Tuesday December 31, 1996
- ESC will close at noon today and reopen Thursday at 9 AM PST. Happy New Year!
- Looking for information on the ASUS T2P4S.
Monday December 30, 1996
- Added Western Digital Caviar drives to product line.
- Questions of the day:When will the final PR440FX be available?
Intel will release the final version of the PR440FX in Boxed form to distributors so we will have pricing information January 2, 1997.When will Boxed MMX CPU’s be available?
Intel will officially release MMX CPUs January 8th through their Boxed program. We will have more pricing information that day.
Friday December 27, 1996
- Gathering information for Western Digital Cavair line so we can add them to our product line.
Tuesday December 24 through Friday December 26, 1996
- Closed for the holidays. Best wishes from our families to yours.
Monday December 23, 1996
- Benchmark page was created. The Intel Pentium Classic 200 MHz and AMD K5 PR133 metrics were added to the table.
- We received more brokered Pentium Pro 200 MHz CPUs (256K Cache).
- Intel releases a new BIOS revision for the VS440FX
Friday December 20, 1996
- Last minute Christmas Shoppers flooded the phone lines. Only US Mail will deliver on December 25, 1996.
- Many suppliers are closing during the last week of the year. They are busy with Physical Inventory counts.
- Pricing on the Pentium Pro 200 MHz OEM is volatile. Availability of the brokered CPUs is better than the previous 4 months. Boxed Pentium Pro 200 MHz CPUs have still not arrived.
Wednesday December 18, 1996
- Pricing for the brokered Pentium Classic 166 MHz and 200 MHz CPUs are volatile. Watch this product carefully. We are expecting the pricing to continue to increase until the MMX versions are readily available.
Monday December 16, 1996
- Bargain Page (aka Red Tag page) was removed today. There was too much confusion between the new products and these remanufactured products.
Wednesday December 11, 1996
- Freetech announced two more new boards in addition to the Falcon and Gemini (see Friday December 6 below). We will carry both these and the newly announced Eagle (ATX form factor). The Eagle and Falcon will both have 2-512 DIMM sockets. Both are available now. There is no ETA as of yet for the Dual Pentium Pro Gemini.
- ASUS announced the P/I P55T2P4S (430HX, 6-SIMM Slots, SCSI). No pricing and no availability. Complete specs are shown at ASUS here
- Intel to ship MMX Overdrive processors first half of 1997. Speeds to as low as 60 MHz. Only applicable to OEM upgradable boards.
- IBM this week at IEDM (International Electionic Devices Meeting) to describe how they embedded static RAM cells into an advanced CMOS logic process. Talks will center on moving to a 0.1 micron CMOS process with a 0.07 effective channel by ~ 2004! They some day in the next few years foresee 4MB Level I cache.
Tuesday December 10, 1996
- Added AMD CPUs to our line.
- Looks like Intel MMX CPUs will be available next week.
Monday December 9, 1996
- Pentium with MMX running at 166 MHz and 200 MHz have found there way into the brokered market. Official release date is January 8, 1997.
- A case of mistaken identity. ESC people are puzzled over the increase of calls today on our phone lines for a company named Einstein Computers (or something like that). These customers think they’ve placed an order with ESC or are unhappy because they never got their product. We know there are at least two companies with similar names: one in Los Angeles and one on the East Coast. Our dog’s name is EinStein and one of our DNS registrations is einsteinscomputer.com. Our company grew out of a small company called Ein Stein’s Computers, which operated from Yuba City for 9 years. Ein Stein’s Computers was a computer service organization and presently does not accept new clients. We are not related to these other retail companies from Southern California or the East Coast. Apparently the salesman “John” is having a bad day and we hope everything works out.
- Snow storm hits New England last night. Power for some people will not be restored for several business days.
- Is your system locking up? Check to make sure the CPU is seated properly, and the fan is situated over the CPU. Make sure the amount of thermal grease between the CPU and fan is no more than one to two pieces of paper in thickness. If it is too thick, clean the grease off the fan and CPU, and place a small amount of grease on the top of the CPU. The grease is not a conductive material, rather it is an insulator. The grease should only spread across the 1 inch heat spreader on top of the CPU. If you are using grease supplied by PC Power & Cooling it is important to know that the tube of grease they supply is for 8 – 9 applications.
Friday, December 6, 1996
- Freetech released two new motherboards. The Falcon for Pentium class CPUs (82430VX chipset, 3/4 baby AT form factor) and the Gemini for Single/Dual Pentium Pro (82440FX chip set, Full AT form factor).
- We have received the following manuals from Intel: “The Pentium Pro Processor Specification Update”, the “Pentium Pro Processor at 150 MHz, 166 MHz, 180 MHz and 200 MHz”, and the “Pentium Processor Specification Update”.
- Fast I/O booths drew large crowds at Comdex. Some say to look for the current parallel technology to be replaced by fast serial I/O .
Wednesday, December 4, 1996
- Digital, with its 466 MHz Alpha chip plans to battle Intel next year on Windows platforms. Its FX32 emulation will allow it to run Win 95 programs.
- Andy Grove at Comdex last week linked Intel’s future to the sale of PCs that will capture the ‘Eye-Ball’ market (now commonly referred to as longe-lizards or couch-potatoes).
- Chips & Technology recently annouced plans to merge its graphics accelerator technology with system memory or logic on a single chip.
- Pricing is very volatile on Intel’s 200 MHz Pentium Pro w/512k cache.
Tuesday, December 3, 1996
- AMD begins sampling of its K6 chip with MMX capabilities.
