What kinds of temps are considered "fine" is pretty subjective, so i hope you'll excuse the prying. For reference, my typical long-session usage temps are at 58±2°C in speedfan and a so-far unrealistic full CPU+GPU load is ~71°C. Ambient is typically 16-20°C. How much of an improvement does the ...

Very nice builds! I'm envious of your Vertex, but couldn't bring myself to pay the premium just yet. How are your temps for the GF9400 in speedfan? I'm curious because I was on the fence between the mini-kaze vs the thermalright tower cooler, but ended up ducting instead. Also, are you running your ...

Thanks for the input, guys. After reading the power figures from the i5 review on here (versus the much hotter LGA1366 chips), any worries I had about running a 380W PSU with the eventual GTX260 of 2 years from now were much lessened. About the 200 vs 300, it looks to me from reviews that they are m...

I didn't notice it until a few weeks ago, but my trusty MS Wireless Intellimouse Explorer 2.0 also makes a high pitch sound while moving the mouse around, though it seems intermittent (session-by-session). I also remember the thread specific to Logitech mice and someone who complained to their tech ...

Thanks for the review, but I have to agree with RRBOT and gang that disabling turbo boost does not give a fair representation of how these CPUs will be used in the real-world. If anything, I guess we should expect the actual power consumption under load to be a bit higher than reported here. I also ...

I know, it seems like a bit of an oxymoron, but here's the situation: A friend wants a gaming rig built on the cheap, but it has to be reasonably "future-proof". Keeping noise down is a tertiary goal and mostly limited to ghetto improvisations rather than higher-end heatsinks,etc. We're reusing his ...

barefootzero wrote:Does anyone know if either the ASUS or Zotac 9300 boards can drive the HDMI and DVI at the same time?

Unless something's changed in the last few weeks/months, the answer is no, unfortunately.

1) You'd definitely have to undervolt (and probably underclock) in order to get your cpu+gpu load under 100W. http://www.silentpcreview.com/article967-page7.html 2) Stock cooler should be good enough as long as you have good airflow over it. You can always improvise some kind of ducting to help out....

The coolest would probably be the one with the lowest TDP, as long as the heatsink is the same across the board. If I had to guess, you'd be looking at something low on features and without an IGP, maybe the Intel P43 (due to it's 65nm process) or something more spartan like the 945P? AFAIK, nV chip...

Kudos on the nice case mods, Pipps. I'm not gonna lie to you though, I was even more impressed by the clean futuristic theme you have running (and this is coming from someone who also does a fair amount of case modding). So i hope you'll see it more as flattery through imitation rather than a blatan...

Hi, I just wanted to advise you against trusting other sites/non-SPCR users on noise ratings. I bought my OCZ GameXstream 600W PSU before I found this site, after reading on Tom's HW or Anandtech that those are "very quiet". It was nothing of the sort and I ended up having to fanswap. I'm not saying...

No prob, and actually, I've been able to slide mine back about an inch since I've made the switch to the IGP with DVI+VGA output and no longer needed to use the DVI-VGA adapter on the old 6600GT with dual DVI

^ I agree with the point on getting a indilinx-controlled SSD instead. In addition to the Vertex, OCZ also has a slightly cheaper line that uses the same good controller but uses either intel or toshiba flash instead of the standard samsung chips to save $ (performance difference would probably not ...

Looks all too familiar
One other thing i did to make it look better is to use a black permanent marker to blacken the metal edges of the USB ports and the mic/headphone jacks.

Maybe check your BIOS. Some have the power button function mapped there (ie: Soft off vs suspend, etc). It shouldn't have any impact since you say it worked before and I'm assuming nothing's been changed in the BIOS since it did work, but it's worth a look.

Thanks for the review, Lawrence! The Q9550S was stable at a minimum of 1.064V (1.075V in the BIOS), which coincidentally is the same voltage applied when idling with SpeedStep enabled. Just wondering: is the idle+speedstep voltage empirical or is there some offical specification that says this CPU i...

The 65W PSU with the case should be fine for running the system you put together. I have the 2000 RPM 80mm Kama FLEX fan (was going to use it as a swap into my PSU in HTPC but it's starting voltage was too high) and it's at least as loud as an S-Flex @ 1000-1200 RPMS at 12V, so I'd highly recommend ...

"but I will not limit myself to IGP"? FYI: GeForce 8400 GS # Cores 16 Core Clock (MHz) 450 Shader Clock (MHz) 900 Memory Clock (MHz) 400 Memory Amount 256MB Memory Interface 64-bit Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) 6.4 Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec) 3.6 Geforce 9400 \\ 9300 (IGPs) Graphics Cores 16 \\ 16 C...

I'd also consider the new WD or Samsung 500GB/platter drives over the Hitachi. Their TB drive was originally 5 platters, and (i think) they only updated it to 4 platters some time ago but haven't really caught up to the ones we mentioned.

Also, make sure that S1 is a Rev.2!

Using a quiet 3.5' 5400RPM HDD like WD Green, Samsung F2 EcoGreen, or Hitachi P7K500 wouldn't be louder than sticking with a quiet 5400RPM 2.5' HDD like WD Scorpio Blue. Besides, 3.5' HDD tends to outperform 2.5' counterpart and cost a lot less compared to 2.5' equivalent. I highly suggest 5400RPM ...

115W is about where it should be. The 4800 series has a really lousy power-saving mode, so your 4850 probably draws 45-55W idle on its own.
Your GPU idle temp is excellent though.

It could be... that's the other thing I had at the back of my mind, but then I remembered that I was able to run pre-BC WOW (~2 years ago) @ 1680x1050 on a P4 2.4GHz northwood with 1GB ram and a 6600GT AGP with FPS varying between 20 and 55, so go figure. From what I heard, the new areas/big raids/b...

It's probably just me but I'd avoid any of the 65nm Phenoms, including the ones that are deceptively named Athlon X2 7xxx. They generate a lot more heat and use more power than a higher-clocked "real" 65nm Athlon at about the same performance and price level. You don't need much CPU to do 1080p with...

You are definitely not bottlenecked by the PCI-E slot with that card. You might lose a few % with the really high-end cards like the GTX285 or 4890, but a 4650 barely taxes the bandwidth. If the only goal of an upgrade is to increase FPS in WOW, then upgrade to a faster vid card. For a noticeable bo...

Solid state drives will give a huge boost in performance over normal HDDs, but are prohibitively expensive these days. I guess "prohibitively expensive" is a relative term. In my mind, if you don't mind paying ~CDN$210 for a 150GB raptor (which offers minimal performance benefit over a new 500GB/pl...

- Zalman CNPS 9700 NT cooler I must've missed the memo about Zalman making quiet fans now... The Gentle Typhoons haven't been tested on here yet, but Scythe has yet to drop the ball in the quiet fan dept. I personally would have waited for the clean bill of health from MikeC on those. Also, with yo...

Lodehacker > He's already running the fans @ 500 RPM. If they're like slipstream 1200RPM fans, that's already considerably lower than 5.5V, so what you're suggesting would be a step in the wrong direction... Thomas > If your CPU heatsink is reasonably close to the rear exhaust (and the fins are para...

Yup, those are the ones! I like how they attach to the card, but worry about the limited surface area for dissipating that heat, and for that price we should be getting copper. On the other hand, the Enzotechs would probably be too tall and i'd have to either shift the fins on the Accelero or cut ou...

Let us know how it goes. Also, thanks for pointing out the Enzotechs. I'm tempted to give them a try over the S1 heatsinks, but like you, have my doubts about their effectiveness. I've also seen some specialized one-piece L-shaped heatsink for the 4870s with a low profile and a red finish, but haven...

I believe that the MB can only output one digital audio stream at once, chosen via a BIOS setting. I wanted to use SPDIF -> DAC -> Amp for music, but HDMI -> TV for movie sound; which isn't really practical if a restart is required every time I switch activity. I haven't really had the time to figu...