Today is off to a great start, just got an email from Damon at AMD, he’ll be getting us a pair of Athlon MPs for the 760 MP vs. Xeon DP review I’m working on. Thanks Damon, we really appreciate the gesture. He’ll also be supplying us with heatsinks, I’m guessing the Taisol heatsinks I’ve seen in a number of AMD demonstration machines already.



Fig 1. Tyan Thunder K7 AMD 760MP chipset motherboard, the first 760MP chipset motherboard available.

What can you expect from the review? Well, I’ve posted a thread in the forum a while ago, which can be found here. We would basically like to ask you, the reader, to tell us how you would like to see both systems tested. As usual we’ll be running benchmarks such as SYSmark 2000/2001, 3Dmark 2001 and some of the other popular ones. However if you, for some reason, want us to run some other benchmark which you think would shed a different light on things we’d be happy to do that. So please take a few moments to read through the forum thread and post any suggestions you’d like to make.



Fig 2. The AMD 760 chipset, nice aluminum heatspreader, looks a lot like a K6 CPU, but smaller.

We’re also getting the parts in, let me rephrase that, we’re also buying a bunch of parts for an upcoming article that’ll put mobile computing in a different light. I’d like to tell you all about it, but cannot yet, as we still have some Crucial parts unconfirmed that we need to be able to do that article. But once we have everything in and we’re ready to go it’ll be worth the wait, I’m sure, especially for all those people that have an older notebook and feel the need to upgrade.

What else? Working on a couple of leads on products we’d like to get our hands on as well as some editorials I’d like to start writing. I’m still waiting for a reply from Bryan at nVidia about some additional nForce info and, if possible, a sample. He hasn’t replied to a single email yet, which I think is kinda rude for a PR manager, so he must either be very busy or he doesn’t care. If he indeed doesn’t reply I’ll remain skeptic about their whole nForce chipset, I for sure am not going to buy into their benchmarks until I see them verified by a trustworthy 3rd party.

He probably thinks we’re not worth his time, or doesn’t like our show-us-the-money attitude. He’d rather send a sample out to editors that are easier to impress and don’t need to run 72-hrs of gut wrenching benchmarks to be able to make a sound evaluation of their new product. So we’ll probably have to ask our contacts at some of the motherboard manufacturers whether they have anything available. We’ll keep you posted!

Oh, one last thing, tomorrow is my birthday, I'll be turning 27 on the 27th of June. That a lucky number? Don't know really, but if you can mathematically prove it is, I'll be buying a lottery ticket for sure.

Sander Sassen