I don't know how applicable to you this is, but based on the Amazon UK prices the Energy Take 5.1 + Yamaha RX-S600 comes out to about 910 euro after conversion.

What are the 5V and 12V watt ratings? If it an old 5V heavy design then it is probably a no-go. If it's a modern 12V heavy PSU then I would suspect it to be fine. Also, why is your system taking a full 2GB from your system RAM all the time? Modern Intel GPUs dynamically allocate RAM up to their max....

AC F8 are usually cheap and decent, if you have a PWM headers on the mobo there's also the AC F8 PWM (any Nexus PWM, on the contrary, is not as good as the 3-pin siblings). I'll second the AC F8 as a decent cheap 80mm. The F8 pro is also great, but can only be used as an exhaust because of the moun...

A sub is okay, 5.1 might be okay too, the current system is 5.1 as well. If a full 5.1 system is OK, then I would second the Energy Take 5.1 that Abula recommended paired with an AVR. It's not the best but very good sound for the money. For AVRs I've had good luck with Yamaha myself. If you can spe...

Unfortunately with all the limitations you have you are likely only going to get something "passable" sound wise. Small speakers with no sub are not going to be able to give you anything close to full range reproduction. You can get OK integrated BluRay/DVD+Amplifiers but they usually have severe li...

I was referring to AMD's “heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access” Ah ok. It's mostly marketing. Yes, in theory it's a great idea. Let CPU programs and GPU programs access the same memory without needless copying, basically making the "APU" concept that AMD has been pushing. The reality: 1. There are s...

yeah i wonder about that with amd. is their idea of unified pointers a good idea and should intel adopt it? I will be completely honest and say I have no idea what you are talking about when you say "unified pointers". so if one person has a 6 core haswell 95 tdp, and another person has say an atom...

by warning i mean intel is a better choice for me than amd. While in most cases today that is a true statement, that wasn't the point I was trying to make. how does amd gpu compare with nvidia? They compare quite well. At this very moment Nvidia has a slight edge, but ATI/AMD has been on top many t...

thanks for the warning! Not sure how it was a warning. At the time there wasn't anything else that performed better that wasn't either much more expensive (the i5) or much bulkier (my two laptops are 12.5"). My statement was more of a "you get what you pay for" and that Atoms/Bobcats are slow. In n...

what you say sounds reasonable i guess. still netbooks are sold and they have atom or bobcat cpu's. oh well. The Atom/Bobcat/etc machines are sold primarily for once reason: They are cheap! Sure a few are sold based on battery life or size, but low price is the primary sales factor. I own two lapto...

what about mobile laptop notebook ultrabook? use the little atom like core for light work, so in effect you have a netbook, use the big core for playing 3d games. in a desktop, the atom like core for doing light work, with the big core completely shut down. It is still not the same thing. Interacti...

I know this probably isn't that useful, but I tried this site on the slowest computer I have convenient access to (a single core Atom netbook) and scrolling was just fine. I'm not sure what else to suggest but it definitely looks like a local issue.

There shouldn't be any network traffic or at least very little once the site is loaded so bandwidth is not likely the cause. Slow scrolling is more likely something local to your PC. Check to make sure your video drivers are installed correctly and nothing else is running in the background that coul...

The newer Atom processors based on the Silvermont architecture are much faster than the old Bonnell based Atoms. The easiest way to think about them is comparable to core 2 CPUs in speed. The current Atom CPUs will do fine with ESXi. That being said, once you are past a couple of VMs you are more li...

Looks good, but you really should change your RAM from 1 X 8GB to 2 X 4GB. While the 5350 can't use dual channel, the 7600 and 7400 can. You will want all the memory bandwidth you can get, especially at 4K.

For a similar price a 18XX Celeron and a H81 MB will give you a lot more CPU power for your emulators and media that cannot be hardware decoded. Switch the RAM to 2 X 4GB if you do this. You don't need a 160W PSU, even if you switch to the Celeron. A PicoPSU 90 with appropriate brick should be fine,...

HFat is spot on that you don't need to check your files that often. I have files with pars that are over 10 years old that still check out fine. I have ZIP files nearly 20 years old that still extract with no CRC errors. I check my files when I do a major storage change/migration with occasional spo...

RAID and ZFS or BTRFS are not backups. They can be used as part of a backup system but by themselves they are not backups, just high availability. ZFS and BTRFS protect only against storage bit-rot, which is good but actually quite unlikely compared to other sources. Bad RAM is the most likely cause...

Both the Scythe Kozuti and the Noctua NH-L9i are meant for 65W max CPUs. The i7-4790K is pretty much the hottest 1150 CPU at stock, those small coolers simply wont cut it. You will have to get something bigger to cool that CPU. The thermal protection on Intel CPUs is pretty good, so you are unlikely...

So, you're saying there would be a considerable performance difference, even if i5 4690k were to be overclocked only to 4GHz, compared to non k? I don't think anyone is saying that. It's such a small difference it would be hard to notice. Here how i5-4690 non-k runs (assuming proper cooling): 1 or ...

What bastiaan said is mostly correct, except the last part. You cannot overclock a non-K processor even 0.1 GHz over the max turbo speed*. For example, your i5-4690 (non-K) is 3.5 GHz (base) + 0.4 GHz (turbo boost) = 3.9 GHz. It does this by changing the multiplier from 35 to 39. It can't be set to ...

What are you going to use VT-d for? Unless you intend to dedicate a specific hardware component to one VM you dont need VT-d.

I hear you Mike. Your conclusions are reasonable given your experience. A question, do you ever put your systems to sleep? That is one of the most sure-fire ways of tripping up a Sandforce drive. It won't happen every time, but eventually the drive will not wake up properly and then you get a BSOD/k...

"NAND endurance" and reliability are not synonymous. Sandforce-based SSDs have a long history of instability, crashes and premature death (moreover, they suck with incompressible data). This is why Anand titled " Intel SSD 520 Review: Cherryville Brings Reliability to SandForce " (http://www.anandt...

There are still some shared resources in a dual core CPU which explains some of the TDP difference. The memory controller and HT bus interface are shared. Also the dual core is likely running closer to its TDP rating in real life than the single core. Core voltage on the dual is also slightly lower....

While what quest_for_silence said is correct, it may not actually save power VS leaving it on. The BIOS or the numproc option may leave the 2nd core in an "inaccessible" state instead of a "turned off" state. Without the OS issuing HLT commands at idle it may actually use more power. You would need ...

It seems to me that the shared memory limit is not the graphics memory limit. As I understand it the interaction between the Intel HD driver and the operating system will use system memory and/or virtual memory to increase the amount of graphics memory available beyond the shared memory limit whate...

What about video transcoding? Don't tools like Handbrake use up all cores/threads that you have? Video transcoding is certainly something that can use more cores. But is it worth the extra cost? In handbrake at stock speeds, a 5960X is not double the speed of a 4790K despite being well over twice t...

A typical "cluttered" system with 20+ icons in the system tray is going to be far more likely to be I/O bound than CPU limited. The common heavy hitters, AV and Malware scanners are going to be almost completely I/O limited unless the user has an SSD. Assuming enough RAM, an SSD is far more likely t...

Washu - it is true that my main A64 setup is nowhere near todays ultra efficient and high performance CPUs, PSUs and the like, but it is lightyears cheaper too, and savings in electricity alone over A64 platform wouldn't justify investment in new hardware when an existing one still gives good enoug...