AMD's memory-switching Hammer exposed

AMD SAYS THE INTEGRATED memory controller on its forthcoming Hammer chips can be turned off, allowing the chips to use the controller of its accompanying chipset if necessary. Thus, inital chip shipments will work with DDR II memory without tweaking, according to an interesting piece on Extremetech.

Back here we wondered how first generation Hammers would work with DDR II. And here's Extremetech's update.

Charles Mitchell, a strategic marketing manager at AMD, tells Extremetech, the first Hammer chips will include a memory controller that will allow up to DDR-333 memories to be used. The next memory controller will support DDR-II, specifically the DDR II-400 speed grade, Mitchell said. The switch will likely take place in 2004.

Over at the Antipoden fora, a post on overclockers.co.nz here, suggests AMD's Barton is really a Hammer in discuise (sic). Why else, smirks the poster, would "AMD put so much effort into Barton if it is not going to be the mainstream CPU for long?".

ocworkbench.com has tried out a SiS 648 reference board and found, for example that disk performance went up 60 per cent with the new IDE drivers using DDR333. Have a gander here.

TecCentral has a review of the Abit AT7 - Max mobo. Babelfish the German from here.

Over at linuxhardware, the guys and gals have built what they dub the system of the year. And, much to Intel's chagrin, it sports a pair of AMD Athlon MP 2100+ CPUs. Wibble this way.

PCPowerzone has a look at Leadtek's WinFast TwinForce 2 combo offering that sticks together their Leadtek, Nforce-powered Winfast K7N415DA motherboard with their own NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 graphics card. That's here.

Adding to the knowledge of GeForce 4, here's hardocp.com's look at Asus' GeForce4 Ti 4600 Ultra Deluxe.

And here's 3D Velocity's own take on the XFX Ti4200.

Here's Dan's account of how he smudged his way through his own Personal Fingerprint ID kit with a spot of jelly.

Neoseeker has a look at Antec's Performance Plus880 "out of the box" case. That's here.

Monster-Hardware runs a review of the Swiftech MCX462, and very pretty they reckon it is too, here.

And for some lighter, palm-sized relief here's an appraisal of Creative's NOMAD JukeBox 3 -- USB-stylee, of course -- from everytingusb.com. µ