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AnandTech: PCI Speed and Overclocking: A Closer Look at A64 and P4 Chipsets . Connie’s Dad got an Athlon 64. It didn’t overclock very much. Just from 2.0GHz to 2.1GHz. This article explains why.

The nVidia nForce-3 150 chipset is supposed to keep the PCI bus stable at 66MHz, but this apparently doesn’t work. The main reason you can’t overclock is because all those peripherals on the PCI bus don’t tolerate higher bus speeds well.

“nVidia nForce3-250″:http://www.anandtech.com/chipsets/showdoc.html?i=2004 comes to the rescue. This is the next chipset out and it appears to fix this and lots of other problems.

Confusingly, there will be four variants of this chipset:

1. nForce3-250 – basic value chipset for 754 socket (the current generation of Athlon 64s), 800 HyperTransport bus, does not include on-chip Gigabit LAN or on-chip Firewall.
2. nForce3-250Gb – includes Gigabit LAN and on-chip Firewall.

With the coming introduction of Socket 939, there will also be two additional versions of the chipset introduced:

3. nForce3-250Gb Ultra – 1000 Mbps HyperTransport, Gigabit LAN, Firewall, Dual-Channel unbuffered, for Athlon 64/Athlon 64 FX.
4. nForce3-250Gb Ultra PRO – for Opteron server chips

All of these include 8 SATA ports, 4-channel SATA RAID plus 4-Channel IDE RAID, and software 6-channel audio. Basically, its an awesome chipset. We should see the first boards for the current Athlon 64 in the next few weeks.

In the next few months, the updated Athlon 64s should ship and this looks like the chipset to use with it!

Once you start spending dollars on games, I have to wonder what you do when you realize that your 4-year-old could easily destroy the CD and then you lose the game. Unfortunately, game vendors are so intent on preventing copying that it is actually quite hard to make a backup for yourself. Here are some hints (for the record, this ain’t about piracy, but about what happens, when Grace pours juice on your CD):

# GameCopyWorld – Generic SafeDisc Patch. Good overview of potential solutions. There are some wrappers that fool things like SafeDisc that are either generic or game specific. There used to be a program CloneCD that would let you do backups, but it isn’t around anymore because of legal issues.
# “Gamefix”:http://go.to/gamefix. This site has a bunch of tools that emulate some of the copy protection schemes like SafeDisc or SecuRom or CopyLok

You can also try to read these copy protected disk with conventional tools, but there will be lots of errors (see “Gamefix”:http://go.to/gamefix)

Image Tab
Image file Enter a Image filename
Copy options Tab
On the fly DeSelect
Drive with source CD… Select Source CD-Reader
Read Speed 1x (150 kB/s)
Read options Tab
Number of retries before read error 1
Read media catalog number and ISCR Select
Ignore illegal TOC Type Select
Unreadable data Continue copying
Data mode 1 – Force raw reading
- If it can be changed or it is not ghosted DeSelect
Data mode 2 – Force raw reading DeSelect
Read audio data with sub channel Select
Use Jitter correction Select (for older Readers)
Ignore read errors Select
Burn Tab
Ignore read errors 1x (150 KB/s)

When ready click Copy CD to start the copy process

Tom’s Hardware Guide Processors: Welcome The Latecomer: Pentium 4 Prescott 3.4 GHz – New Processor Nomenclature To Come. To add more confusion, the clock rates of various Intel chips don’t seem to correlate to performance, so they are going to introduce model numbers.

Right now, a mobile Pentium 4 running at a lower clock rate can actually be faster in benchmarks than a desktop Pentium. This is because they are different architectures internally. It is why an AMD ship running at 2.0GHz can be as fast as mobile Pentium running at 2.2GHz or a desktop Pentium running at 3.4GHz. Talk about confusing.

So Intel is going to these models:

For Mobile:
Pentium M 755 (2.0 GHz)
Pentium M 745 (1.8 GHz)
Pentium M 735 (1.7 GHz)
Pentium M 725 (1.6 GHz)
Pentium M 715 (1.5 GHz)
Pentium 4 Mobile
Celeron M 340 (1.5 GHz)
Celeron M 330 (1.4 GHz)
Celeron M 320 (1.3 GHz)

For Desktop:
Pentium 4 Extreme Edition
Pentium 4 560 (3.6 GHz)
Pentium 4 550 (3.4 GHz)
Pentium 4 540 (3.2 GHz)
Pentium 4 530 (3.0 GHz)
Pentium 4 520 (2.8 GHz)
Celeron D 340 (2.93 GHz)
Celeron D 330 (2.8 GHz)
Celeron D 320 (2.66 GHz)
Celeron D 310 (2.53 GHz)

Good luck figuring this out! Oh BTW, the main conclusion on Tom’s Hardware is that the new Pentium 4 3.4E GHz wasn’t a great deal. Still much hotter and about the same performance. There is apparently a new stepping (silent upgrade called D0) that you need to make sure to get.

WeetHet – CDRW – How to write a Bin/Cue CD image using Nero Burning Rom. _Hat tip to google for helping me understand the differences between .BIN and .ISO files_

BIN/CUE files (files that have a suffix .BIN and .CUE) are often found on the Internet and commonly created using CDRWIN by Golden Hawk.

If you already own Ahead Nero, it know how to burn ISO files, but not BIN/CUE files.

Simply put, a BIN file is nothing more than an ISO file variant, and a a CUE file nothing else as an index file for the BIN file.

Tip: If you only have the BIN file, and don’t have the CUE file, then look in the “downloads”:http://www.weethet.nl/english/download.php page where you can find a little tool called BIN2ISO to convert BIN files to an ISO file.

So the steps are:

# “Convert a BIN file to an ISO file”:http://www.weethet.nl/english/cdrw_bintoiso.php.
# “Burn ISO with Nero”:http://www.weethet.nl/english/cdrw_usingnero_iso.php on how to burn this image file (thanks to Hans van Helden for the tip!).

USB parallel adapters, USB computer parallel adapters at TigerDirect.com. Many of new PCs don’t bother with a parallel port. If you an old printer that only has a parallel port (technically a Centronics IEEE-1284 port), then this is the magic cable for you.