Crystal Chip Review

[spedmetal]

Many of you are already aware of the Crystal Chip and some of its feature, but I wanted to expand upon this chip some more as I don't believe its getting the recognition it deserves.

First off you can find this and more information about the Crystal Chip at there official home page here http://crystal-chips.com

The Crystal chip is loaded with features that I won’t cover here as it will just make this post even longer then it’s going to already be but you can go here for a great break down of everything http://crystal-chips.com/index.php?page=prod_cc1

The Crystal Chip (CC) is about the size of the Matrix Infinity so this makes it just as easy to locate a good spot for it on the motherboard as the Infinity, unlike the DMS4. It has its own on-board oscillator which I have always liked chips to have, for one this means one less wire to solder and two you can keep from having to drag a high frequency wire across the motherboard that can bleed noise into the motherboard. On V9 and later versions there is no tray out (TO) point (similar to reset point) to have to solder. The CC has 4, yes countem 4!!! Ground pads to solder to making it very easy to find a good short ground point on the motherboard.

I could go over a large list of what it booted, but I’m not because this thing boots damn everything! I tested it on a V9 PS2 ands it even booted Spyro3 which is an anti-mod PSX game and it got past the mod protection which currently only a handful of chips can do.

Many of you may have heard that the CC is a home brew only chip..... well your right, kind of. It comes from the CC team flashed with a bios that will only boot home brew applications. This however can be over come by re-flashing the chip with a “hacked” bios for the CC that can be very easily found on the net.

One of the most innovative features of the CC is it “Boot Manger”. The Boot Manger (BM no not bawl movement you sick-o’s) is an application that you install to your memory card that acts some what like a hacked Xbox dash in that the BM will boot up before anything else allowing you to select what you want to do, screen shots are to follow that will show it all. With out the memory card and the BM the chip will still boot back-ups with the hacked bios, not only that but it auto detects just like the Infinity. The BM and homebrew apps can’t be installed to the HDD at this time; maybe in the future they will develop something like this.

Here is what the install looked like click here

Boot Manger Screen
Notice the blue disc in the upper left of the screen, the BM will show you what type of disc you have in the DVD-Rom, very cool indeed!


Application Browser
This feature boots apps right from the memory card, and yes it will boot HDloader from here as well.


Configuration Screens
The following 5 shots are of different configuration screens with a sh*t load of options.














Cool Sticker
And last every CC comes with a cool raiser vinyl sticker just like this to stick to the out side so everyone that sees it will know you have a bad ass chip in your PS2.


Ok well I’m sure there is stuff I have left out that I will be adding here, but for now this is a very good overview of the awesome features of this power house of a chip!