What brick are you using with the picoPSU?

I used electronic cleaner spray with great success on the volume pot on my cheap kitchen radio. That stuff is supposed to evaporate. I would hesitate to use something that leaves grease behind.

I know, I was really angered by the fact that it is a disservice to people to gloss over the fact that there is no real difference between the 7890K and the 7870K except for the price. Who cares, they both suck. It's not "Buy the 7870K if you are not a TOTAL MORON. End of fricking story." As Gadget...

The whole universe vibrate dude. :) And solid state electronics vibrate, giving us coil whine and such. I thought that my SSD made small noises while getting written to, but it turned out it was the motherboard that emitted the sounds (very faint chirping, growling). So I think it might be a possess...

When you do support you have to know this and compensate for it. It's also an exercise in setting limits. Building systems for others is a great way to get rid of your older stuff. Or less than new stuff. Since you are responsible for support it will have to be good stuff; only sell crap as a challe...

Nice!

I've had computers with two wires sticking out for a power button. Touch the leads lightly and voilà, the computer starts. :) My point is that it's hard to fail when all you need is some kind of momentary switch. Perfect starting project if you are new to this. When drilling you want a nice hole. If...

It would depend on the resistance I think. With the fan laying flat on a table the air would rush out of the slits, but maybe with a low resistance heatsink the low air pressure behind the fan would turn the slits into intakes.
I would love to see some testing with smoke to see where the air goes.

I still regret selling my Ninja. It served me well for a long time and I love the fin spacing. I still have my Ninja Mini, but it's not in use at the moment.

You can buy a lower clocked part and maybe overclock it to the level of a higher clocked part. But for the underclocked parts there's no maybe. I have not seen a non-T part that would not be stable at T-settings. As far as I know, the T-parts don't go into the higher P-states and that's it. That and...

Intel has clever marketing, and it works. We fight it, bitch about TDP in the forums and how it's intended to be read. Sometimes we win, sometimes we don't.

rruff wrote:Based on the little research I've done, you won't gain anything by underclocking, as it doesn't affect the idle states. It only limits the max.

+1

Also, since the CPU idle at less than 5W it's mostly the choice of motherboard that determine how low the idle power consumption can be.

mattlach wrote:How do you guys feel now a few years later?

All of my picoPSUs (main system, htpc and server) are still going strong. No UPS. I have good bricks though, and the Swedish power grid is solid.

Beautiful

Some more details would be very welcome. Any pictures of the inside of the case? How much did the heatsinks cost?

http://www.techno-labs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/811z51-DlfL._SL1500_-500x378.jpg I would go for a nice DIY solution. A (perhaps slim) 120mm fan mounted with zip ties and powered either through USB like the two original fans or (if the thing isn't mobile) with a normal power adapter. Perhaps w...

gigichan000, what do you think about this one?

http://www.fanlesstech.com/2016/02/how-about-no.html

The system will be primarily for watching video, but I'll use it for converting video as well. While a non-T CPU would encode that video faster, it would also create a lot more heat – too much heat for the cooling available in a system of this size (80mm tall case with a 3.5" drive above the cpu/co...

What beast of an HTPC are you building that you need an i5? Why isn't a Pentium enough? And this TDP thing again.. ;) The factory underclocked parts are nothing special. The T-part is not more efficient, it's the same CPU with different settings. Get the 4690T if you want, but please do so because y...

In front of the fan. The fan should suck air through the filter, not try to blow air through it.

Panti hoes is great for this.

All the pico does is to convert +12v to the other voltages needed. And since most stuff run on +12v and it's possible to feed stuff +12v directly from the brick, it could be argued that you hardly need a picoPSU at all..

Do you already own the case? I would not use a dedicated graphics card in a heatsink case. First option would be a CPU with a decent onboard GPU and check if that would be enough performance. If a dedicated card is needed then go with a normal case (unless you want to roll your own, flexible heatpip...

aquelito wrote: VGA : Sapphire Radeon R7 250 Low Profile
80 euros

Do you plan to cool that using the Streacom FC8?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage What NAS means when we're talking WD Reds is that the WD Red is "NAS ready" or whatever you want to call it. The drive is designed to be able to run 24/7 if need be, like the case could be if it would sit in a NAS box. There's nothing special ab...

Very nice. 19W idle is very good. I expected it to be higher since you're using an Asus board as well as a normal ATX PSU.

I have a Musical Fidelity V-DAC and I'm happy with it. It's the only discreet DAC I have used so I'm not really sure how it stands up to the competition. But I do know that the improvement in sound quality was incredible. So while I'm not really an audiophile, I do think that getting a DAC is a good...

And yes, I'll probably move away from the 212 Evo to something better -- and possibly the Macho, given your report on the stock fan that comes with that cooler. :) I was originally thinking of mounting the 212 Evo horizontally, with the fan exhausting through the case top grille. That's atypical, I...

Everyone who's suggesting replace a working Hyper 212 EVO is full of lint. No one is replacing anything, just discussing which cooler to get, right? Hyper 212 and Hyper 212 EVO was and perhaps still is a great low budget alternative, but if the fan is to be replaced anyway there are better alternat...

NeilBlanchard wrote:I would email Scythe for your area, and ask them about buying a second set of clips.

Sometimes you have to ask twice, since the obvious response is: use zip ties.
viewtopic.php?f=24&t=68612

No, because of those specific situations. In the right case a GPU is really fast, but in the wrong case it will be far slower than a general purpose CPU. Very simplified GPUs suck at non extremely parallel tasks and branching. If the problem doesn't scale to 100s of threads or makes many decisions ...

Haswell-E is six core right? $1000 and 140W, what's not to like?

Isn't the GPU taking over much of the heavy work nowadays anyway? In specific situations they blow any general purpose CPU out of the water.