Alan has posted a great review up on some Geocities web space, check it out here.

Brian Underdown at www.g7lij.co.uk has posted a review. Here is the link straight in.

Tweakers.net have a great review up.....if you speak Dutch check it out here. 

One last thing......if anyone is looking for some high quality address management software, visit my mate over at Correllan Computing Services. (he doesn't develop on an Athlon machine, but I will convert him to the dark side :) Fluke

Sharky Extreme has posted a preview of the Abit KA7 Athlon motherboard. Here's a clip of what they had to say :

"One thing that impressed us about the KA7 was its tweakability. FSB and memory speed settings were adjustable in 1MHz increments. In addition to memory timing, you can adjust CPU bus timing through CPU Pull Strength and CPU Drive Strength settings. And every little bit of AGP is laid open to tweaking as well, not just AGP Aperture size. Through BIOS tweaking, you should be able to increase your performance significantly."

Sounds VERY promising......looks like Abit might edge ahead of Asus in the Athlon motherboard stakes. 

Kevin from over at K7 Core has put together a graph showing what devices are being used by everyone on their Athlon database.....and we are pleased to say that by far the most used is our very own FreeSpeed card *smug mode disengage* :) Fluke

Abit have at last released their long awaited Athlon motherboard. Here's a clip from the T-Break press release:

"Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C. March 24th 2000 Unveiling a whole new level of quality and sophistication for the Athlon platform, ABIT has released their long awaited Slot A board, the KA7. This board is designed to support AMD-K7 Athlon Slot A 200MHz FSB Processors using the VIA VT8371(KX133) /VIA 686A chipset. It also supports all normal industry standard functions for motherboards such as Advanced Configuration and Power Management Interface (ACPI). AGP 2X/4X and 100/133MHz SDRAM Memory Bus Settings. The KA7 uses four 168-pin DIMM sockets supporting PC100/PC133 SDRAM modules up to 2 Gigabytes MAX. (8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512MB SDRAM). In addition ABIT has added a new level of stability and performance with their famous 6 chip Data Buffer Set with ECC support" Fluke

If anyone has difficulty in remembering important dates (I forget constantly :) or is tired of using *icrosofts address book and dialer check out this great site, they have the tools to help you.  Correllan Computing Services specialize in making easy to use software that helps you in everyday life.

This is not Athlon related but if any of you download the odd MP3, you may find this program handy. It's called Napster and you can snag a copy here. Fluke

"The layout of the AK72 does have some serious issues. There is entirely too much wasted space on the board which, while it doesn't affect the performance/stability of the board, influences the price and installation of the product because of the increased size. The expansion slot layout isn't the most ideal either"

There is also a review of the Senfu Watercooler Unit

Chip-Magazine (the printed version) in Germany, have done a great feature on Athlon overclocking starring our FreeSpeed card. If you live in Germany and are interested in Athlon Overclocking, go and buy yourself a copy :) 

We had a mail today from one of our customers (thanks Pika) who has found some info on the new collaboration between Motorola and AMD. Apparently, the Mustang core is being enhanced to 0.15u and will reach 1Ghz within 5 months. The core has 256k of 256bit full speed L2 cache and is optimized for multiprocessing with direct processor-to-processor communications capabilities and full-speed cache sharing across CPUs. Sounds pretty good stuff (will Intel keep up with AMD ?, seems like they have a battle on there hands). Fluke

Cleggy (our resident SETI guru :) has mailed us regarding poor number crunching performance of Coppermine P3s compared with much slower running Katmai P3s.....can anyone explain this ?, maybe SETI needs a larger L2 cache ?. Of course Athlons beat the both of them :). Fluke

20/03/00: I must apologize about yesterdays news concerning the new 5.08 Detonator drivers. These are not released yet but are leaked drivers direct from NVIDIA (they still rock though :). In case anyone is having problems finding them you can download a local copy for win9x here. 

Aopen have published the details of the new AK 72 (sounds like a machine gun :)  KX133 based Athlon motherboard. Check them out here. Thanks to Syrax for the link.

Magnus Rasmussen has posted a review of the EPOX EP-K7XA Motherboard. Here is a link straight to the review.

We had a email today from h4p3 telling us about a new hardware site in Austria called www.overclockers.at. Check it out if your from that part of the world.

Cleggy has updated our SETI stats, and we are still flying up the rankings. Fluke

T-Break has posted a review of our FreeSpeed .....here is a link straight into the site.

We didn't spot the release of new NVIDIA detonator drivers, and I must admit I rarely upgrade them that often as there is never much improvement in frame rates. However, these are different.....NVIDIA have now moved to v5.08. Here is what Firingsquad has to say about the driver.

"The frame rate increase between the 3.68 drivers and the 5.08 drivers is astounding -over 30% in some cases!"

Awesome :) ......You can jump to the review here. I tried a few quick tests today and in Quake2 got our highest benchmark ever. 

146.8 FPS in Quake2 timedemo 1 on map1.dm2 @ 1024@768 and 66.9 FPS in 1600*1200

To get these results we installed the new driver, clocked the Annihilator Pro DDR up to 135Mhz core 350Mhz memory and enabled AGP x2 mode and side banding (using creatives AGP utility we posted earlier this week). After around a hour of timedemos we did get some artifacts on the screen and the GEforce was cooking :) ....we are going to try and get a decent cooler on, and maybe we can clock even higher later next week. Fluke

Skittlebox has posted another review of our FreeSpeed card. You can jump straight to the review here. 

We have just received a shiny new Globalwin VOS32+ Athlon heatsink from OCuk and hope to test it on our 750core 550 later this weekend. It certainly looks like it will do the job. We will post our results soon, maybe 1Ghz will run stable at last. Fluke

17/03/00: David Ross from over at Hexus.com has posted a great review of our FreeSpeed card. Here is what they liked about it :- 

-Great Price! 
-Easy to use - within 10 minutes we had our Athlon running at a higher and stable speed
-Best way to save money with Athlon overclocking
-Excellent instructions

You can jump straight to the review here. 

Overclockers.com.au have posted a interesting article on the problems with early FIC SD-11 Motherboards rebooting without warning. Apparently this instability is caused by the omission of a 220pF Capacitor and can be fixed simply by adding the component. Check it out here.

In case I haven't mentioned this for the last two days :) , we need more SETI clients to help us. Read all about it here. 

I would like to apologize for not posting as much as usual on our message board over the last couple of weeks, things have been very busy here (poor excuse :) ......I would also like to thank everyone who has been posting replies (such as Japgar) to help people out. Fluke

Maz over at our Spanish FreeSpeed dealer NGA Sistemas has informed us that they are now a authorized dealer in Spain for Alpha heatsinks. They expect to receive a batch of P7125M60 and PEP66U sinks on or around the 20th of this month. This is great news for anyone wanting to overclock there Athlon, as NGA now have the complete Athlon overclocking solution.

Cleggy has just sent us a little utility from Creatives web site called AGPwizard for tweaking Creative GEforce256 cards. You can download it here (we have not yet tested it on a Athlon system yet) Fluke

With all the clocking results we have had over the last few months, we are starting to see patterns in success rates appear. It seems the worst results appearing are with the FIC SD11 (though we have had some good overclocks with this board). The SD11 seems to occasionally hit some stability problems. It is still worthwhile trying to overclock when using this board though.

Thomas, one of our news contributors and resellers at TotalOverclocking, has informed us that when he flashed his Gigabyte's GA7IX BIOS to the new F2 version it allowed him to overclock his even Athlon further. This is pretty strange, but if it worked for him, why not give it ago.

Now this is not Athlon related at all......but is REALLY FUNNY. It's a Flash4 movie of Star Wars, the complete film in about 3 mins :)). The .exe is only 1meg in size and is really worth checking out. :)

Speed-Fr have posted a review of the FreeSpeed card. Here is a link straight to the article. Fluke

"This great overclocking device is one of the best on the market today. The FreeSpeed Pr v2.0 is an essential for any game Athlon owner wanting to get the best performance possible. With simplicity and elegance, this card does not let you down. It sure is staying in my rig for a long time to come! Although the dipswitches can be difficult to remember at times, you get use to it pretty quickly. Well done to Ninja Micros for what I consider THE BEST GOLD FINGER card on the market. Thanx to PC Index for supplying the unit."

Cleggy has again updated his speadsheet for our SETI effort. (I think the strange peak is from a few days of no updates, either that, or someone switched on a Cray for a couple of hours :)

Alex is continuing his great work with the French FreeSpeed Forum........if you speak French take a look (I wish I knew what they were all saying :) Fluke

"For content creation applications and games (in most cases), the 1GHz Pentium III is faster than the 1GHz Athlon. Whether this is because specific SSE optimizations or because of the full speed on-die L2 cache of the Pentium III depends on the particular game and/or application, but for the most part the Pentium III will come out on top.

Things change once you enter the professional graphics arena, where the Athlon completely dominates provided that it is paired up with a KX133 motherboard.

For most users, neither of these CPUs is worth the time of day simply because of their cost, whereas overclocking a slower chip to speeds close to 1GHz would make much more sense. For the Pentium III, reaching 1GHz via normal overclocking methods may be a bit difficult, but it has definitely been done before with the Athlon."

It seems it is indeed a very close run thing, but one thing for sure ......Athlons are still THE best CPU for overclocking. 

We have had a few comments about the new site colour :)) , ranging from "much better" to "looks like Thousand Island salad dressing" LOL :) ......gonna stick with it for a while, but I see it not lasting long.

Our SETI world domination attempt is still going well and we are now ranked just over 5000 in the world, not bad ...we still need more CPU power though. You can read all about is on our SETI page. Fluke

Chris Angelini & Alex Ross over at Sharky Extreme has posted a review of AMD's new Athlon at 1Ghz.

Here's a clip:

"Now that the year two thousand is well underway, its pretty clear that households resembling old episodes of the Jetsons are still pretty far from reality. Robotic maids and hovercraft-filled, floating freeways have yet to materialize, and although we wouldn't mind reviewing the first Bed-Maker Deluxe, there is no question that our friend "Betty" is more or less still a concept.

What we have today is reality, however, and has been long in waiting. Expedited by a grueling battle between chipmakers AMD and Intel, the gigahertz barrier (which has approached quite rapidly) has finally been breached. If anyone has left-over party favors from their Y2K bash, it may be time to put them to use.

Before you pop that $600 1971 Dom Perignon, we'd like to demonstrate exactly what 1GHz of performance will offer and what you might be asking for after your purchase."

You can jump straight to the article here. Thomas

As expected, AMD released the 900, 950mhz and 1000Mhz processors today.  This months production for the 1000mhz chips will be made available to large OEMs only, with general sale starting in April.  AMD intends to produce a few hundred thousand of them during Q2.  (unlike Intel, who schedule this kind of production on the 1Ghz PIII only for Q3). Compaq and Gateway will have systems based on the new AMD chips available already this week (!).  Prices will be pretty high with the 1000Mhz chip pricing at $1299 in high volume OEM quantities of 1000pcs.  The 900 and 950Mhz chips will be $899 and $999 respectively.

For the full AMD press release, follow this link.

As a result of this announcement AMD's share-prices are soaring upwards...  At the moment of writing up by 14.5%, to 47 1/2 per share. David Van Dromme

Jai from over at Insanehardware.com has informed us that they are running a competition to design a new logo for there site. The prize for the winning design is a FreeSpeed card......so all you Athlon owning artists get your Photoshop loaded and start drawing :)

Anandtech have posted a review / preview of the the new AMD Athlon 900Mhz , 950Mhz and 1Ghz. You can check out the article here. (it's very interesting to see AMD have used the old clocking trick of raising the core voltage to achieve yield rates on these CPUs, the cores are now running at 1.8V). Fluke

You can read about it here. The Virus is a worm type called "Pretty Park", and can be killed by doing a simple registry change. We have got to stop this one fast, it seems everywhere (several of our customers have already been hit). Many apologies to anyone who got spammed......there are some sick people around writing this stuff :P Fluke

You can read all bout is here. Thomas

Intel also plans to release a 1Ghz Coppermine this month, but expect only to mass produce in Q3.  Initial systems based on these CPUs will probably come with a considerable price tag.  Dell already stated their price for such a system (using RDRAM) will probably exceed $4000 - not everybody 's piece of cake.  

Athlon 1Ghz systems will be cheaper because of their use of the cheaper (DDR-/VC-) SDRAM  compared to RDRAM. AMD and IBM will also FAB Compaq's Alfa CPUs...  Jerry Sanders said that AMD intends to offer both CPUs on identical platforms in the longer run (the Athlon already uses the Alfa EV6 bus), offering the user to make a choice between the Athlon or the Alfa CPU.

Thanks to David Van Dromme for the info, most of which is sourced from www.theregister.co.uk. Fluke

At last today we managed to get another 0.25u 750Mhz core Athlon 550 (the supplier has no more...sorry). Currently we are sitting at 950Mhz (with no FSB tweaking) rock solid with 1.9V and a Arctic cooler......however, heat seems to be a issue on this particular chip as the unit is running very hot. We have just ordered a GlobalWin VOS32+ cooler in a hope to improve things a little.....we will keep you all posted. Fluke

AnandTech has posted some CeBIT 2000 coverage giving some good guides to some 20 Athlon motherboards at the show...well worth checking out. (thanks to David Van Dromme for the info)

Abbas Jaffarali has informed us that there is a LAN party going on called Fusion 2000 in the UAEs between March the 8th and 10th. There are many prizes on offer...including a ***FreeSpeed card*** :) , check it out here (of course if I was in the UAE area and entered there would be no point in anyone else playing as I'm a Quake god ;) Fluke

Soyo are at last releasing some Athlon motherboards in the form of the SY-K7AIA and the SY-K7VIA. Here are the reported specs-

SOYO SY-K7AIA
AMD 750/751/756 Chipsets, ATA 66
Slot A for AMD Athlon K7-800MHz + CPUs
Supports 200MHz System Interface Speed
Selectable FSB from 100 MHz to 133MHz (155MHz)
SOYO Jumperless design, SOYO Power-Up Feature
Superb Overclock Capability
AGP, 5PCI, 2ISA, 3DIMM, ATX

SOYO SY-K7VIA
VIA KX133 Chipset, ATA66, 4x AGP
Slot A for AMD Athlon K7-800MHz + CPUs
Supports 200MHz System Interface Speed
Selectable FSB from 100 MHz to 133MHz to 155MHz
SOYO Jumperless design, SOYO Power-Up Feature
Superb Overclock Capability

Now Soyo have always made very good motherboards and their most recent Slot 1 offerings have been very good for overclocking. It does indeed look like they have done the same for us Athlon fans. We just hope that the FSB adjustments use 1Mhz stepping. If anyone knows this for sure please let me know. Fluke (thanks to Pika for the info)

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