That plastic is actually used to support the video card, it hooks into the CPU cooler to lock in the video card. The CPU cooler itself is attached to the MB with two screws.

USB is a crap interface rammed into popularity primarily by MS in it's "new computing vision". It is way behind IEEE-1394 in performance but as that was popularized by Apple, M$ needed something "unique". It also has a shitty connector system that is easily disconnected, a limited cable length and ...

They switched to the G33 system with onboard video for the power consumption tests.

Asus MBs (at least the P5B deluxe I used) won't automatically step down the voltage if you change the voltage from default or overclock. It'll still drop the multiplier. Of course, if you undervolt, it doesn't really matter.

To answer a couple of questions, the Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme fits the Sonata 3, as does a 8800 GTX if the 120mm fan is not attached to the HD case.

The TAT workload is also a worst-case scenario in terms of power usage, no other real world application comes close to TAT in getting the temperature up on a C2D.

Mwave has the 3600+ at $61.50 and the E2140 at $69. There are plenty of cheap Socket 775 motherboards in the same price range. They have inferior integrated graphics but since the OP is planning to use a discrete video card, it doesn't matter.

Hmm. It doesn't show a 2.1GHz Brisbane in this graph, only a 1.9GHz (X2 3600). Furthermore, if you're going to compare an AMD processor to the E2160, it should be priced equivalently. The 2.3GHz Brisbane is a little bit less expensive and the 2.5GHz 4800 is a little bit more. Those would be much be...

to prod : do you mean to say that intel chips are better for photoshop?? The Pentium E2160 should exceed a 2.1GHz Brisbane in Photoshop: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/pentium-e2160_11.html#sect0 and also has excellent power dissipation: http://www.matbe.com/articles/lire/385/core-se-...

There is no problem with booting from PATA optical drives with the JMicron controller. No drivers are necessary, unless you want to use AHCI/RAID with SATA drives on the JMicron controller.

The drop in voltage under high CPU load is actually part of Intel's specifications. See page 21 of the Intel data sheet:

http://download.intel.com/design/proces ... 327804.pdf

No again. One was a tower and one was a rack server. There are fewer I/O slots on a rack server relative to a tower, so you are not comparing apples to apples. No, obviously you can't understand how the major manufacturers would not bottleneck their scores in a important test by using inadequate IO...

Wrong, it is completely the opposite. You are comparing a tower with 10 drive controllers and ~800 drives to a rack with ~6 drive controllers and ~500 drives. Again, TPC is all about I/O. Do any comparison of scores and you'll see the biggest correlation is around I/O. The more drives and controlle...

As for performance, why not look at the SPEC2006 benchmark: http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html Best Xeon 7140 score: 80.6. Best Opteron 8222 score: 108. That is a pure cpu to cpu test. The TPC-C is less of a CPU test, for instance, because it really measures I/O of a platform. Your pe...

Barcelona will have the same chipsets as dual core. 1-way through 8-way, dual core or quad core, it will be consistent. Intel could never get close to that. But they don't, since each major OEM has their own chipset for each different socket level. And if you actually look at the benchmarks, Optero...

because they scale better and AMD has 8-way x86 options. Intel is MIA in the 8-way and has no scalalbility in the 4-way (along with 150w chips). AMD has 1 decent 8S option by Sun. IBM and Unisys both provide servers greater than 8S based on Xeon. IBM can build you a 32S Xeon system if you want. For...

Cache is a band aid for a poor front side bus design. Tell that to the Power series which features massive caches and interconnects. Intelligent chipsets are great, but to real enterprise customers, having the same chipset for 1-way, 2-way, 4-way and 8-way platforms is a much better choice than one...

Actually, it has a major impact on core-to-core latency and bandwidth. The Intel Quad's bus and AMD FX's Hypertransport connections have comparable performance, while the L3 cache is at least an order of magnitude faster. This remains to be seen, since the performance of L3 cache, plus how effectiv...

All have my comments have been around Barcelona, which is a server processor. There is a big impact on memory bandwidth for servers and workstations. I won't even pretend to know much about desktop processors because I don't real deal with them. Most desktop applications are not optimized for quad ...

Penryn is only a dual core architecture. They don't get to quad until then next generation. Penryn glues 2 duals together to get a quad and all of the die to die communication between the two duals actually runs out over the front side bus through the memory controller, killing your memory bandwidt...

i read that its better to use the 533mhz ram with C2D (as opposed to 667mhz) cause it is the same core frequency as the bus speed of the cpu . although maybe that only applies to running it a stock speed (no OC) Even at stock, faster memory has some (small) benefits for a C2D. http://www.xbitlabs.c...

Natronomonas wrote: but I was looking for e4300.

(not TDP, actual consumption...)
Thanks...

http://www.behardware.com/articles/652- ... e4300.html

accord1999, how much do you push your machine? r u running cpu intensive tasks/games most of the time for longer periods? (or just for tests) I can run CPU intensive tasks without problems for days but I usually don't run completely fanless as I have a X1900XT video card and even with the IceQ3 coo...

J. Sparrow wrote:It's Intel, their TDP of 50 W probably refers to a turned-off PC

Yonah would disagree with you, 31W TDP and only 25.4W measured power consumption.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article313-page5.html

in other words, can the E6600 be passively colled with the Scythe Ninja (bought one last night ;) and just a single 120mm nexus case fan? Quite easily, I can run a E6600 at 3GHz with the Ninja and just a single 950rpm 120mm case inside a NSK6500 case. It can get warm with dual Prime95 but there's s...

With a Ninja or better, you can overclock it to 3GHz and still run it passively. The E6600 also undervolts very well at stock speeds, stable at 1.1v (which is the value for the MB I'm using).

RaptorZX3 wrote:yeah

hmm i've found out that on NCIX (Canada) they sell Noctua 120mm fans for 19.50$CAN

NCIX's sister site, Direct Canada has them for cheaper:

http://www.directcanada.com/products/?s ... ure=Noctua

People have done Ninja-passive overclocked Venice 3800's, X2 4000,etc...but,with a lone fan at 800? I doubt it. The Core 2's could have aimed more for cool--but Intel wanted to squeeze more horsepower when going to 65 nm. Yep, I've ran a E6600 at 2.4GHz/1.1v with only a single Scythe 800rpm case fa...

Platypus9 wrote:Thanks for the replies,
if they were the same price, i'd probably get the E4300,
but the 3800+X2 is much cheaper, and the AM2 socket is a great upgrade path, which I don't think can be said for 775.

Why's that? The 775 will upgrade to quad cores today.

Im new to this, but I want to use passive cooling on my upgrade with the Ninja Scythe (revB). Quiet is the priority. I'm not sure if one platform will be hotter, I understand this is seperate from the heat generated by the CPU alone. I believe either of these cpu's could be passively cooled? http:/...