Video Wars
Diamond Multimedia has really been on a role lately. First there was the Monster 3D II, widely recognised as the best single 3dfx Voodoo 2 video card, then came the Rio, a portable MP3 player, followed by the Monster Sound MX300, my choice for the best sound card on the market today (the four speaker support is AMAZING).
In the next few months, the video card wars are going to heat up again. Several vendors will be releasing their next generation 3D accelerators, including nVidia, 3dfx, S3, Matrox and Ati. This means big competition for your hardware dollars and will result in high performance video cards at fairly reasonable prices.
As it stands right now, Diamond seem poised with another winner, the Viper V770. This card will be based on nVidia's TNT2 chip and early benchmarks indicate that performance will be through the roof. Add to that a full selection of the latest features including support for 32 MB of video RAM, full AGP texturing and 32 bit rendering. At this point, TNT2 looks unbeatable.
3dfx, which recently purchased STB will be releasing their Voodoo3 series of cards, but, in my opinion, they've already missed the boat. V3 will only support up to 16 MB of RAM and will be limited to 16 bit rendering which equates to lower image quality, although you can bet that performance will still be top notch. V3 will not support AGP texturing so textures will have to be stored locally on the video card and not in your system's main memory like TNT2.
Look for S3, Matrox and Ati to battle it out at the lower end, while TNT2 and V3 compete for the hardcore gamer's dollar. The graph shown here was taken from Tom's Hardware, www.tomshardware.com and estimates the performance of some current and future video cards on different CPU platforms. The TNT2 is clearly the winner on Intel based computers. 3dfx takes the lead on AMD CPUs because of enhanced driver support for 3DNow! This difference will become smaller as TNT2 cards are released with more up to date drivers. These results were made with prototype cards and results will vary when the actual cards are released. I can't wait to pop a V770 in my system and see just how fast Quake 2 can be!
If this isn't the coolest little device I've ever seen, I don't know what is. Measuring in at 9cmx4cmx2cm, this modem is the perfect tool for the laptop owner who wants to access the Internet while on the road, but doesn't want the hassle of PC card modems. This modem is a snap to set up. You simply install the software and then plug it into a USB port. That's it! Then, you can connect and disconnect it as much as you want. It seems USB peripherals are starting to be truly "Plug and Play" as was promised two years ago. The speed of this modem while on the Web or downloading files is on par or better than other V.90 (56 kbps) modems. Unfortunately, it's a soft-modem, meaning that it uses your CPU to perform the modulation/demodulation tasks that a normal modem would do for itself. This makes it completely unsuitable for online gaming where your CPU is already taxed to its limits.
Okidata OkiJet 2500
Just a few short years ago, colour printing was prohibitively expensive and out of reach for the average home user. Today, low-cost colour inkjet printers have come down in price and gone up in quality. I don't know why anybody would buy a black-and-white inkjet printer over a colour one given that the price difference is negligible. Okidata's newest printer, the OkiJet 2500, is a fine example of such a device. It's a 1200x600 dpi printer on photo quality paper and 600x600 on plain paper. The quality of the text printing is very good. Its colour output is also good, but the colours are a little more washed out than other printers in its price range. The printer is rated at 5 ppm (pager per minute) for text and 2.5 ppm for full colour images. Overall, I am quite impressed with this printer. The biggest problem with the OkiJet 2500 is that I have yet to find a store that sells ink cartridges for it in Saskatoon (there are stores in both Regina and Prince Albert). Cartridges can be ordered directly from Okidata and will be shipped within a few days. Once this printer becomes more widely available, better support will soon follow.
by Jason Offiong
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