally updated and converged 5 of our CGI scripts these past few days…
And, I just finished adding 2 entries (that’s a total of 19), and about 5 hotkeys, to the Win98 Tweak Guide.
