When I reviewed the 4670, I got idle power reads at 25W (48W load)--3W idle seems far too low. Maybe re-check it? I also got higher power consumption results from the 4650, at 25/ 40W (although the 4650 was factory-overclocked).

Overclocking?

Bad sector'll do that in a pinch, though.

Yeah, there's no way that assembly is going to be rotated... Burning hot to the touch isn't bad unless the thing crashes because of heat issues. About the only thing that's going to be super-easy and silent is for you to remove the heatsinks and apply a premium thermal interface material to it. Actu...

Cool utility, I'll see if I can add it to our motherboard reviews.

Oh, right, I'm in charge of motherboard reviews.

Bush is not a good public speaker. He is a bad orator , but he is a magnificent speaker . The speeches he's delivered have acutely driven American intentions and global economies well beyond the realms of rationality. Not since the likes of Regan has so much ridiculous bullshit been woven into a ta...

Yeah, and hemorrhage just means bleeding (and what, no one ever died from blood loss?). I still think she's got a claim (since she's not allergic to the materials used there). Wal*Mart reacting to the ordeal by pulling the thongs isn't likely just to please people. Did anyone follow that Wal*Mart SS...

Vista runs FINE on two gigs, you won't notice any difference making the shift from XP. Remember that Vista uses the memory to cache system data (like *nix) which is where the idea that Vista hogs RAM seems to stem from. It's just a cache, which if anything, will improve things.

Hey, there's more:

http://consumerist.com/consumer/recalls ... 298888.php

Using a heat gun, or carefully holding the heatsink near a candle's flame (using small pliers) heats up the tape and makes it much stickier.

But if you do need to use thermal epoxy, you can find Arctic Alumina Adhesive, which holds very well but not permanently.

I just spent two hours reading Wikipedia entries related to jumping the shark.

Way to go, peteamer.

If you're going to be gaming I'd get an 8800GTS 320; drop a couple of gigs of RAM. You won't notice having less memory but you WILL notice the gaming improvement. If you're NOT gaming, I'd get an HD 2600 card, since they really are the best video-accelerating cards on the market. And gaming is on pa...

So, are you going to snatch one up soon?

Oh, perfect!

Actually, I already have, and I can't wait to mount it.

JoeWPgh wrote: ...'Minja'... Nice naming convention. I hope it sticks. Yeah, it's tops. It's probably the most cunning name I've ever heard. I swear, it's the perfect fit, like the way a knife fits into a sheath. It just comes off the lips. Typing it makes me just want to finger the keyboard all day.

The Arctic Cooling Alpine 64 supports 754, 939, and AM2 Cool. What are the advantages of Hypertransport 2 and PCI-e 2.0? Mostly it's better power management. Yes, they're both backwards-compatible with their precursors. Is there any significant differnce between the 65nm chips and the 90nm chips? J...

Well, your heatsink, unless it has AM2 hooks, won't be compatible with a new AM2 motherboard. And while all AM2 boards will eventually get Phenom support, they will not be fully-featured with the new Hypertransport or split power plane. Also, AM2+ will have PCI-Express 2.0a...Unfortunately, when Phe...

I had a Geforce 2 that had that problem. Turned out to be drivers. If you want to rule out software issues, download and run a Linux live CD, like Ubuntu.

If it still happens then it's got to be a hardware problem.

There are usually sales and other shelf-clearing tactics, but prices don't usually drop until after the first quarter of the next generation.

The CPU price war has spoilt everybody.

First, that's more processing than you can imagine, and it will be a tough overclock no matter what.

But if you think that's the direction you want to go, you'll want to try water cooling; it's the best way to get any kind of OC with a quad-core and still stay silent.

Anyway, I'm buying a pair of 8800GTS 320s for a build I'm putting together this week. I think it's fine time to buy; the inflation of the 9-series will make it unreasonable when it's first released.

I hate to break it to you but an athlon 64 would almost certainly bottleneck an 8800gts No it won't. AMD processors at 2.6GHz and higher are enough for even SLI 8800GTXs. 2.4 is plenty for a single card, and probably enough for 9-series. Although I don't believe for a minute any of NVIDIA's perform...

Gigabyte was one of the first companies to update their 690 BIOSs with the new variable clock speeds and HD support. I suspect that part of the additional power consumption comes with a great deal of other performance benefits.

If I was a Gamer and looking to spend big big money for whatever kick a higher frame rate adds,,,I guess I'd lean toward Core 2. CPU makes little or no difference for gaming. Number of cores even less, well, as long as it's two. Games depend on the GPU almost entirely now. It used to be different, ...

Those temperatures are somewhat acceptable and well inside the safe operation of the processor. Remember that a 3200 was an 89W part with a small die, and that a 180 is a 110W part with a die that's twice the size. Additionally, a 7700 is only really good for about 125-150W of dissipation with the s...

790 is supposed to premiere with AM2+ and Phenom, so there's a lot weighing on the whole package.

I would not hesitate to replace the chipset heatsink, file the PCI-Express slot open, and shove a x16 card in there. My one major concern would be with the Xeon heatsink mounts. Not exactly popular, but I'm sure if you can afford that board and the requisite guts, that you can afford a Koolance kit ...

Heh, I totally missed that, sorry :P Still...eight gigs...I'd probably get four and be very happy. I stand by my other recommendations. Especially the quad-core instead of a dual-core processor. But if you're serious about server hardware...check this out: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherbo...

I don't trust Anandtech's noise-testing methods. http://www.anandtech.com/casecoolingpsus/showdoc.aspx?i=3022&p=7 If the dBA bottoms out 38, which is approximately someone humming, then their office is way too loud, their equipment amateurish, or both. Given their tendency to run falsified "leaks" a...

the only reason i don't still have an AMD is because i have to DDR ram. i have DDR2, and SD, and RD...no DDR. i have an Athlon XP 1.75ghz CPU and board upstairs, but no RAM for it. K8 processors are cheap and support DDR2 as well as DDR. Athlon XP is a K7 single-channel part. If you're going to use...

if you really wanted to argue between AMD and intel, you just can't...i prefer Intel due to its technology...i used to have an older AMD system...one of the earlier Athlons, compared to an equivelent P3 or P4 [423 P4] the AMDs were much faster yes, but they also ran very hot. now you see AMD copyin...