Wednesday News Edition 3

With all the hype about the latest generation offerings from ATi and nVidia on the horizon, it's easy to overlook some of the current hardware that is available at a great price. OCAddiction takes a look at the Albatron GF4 Ti4280PV AGP 8X video card today. If your on a budget but need a card that will perform well and has all the bells and whistles, this might be worth a look.

"Albatron has chosen to use Samsung memory for this video card. Samsung has gained a pretty good reputation with their ramchips. Looking closely, the ram is rated to run at 3.6ns. A quick calculation (1000/3.6 = 278 * 2 = 556MHZ DDR) shows that the memory is capable to run at 556MHZ."

It would seem that the changeover from Ultra ATA hard drives to Serial ATA is gaining momentum with more and more new motherboards being released with Serial ATA connectors installed. The whole drive behind SATA is, and was of course increased speed, with an end product that also reduces cable clutter.

It's no secret why Dual Channel memory is so desirable. Initially Intel put all their support behind the RAMBUS DRAM architecture, but high prices, slow adoption, and the controversy surrounding RAMBUS itself, have made RDRAM a minor player in the consumer market. And yet it's nigh impossible to ignore the fact that PC1066 RAMBUS memory has an impossibly huge 4.2GB/s bandwidth compared to the 3.2Gb/s rated bandwidth of PC3200 DDR memory. But now Dual Channel seems to offer an enticingly cheap alternative to the more expensive RDRAM platform by providing 4.3Gb/s of bandwidth using PC2100 memory

Hardware Fusion interviews Andrew Humber, European PR Manager for NVIDIA on their ground breaking product - the GeForce FX. In the first of a two part interview we cover questions such as the competition with ATI and the ground breaking features that the GeForce FX will contain. At the time that this interview went to press some of the questions and answers were slightly outdated and non-complete, we ask our readers to bare this in mind. Here's a clip:

Q. What inspired NVIDIA to choose the name “GeForce FX” and come away from the numeric titles of the previous GeForce cards?

We chose FX for two major reasons. First, GeForce FX is all about rendering cinematic-quality special effects in real time on your PC. It is our goal to continue bridging the special effects viewers love in the film world with what can be done in real-time rendering. Second, this is the first GPU that combines the best technology from NVIDIA with the best technology of what was 3Dfx. We feel that it’s a nice way to acknowledge the passion and technical contributions that the former 3dfx employees have brought to NVIDIA.

Confused about NVIDIA's SoundStorm initiative? We clear it all up once and for all in our SoundStorm In A Cup editorial!