The Games of E3

By Andy Patrizio

June 23, 2003

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Greetings from Smog City. It's finally warming up here after a ridiculously cool spring, although I was never terribly cold because I sit at a desk with a 3 Ghz Pentium 4 on either side of me. If that sounds like braggadocio, my point is actually that it's like being sandwiched between two hot plates. So I promise, just in time for summer, next month's column will be all about cooling.

First, a quick update on the new Intel chipsets. Last month I reviewed the 875P chipset, and it proved itself to be a winner. Intel has now released "Springdale," the 865 chipset, which will eventually replace the long-dominant 845 set. The 875 is aimed at the performance market, while the 865 is for the mainstream to value markets.

Like the 875, the 865 has an 800 Mhz front-side bus, Dual Channel DDR400 memory and Gigabit Ethernet. The only real difference is the 865 doesn't have ECC memory support, no Performance Acceleration Technology and lower pin counts on the RAM sockets. The resulting savings: $14. Whoopty-doo. Intel will also sell motherboards without the RAID0, which will save a good amount of money, but it will come with on-board video.

ECC stands for "error correcting code," which means ECC memory detects and reports memory errors, and in many cases, can correct errors without interrupting the operation of your system. PAT adds a small amount of performance and the higher pin count means a faster memory bus. I haven't had time to test the system, but next month you'll get a head-to-head comparison.

On to the main event. Last month was E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the videogame industry's equivalent to Comdex. E3 is primarily a software show, and a console software show at that, but I went hoping to find some PC hardware news.

Well, so much for that idea. There were maybe fifty PCs in the whole place.

It wasn't a total loss. Coaxsys showed off an Ethernet hub that would let you set up a wired network in your home using coaxial cable, which is often built into homes.

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