On a tangential note, did anyone notice the little blurb from Computex about the Seasonic S12 II PSU's with solid capacitors? The same features that make them attractive to VGA and mobo makers also applies to PSU internals in some respects. One Pro that you didn't comment on was their smaller size. ...

An outstanding idea in an anechoic chamber. A lousy idea in a live room with undefined reflections IMHO. Including in my room, which is why I prefer close measurements to get the intrinsic noise caused by the fan. But moving the mic closer to compensate for a poor testing environment does not unnec...

I concur with Panda. The MX-1 that I just got last week is quite a bit louder than the ones we first heard at CES this year. The sound quality is degraded: much more whine and bearing chatter. I'm going to play with undervolting the fan in the next few days. Given its cooling performance you should ...

A couple of points: -saying "fans don't make noise, its the air turbulence that does" is a bit like saying "speakers don't make noise, its the air movement that does". (or "guns don't kill people, people kill people"). They're true statements, but not really surprising. All noise is from air movemen...

I have some first-hand experience with this. I'm using a Sharp Aquos 46" as my tv/htpc display. On my system at least, connecting both cable box and PC was simple as pie. One HDMI input gets connected to the cable box, and one gets connected to the PC via a DVI-HDMI cable. The only nagging issue I h...

Yeah, the UAC is killed on my machine....considering that I've never run anti-virus or anti-spyware on any of my XP machines and have never gotten anything, I figure that the extra protection afforded by the UAC was lost on me anyway. :lol: I may have also set ACAD.EXE to be running in XP compatibil...

I thought about BF's new toy today when I came across this: HP intros ultra-green slim PC . While the EPEAT Gold certification, "95% recyclable materials", and 240w 80+ certified PSU are all fine and dandy, what caught my eye was in the Configurer : AEG-XP1500-110 Solar Power W/5 AMP AC Charger [Add...

NeilBlanchard wrote:On another tact, are you going to use WinXP? AFAIK, AutoCAD cannot be run in Vista.

2007 runs just fine on Vista for me.

Since you wont be overclocking i really dont see need for overclocking memory. Any PC6400 (even 5400) will be more than enough. I have no knowledge of overclocking so you'll have to cut me some slack, maybe I misunderstand. The stock speed of the memory is faster (and is supported by the motherboar...

If done correctly, there could be a use for TEC's in quiet computing. There's two factors, that if balanced properly, could result in a TEC-based cooling system that outperforms a conventional aircooled system: 1. Heatsinks, and particularly heatpipes, increase in efficiency as the difference betwee...

I would be willing to bet that world-wide there are still many more CRT monitors in use than there are LCD's.

Bigg does have a point. I think a lot of us forget that the biggest supplier of GPU's isn't Nvidia or Ati. It's Intel. In fact Intel supplies a higher percentage of the graphics market than Nvidia and Ati/AMD combined . Stand-alone graphics cards account for something like ~8% of the market, and mul...

What are you looking to do on the 1080p TV? Play games, or just do htpc type stuff? If its just htpc you really don't need that powerful a card to do that. My htpc is doing 1080p from an Ati X850-Pro AGP card. Certainly not a performance powerhouse by modern standards. It pays back 1080i content (wh...

I think it depends on intent, and impact. If my neighbor intentionally leaves his wifi open and my use of it does not impact his use, then its not an issue. It's like a neighbor overwatering his lawn and the excess water running onto mine. But, if I take steps to break into his system that he has tr...

I don't know any people who drive just for joy. If I'm driving, it means I'm driving somewhere. Have you never heard of NASCAR? :wink: Recreational gasoline use (boats, ATV's, race cars, snowmobiles, etc) in the US accounts for 7.5 billion gallons of gasoline consumption a year. Although that is on...

Why not just solder a leader onto the solder pad of the appropriate pinout on the pico's PCB? Pins 1, 12, and 12 are all 3.3v. (all the orange wires on a standard atx plug) Out of curiosity, what is the amp? I've been running a little Tripath amp off of the 12v from my PSU for a couple of years now....

The PQ curves involve CFM measurements, and as someone associated with SPCR has pointed out, measuring CFM is just a tad tricky... Actually, no. PQ curves are generated with the ANSI 210 testing standard, andat no point in that do you ever measure CFM. CFM measures are, as we've seen, nearly imposs...

That's fine. And in the future if they don't let me upgrade just the processor well then Ubuntu here I come. So there. With the amount of trouble you've had going from XP to Vista, I'm not sure diving into Linux is really something you should be thinking about too seriously. :wink: Vista's rules fo...

In addition to AtiTool mentioned above, Rivatuner allows for dynamic fan control and GPU underclocking for the cards that allow it. What sort of flexibility the software will allow for is a bit hit or miss though, it depends on the design of the VGA card itself. Once you settle on a particular card ...

ATX will be supported for the forseeable future. Intel has all but given up on pushing BTX on everyone, and no one else is even talking about replacements. There will continue to be alternatives to ATX, like BTX, and the whole family of SFF standards, but ATX itself isn't going anywhere for a good l...

Looks like a one-time deal, unfortunately. That update was six months ago, and was very limited in what chipsets it added support for. I was surprised to see that the olf MBM website is now a cyber-squatter. Sad. I never understood why Alex didn't turn the whole program open source when he wanted to...

So, besides the 220mm side fan, the only fans needed are a spot fan for the HDDs, a spot fan for the HSF, and for those who have to have a hot video board, a spot fan for it. Let me get this straight, in your positive pressure setup you need: One 220mm fan on the side. One fan blowing on the HDD's....

Disregarding dust for a moment, the differences between negative and positive pressure case airflow schemes are really pretty small, assuming that each is implemented with similar care and forethought. A quiet negative pressure system is often easier to built however. "Easier" being defined as somet...

What other gadgets did you have running at the time?

I've noticed that occasionally my Everest sensor gadget will hang, and when it sticks it will gum up the rest of the Sidebar gadgets as well. I don't use the clock, but I imagine that if I did it would have been stuck too.

avgw.exe is part of your AVG antivirus. It should only run when it is doing its daily virus scan. Check what time you have the daily scan scheduled for. I usually schedule mine for like 3am, when the machine is just idling anyway.

What's also interesting is the break-even point between flying or driving to a destination - your car must get at least 46mpg to have an equal/smaller footprint than taking a plane. Yeah, that brings up another good point... Is my carbon footprint different when I fly coach versus when I fly in the...

I think Spanki does make a point, but there has to be limits. Taken to its logical end that reasoning means that SPCR should be testing every 100CFM fan, and every 60dBa HSF just because they are popular with enthusiasts. There are hundreds of "enthusiast" review sites out there which tackle that ki...

A- @ 8379lbs of CO2, with a not completely honest answer of "no" to the meat question. That meat question is eco-weenie-pasty-faced-vegan-BS. There's more to your eating habits than "Do you eat meat?". If I eat meat once or twice a week (which is about my average), it must have a different impact on...

Just to clarify qviri's statement: You do not need DX10 hardware to run Vista. The DX10 capable vga cards out there probably represent something like 0.0001% of all the computers in the world. :wink: DX10 will be useful for high-end games starting late this year, and continuing on into the future. E...

I'll second Bluefront's suggestion that it's the battery. If you have another machine you can swap the battery from its mobo just to do a quick check. Something else to check while you're at it: Make sure the battery is in the right way. I had a Gigabyte board that came form the factory with the bat...