Thursday News part 2

Recently, Serial ATA hit the shelves with a bang. Offering smaller cabling, faster transfer speeds, and breaking the limit on the ATA 137GB drive size limit, Serial ATA is poised to change the drive industry as we know it. In our latest review, we take a look at the first contender in the new drive war, the Seagate Barracuda V Serial ATA drive. Stacking up this 150MB/s behemoth against both an ATA/133 and an ATA/100 drive, we took a gander to see whether this drive is a welterweight contender or a heavyweight champion.

I hit a couple of show stopper issues during the restore portion of our testing. After having selected the files to restore via the Media View function, I chose an alternate location for restoration of the files locally on the hard disk. The software began the process of restoring the files from the CDRW backup I had made and all looked to be moving along beautifully. It was just as the last of the files appeared to have been restored that the problem hit, the test machine got a nice and shiny blue screen of death.

The Leadtek K7NCR18D-Pro is as fast as our current champion, the Epox 8DRA+. It is not too strong in the overclocking department, but hey, people do not buy a system/OEM board to overclock. Future BIOS releases may increase it stability somewhat. All in all, a good system board for system integrators but not overclockers.

The modding craze has caught on with young and old alike, the difference being that as we get older, we tend to become more conservative in our likes and dislikes. As I fit into the latter category of enthusiasts, I decided to mod my personal box in a manner that would best suit my personality."