From my viewpoint, the speakers you hook up to your computer are of great importance. Why invest in a great sound card, such as the SB Live!, if you have crappy speakers attached to it. They just don’t give it justice! With the LOW cost of speakers these days, there is no excuse to having the standard two...

Superpower is a 12 year old company that designs and manufactures PC cases and power supplies, along with their server counterparts. Until recently, I had never heard of this company, but I was recently presented the opportunity to review one of their PC cases and become familiar with their product line. They sent me a KS-298XP, from their Polaris II series. The...

Windows 2000 has been the talk of the operating system circles for almost a year now.  At first, it was supposed to be Windows NT 6.0.  Then, some say after Linux caught on, they upped it to Windows NT 5.0, and renamed it, Windows 2000.  It’s still based on the NT 4.0 code, which we...

Motherboard SpecificationsCPU Interface Slot 1 / PPGA 370Chipset Intel 440BXL2 cache N/AForm Factor ATXVoltage ...

Motherboard SpecificationsCPU Interface Socket 7Chipset Via MVP3L2 cache 1 MBForm Factor ATXVoltage Range 1.3 - ...

Creative Labs has long had a history of creating the standard by which all other multimedia companies base their product line. Their orignal sound card, the Sound Blaster, quickly became the standard, leaving other companies to try to make their hardware "sound blaster compatible". Creative...

Processor voltage today is not a huge concern to the normal user. The only people who really concern themselves with it are those who overclock their system and sometimes fine-tune the voltages going to their processors in order to garner some extra speed and improve stability. So, this article is more of a reference. Why does the voltage of your CPU even...

Through the course of PC development, there have been a variety of different and competing video display standards developed. Since the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) came out with an agreed-on SVGA spec, there has not been much volatility in this area. This is good news for consumers because you don’t have to worry about getting hardware...

In the world of personal computing, 3D is big thing. All of us, on a day to day basis, use our computers to do mundane tasks like word processing, accounting, check our email. These things are all strictly 2D, things that fit nicely on a flat monitor because all that matters for an image is width and height. But, move beyond that into some of the more complex...

Universal Serial Bus is a powerful external bus system for hooking devices to your PC and having ample bandwidth to perform the tasks today’s users are taking on. Originally developed in 1995, USB was developed by a collaboration of different companies in order to make connecting external devices to a PC as easy as plugging it in. Parallel and Serial ports...

The packaging is simply the entire makeup of a unit of memory, such as the SIMM or DIMM. Since the memory chips themselves are way too small, they must be combined and put onto a medium that can be worked with and added to a system. So, designers took the memory chips, placed them on a small fiberglass card, and created the memory module. There are...

Intel released the Pentium III “Katmai” processor in February of 1999, running at 450 MHz on a 100MHz bus. Designated as the Pentium III “B”, Katmai introduced the SSE instruction set, which was basically an extension of MMX that again improved the performance on 3D apps designed to use the new ability. Also dubbed MMX2, SSE contained 70...

Overclocking has long been a favorite method of tweaking PC performance by PC enthusiasts. The concept of it probably got its start back in the days of the Intel 486 and AMD 5×86. For example, the 5×86 was the basis of a lot of overclocking fun, because you could increase the front side bus speed from 33 MHz to 50 MHz and reduce the multiplier to 3.0x...

Although Intel got into the Socket 7 chipset business and basically took over, there were many great chipsets out there that didn’t boast the Intel name. Also, Intel decided to move onto sixth generation chipsets after its release of the TX chipset. TX was their last Pentium-class chipset, leaving the market wide open for their competitors to come in and...

SCSI is an entirely different interface than the more popular IDE. It is more of a system level interface, meaning that it does not only deal with disk drives. It is not a controller, like IDE, but a separate bus that is hooked to the system bus via a host adapter. A single SCSI bus can hold up to eight units, each with a different SCSI ID, ranging from 0 to 7....