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Chips, chipsets & mobos, Intel i845D

And personal transportation devices

HWRoundup Mobos, chipsets and other inner bits: X-bit labs has a lengthy piece discussing Intel's i845D chipset, the first one from Chipzilla to support DDR SDRAM (up to DDR266). It's much the same as the existing i845 chipset, but with a modified memory controller. There's no new support for any new things like USB 2.0 or ATA 133, although the company plans to replace it around April next year with i845E, which will include DDR333 support and other features.

Amdmb.com reviews an ECS K7VTA3 Rev2 (based on the KT266A chipset) and finds it to be a decent, stable and inexpensive board. If you're not looking for frills, check this out, otherwise you'll need to look at other options.

AMDZone reviews and overclocks an Athlon MP 1900+ (initially clocking in at 1.6GHz, but easily revved up to 1.8GHz). It's tested on the 760MPX mobo, which now ships with 66MHz PCI (and audio) support, a good improvement.

VR-Zone picks up an Iwill XP333-R mobo (using the new ALi MAGiK1 revision C1 chipset) and finds out how much overclocking it can handle, notching the FSB clock speed up to 205 MHz. (Overclockers and others messing about with inner bits may get exciting about the prospect of custom atomic fan grills - I kid you not.)



Skycar, Segway and personal hovercrafts

In the last roundup, I got excited about the prospect of a

personal skycar

coming our way in the not too distant future. A few people have slapped me back to reality.



Reader Peter Simpson has a link to an interesting article showing that Mr Moller has been tinkering with his M400 Skycar dream since 1963, but he hasn't spent much of that time in the air. Sadly, the chances of it taking off from our backyards in the next couple years are, well, slim to none.

All is not lost though, Richard Tietjens has a link to a Zap! Airboard, which is essentially a shrunk-down hovercraft that floats three or four inches above the ground and speeds along at around 15 mph. Unlike Moller's dream, you can actually buy this one for a mere $9,500.

Then, of course, there's Segway, another device not intended for the faint of wallet. It's expected to sell for around $8,000 to $10,000, although that should be reduced to around $3,000 over time. Extreme Tech looks inside the roller, uhh, personal transportation machine, takes some nice snaps of its inner circuitry and walks away, as many others have, grinning madly.



Inkjets

Tom's Hardware does printing this week, comparing various

inkjet printer models from HP, Canon, Epson and Lexmark

. An exhaustive test, broken down on the basis of cost, puts the Canon S500 as the overall leader with the best overall quality / price / speed ratio, although Epson's C80, HP's 980cxi DeskJet and Lexmark's Z43 draw mention for various strong points.




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