Sledgehammer revisited

DIGIT-LIFE has posted another part of its look at the Athlon 64 Sledgehammer over here. They recap: "The processor will be launched at the end of Q1 / beginning of Q2… It will start at the rating of 3100+ which corresponds to the actual frequency of 1.8GHz. Later on, they say, the line will look like this: 2800+ (1.6GHz), 3100+ (1.8GHz), 3400+ (2.2GHz), 3700+ (2.4GHz), 4000+ (2.6GHz) 4300+ (2.8GHz). For all things Hammerish, INQ-stylee, go here.

Anandtech looks at the HP Windows XP Media Center box and finds it very wanting indeed. Even though it uses a high end 2.53GHz Pentium 4, it still manages to deliver bluish screens, it won't jump over commercials, and it seems to stutter an awful lot. Here.

Elsewhere, AMDBoard points at a couple of sightings of the SiS746FX chipset. The Babblingfish has a stab at translating Chinese site Gzeazy's review of the reference board over here, while OCWorkbench seems to have snaffled the benchmarks and posted them up on their forum over here. Be advised that the Chinese takes an age to come through, though the results - language-wise - are surprisingly lucid - well, as these things go you can almost make some sort of sense of it.

X-bit Labs woos the overclockers with an appraisal of three boostable "gems": AMD's Athlon XP 1700+, Intel's Celeron 2GHz and a Pentium 4 1.8A GHz. All is let slip over here.

Beyond3D adds another part to its look at Hardware Geometry Processing, taking a good long look at the Vertex Shader, over here.

OCAddiction considers a complete water cooling kit by Aquastealth over here. They're not impressed.

The protesting geek at I Am Not A Geek here fiddles with a Samsung SF-531 Multifunction Device.

myWORLD Hardware considers some FannerTech's system coolers over here.

3DCenter have Googled a nice forward-looking piece considering what will happen in the hurly-burly world of graphic chips this year. All the gen on upcoming Radeons, Parhelias, GeForceFXs, PowerVRs, Xabres and Trident XPs awaits you here. And here's the German original.

And finally, quoth Trevor McDoughnut, Spode's come across an English rose studying computer science and reckons it's a big deal. "I'd spent seven years in an all girl school and had my own ideas about the sort of men that I wanted to spend four university years with," writes Lorna, who's obviously got her priorities right. Sigh. "High heeled footprints on the industrial green and beige flooring of university computing departments around the country are likely to remain a rarity and queues in the girls' toilets non-existent," says the Canterbury undergrad over here.

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