Sorry if I am at all offensive... but I'm not getting the answers.

I know about not needing to be a mirror finish... I'm not looking for whether if there is a difference between a mirror finish or not, but rather an absolutely flat base compared to a base with fine grooves that are of a same size.

I dunno if this hase been posted or not, and I feel that I should ask before I do anything to the sink. The heatsink I have right now has these really fine grooves on the base of the whole heatsink which seem to be very nicely polished. Now everyone had said lap the sink for better temperature, but ...

I tried it on my A7V600-X, works miraculously!!! Dropped from around 39C-32C right now with my 1.92Ghz 2600+ Barton.

Th reason for the fan RPM to go up is very simple, its because the intake of the fan is partially blocked when you are sucking from the heatsink. You can try a very simple test, place 2 fingers lengthwise by the intake of the fan, check the RPMs, the fan speed will increase. Noise will increase by A...

CPUs and GPUs are very very different. GPUs only do very specific things. They work with triangles and pixels. Shading and texturing. They can't do anything but graphics, they're only designed to do graphics, and they do it well. I've read that it is possible to transform sound into triangles and t...

Though this may not help much. I have 9600XT that had a really bad fan, I removed the dinky fan and stuck a 80mm fan under it. Idle temperatures were higher, but load temperatures were higher. I'm not sure what that says, just what I found with my experience.

If you are by any means interested and would like to try and discover what would be causing it, I can let you have some fun with my computer(I trust you as the leader of SPCR). The lab and my place seems pretty close as its between Fraser and Main(counts the number of streets. with my fingers).

OK, here's the final possibility: Ambient temps are higher in Vancouver than they were 2 months ago. Most thermal testing for SPCR now has to be done earlier in the morning, otherwise the ambient gets too high so the results are not as easily compared to previous reviews. The Super Tornado fan is t...

MikeC wrote:Mebbe the PSU is clogged up with dust internally. Have you tried opening it up for a major blow out or vacuum?

The power supply is only 2 months old. Also when I cleaned up 2 weeks ago, there was barely any dust in power supply.

StarfishChris: I know its the power supply because I can hear the difference when it ramps up due to temperatures going up when I game or do CPU intensive tasks.

Gremlins. Improved fan motor efficiency due to bearings being well seated. Reduced air pressure due to ozone layer hole leaking oxygen into space. PC hardware / software error. Memory loss / error (yours, not the PC's). But does it SOUND any different? If not, why worry? 1. maybe 2. too technical f...

I cleaned everything up last week. I was thinking about the dust thing too, but it hasn't helped much other than lower my CPU temp by 1C.

I'm not sure to put this under power supplies or fans, but do fans speed up over time? I have noticed this happening on Seasonic Super Tornado and my old heatsink fan. They sped up with age. When I bought my heatsink, it spun at around 2700RPM, then it slowly crept up to 3k. Its not temperature cont...

If you just jam ur finger in the fan, not only do you risk damaging it, you also risk hurting urself. Those blades are thin, like a knife, and they easily spin at 6k rpm, what do you think you can compare that to considering I got a chunk lobbed off by my 80mm CPU fan before spinning at around 2600r...

Video cards can probably be cooled fanless as there are X800XL, 6600GT, and 6800's out there that are being cooled fanless. CPU's, well, that's a different story. I doubt a A64 3800+ and above, FX series, Intel 5XX, 6XX, 8XX, A64 X2 can be cooled fanless. Cooling low model Winnies and Venices fanles...

A partially blocked intake would actually make a fan spin faster. I have tested and confirmed that and can be repeatable. So the problem is probably dust on the fan.

I feel that graphics cards are playing catch up with games. Games seem to be always ahead of graphics cards in requirements. Even with a 6800U or X850XTPE, I don't think you can play D3 or HL2 with all eye candy on right? It was the same with last gen cards with Halo2 and Farcry.

Heck, the plumbing for the big companies in graphics and CPU is messed up. Intel messed their 90nm up and nVidia messed their 110nm up...

that 85% card may very well become the new mainstream. Definitely my choice and most other people's choice in cards.

And to know that the X800's uses less power than 9800XT's, that at least is an achievement.

Seems like the top current ATi cards doesn't consume more than the top cards of yesteryear... That is indeed very interesting.

Nice drawing Mathias, well... gets the point across, hahaha, and even not very experenced users like me can understand.

I heard that the ATI branded cards are made by Saphire and Celestica. I think those are different companies. Sapphires have an out of box failure rate that cannot be matched by anything else, and I've never heard of problems like that with ATI cards, so I doubt ATi cards are made by those 2 compani...

Splinter: I understand now, thank you for ur excellent analogy. I don't think that 200W cards would become a reality in the (near) future. How they will cool such a beast? Air cooling can't handle it. Maybe watercooling... I don't think it will happen either, and at least not in the current configur...

My Sapphire card had a ceramic fan..... It started out really quiet, being barely able to hear it, after awhile, it just started grinding like crazy. It spins properly and keeps things cool, just loudly though.

Also question about why does it seem that GPU technologies seem to be behind CPU tech? Nvidia just started 130nm and last time I looked, ATi was still on 150nm?? At the same time, they seem to be using a lot faster memory chips and systems, why is that? No, ATi's been using 130nm since 9600's (thou...

What are the typical wattage consumed by current cards anyways?? For like 9600's, 9800's, 6600's, X800's, 6800's?? I just wanna compare the power used today and tomorrow. I think gas is always brought up here is because its the same as wattage used by computer components. People only started caring ...

Maxtors, the worst drives in the world *lookst a pile of dead Maxtors in back room* and I got the proof to back it up. The bunch of us(group of computer kids at school) are running quite a few maxtors ourselves. We don't seem to be running into any problems other than me blowing mine with a plug wh...

ultraboy: thanks for the review. Appreciated. Now continue on looking for me. The never ending quest of finding good looking parts that are quiet. m0002a: thanks for the info. Didn't realized it would be based of the imperial measuremnts(I mean, its modern tech stuff, one would expect the metric sys...

my modem does the same thing. On a lesser extent, so does my router. Both are D-link parts.

Perhaps vacuum and blow dryer together? The blow dryer will blow the dust everywhere, so use the vacuum to suck up some of the dust that flies off...