In a way, today's high-end PC gaming is what street racing was to an earlier era. In both cases, top speed produces the bragging rights. Making a strong argument for those bragging rights this month is the Ultimate M5-64, a high-end gaming system from ABS. Powered by AMD's flagship 2.6-GHz Athlon 64 FX-55 processor, dual 74GB hard drives in a striped RAID 0 array, and a 256MB EVGA-E GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics card, the M5 took honors as the second fastest PC we've tested to date, turning in a smoking 107 on our WorldBench 5 tests. Only the Alienware Aurora 64 FX-55, which we tested at the same time, was faster, with a recording-setting WorldBench score of 110. The ABS also fell just behind the Alienware in graphics performance: In our Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Unreal Tournament gaming tests, both systems pumped out graphics at a blistering average of nearly 300 frames per second.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_nf4_winxp_6.39 (Win XP)
http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_nf4_win2k_6.39 (Win 2K)

Nvidia said there are general bug improvements, as well as a Disk Alert System included and more. I'm hoping they may also clear up an issue we are having running the Gigabyte 6600GTs we have in SLI mode.

This year, the company still expects its mainstream and consumer-SFF systems to account for about two-thirds of its barebones sales, but the company still plans to beef up its SFF products. Asus will add some AMD CPU-based products to what is currently an all-Intel lineup, and at CeBIT 2005 there will be some PCIe SFF PCs at the company�s booth.

Yonah's chipset, Napa, looks really good. All the Turion chipsets look to be the spiritual equivalent of the Pentium 4M, the same old desktop core but tweaked a bit. In my opinion that won't be enough to cut it. Any advantage Taylor has will be eaten up by the chipset. AMD will come close, but I don't think it will pull an Opteron on Intel in this round, Yonah is just too good.

THE AMD Sempr0n is an interesting beast. Stretched across so many sockets, so many clockspeeds, it must have pins in places we didn't even know existed.

If you have any Nforce 4/Ultra or SLI boards I believe that it might be a good idea to get these drivers. Nvidia updated the audio driver to 4.60 (WHQL), Audio utilities to 4.51, Ethernet driver to 4.68 (WHQL), SMBus driver to 4.45 (WHQL), Installer to version 4.60 and IDE NVIDIA driver to 5.07 (WHQL).

After posting my AMD Athlon64 vs. Sempron comparison last week I was still puzzled to why the overclocked Sempron 3100+ was able to easily out perform the Athlon64 3200+ in all the synthetic tests but not the real world tests. A large number of readers also thought this was quite strange, so I spent most of this week trying to find out why. The problem seemed to be the Gigabyte K8NSNXP motherboard which featured an out-dated BIOS version. While the board did detect the Sempron 3100+ processor, the board�s 3D performance when using the Sempron was for some unknown reason quite poor.

The conclusion, for AMD, is that commercial IT buyers know all about Centrino but still prefer to buy on brands - such as Sony, Panasonic and the rest. Consumers are pretty much clueless about Centrino, and if they do know about it, they think it is a CPU.

According to AMD in a statement, Microsoft will use HP Proliant DL145 and DL585 servers in North America, Europe and Asia.

SK8N

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K8V Deluxe

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K8V

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The wire reported that Ruiz spoke at a Sun meeting today and painted the firm in glowing colours.

The slow but inexorable march to 64-bit computing--the successor to familiar 32-bit x86-based technology, which has dominated the desktop world since the advent of Windows 95 almost a full decade ago--seems poised to speed up. Not only has Microsoft announced its plans to release its first 64-bit operating system for mainstream desktops, Windows XP (news - web sites) Professional X64 Edition, by the middle of this year, but also the company has delivered its initial Release Candidate (RC1) of the operating system.

As I pointed out in the introduction to this article, AMD's approach to turning the Athlon in the Hammer is in some ways analogous to their approach to turning x86 into x86-64. Overall, the approach is evolutionary and not revolutionary, with a focus on improving and optimizing a tried-and-true design. Hammer keeps the Athlon's wide execution core and alters the rest of the design so that instructions and data are funnelled to that core at a higher rate.

In the third quarter of last year, Intel regained the number one NOR ranking and its sales rose by 34.9 per cent last year. AMD's sales rose by 31 per cent.

KEITHLEY INSTRUMENTS said that AMD will use its parametric test system at its 12-inch Fab 36 factory in Dresden.