Surely this is bait-and-switch fraud! You can't advertise a product as a certain spec and then silently make it worse and expect to get away with it. Their numbers don't add up either. If the maximum program/erase cycles decreased from 8000 to 5000 that is nearly a 40% reduction, but the amount of s...

I don't know what is inside, I bought about ten for £1.80 each from Wilkinsons years back so never needed any more. The ones I have use fairly a standard power resistor and op-amp circuit, easy enough to interface.

PM230 should be avoided, apparently. A normal meter measures below 1W. Max 3680W (16A). ...batteries? Only for moments when the meter is not plugged in. For clock, settings (like kWh price), results. No, they need them all the time to work. Without the batteries you get nothing at all on the displa...

In store only I think. It depends on the store too, some have them for £6 and some for £5. The Southampton store has then for £5 on the basement floor.

AMD Llano APU to Get Dual-GPU Technology Similar to Hybrid CrossFire If only they would include support for turning off the discrete GPU to save power when not in use... Laptops have the capability but they never bothered with it for desktop chipsets. It would also be helpful if they could fix the ...

I have an X25 too and it is fantastic. Windows 7 helps a lot. I'm not sure what to make of these new devices. I won't be upgrading any time soon personally since most of the performance improvement comes from the lower latency rather than raw read or write speeds. Latency is unlikely to be much bett...

Why is it that the UK versions need batteries? The Japanese and US versions are powered from the mains which seems obvious. It must have something to do with safety.

Anyone in the UK should check Robert Dyas shops. They have them for £5 in the clearance section at the moment.

You are both looking at extremes. Ces, in the case of a passively cooled CPU it is obviously going to run an awful lot hotter. What we are talking about is the difference between a 5V fan and a 7V fan at most. The 6xx0 cards run very cool at idle anyway so I bet the difference is no more than a 5C b...

They are controlling the fan speed based on temperature. It's just one BIOS makes a different decision on how cool or hot to allow the card to get than the other. Just as you may decide to run a hard drive without a front case fan to cool it and I may decide to put that 92mm or 120mm front case fan...

It still seems pointless to me. Why not just control fan speed based on temperature, that way it can be silent at idle in most systems but run a bit quicker in really hot ones. I think it is more of a marketing tactic. By having a little switch that changes between quiet and performance people think...

I'm not sure I see the benefit of dual BIOS cards. When not gaming performance of even the lowest end cards is more an adequate for desktop, 1080p video and even CAD and most 3DS work. Therefore there is no advantage to a powerful card like the 6850 running at anything other than the lowest possible...

A good microphone and audio analysis software might be an option. You could probably calibrate it to get dB readings but even without it would still be good for measuring relative volume. You could see how much difference a change makes, or compare one HDD to another etc. It would also offer another...

It allows you to do Hybrid Crossfire which is using the on-board and the discreet GPU in a Crossfire configuration. The performance boost from using the on-board is usually negligible so it is more for convenience than performance. Unfortunately the graphics card does not shut down completely so sti...

I wish they would do Hybrid Power for desktops (turn off the discreet GPU and just use on-board when not gaming).

You could get a similarly accurate reading just by measuring at the wall when the computer is idle and under load with an ordinary power meter. Since you know the minimum power consumption of both the CPU and the GPU thanks to sites like SPCR you can then estimate the load consumption pretty well.

I had a HP keyboard at work, it was okay. Quiet but with a good response. I decided to get a Microsoft 600 keyboard. I had a discount voucher so it was only £5. I was looking at the more expensive 3000 one but the stupid F keys put me off. The 600 has small but properly labelled and grouped (3 lots ...

Ah, that one looks better. I have arthritis in my hands so an not a typical example, but I definitely prefer a bit of spring. Thinkpad keyboards are perfect for that. Soft so there is little impact and springy with just the right amount of travel. I find that keyboards like the Apple one (e.g. Sony ...

I tried the Apple keyboard out for a couple of hours and was not very impressed. I think the problem is mainly lack of travel on the keys. The spring in most keyboards pushes your fingers back up... It's a bit like walking where every step springs your foot back up and forwards a bit. It also felt a...

Can anyone recommend a good silent keyboard with proper F keys? The Microsoft ones are nice to type on (I like the low impact laptop style keys) but they tend to have stupid F keys. They are either too small (why not make them normal size?) or they have different caps on them with the F1-F12 printed...

Are you saying most of your drives have errors in their error logs? No. When drives fail it tends to be pretty obvious. Very few people use the manufacturer's tools or even know they exist anyway. Would you care to post SMART logs and test results of a drive which seems to be working but is really ...

The Google study says that only 9% of their drives report any reallocations which goes to show the 99% figure is indeed on the high side... Okay, I should qualify that. 99% of drives will have re-allocated sectors, they just might not report it. Most do report some though, but you have to examine t...

The findings actually showed that 2 year and 3 year old drives have higher chances of failure than 4 year and 5 year old drives... Yes. I don't see how that contradicts what I said. Also, the document suggested no strong correlations between intensity of use, which would be related wear and tear of...

Well I have had 6-10 storage hdds for quite some time (since 2004) now on my machine running 24/7 and have gone through many capacity drives, from 120GB to 2TB, some hdds I've kept long, some I've sold after two years approximately... I have had lots of drives over the years and never once had a si...

No, I am saying that I don't feel comfortable with a product whose technology itself limits it to a certain lifespan... HDD technology also limits their lifespan. A lot of people don't realise this but HDDs are designed with redundant storage because it is inevitable they will have bad blocks. When...

Lifespan of any half way decent SSD is not an issue any more. In fact for most desktop users it is more likely that a HDD will fail during the lifetime of the PC than an SSD will. HDDs are a lot more fragile and sensitive to heat. Laptop drives especially so. I fix PCs for a living and about half th...

I have a 160GB Intel SSD. It's a mid-range one and performance is excellent. While other SSDs will out-perform it on raw transfer rates it wins by far on reliability and hassle-free use. The problems with SSDs slowing down over time are now receding, especially thanks to Windows 7's use of the TRIM ...

I have been looking for some non-game benchmarks but there do not seem to be any. I am thinking about things like Folding@Home and physics processing.

The lower number of stream processors suggests that the 5000 series might be faster for those tasks.

I have an early quad core Intel CPU (one of the rather warm 65nm ones) and a 4870. Actually it's a crappy nVidia 680i based board which doesn't help matters. My system can pull 450W at the wall in some games. At work I built a system for a client with 5870 and AMD hex core CPU on an Intel mobo with ...

The comment about going up to 700W with a fan is interesting. Makes me wonder why they don't release a version with a fan that only kicks in above 400W. With one of the 5000 series Radeons and a modern 6 core CPU you could have a system that runs fanless in normal use but can ramp up to heavy proces...