Content and news by Rob Williams

“In a bid to stay at the top of the LCD race, BenQ has in the past few months belted out product after product ahead of their competitors. With the hotly contested 8ms LCD market being taken care of by their FP71E+ and FP937S+ models (17-inch and 19-inch respectively), BenQ is now pushing a new breed of LCDs. The FP91V+ is a 12ms LCD monitor that is also technically a 6ms panel. How’s that you say?”

6ms?? Damn! Check out the full review to find out more, at Hardware Zone.

“When most of us get email offering questionable herbal alternatives to Viagra or dubiously low prices on Adobe software, we simply delete it, having accepted long ago that receiving at least some unsolicited email comes with the price of using the Internet. But for Daniel Quinlan, it motivates him to figure out how to stop it — for not just his sake but everybody else’s. It’s his job: He works as an anti-spam architect for an email security provider. And his paid work also carries over to his contributions to SpamAssassin, of which he currently chairs this free software’s Project Management Committee.”

SpamAssassin has always been a program I’ve loved.. it’s filtered out a LOT of my spam. The interview is definately a good read, so give it a look at OSDir.com.

“Microsoft is back-porting its WinFS file-system technology to Windows XP, the same way that it is doing with its Windows presentation and communications subsystems, according to company officials.

The acknowledgement is significant, given that Microsoft has been reticent to offer any details on WinFS since the company decided in August to cut the WinFS information storage and retrieval feature from both the client and server versions of Longhorn.”

If they can’t release LongHorn with WinFS, it’s odd how the can do it with WinXP. It will be interesting for sure. Check out the article at Microsoft-Watch.

“Gracenote Inc. knows almost any time a CD is “ripped” for use in a portable music player. Apple, Creative and Rio use its service, as do hundreds of software products devoted to playing and recording music CDs. Yet, few consumers know much about Gracenote.”

It also mentions in the article that it is ‘almost’ completely anonyomous. Check out the read at MSNBC.

Tom’s Hardware has a great article on the event where ATI debuted their 512MB card. This is also the event where three world class overclockers would try to break current records.

“ATI went to a LAN Party deep into the heart of Texas to share their latest and greatest with their fans. Fair Park, the home of North America’s largest Ferris wheel, the Cotton Bowl, and Big Tex – a 52-foot tall statue wearing his 70+ gallon-sized hat – was the three-day home to the ATI Ultimate LAN Party. The native organizers, the Texas Gaming Festival (TXGF), were called in to host the event, and all the stops were pulled out to make sure this would be a party to remember.”

Check out the full review at Tom’s Hardware.

“Software Architect Marvin Theimer said on Thursday that the company hopes to have a beta, or test version, by this summer, with the final version of Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition ready by the SC2005 supercomputing conference in November.”

The version also promises that bugs will be exploited 5 times quicker than on a regular XP machine. Check out the full read at News.com.

FAIRFAX, VA – March 3, 2005 – Mythic Entertainment, developer and publisher of the critically-acclaimed massively-multiplayer online role-playing game “Dark Age of Camelot(R),” today announced that a “Dark Age of Camelot” “Roundtable” fan gathering will take place in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area this April. Players from around the world are invited…..

“Well, Linux certainly isn’t most peoples’ thought for a games-based PC. Especially one being taken to a big tournament LAN party. However, by design or trickery, none of the tournament games at the event were out-of-bounds to my Linux machine, and rousing games of Call of Duty, Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004 were shared by the HEXUS.net collective and any other gamers who felt like joining in.”

Check the article out at Hexus!

“Today we will be looking at the 2 gig version of the Twist Pro. The first thing you notice about the Twist Pro is its design. Instead of the typical flash drive that uses a cap to protect the USB connector, the Twist Pro uses sort of a pocket knife approach. The advantage of this design, is you never have to worry about losing the flash drive cap.”

Nice.. because I lost my flash drive cap :( Check out the review at Tech Tastic.

“Not so long ago, we took a look at Arctic Cooling’s Freezer 7 that happened to be a unique looking aftermarket CPU cooler for LGA775 socket. The quest for a better LGA775 CPU cooler goes on as we took a look at TTIC’s latest CPU cooler that supports socket LGA775; the NPH-775-1 CPU cooler. So let’s take a look at this particular CPU cooler to see if it is the CPU cooler for your LGA775 setup. Besides that We also will review the AMD 64 version from TTIC; NPH-K8-1 too.”

Check out the full review at PCModdingMy.

“While the 6800 Ultra is currently the fastest NVIDIA card on the market, we wanted to take a look at how the 6800 GT stacks up to its bigger brother. Unlike the x800Pro to the x800XT, where ATI crippled 4 of the rendering pipelines, the 6800 GT has the same architecture of the 6800 Ultra. This means you will still have 16 pipelines and 6 vertex shaders. The only performance differences are the clock speeds. Most 6800 GT’s are easily reaching ultra speeds, so we are going to take an in-depth look at this today.”

Head over to HWLogic for the full review.

“Memory with programmable led displays?!? Well that’s excatly what we will look at tonight as they have sent us their latest ram with leds. The Twinxp1024-3200xl memory seems to be revolutionary on the market as it’s the first ram with led display that you can program so you can get the latest info about the ram. You can see voltages, tempereatures etc so lets check this out.”

Who ever thought RAM would be *this* cool? Check out the review at Comment (0) -->

“The K8N Neo3-F measures 295mm x 185mm, so it is nearly as long as a regular ATX motherboard but is 60mm narrower than usual, which means that it has ten percent less surface area than a micro-ATX model, which would typically measure 245mm x 245mm. A smaller motherboard is cheaper to produce, but tend to suffer from a lack of space in which to fit the various connectors. Surprisingly the K8N Neo3-F manages to cram in plenty of features, although it only has two memory slots making for a current practical limit of 1GB of system memory. The two ATA133 connectors are arranged along one edge of the motherboard and below them are the four native SATA connectors, which have NV RAID that covers all four ports.”

Check out the full review at Trusted Reviews.

“In the past year, we have seen lots of memory rated at DDR500, so you may wonder why we are reviewing a new DDR500 memory today when there are now a few rare modules rated as high as DDR600. The answer is pretty simple, since OCZ PC4000 VX Gold is the only memory that we have ever seen rated at DDR500 2-2-2. While it is rated at DDR500 at these extraordinary 2-2-2 timings, it also carries a very high rated voltage of 3.3V – far beyond what most motherboards can supply.”

I never expected to ever see DDR500 to have such low timings! AnandTech has done tests to see if it lives up to it’s 2-2-2 timings. Check it out here.

“Today 3DXtreme has the great pleasure of reviewing two mainstream video cards based on the nVidia 6600GT chip. Our samples are provided by eVGA and Chaintech, two of the industry leaders among video card and hardware manufacturers. With the emergence of high end video cards from nVidia and ATI, such as the 6800 and X800 series, the mainstream has largely been forgotten. Let’s take a look at these two video cards and see how they measure up in today’s gaming applications and a little later we’ll have a look at these cards in an SLI configuration and see how well they stack up against a current high end card.”

Check out the full review at 3D Xtreme.

Nvu is an open source HTML editor.. and I didn’t even know it existed until now. I will definately be checking it out, as it’s supported by Mozilla. /fanboi

If you want to give it a go, check it out here. If you want to get a stable version, get one at Nvu.com.

“The Mozilla Foundation today announced the launch of Mozilla China, a new non-profit that aims to help develop, promote and deploy Mozilla products in the World’s most populous country. Mozilla China is backed by the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) and the Sun China Engineering and Research Institute (ERI). It will be co-chaired by Dr. Li Gong of Sun ERI and Mr. Mingshu Li of ISCAS. The group’s steering committee will consist of the two co-chairs and Mozilla Foundation President Mitchell Baker.”

Mozilla proves that they want to take over the world. You can check out the Chinese site here. Just don’t look at the crap coding in the source.

“Don’t you just love sound, listening to and feeling it to get the best experience in what you are doing? Get more into the movie, the game or music and check out this PCMCIA Creative Audigy 2 ZS notebook card, it’s payable, its fun and most of all it’s portable.”

Check out the full review at HardwareXL.

“Given the minor time investment in cleaning the heatsink, I was pleasantly surprised by ArctiClean’s ability to get rid of the leftover compound. It’s not a miracle solution; it took several “passes” to get most of it off. But, as you can see the difference between plain rubbing alcohol and ArctiClean is quite noticeable. It’ll still take some time and lots of rubbing to get rid of all the paste, but it’s a great start. I also used ArctiClean on a copper heatsink which used a ceramic-based compound. It came off completely with the cheaper alcohol and ArctiClean didn’t account for any noticeable difference. It seems that the degree to which rubbing alcohol will work compared to ArctiClean depends on the compound in question. Arctic Silver, as we saw earlier, doesn’t come off too well with Isopropyl, but white paste does. I then decided to clean off a CPU which was placed below the aforementioned copper heatsink. It too had a ceramic compound on it.”

Check out the review at Mikhailtech.

“Overall, the AC Ryan 450w modular power supply is an excellent unit. The only negative thing that I found about it is that there were not enough mini 4-pin connections for my setup. Aside from that, the voltage levels all stayed at proper levels, the modular cable system makes my case look a whole lot cleaner, and actually makes installation easier since I don’t have to hunt around for my cables.”

Check out the full review at Viper Lair.