Summer slowdown? Sure looks like it, most people are either on vacation or taking things easy, and so does the whole computer industry so it seems. The number of new products being released isn’t something to write home about, and there’s a real, noticeable slowdown in press releases. Naturally that affects us too, as if there’s less new products being released we have less to write about or to evaluate. But don’t worry, if there’s not enough to go around with we rather take an even closer look than we normally do, or look at pending issues from a different perspective.



Fig 1. MSI’s K7T266 Pro motherboard featuring the Via KT266 Pro chipset, and, odd but true, a Pentium 4 compatible power connector on an AMD motherboard.

What new products did we get in over the past few days? MSI sent us their new Via KT266 Pro chipset motherboard which we’ll be looking at once we get our AMD 760 chipset motherboard in as we need to have something to compare it to. The AMD 760MP platform is still in the works. We’re having some problems with our motherboard, and we’re zeroing in on a solution, although we’ve had no feedback yet from anyone at AMD or Tyan, the motherboard manufacturer. For more info about our dealings with the Tyan Thunder K7, check here.



Fig 2. Some parts of an upcoming article we’re working on, we’ll just leave it up to you to guess what parts these are.

What else? We almost got all the parts in for some other articles we’re working on. I’m actually waiting for some parts from IBM, which are rather hard to come by, or at least so I’m told. Speaking of IBM, we also got two IBM 60 GXP harddisks incoming by way of Ryan Oland, which we'll use in a roundup article that'll offer a fresh look into the Intel Pentium 4 vs. AMD's Athlon debate, and that will certainly appeal to most of the gaming/multimedia enthusiasts.

We’re also going to add some functionality to the site in the next few weeks, and I’ll be sure to mention any new features in the daily columns. We have some very nice new features in the works, which I’m sure you’d welcome and find a real asset when browsing Hardware Analysis.

Sander Sassen