Monday news part 2

Today Soyo have sent over their SY-P4I 845PE based on the Intel i845PE chipset with a 533mhz bus and some great features such as P4 support up to 3.06GHz. We'll be taking an in depth look at its features, design and performance in the coming pages, so what are you waiting for get reading.

I have been waiting for this day to see if the famous Icemat can compete with my old Everglide pad... I will try the Icemat with mousepads and without- and also do other testing to see if it can be the new pad for me. Icemat is a mousepad made out of glass which gives very good precision. so let's have a look.

Unlocking a TBred requires connecting the L3, #5 bridge. This will unlock multipliers 12.5 and under. We managed to hit 12.5x201, but Windows simply refused to POST. We started dropping 1MHz at a time before settling on 12.5x198. The resulting overclock is 486MHz over stock, which is about the same as we got with 15x165.

With so many video cards manufactured so closely to the reference design provided by the GPU makers, choosing one that is unique is hard enough, let alone one that speaks to your inner geekness. It’s almost like shooting fish in a barrel, when it comes to making the seemingly important choice. Sure it’s fun to shoot the gun and get your card, but once you get it home, it smells like fish, and none of your fellow freak geeks are saying ‘Holy Mackerel’

Those who are not familiar with the Radeon 9700 will want to know that this board variant remains exactly the same as Radeon 9700 PRO in all respects other than the clock speeds of the core and memory. This means that all 8 pixel pipelines available from R300 are there, as is the full 256-bit memory bus. All that's different is that where Radeon 9700 PRO has core/memory speeds of 325/610MHz, Radeon 9700 weighs in at 275/540MHz. This still equates to a theoretical pixel rate of 2.2G pixels/s and a physical bandwidth of just over 17 GB/s.

The ATX power connector was right at the top where we like it, with 6 PCI slots and 4 DDR slots there was plenty of room for expandability. When you consider that there is onboard LAN, sound, and USB 2.0, the 6 PCI's may actually be overkill, but better too much than too little right.