I built and tweaked this computer a few years ago to be powerful but inaudible over ambient noise. The CPU cooler is completely silent (passive), while the video card (Nvidia Geforce 9600 GT) settles down to inaudible right after startup. It was connected to an HDTV using a DVI->HDMI adapter (42" mo...

Idle 35.8watts http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/gainward-bliss-8800gt_5.html#sect0 Hmm. I find that hard to believe. Almost every review i've seen has shown the 8800gt at idle consuming substantially more power than the Radeon HD 3850, yet i've just installed my new 512MB 3850 and fou...

Yes, I've done it with Windows 98. Temp files and swap files can be put on a RAM drive, if you're worried about writing to the flash drive. The registry can too. (In fact, all of Win98 and apps can, if you stick 'em in a compressed volume file that is stored on the flash drive, then copied to a RAM...

Ah, i had forgotten the SSD was rated so slowly. Now i remember why i decided to try the CF route... I installed HD Tach to get a bit better benchmark. I'm rather blown away by the results: First, a comparison with a Cheetah 15k.3: http://lh6.google.com/davidfalkayn/R1EJRiUGbYI/AAAAAAAAABY/-StjnxXtH...

Ok, this is interesting... SiSoft Sandra read performance: VIA VT8233 ATA: ~32 MB/s, UDMA3 Promise FastTrak100 Lite: 46 MB/s (can't determine mode due to RAID obfuscation) Very promising, i think. Copper, did you ever benchmark your card? Edit: It's unfortunate that PATA is going the way of the Dodo...

Flandry: Is the CF is hooked to the same IDE channel as the system's optical drive? If this is the case that's probably why it's only running in mode 2, with IDE you will be limited by the slowest device on the channel, which is the optical drive. :) The quick-n-dirty test setup is all kinds of wro...

GDP Growth USA 3,2% Finland 5,5% Inflation USA 2,5% Finland 1,2% National debt USA: 70% of GDP Finland: 35% of GDP You are in the middle of a subprime mortgage crisis, oil prices are going up and value of dollar is going down. Future doesn't really look too bright for you at the moment. Finland on ...

It sounds like what you need is what's called a "muffin fan". It's basically a 120mm 110V AC fan. I think that would be a better option than splicing in an AC/DC converter and 12 V DC fan...

I got mine today. If Antec doesn't stiff me on the rebate, it willl be $26 total. Pretty sweet! 8) Now i just need stuff to put inside -- not arriving until Monday at the earliest. :( I got the Earthwatts 380 that was on a similar deal, so i got a nice, system-ready case for less than $50. HedgeHock...

It's certainly been done before (various accounts in cyberspace about it). I'm going to try it . Make sure if you go the CF route that you get a fast one (the Transcend 266x is one of the best deals and fastest available) that supports fixed mode with UDMA. The Transcend one (not sure about others) ...

I use a Transcend 8GB SSD in my notebook. I've used it with both Windows 2000 and Windows XP and there is a short delay after every user log-in. It lasts about 10 or 15 seconds and starts after the desktop is fully loaded. The drive activity light remains solidly lit and everything requiring disk a...

I needed a big CF card for my camera for when i go on holiday overseas next month, so I went ahead and bought some serious overkill in the form of a 266x Transcend model. After the trip i will be using it as the basis of my new system (with a 1 TB GP WD drive for media), but i couldn't help throwing...

One question i have is about whether these boards can boot from a PATA drive, considering that the interface is provided by a 3rd-party chip, especially if there is also a SATA drive attached. Has anyone tried this or seen an option in the BIOS for it? I would most likely boot from a CF card on the...

Frankly the consistency of power draw across that large loaded temperature range surprises me. Did you just measure at one temperature/fan setting and then assume the rest were the same? I ask because it seems from other reviews like the power draw/leakage current of the 8x00 GPUs is very sensitive ...

Here is some potentially useful information.

One thing I would like about going Intel is that I would *hope* driver support would be better. Being a Linux user this is important. Also my Intel-based boards have always been VERY stable. I would wish for a BIOS that lets me downclock the CPU as it's very likely overkill for what I need, or leas...

After seeing a PSU review recently where the PCP&C unit had the highest efficiency of the lot, i decided to revisit their page because it had been a half dozen years. After browsing through all the lower rated supplies, i realized that PCP&C, for the most part, doesn't gives a rat's ass for efficien...

Very nice post, tehfire. I have discussions with my Muslim friends (i am christian) all the time about this kind of thing. They come from a country that is struggling to remain secular in spite of a rather zealous party being in power. We were talking about mandated dress codes recently. They didn't...

The clip cuts off before the end of the coverage. Will the man be charged with anything?

Why the hell is high maximum power capacity so hated here? all PSUs have an efficiency curve, peaking in the middle and tapering off towards either end. Therefore, power supplies run at the low end of the curve will be operating outside their optimal efficiency point. Because of overestimation of p...

Bear in mind that the first stepping of a chip fabbed at a new process node will not be as highly optimized as the final stepping of the previous generation at a larger node. This is true of every generation i can think of. Regardless of what the actual situation is now, give it six months and you'l...

Funny thing. Googling GA-g33m-s2 review gets a page of pricefinders, and then this link with the fragment where you say that it is an energy hog in a review. :D If you read one of the end posts on that thread I report my own testing of the G33M-S2H which found the power consumption to be very compe...

The BIOS doesn’t offer an option to boot specifically from the PATA port which isn’t surprising. I don’t have a PATA drive to test it with either. Rats. Well, it's good to know, anyway. I would most likely boot from a CF card on the PATA port if i ever decided to get one of these in spite of ...

Two differences between the -S2H and the other two mATX boards (-S2 and -DS2R) are that the -S2H uses the RTL8110SC chip for Gb ethernet, which uses a PCI interface (it can't technically handle the Gb bandwidth), while the other two use the PCIe-based RTL8111B, and that the -S2H uses 12 lanes of PCI...

crabnebula wrote:The drawback with this workaround is that the FSB goes back to its BIOS default if you standy/resume.

Meaning that you have to reboot to get dynamic FSB again?

Thanks for all your help. As i was warned, the WU expired before it was nearly finished. I did find out that there is a text file in the directory that gives the expiration date. Anyway, i uninstalled and deleted the directory to get it to stop working on the already expired WU and reinstalled. I go...

Check bios customisers I belive the overvolters pioneered much here. Pencil tricks or little modification and you should be able to undervolt. It may be possible with a BIOS mod for older cards. The 8x00 series (so far, anyway) appears to support only two very similar voltages, and i've not heard o...

Sadly, nVidia doesn't really care.

I don't believe there's any way to do this, short of fiddling with the PCB.

1TB greenpower are apparently quiet enough that you can stick 5 of them in just about anything and have it be quiet. I don't believe a word of that. Maybe you're using a different meaning of the word "quiet"? Well, they're the quietest or very nearly the quietest 3.5" HDD available according to the...