What if you mixed aluminium oxide in with the oil? Or with candle wax?

You can get thermally conductive rubber. I don't know what that is, but it's very expensive. I think it's got some sort of silicone compound in it.

And I thought the original Smart Drive was expensive...

lm wrote:Costs a fortune, but then again you could be working extra hours to get more pay instead of using a lot of time to configure and maintain a RAM boot system.

It would be nice if I could get work whenever I wanted it.

I just installed a 500Gb one. Far bigger than I need really, but it was for the silence, obviously. It's considerably quieter than the 250Gb Hitachi P7K500 it replaced, which was, to be honest, something of a disappointment. It makes some unusual clicking sounds (like seek noise) when turning on, an...

[quote="lm"]If I understood correctly that you would replace the 5V circuitry of a regular PSU with a pico psu:[/quote] I'm not suggesting anybody actually go and do this, I wouldn't think you'd gain very much, just saying that it's effectively what Google has done, having a Pico PSU build into the ...

Actually, if this is a total dream wish then I have a completely new design idea that has never been tried before, at least to my knowledge, in any form factor. What I want is a completely modular case. You know what, I've had exactly the same idea. In fact what really would be interesting to see i...

There are a few improvements I'd make to the NSK3480. 1. front 120mm fan mount instead of 2x 92mm. 2. holes for the cables to exit the PSU on the other side so cable management can be done at the back of the motherboard (a fairly common mod here, I see) 3. hole cut out under the PSU so you can use a...

Actually one could probably mod a Pico PSU or something similar to do exactly the same, power it off your 12V rail and bypass the regulators on the 12V output. Find out which bits of your PSU do the 5V line and remove them.

It would be interesting if you could get away with powering dual hard drives serially, giving them 6ish volts each. Very dangerous, I suspect. If one drive ever happened to require less current than the other at any time, the voltages could go all over the place. With fans, however, it is a very re...

blackworx wrote:These guys have the 330

http://www.awd-it.com/scripts/prodview. ... oduct=3098

Well maybe their website says so...
http://www.ciao.co.uk/AWD_IT_com__6850278

I was also thinking about PWM -> DC convertor like this: http://www.nanoxia-europe.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10&Itemid=15&lang=en It looks good but I can not find any review on this. Can anyone comment on this item ? SPCR member PCY makes these: http://www.paqt.co.uk/store/in...

I guess even at peak power consumption, it will finish quicker anyway so not really use any more in total. Like PSIU said, the 5050e is pretty much a power optimised 5000+ (65W down to 45W), the 5600+ used to be an 89W part, and they got it down to 65W, which is about the same kind of reduction, so ...

ah I never thought of that. Two doesn't seem like very many, even my super-cheapo Biostar one has four. Still, why do you even need that many hard drives?

I think what I really liked about Seasonic best is the fact they do a 330W one. Anything less than 500W is becoming increasingly difficult to find these days, excepting cheap and nasty ones... I encountered this the other day: http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=12015 tempting to see if I can f...

For gaming it appears the i7 gets beaten by its own predecessor, somehow. It does very well in all the synthetic benchmarks (the oldest trick in Intel's book), but in anything real it looks like a bit of a disappointment. I put this down to the hyperthreading. Great for raw throughput, but seriously...

This wouldn't cost £160 http://www.cclonline.com/product-info.asp?product_id=20800&category_id=491&manufacturer_id=0&tid=mbb0015 Or this lot from Ebuyer, with free delivery: 1 MSI K9N6PGM2-V Socket AM2+ GeForce 6100 onboard VGA 8 channel audio mATX Motherboard 148025 329 in stock £35.80 1 AMD Athl...

Scythe Shuriken - 64mm.

Well I never. Is it possible one might be able to construct the world's most efficient CPU heatsink out of... pencils?

Scythe are just playing silly here. Nobody in their right mind would buy anything like this. Of course there are plenty of folk about who are not in their right mind.

hmm they do 380W and up, quite expensive though.

I noticed some time ago that Ebuyer stopped stocking my favourite brand of PSU. And then looking on Google Shopping it seems nowhere in the UK is stocking them at all, even the websites that still have them listed never have any in stock. Sometimes they are listed as "Nanopoint Seasonic", which is c...

Not really, the single platter drives seem to be lower quality, so while they should be better they are actually worse (check out SPCR's WD3200AAKS review .) 2-platter 3.5" drives always seem to the best. My single platter Samsung S250 is fine, but it might be the exception, and the 2 platter P7K50...

SnowPunk98 wrote:I just bought the P7K500 that you linked, hopefully its fast and quiet. Do you know if this is a single platter model?

Only the 250Gb version is single platter.

For a gaming PC I'd have thought an E8500 would beat a Q9550, since even most modern games still can't manage to make good use of more than two cores.
As demonstrated, for instance, here:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/sh ... =3344&p=15

I've yet to discuss exactly how important the data is... I'm hoping to be able to convince them to get a central file server, rather than big drives in individual machines, and set it up in RAID5. Installing RAID arrays in multiple machines will start getting expensive.

Hmmmna... first it seemed like it was the 334Gb platters that were dodgy, now someone says the 250Gb ones aren't safe.

I've had no problems with the three 500Gb F1s I've installed so far. I can only hope it was a problem with earlier batches, that Samsung have now fixed.

As long as the new Phenoms can compete with Core 2, they should at least be able to stay in the game for mid-range systems, which is where I'd be more likely to spend my money.

Hitachi P7K500

I'm guessing they're choosing the numbers precisely NOT to confuse consumers, like the old days when an Athlon 3000+ was supposed to be the same speed as a 3GHz Pentium 4, even though it didn't run at 3GHz.

Well I don't know if the 320Gb drives have problems, I'm only repeating what I've heard about the 640Gb and 1Tb versions, both of which use the 334Gb platters. I've used a few 500Gb F1s so far with no problems, they use two 250Gb platters. I'll be using Hitachi P7K500s in my next lot of builds, afte...

The massive unreliability issues. High rate of DOAs, SMART errors and failures within the first few months.