Taiwanese make ATI ‘scrapcards’

HWRoundup And after a long break, here's a round-up of news from Hardware Land.

And we swoop on 3DWin.net, a German language site, which is running this warning (scroll down for an English translation) about buggy OEM ATI Radeon 8500 LE cards from Taiwan hitting the system builder market. The bug is pretty damn serious - after a few days of use, the hard drive crashes - and "often the registry and system-files are affected".

3DWin places the blame firmly at the doors of the anonymous cardmaker (or cardmakers - it's not clear from the report). But it adds: "You can't blame ATI who they're selling their chips, but they need to give their chips into good hands. Because if their image is ruined it will be hard for ATI to raise their quality level."

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Is it my imagination, or is there/was there a web site devoted to pictures of prices in shop windows in Akihabara, the electronics district of sleepy Tokyo? Retailers here don't care about NDAs and embargoes - they flog CPUs, chipsets, mobos before the rest of the world - sometimes, they're engineering samples, but hey, what's that between punters.

The latest pre-releases to surface are mobos incorporating Intel's 845G and 845GL chipsets, and the spotter is Martin Williams, a hack on the Tokyo bureau of the IDG News Service. This really is jumping the gun - Intel's new integrated graphics chipsets are expected to start selling officially in mid-May. And don't forget, there may be a third ultra-cheapo version, the 845GLL.

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Hexus.net, the energetic UK review site, has put the Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti4200 through its paces.

Summary?

Thumbs up

for this graphics chip.

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