I have a 7600GS from XFX and all I can say is I've never had any issues with it. It draws its power from the motherboard, it has no extra power connectors. I think the power is more like 45W at peak load but it should be idling at boot time which is probably under 30W, hardly taxing for a modern mot...

There are plenty of components (e.g. video card, disk drives) which lay across the case horizontally and so will mess up a pure convection airflow. Also, convection will not necessarily direct the airflow at the components which need it the most, namely CPU HSF, PSU, graphics card, and HDDs: the wea...

My system is in my sig. I have had up to nine 3.5" hard drives in it and the power rails remained rock-solid. OK, the graphics (7600GS) is mid-range not state of the art, but I probably have at least 100W more of hard drives than most people. So I think a 430W PSU should be ample for any single grap...

Fair point, vitaminc My ambient is 22-23 degrees C and relative humidity is in the 40-50% range. After my posting above, I tried putting an Arctic Fan 12 (@ 1018 rpm) on the Scythe Ninja, and it dropped my CPU temperatures to 37 degrees idle, 44 degrees full load (two instances of Prime95 at 100% lo...

What are your voltages, clock speeds and case temperatures? What are the fan speeds of your exhaust fans I had a single core Opteron with a passive Ninja and S12-430 and a 120mm case exhaust fan, both on 800-900 rpm. At 1.3V, 2300MHz, the typical CPU temperature was 42 degrees, maximum 48 degrees wi...

Depending on your motherboard, you may be able to use a Scythe Ninja? At least, it fitted the existing socket 939 baseplate/retention bracket on my motherboard (ATI A8R32-MVP) without any work to the underside of the board, although it may be different on other motherboards (the heatsink comes with ...

Good luck finding any Socket A board at retail. I managed to buy one of the last Gigabyte boards in February 2006, but I cannot see anything now in my country (apart from the cheap boards bundled with the AMD Geode NX processors, which are basically underclocked Athlon XP-Ms I think). For a used mob...

CPUID String: 20FB1 Processor APIC: 0 Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (Manchester) CPU Speed: 2255.16 (205.01 x 11.0) Revision: BH9-E4 Platform: Socket 939 Startup VCore: 1.350v Maximum Case Temperature = 63C TDP: 105.0 / 65.6 Watts Same as geforce1. Currently on 1.25V and looking to reduce it. I ...

To resurrect an old thread, I just moved my PC (three fans, five drives, see signature) and the noise while objectively the same is subjectively very much more intrusive. Reason for posting here is I have wooden floors, hard furniture, no carpet like the OP. Original position of the PC was under a d...

It is appreciated that using a mouse with your left hand if you are right-handed is difficult, and vice-versa - that's why my post said "learn" to do that ... I had a carpal tunnel problem in my right wrist a few months back, still had to work of course (self-employed), but cured it through doing "n...

Referring to my earlier post, emphasise that the Seagate 320GB I described as having "quiet" seeks is suspension-mounted on elastic. So I am only essentially hearing the motor noise from the drive and any internal vibration-induced rattle and hum. The people reporting that the drive has loud seeks c...

Very happy with my new 400GB T133. The seek noise is very soft in character, better even than the 2-platter 320GB Seagate 7200.10, and motor noise is also soft and alluring. I think the PCB and general build quality is very nice - the PCB seems a much simpler design, with fewer components mounted on...

Drive spindown optimising is a compromise between wear and heat for the drive due to constant spinning, and wear due to spin-down/spin-up. Like an aircraft in take-off, spin-up is the most stressful time in a drive's life (but obviously the stresses are not so huge)! Most drives are rated for 50,000...

Three easy tips * Learn to use your left hand for your mouse sometimes (eg. browsing), to give your right hand a rest. * Improve your whole body posture at your keyboard, to have a better hand and wrist angle * Check your wrist position when you are sleeping, you can have a bad wrist position which ...

As you can see from my sig, I have five hard drives powered by a 430W PSU without breaking a sweat - actually I have tested up to 9 drives, alongside a SATA card and TV card. This suggests that 430W would be more than ample for your system even with the 7900GT.

Sorry to say I disagree with experienced reviewer Devon. I use many brands of hard drive in a real-life context (high capacity HTPC) and the new Seagate 7200.10 two platter model (i.e. 320GB, not the reviewed 750GB) has one of the quietest seeks: if suspension mounted its seek is virtually silent i....

Wow! That's a lot of posting in a few hours - slow afternoon at work, guys? My views on the interesting off topic conversation: Windows could be a lot less vulnerable to security threats if (a) it were obvious to a user which are operating system files and processes and which are not; (b) if operati...

The way to speed it up is to snapshot the OS memory once bootup is completed, and stash the snapshot onto your nonvolatile memory device. The next time the system boots, you can either run the OS directly off the external memory, or copy it verbatim into RAM and run it there. The memory-to-memory c...

An update on the noise characteristics of my 7200.10 320GB. Its seeks are quiet, I would say more quiet than the next quietest seeking drives in my system (Diamondmax10 300GB which is quieter than 7200.9 250GB, which in turn is quieter than 7200.8 200GB). The idle noise of the 7200.10 is very quiet,...

inti, it's strange you're having issues with the Uli SATA and are OK with Sil. Guys on one of the OC forums are having issues the otherway round. Those guys are having issues with WD Raptors; also they seem a little confused which SATA port they are using. I would guess they are probably using the ...

I have five drives in a Sonata. I'll try to find a picture later. All drives are suspended in the standard Sonata drive cage using a thin elastic cord wrapped around the standard drive bay metalwork to make a series of cradles for the drives. This is virtually silent when drives are idle (there is a...

I have a request, could you download and run "HDTach" and let us know your results. Your HD Tach results may also give an indication of whether your problem is the SATA controller, or your test utility software. I'll give it a go, but it may take a couple of days - my drive is installed in the fami...

I have a 7200.10, 320GB model. I chose it for the capacity and because I expected a two platter drive to be quiet: it has met that expectation. Subjectively it is the quietest drive I have used. Here is a subjective comparison of the drives in my HTPC, with score 1 for the quietest and 5 for the lou...

There is an incompatibilty between the Asus A8R32-MVP and the newest Seagate 7200.10 SATA drives (I have a 320GB drive, not the 750GB). The 7200.10 drive has slow writes when connected to the southbridge SATA ports (approximately 25% to 30% of the proper speed), but runs without issues when connecte...

Further correction to the above: I took another look inside my PC and the thumblatch would not be physically touching the RAM in slot A even if it has big heat spreaders, the thumblatch is at least 5mm too high to touch it. But I do still think it would be impossible to install memory in slot A on t...

It is sometimes suggested that the dedicated 4pin ATX12V lead for the CPU is by itself on the 12V2 "rail" because the CPU neads "cleaner" power. At first sight that is understandable because the 12V1 "rail" probably carries a bit of RF noise due to the length of the cables and the fact that some ele...

Thanks. Here's the reply I received from Seasonic, by the way: The +12V1 rail is for main power 24P, molex 4P and other else. The +12V2 rail is for CPU usage, such as ATX12V 4P and 8P . Best Regards, Technical Support Sea Sonic Electronics Co., Ltd. Seems to set out the party line, although from rea...

I have a Seasonic S12-430 (version 1 from Q1 2005, with only two SATA power connectors). I'm seeing a bit of instability in my system when using SATA drives and I think I need to know exactly what is on 12V1 and 12V2. My understanding is that in principle, the motherboard power connector and Molex c...

@ceselb, it is the metal thumb latch on the Ninja heatsink itself that causes a problem, it is not a question of fan mounting (I have no fan as you can see from the pics). In other words on the Asus board, I think the thumb latch on the Ninja would foul any memory in Slot A, with or without heat spr...

inti, the oddly placed SATA port on the A8R32 is meant to be an external SATA port. Thanks but are you sure about that? Pretty definitely looks like an internal port to me and I am now using it as that: I have a hard drive connected to it. There is also an external SATA port on the back panel which...