According to News.com, Intel has completed the design work on their IA-64 CPUs. Should be shipping the middle of next year.

Explosive3D has a total cooling roundup taking a look at everything you would want to cool on your PC and how good the different products are.

Viper3D has a new Quake3 framerate optimization guide for you to tweak out your console commands and vid card with.

PennStar has updated their State of 3D article taking a look at all of the 3D chip makers at a fairly technical level and discussing the chips they are working on over the next year or so. Here is a bit on ATI's plans:

This summer ATI is planning on releasing the Rage 128 Pro. This chip will have all the features of the original Rage 128 GL, but be clocked at 125 Mhz. Other optimizations in the design will supposedly give a 30% increase in performance over the Rage 128 GL. This chip is supposed to be announced in July, and shipping products made available in late August.

The Alienware guys have word that they plan on selling a hybrid Voodoo3 / TNT2 based gaming system which looks... interesting.

Creative Labs has released some new SBLive! linux drivers. Thanks Rick

Full On 3D took a close look at the newest beta drivers from ATi which finally promise 3DNow! support. Faced with Unreal and Quake 2 crusher and demo1

FiringSquad has updated their buy hardware cheap guide which offers some pretty drastic measures on what you can do to get your PC hardware as cheap as possible.

ATI has released some new drivers for their Rage128 cards, including some specifically tailored for play with Quake3.

Well, sorta new drivers. Version 2.08 of the TNT/2 (or at least they were dated July 9th) drivers. Big warning label on these as they aren't an official release, nor do they have the Nvidia name. These are reference drivers under the Supermicro Platinum TNT label. Thanks D128.

The media usually eats this stuff up, but when you get credible sources like John Carmack (.plan update) saying that K7 Athlon rocks, you know there is some substance there. Looks like it's Tim Sweeney's turn with the praise as he has just updated the Unreal Tech Page with how this new wonderchip run Unreal (but no groovy benchmark charts):

My new 550 MHz AMD Athlon (K7) just clocked a jaw-dropping 68.5 Unreal timedemo at 1024x768, running on a Voodoo3 3000 card.  Even more telling, at no point did the frame rate ever drop below 38.0 fps.  That's astounding, considering the intense lightmap and geometry usage in the timedemo level.  Even while playing Unreal Tournament's most texture and polygon intensive level (Shane Caudle's DmGothic), the frame rate hardly ever went below 60 fps.

The Athlon's 128K L1 cache is awesome for memory-intensive games like Unreal.   Operations like visibility determination, which thrash on the Pentium III's 32K cache, now run at full speed on the Athlon.  This CPU truly shows a generational performance improvement, like going from my old 486 to my first Pentium.

When I saw AMD's K7 spec, I was pretty skeptical.  The K6 had been hyped up, but in reality it was slower for Unreal than a Pentium II of comparable clock rate, due to its poor non-SIMD floating point performance.  The K7 claimed to fix all of that, and debut a new architecture with 3 execution pipelines.  I decided to wait and see, without getting my hopes up.

Bottom line: I waited, and now I have seen!  The Athlon is clearly the fastest x86 CPU at any clock speed.

Congratulations go to AMD.

And just to think that the P3 Coppermine (which contrary to popular belief, does NOT make use of copper technology) will have 64k of L1 -- still half of what the K7 Athlon will ship with (and hopefully they do get around to shipping those out)

Fo3D compares the various sound APIs that are available to a Vortex 2 with Descent 3 and makes the usual performance comparisons. Keep in mind that these tests were done with much older drivers. On a side note, I installed the newest version of the drivers Aureal released, and even though they are BETA, they're far better than the previous release.

SystemLogic has posted a lengthy (14 pages) review of the Permedia3. There's already plenty of benchmarks and info, but according to Dave, an add-on is expected in the next week with even MORE benchmarks and analysis.

AnandTech has published a comparison of the TV-out capabilities of several popular video cards. Tested were the ATI Impac TV2, Matrox MGA TVO, Brooktree BT869, and Chrontel CH7002D-V. How'd they compare? The TV out of the G400's tested came out on top, while the ATI card lagged behind. Also, there was a surprising difference in quality between the V3 and TNT2's tested, even though they all used the Brooktree technology.

CPU Review has gone geeking once again and has decided to share the experience. This time he rigs up an inexpensive SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing, like 2 CPUs) system and dumps NT for Linux.

Aureal has released some new drivers for the Vortex1 & 2 chipset based soundcards. (Chances are if you dont have a soundblaster, you have a vortex) You can grab the A3D drivers here, and the Vortex2 reference drivers here Thanks Railshire

GameCenter does their part trying to clear up this mess of 3D accelerators we go ton the market. They look at the 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 Creative Labs 3D Blaster RIVA TNT 2 Ultra Diamond Multimedia Stealth III S540 Diamond Multimedia Viper V770 Ultra Guillemot Xentor and Matrox Millennium G400 Max

The end of the world is upon us! Huntsman has done his homework and dug up just about every good price you can find for buying your next PC. Better yet he breaks it down into categories for those of you with different budgets. ShackWare has been updated! Here is a bit of word from Clay:

OMG. When did the whole freaking world go insane? HAVE YOU SEEN RAM PRICES?!?! Dig it:
512MB: $999
256MB: $172
128MB: $61
64MB: $27
DO YOU SEE THAT? You can use 64MB sticks for toothpicks!

Couple of tech bits for ya slopped into a paragraph till I get home and mess with the database templates some more. Firstly you should have a look at the Fullon3D chat with an Intel rep talking about their IA-64 CPU architecture. (next-gen stuff) Then there is also the PlanetQuake and FiringSquad hardware tips sections being updated. PQ helps you guys on the video card front and FiringSquad tries to cover it all for PC upgrades. You may also wanna have a look at the Tweak3D modem tweak guide while you are looking to boost performance. Lastly NT Gaming Palace has slapped up some new INF files for those of you using V3 cards and that Win2k beta MS is selling. (Thanks VE)

It's God Box vs. Nerd Box over at Ars Technica. Those guys get some kick ass dual cpu action going with P3 560s and C504s. No idea how much longer Intel will allow SMP with S370 Celerons though. Crazy =

All of the SC-750's fan mounts are occupied in the Nerd Box, and there are a couple of fans mounted in places where SuperMicro never really intended. Including the power supply and TNT card, I count a total of 19 fans in the Nerd Box. Don't think this thing doesn't sound like a 767 taking off, especially once that 10,000 rpm SCSI drive spins up. But to a true PC performance freak, it's music to the ears.