Thursday News - 5 December

With the modern appeal of minimizing some dimensions and maximizing others, the LCD monitor market is becoming ever more competitive and crowded. The $730 Philips 180B2 flat panel adds another apt competitor for increasing your viewing area while minimizing your monitor’s footprint. Read on to see how it stacks up…

While at the time a window in a PC was revolutionary, there is no hiding the fact that it was a "simple" mod. I just slapped up a piece of plexiglass behind the window, put on some window molding around the edges and was done. I suppose I was so intrigued by the window that I didn't see the plainness in it. It was not until a bit later that case lighting became all the rage. Shortly thereafter, window appliqués started making an appearance on some case windows. Now, Case-Mod has taken things one step further by taking a case window and laser etching a design into it, thus creating the 8-Ball Window Kit we are looking at today.

Today, we're presenting a review of the ATC 4000 case, which happens to be a bigger version of the ATC 400. Not only does this case fit all requirements for a mid tower case, it can also function in a 4U rackmount configuration. To top it all off, it comes with the traditional CoolerMaster quality and impressive looks. Is this case worth your money? Read on to find out.

OCAddiction gets hold of a shiny new 2GHz Celeron and puts it on the test bench to see how it compares to both the Northwood 2.0GHz P4 and the AMD XP 2000+ CPU. The new cely's pack a punch for the price and you might be surprised the numbers this little CPU is putting up. Here's a snip from the review.

" The die size of the Celeron is the same of the Northwood. The 1.7GHZ and 1.GHz Celerons have 0.18µ die size while the new 2GHz Celeron is 0.13µ. Generally speaking, the smaller the die size the cooler the CPU. It'll require less voltage to run and also give better overclocking results. Thus, the new Celeron should definitely overclock better than the older Celerons. "

Looking at the specifications, you can see that the chipset offers a good blend of advanced features like AGP8X with DDR333+ support. 6-channel audio is provided via the ReakTek AKC650 chip, and a Broadcom 4401 or Broadcom 5702 provides LAN support. The 5702 Broadcom chip comes with the 648Max-F board, which is equipped with Gigabit Ethernet. The board can support up to 6 USB 2.0 devices, but beware that only 4 are actual USB ports (on the rear of the board). The other 2 USB "ports" are really a motherboard connector for a front USB port device. For audio, the board has 3 jacks onboard and a simple S-bracket that includes center/sub and rear speaker outputs, plus optical and coax SPDIF jacks