While the RADEON 9800 PRO seems to be the most wanted high-end graphics card now according to our survey and is also unbeatable in terms of speed, the most-awaited graphics card of the year 2000 – the 3dfx Voodoo5 6000 with 4 VSA-100 chips – would probably have been outperformed by the GeForce2 Ultra, the highly-pumped version of the GeForce2 GTS. Certainly, this is one of the reasons why the $600-$700 monster powered by 4 graphics chips never made it to the market. Read a review of the Voodoo5 6000 performance over Sudhian Media here. Keep in mind that the graphics card is not a commercial one and there have no been any new 3dfx drivers for more than two years.

GamePC has got their hands on the new Intel Xeon DP processors with 1MB of L3 cache (see this news-story). They decided to test the chips against the Athlon XP, Opteron and older Xeon processors without L3 cache to see if there are significant performance gains in workstation tasks. Since CPUs based on the NetBurst architecture benefit from additional caches much, the outcome of the benchmarking was quite predictable: the new Intel Xeon processors 1M outperformed the older CPUs without L3 in the majority of the tests, though, performance gains were varying and you should read the review for all the details. Also, I think you should pay your attention to the review, posted on the same web-site, titled “Xeons For Gaming: It’s Not Such A Crazy Idea After All”. This review is available over here. 

Small Form Factor PCs (SFF PCs) are becoming more and more popular. Thus, it is no wonder that more and more manufacturers join “SFF Race” with their solutions. IWILL is one of the companies who joined this market not so long ago, but their SFF PCs are worth to see since they have unusual size - slightly bigger than ordinary CD or DVD drive. ClubOC.net has got this SFF in their lab, tested it and concluded that this baby is an “incredible computer” even though it lacks high-speed 3D graphics performance because it utilized i845GV chipset. Read the entire review here.

CNet has an interesting article, quoting Al Zollar, a general manager of sales for IBM eServer iSeries. Mr. Zollar said some interesting things about SCO’s claims for intellectual property rights over portions of code of some Unix-type (namely Linux) operating systems. IBM executive said that there is a “set of forces” which is attempting to stop adoption of open-source operating systems. He even claimed that the center of this set is located in Redmond. I cannot vouch for what did Mr. Zollar mean, but I remember that the headquarters of Microsoft Corporation are located in Redmond, Washington. Read more comments about IBM executive’s speech here.

I think, you still remember ABIT’s claims that its hard drive security system will protect you from RIAA’s lawsuits (see this news-story). Overclockers.com has some comments about this statement. According to Overclockers.com, ABIT’s HDD protection technology is near totally useless when it comes to court cases with RIAA (at least, in the USA). The point is not in the technology itself, but in the US civil laws. Of course, Overclockers.com is not a law firm, but anyway, their thoughts over here are worth at least reading.