| New Digital Camera! - Mafu (19/01/2003 10:00:19 PM) |
| So you want a digital camera? But waiting to get something with a bit of resolution? 4 or 6 megapixel just doesn't cut it for you web photo album? Kodak are about to release a new FOURTEEN (14) thats right FOUR freakin TEEN megapixel beast! It uses CMOS technology for the sensor, and looks uber cool. Buy me one now. This isn't for the weak hearted - 14 mega pixel, 2000 x 3500 resolution, 35 meg TIF files... Roll me over and scratch my belly! The links: The news release via Digital Photo Review The Kodak site with sample images Read more (2) |
| Fuji Slim Shot Review - Elsta (9/12/2002 3:14:32 AM) |
| Well I’ve wanted one of these little suckers ever since seeing a review on it. The Slim Shot from Fuji holds the record for being the world’s slimmest digital camera at only 6 mm thick and at the size of a standard credit card transporting the little sucker is not going to cause many back injuries. The compact mini digital camera class although still in its infancy is producing some pretty functional cameras, many though without flash or the ability to increase memory via upgradeable flash cards. The Slim Shot falls into this category but don’t let that put you off to quickly. The price and size make overlooking such issues easy. The picture quality in low or unnatural light is not great but with a steady hand the auto bright technology onboard will lengthen the shutter speed long enough to capture more detail then the other compacts in the mini or key ring class.  Other handy features are that the camera is powered by a usb rechargeable battery that charges as you are downloading your pictures. The Slim Shot takes 26 640 x 480 shots or 101 320 x 240 or any combination. Below is a 640 x 480 shot of my dog.  |
| 128 MB USB Flash Electronic Drive - Mafu (21/11/2002 9:41:13 PM) |
| http://www.memorybar.com The most uber cool thing I have seen in a while. 700 K/sec write; 900 K/sec read; USB; Hot plug; Bus powered; 2.5cm x 1 cm; $109 @ Sunlit http://www.sunlit.com.au Also available in 256; 512; and 1.2G! Stop reading this now. Go buy one. You NEED it. 
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| All this and I can only see 30 of them. - Elsta (31/08/2002 2:46:30 AM) |
GF4 MX440 + XP 1600+
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| AMD 2700+ - Porcupine (21/08/2002 8:13:04 PM) |
| The AMD 2100+ has come down $100. The AMD 2200+ is now selling about Brisbane, and AMD have just released their Athlon XP 2400+ and 2600+! See the review on amdmb.com. Apparently AMD's new CPUs are hideously overclockable, if you're into torturing your chips that way. Overclocking gets 300 frames per second in Quake 3 with everything on! Yes, it kicks anything INTEL has out now. I'm guessing the response from INTEL should be reasonably swift, however expensive. We should get 3GHz CPUs before the year is out. And the response was very swift. Intel have released their P4 2.8GHz for uber$, which some monkey used liquid nitrogen to get to 3.9GHz, reading the page I think the CPU went "raja rikki" at 4.3GHz. AMD responded straight back by announcing the 2700+ to be released in mid October 2002. Effectively, right now (1 September 2002) the fastest you can get is the Pentium 2.4GHz or the AMD 2200+. However, Game Dude is taking orders for Pentium 3.0GHz (which nobody else even seems to know exists - not even on the Intel site) and AMD 2600+. Read more (1) |
| AMD 2100+ - Porcupine (11/08/2002 10:06:08 AM) |
| Grand Theft Auto 3 runs a little chuggy on my Celeron 766MHz system. Morrowind is smoother, but all the option are turned right down. *sigh* Time to upgrade. So hunt around Brisbane for the best prices on all the pieces and always end up with GameDude on the top of the list. Trouble is the store is way on the other side of Brisbane, that and it always has at least an hours worth of people lined up outside the store. UMart prices are pretty close, and its nice and central. Unfortunately, UMart's selection of graphic cards is nowhere near as good as GameDude, so I was going to have to at least buy the graphics cards from GameDude ~ might as well get it all there. Looking at the various CPUs available, there is no way I could afford the $900 for the Intel 2.4GHz. The $400 mark seemed good to me, and so the choice was the AMD 2100+ (1733MHz) or the Intel 2.0GHz. Well, the benchmarks made the decision VERY easy: AMD 2100+ is the way to go. Here's an extremely rough guide to CPU power. Based on a little program to calculate Pi, the number is the number of iterations the cpu does in a second. Pentium 166 1,240,000 The Motherboard came down to a toss up between the Asus A7V333 or the Gigabyte GA-7VRXP. The Gigabyte is the faster of the two, but I have usually had good luck with the ASUS motherboards, and it had the chip overheating protection (COP). I was going the Gigabyte way for a quite a while, and only really changed my mind outside the store. If they didn't have the Asus I would have been quite happy to buy the Gigabyte and save the $50. The graphics card. Last time I spent big on an Asus TNT2 Ultra card, and got great performance out of it for quite a while. By today's standards tho - it sux. The price of the graphics card just dropped like a rock over the following months, so I expect whatever I buy now to be $2 by the end of the year. Still, I wanted as kick arse performance I could get without being obscenely priced. In an article about Doom 3, I notice that it requires 80Meg of textures to be in the graphic card to be run in full quality, so a 128Meg graphic card is the way to go. The new ATI Raedon card is coming out very soon which should be faster than everything about, but coz I have had unresolvable troubles with ATI stuff in the past - they can go shove their cards. A check of the benchmarks and check the prices around the place and I decide on a great value GeForce 4 128Meg Ti4200 from X-Micro. 512Meg of PC2700 RAM, well two lots of 256Meg, just in case one goes bad, I can turn it in while still keeping the PC running. Finally a nice ATA133 7200rpm 80Gig HDD. Get all the stuff home and slowly, carefully put it all together. I take way longer than is necessary as I check out all the jumpers and make sure I know what they are supposed to do, all the defaults on the motherboard are good. The hardest bit is putting the USB connector on from the front of the case, as they all came as individual wires that had to be attached. Fire it up, and er ... I am asked "MHz settiing: 1300 or 1733". Um, didn't I buy a "2100"? Oh! 2100+ runs at 1733. Doh! Select and away it all runs. Everything is working! Well except the HDD LED, I put it around the wrong way. This is great! First time working hasn't happened to me before. I added an extra fan for cooling. The blue light transparent fan really adds a nice feel to the finished uber-power machine. I have the side off most of the time, and the CPU gets to about 52°C, and 13°C more if I put the cover on. I turned the extra fan around to blow and it raised the temp by 7°C! I may add another fan and maybe even change the CPU fan later. This *is* winter, and I'm guessing there will be over heating issues when summer starts to bite. I'm very happy with this system. GTA3 and Morrowind run wonderfully with everything turned on full, as does Serious Sam 2 (in the thickest of battles it never lost a beat), Castle Wolfenstein, NeverWinter Nights, Soldier of Fortune 2 and of course EverQuest! Of course, I expect I will have to do this all again in three years, when this machine starts to become a touch embarassing. |
| Thinking of getting a Pentium 4? Wait no longer. Or maybe wait till November 2002. - Morte (4/07/2002 9:39:28 AM) |
| 04/07/2002 I was writing some recommendations for a friend who wanted to know the best motherboard for a Pentium 4 at the moment, so I decided to share with the rest of you. THE best board to get for a Pentium 4 (at present and for the forseeable future) is the Giga-byte GA-8IHXP, but there aren't any in Queensland (or Australia) by the look of things. The second best is the ASUS P4T533-C, and it just so happens that COMPUTER ALLIANCE sell them. Lucky lucky you. The 850E chipset runs the mem/cpu FSB at 533Mhz (as opposed to 400). HOLY FUDGE, I hear you say. Using PC1066 RDRAM with a bandwidth of 4.2Gb/sec, this is likely to outperform the beejeesus out of any DDR-SDRAM (which currently is likely to only hit 2.7Gb/sec with the current DDR-RAM architecture). The ASUS board only has six USB ports, four v1.1, and two v2.0. The six channel sound built in just means it supports Dolby 5.1 (with SPDIF in/out ports). This is optional, so if you want it, ask for it. Anyway, blah, blah, blah, this is the board to get. So get it. Apparently, since Intel aren't continuing future development for RDRAM, this is likely to be the last chipset from them supporting RDRAM, which means that nothing will have this much memory bandwidth until a completely new memory architecture is placed on motherboards. God only knows when that might happen, but it won't be in the next year. The info is all Toms and Tweakers too It appears to be difficult to get PC1066 at present in Qld. It also appears that while this is the most powerful, it still costs a bundle. So if you are a 'pewr piece of crap', you will probably have to live with the DDR333 running at 2700 instead. There are far too many boards out there doing that, so I won't bother comparing them here. In other news, Soltek decided 533 wasn't enough for them, they o'c-ed an SL-85MIR board to 800Mhz CPU&Memory FSB (200 actual), with a lock on AGP of 66, and PCI of 33, so that peripherals still actually run 'stably'. Note well, this is for overclocker freaks who like to live dangerously, and/or with VapoChill. I disavow personal financial relationships with the aforementioned brand, store, and website names. I also emphasise that this recommendation and knowledge could not have been imparted to you without having mentioned them. This was just an expression of my educated opinion. I don't want to enter into arguments re bandwidth vs latency. For pissy little apps that do small bits of shit, sure, latency is the all-important thing. But if you are doing video editing and other processor intensive tasks that take longer than a few extra nanoseconds, bandwidth is king. Why wait till November 2002? Oh, that's just when the next hot shit P4 chipset comes out. You'll have to wait and see whether it is any good tho. I have no idea at present. I just wish AMD put thermal resistors into the CPU, (ones that worked), and I can forget this Intel crap. 05/07/2002 OK, let's get a DDR board instead. This is (to tell the truth), a really crap time to buy a Pentium 4, since we are halfway between the old chipsets, and the new ones due out in October/November, and even better ones in 2003. But you pushed and pushed, and this is what you get. The best chipset for this at present is not officially endorsed by Intel, and is subject to patent licensing lawsuits between Intel and VIA. However, since the alternative is an Intel chipset (845G) that has a few limitations (not all mobos support PC-2700 on it, eg. ASUS P4B533-V), and which forces you to have a video controller you don't want, it might still be a safe bet to go with the VIA P4X333 chipset. Let's look, for example, at the cost of a P4X333 mobo, 512Mb DDR333 PC-2700 RAM, with a 2.2Ghz P4b (CPU and RAM running at 4x133Mhz FSB): From Altech in Brisbane, we have: $270 512MB PC-2700 (333MHz) DDRAM `Corsair VALUE SELECT` (USA), 32Mx64, CAS 2., Lifetime warranty $225 Soltek SL-85ERV (VIA P4X400+8235) M/B, 533MHz FSB, DDRAM, ATA100/133, On-board 6-Ch, USB 2.0, Audio, ATX $866 Intel Pentium 4, 2.4GHz (478-pin), 533 MHz Bus or if you are a cheap bastard, $530 Intel Pentium 4, 2.2GHz (478-pin), 533 MHz Bus If you can't add that up, it is $1025 for 2.2Ghz, or $1361 for 2.4Ghz. So there you go. Here's the link to the specs for the mobo in Altech, and the chipset review: Soltek Toms Hardware 6/7/2002 Oh Crikey - now we hear that the 845G chipset DOESN'T support PC-2700 DDR333 RAM. Tom's Hardware basically says it DOES, and the vendors basically say it DOESN'T. The truth appears to be that somewhere in the depths of Intel's chipset spec, it DOES allow for PC2700 DDR333, and that in theory, it would just require a jumper/bios change to accomodate it. Unfortunately, it also appears to be the case that most (if not all) mobo vendors are hedging on the side of caution, and only stating support for PC2100 DDR266 at most. But the test runs for DDR333 were done using Giga-byte's GA-8IGX board, and on Giga-byte's website, the board spec is only up to PC2100 DDR266. So that means there must be a bios/jumper setting to enable it. From what I can see on Tomshardware, the chipset 845G runs its actual main bus speed up to 166, which only needs a multiplier of 2 to support the memory clock of 333 and 3.2 for the CPU clock of 533, whereas the normal bus speed of 133 is multiplied by 2.5 to hit 333, and 4 to achieve 533. But then, having said that, the 845E also has this main bus speed up to 166. It is all very confusing. sources for the argument include: Toms 1 Toms 2 Toms 3 Anandtech SharkeyExtreme VR-Zone GigaByte ASUS INTEL The only other contender (which supports DDR333) appears to be the SiS645DX chipset, HOWEVER, it came out in March, and has no support for USB v2.0, and there is no way a sane person would get a NEW motherboard without it. Besides which, several chipsets (notably Intel) are starting to include hardware support for Gigabit Ethernet, and the USB2.0 hardware is a key component of this. Read more (3) |
| ATI Radeon 7000 Graphics Card - Mafu (13/06/2002 8:48:42 PM) |
| OK guys, this is cool. A 64 meg dual display AGP 3D video card, with video out (both RCA and s-video)! I just had to get me one of these! So hot to trot, I went and bought one ($149), and skipped happily home to install it. As most of you will appreciate, when we get a new computer toy, we generally want to have it installed sometime prior to leaving to go and pick it up. “Bugger reading the manual, bugger looking at the box. Lets just rip out that old card, stick the new one in and see what happens.” I resisted the urge to play it safe, and did exactly this. I didn’t actually expect it to work easily though – sure, it says “plug and play” on the box, but when it comes to “plug and play” I am highly dubious. In the past, when I have bought a “plug and play” card, I realised what the manufacturers meant was either: a) “Plug” the card into you computer, and then you’ll have to “play” with every frickin’ setting on your computer, just to get it to half work. Or, b) “Plug” the card into your computer. Forget about getting it to work, it won’t. You’d be better of “play”ing with yourself. Anyway, it worked. I plugged it into my fancy AGP slot, plugged in the monitor, and turned on the computer (win 98, yes I know, I know…. Soon to be changed!). The card was detected, I shoved the supplied CD into the drive, it installed, rebooted and worked! What the? I was tempted to pull the card out and try again – it was so sweet just to see a computer frickin’ work like it was supposed to! Well, what more is there to say? The dual display is way cool, I can have my desktop over two monitors, which means I do twice as much work (yeah right!). It copes with monitors of different sizes, and different resolutions no sweat. Plug in your TV, and it is automatically detected, and under properties you can even configure actual displayed area, contrast, brightness etc etc! It runs the DVD player no problems through the TV, which is cool, and I can even have the TV as a third monitor apparently (although I haven’t tried it yet). I can’t say much about the gaming performance, as I haven’t had time yet – been too busy watching DVD’s! Now all I need is a pair of 19” monitors…. Hell, I’d settle for a 17” *homer simpson voice* Sweeeeeeet. Doh’, that’s drool all over the keyboard */homer simpson voice* Want more? Well, after you finish wiping that of your keyboard, try: http://www.ati.com/products/pc/radeon7000/index.html |
| Free cable TV - Big Tone (9/05/2002 7:49:11 AM) |
| Ok, today I discovered the joys of Free Foxtel. I was sent a link to a website that described How to get the free Foxtel and I spent today rounding up all the parts I need. Reqirements : Live foxtel plug. (those with BPA cable will already have this as it travels on the same cable as the internet service) After setting up the card and plugging all the leads in and tweaking the software ... BAM - free Cable TV !! The software still needs work but it wont be long before the picture is perfect. Oh the Joy !! You can view the details on the website or contact me for further information Read more (5) |
| Hardware Review! Fly Video 2000 + remote - Elsta (25/04/2002 11:07:53 AM) |
| A few weeks ago I purchased a Fly Video 2000 so I could watch TV and capture some video. I've messed around with it a bit now, so here's the review. The hardware itself is great, the capture rate even at 640x480 is excellent. I must mention that the sound quality you get out of the 2000 is not as good as the 3000 that I intended to buy. Unfortunately the guys that supply Concorde made a boo boo and sent out the wrong one. I asked what the difference was between the two models and was informed by Tech Guy that the 3000’s have enhanced stereo sound when recording. The 2000 still does stereo very well, whilst watching input from cable or free-to-air TV but when recording it captures sound in a very flat not so great way, fine for home use though. The Tech Guy I spoke to on the phone at Concorde was very helpful but when I got to the store I had to deal with one of the sales management monkeys that everyone should try to avoid in the normal course of life. They are the kind of person that runs XP on their home computer because they thought that upgrading to XP was going to solve all their computer problems, when really they should just pack up their computer, take it back to the store and inform them that they are just too damn stupid to own a magic box calculator. Sales Management Guy tried to warn me off purchasing the card saying “I hate to try and warn a person of a product I stock on my shelves but I took one of those fly video capture cards home last week and I couldn’t get it to run on my computer”, at this point I asked him what operating system he was running “I run XP *cheesey sales grin*”. Ah. XP. I realised that listening to Sales Management Guy would be a mistake and ran to the check out with the card before he could launch into a speil about the much more expensive card gathering dust on the shelf, which I think he said (to the back of my quickly departing head) "ran like the wind [foul stench] on Windows XP [festering pus wound of an operating system coded by satan worshippers at Microsoft]". I was due over at a friends place for a BBQ, so I tore into my machine and installed this sucker as fast as I could. Which is usually a mistake, as generally you will miss something and spend the next couple hours backtracking, trying to figure out what bit of the installation you screwed up. Or you have to spend hours downloading updates for every driver on your system. But not this time. The installation was effortless due to Microsoft digitally signed drivers that run first time (wow!) so the whole process was rediculously easy. I got to the BBQ only a bit late, coz I couldn't help myself, I had to play with this new toy! And I was pining away all night. They had to tell me, rather loudly, about their lack of interest in video capture cards for some reason. Heathens! As for the video capture software that comes with the Fly Video card; I have one word: Excellent! You can schedule record to capture your favourite show in any resolution you want anytime you want. One small beef is with the video editing software that comes with the card. It’s not the best, though it would do the job for most home videos. For $100 (card+software) you really shouldn't expect high end software. The remote is very cool. I can grow my ass as fat as your mum's while flicking channels annoyingly and switching between the TV and radio functions which could pick up every Brisbane channel effortlessly, even in my basement with an elcheapo Crazy Clarks TV antenna. In short: I lurve it. I want to marry it and have its babies. |
| Digital Camera: Canon A10 - Porcupine (14/04/2002 9:24:35 AM) |
| Looking at replacing my standard 35mm film camera with a digital camera. Went through the whole process of tracking down what I wanted and came up with my ideal camera: Canon A10. I like photography. I take a lot of photographs. In the past couple years I've had a Canon Epoca, an Olympus IS100 and an Olympus IS300. I've taken a crate full of photographs. The photos I took on my trip to Europe came to over $400 on film and development. And that was after shopping around for the best price, which was $150 less than what some developers wanted. I then sort the photos, store them in a special flip book that I like, and stash the negatives aside for storage in special acid free neg holders. Then a bunch of my relatives want some of the images so I have to get duplicates for the locals and scan and email others for distant (geographically speaking) relatives. Now, I'm not a person with too much spare time on his hands. I have EverQuest to play, ASP code to write, stars to gaze at, birds to watch, essays to write, etc. It took me months to do all the photo stuff. So, digital photography looked better 'n better. I could have the images and burn them to CD. Throw the CD to anyone who wanted stuff, or just email the things. NO developments costs. Very fast turn around from click to viewing the image. No scanning. But I don't have prints. Thinking about this carefully I realised I didn't give a damn. I much preferred the ability to carry my pics around with me on one CD (a third full so far) than the crate of photo albums I have. I had to decide what did I want in a digital camera spec wise? Clean clear images, a reasonable zoom, a nice wide angle, use flash memory card (coz my Psion does), good battery life. Then it came to how many pixels. I initially wanted as many as I could get. 3Megapixels looked like the go. But I realised that if I didn't want to print the things, then all I needed was a screen full. So 2Megapixels, er no, 1.2Megapixels would be fine. Hmmm. It also meant that the images would take less space on my disks, and I could fit more of them on the camera before having to dump them to PC. Now the memory in the camera is a big issue with me. I wanted to be able to take this camera away where I could photograph for a month without needing access to a PC. After looking about a bit I noticed the Flash RAM went up to 512Meg! Probably a bit too much, heh, so I opted for 256Meg, which I estimated would be around 500 images depending on compression ~ turns out to be around 700 on normal and probably about 1400 on high compression. Should be more than enough for my trips away. If I spent any more than one month away then I would probably get withdrawls from lack of computer. Did a web search for "digital camera comparison" and got a horde of pages, some really good. Then its just a matter of reading. After narrowing down my specs, I had a list of about four cameras around the same price. The real kicker tho was user reviews. On the other cameras, people had positive and negative things to say, but were generally pleased. Good. Means you couldn't go too far wrong whatever you really wanted. But the comments I read about the canon regularly involved people wanting to make love to the device. The Canon A10 was the most expensive of the lot, but I was sold. Just a matter of tracking down a seller. There are a large number of overseas places, particularly in the USA where I could have purchased this camera at a much better rate. But I'm always troubled with delicate optics being transported to Australia, what customs might do and international waranty issues. So I pay more for the locally sold product. Sometimes a lot more, as the USA seems to have some awesome bargains from certain stores. In Brisbane, Sunlit computers sell the Canon A10 for the best price, but never seem to have stock. Photocontinental are just a great all round store for cameras, but are more expensive - but not that much more. And they had stock. Done! Purchased the camera, then some flash ram from the great people at the disc shop. Then I went nuts! Photographed all sorts of stuff. This camera has opened up a whole new level of photography for me. I now experiment on things that I would never have done with film. Freedom! And the quality is just excellent. At work we have two digital still cameras, an Agfa and an Olympus. Both are reasonable machines, but really suck batteries. The canon is extraordinarily frugal. I managed to get 160 images on normal alkaline batteries before I swapped over to NiMH AAs. So my tip is to buy the best digital camera for your needs. If you like photography then digital photography is for you! It will save you heaps! Read more (1) |
| Fly Video 3000 + Remote - Elsta (13/04/2002 1:12:43 PM) |
| I’m about to go and pick up a fly Video 3000 with remote so I can watch TV on my computer and capture some videos. I’ll keep you posted and do a bit of a review on it after a sufficient play. Purchased from: Concorde Computers. Price: $125.00 AUD Manufacturer: Animation Technologies |