Right now I am in the San Francisco Bay Area, overseeing the last completions of our large scale test lab, which will supply us with a Whitney motherboard review as well as a comprehensive 3D-card review in the next weeks. At the same time my <link=1>German website is doing a tremendous amount of work due to my new VP Europe, Hermann Eiden . Hermann's and mine new six step 3D Guide marks the first time in the history of Tom's Hardware Guide that an article was not primarily written in English and then translated for the foreign websites. The article will be translated into an English version soon. The German website is the first of the non-English sites that will provide its own content and it will have its own lab and editorial office. The English website will benefit from this as well of course and we will make sure to keep the content of all websites synchronized.

3D Chip News

The whole world is talking about Voodoo3 now, which is available in the shops for a few days already. This puts 3Dfx in a good position against NVIDIA, who will ship their first TNT2-boards some 2-4 weeks later than 3Dfx. Whilst everyone is talking about those new 3D chips now, the competitors are catching up though. Matrox' upcoming G400 MAX chip is offering no less than 333 Mtexel/s fill rate, a 360 MHz RAMDAC along with their hardware bump mapping, so that this chip may be a serious competitor to the above two. At the same time the other Canadian 3D-chip maker ATI introduced their Rage128 Pro chip, which is also coming closer to Voodoo3 and TNT2 than we would have expected. Some odd rumors about strange behaviour of Savage4 with its latest driver overshadow this upcoming S3-chip and we still haven't heard anything meaningful about the Permedia3 from 3Dlabs.

Camino Deliberately Delayed

In closing I'd like to mention that there will still be a while until Intel will release the '820' chipset, also known under the code name 'Camino'. This chipset is supposed to be the first to support direct RDRAM, but unfortunately it will not support any other RAM-type anymore. The poor availability of direct RDRAM and the pathetically high price of this questionably high end memory type are supposed to be the main reason why Intel is delaying the launch of '820'. SDRAM for 133 MHz FSB has become available now, so that VIA's next Slot1-chipset with 133 MHz FSB-support seems to make a lot more sense than 'Camino' or 'Intel 820'.