I bought a 15R last year as a christmas present for my step-daughter, and an SSD to replace the stock HDD to help speed it up. Boy, do I wish I'd read up beforehand. The HDD is screwed to the inside of the motherboard, so to swap in the SSD I had to completely disassemble the laptop (keyboard off, s...

I tried the public preview of Win 8, I hated it. I think the Metro interface is Microsoft trying to be cool. Microsoft's problem is that they aren't cool, and they never will be. I'm reasonably confident that the silly interface for desktop use will go away in Win 9, not least because businesses are...

I have an i3 running in one of these. I Dremeled the stock fan off the stock Intel heatsink, and glued a quiet 80x25mm fan to the inside of the lid of the case. This is the only moving part (SSD fitted, not HDD), it's unnoticeable over ambient except at the dead of night. That said, the Antec ISK100...

Also don't forget that writes are amplified. I dont know what this means.! SSDs are arranged in pages, with a typical page being many kilobytes in size (4-8kB being typical I think). When data is written to a page, the whole page must be erased and rewritten, regardless of how much data is actually...

I have one of these http://www.logitech.com/en-gb/keyboards/keyboards/7288 and I find it quite nice. Better than the corded Logitech illuminated keyboard I have one of at work (which I think is out of production now). IMO it's also better than the UltraX, which I never really got along with. I do wi...

300W sounds way too much if there's no discrete graphics card in there. I'd expect something in or around the double-digits watts (ie. <~100W).

What CPU are you running?

Posy-phrasing a little, but maybe something along the lines of "if the well regulated militia (whose day job is working with guns) doesn't trust you to work with guns, you shouldn't be allowed to own guns"?? Not specific enough to pass muster in any US Court. Well yes, that's why I said I was posy-...

So he has history and that is the kind of history you should be worried about. Why not ban him from owning weapons for life? Maybe you could suggest the exact wording of the law you propose to do that (while making sure that it still complies with the 2nd Ammendment and the right to bear arms). Pos...

ces, there is no problem with the moderation here. There never has been. Even if there were, it's not a matter for discussion - the SPCR guys run this site the way they see fit. Their site lives and dies by their decisions, and given that the site is as strong now as it has been for the many years b...

Check out the Lian Li PC-q08 or Lian Li PC-q11. They both have room for 6 3,5" hard drives, and they are mini-ITX cases so they are smaller than the average case. Seconded. I have a Q08 with six WD 20EARS (I think they're EARS) as an HTPC/NAS. It is audible (it's basically white noise, no tonality)...

They stop spinning altogether.

There are a lot of winks and nods towards power management through variable RPM at various places in the storage food-chain, I've yet to see any meaningful evidence that either of the HDD manufacturers are actually doing this.

I would also submit that the rules for this forum are not clear. I would submit that anybody and everybody who frequents this place has an inalienable human right to go somewhere else if they don't like the moderation here. One could argue that if the moderation is bad, and people leave in droves, ...

So yes it does need an update AMD are slapping Intel about bang per buck wise at this price segment. What about sales-wise? Any indication that Intel can't sell all the i3's it can make? Furthermore... SNB and IVB don't share fab capacity don't forget. If what you say is true (and I don't doubt it ...

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=64666 Thanks, but those are laptop CPUs as opposed to desktop cpus. Yes but there's discussion about the non-mobile parts too, including a distillation of this forums knowledge on their rumoured arrival time (tl;dr version - no-one really kn...

Have a look in the BIOS, often there's a setting there to disable SMART. Win 7 might give up checking if it thinks the drives aren't SMART-capable.

I get the impression they're not in much of a hurry, it's not like they're under much pressure from the competition to replace Sandybridge.

General rumours suggest Q3 for i3 IVB availability, possibly the back-end of Q3. Take that with an Internet-sized pinch of salt of course.

I am using this case + PSU combination in one of my builds. It works fine, though it's a bit of a tight squeeze getting the mobo+HSF+side-panel assembly into the case. If you're wanting to use a PCI-E card, you need to check if the AXP blocks the PCI-E slot on your motherboard of choice (if you have...

I've heard that the drives are slow. This depends on what you're measuring, and who it is saying that they're slow. Their random access times aren't anything to get excited about, in sequential read they can sustain 100MB/sec quite easily. So I wouldn't install a performance-critical database on on...

SSDs overheating? That's a new one on me :?: Over hard drives overheating? I've built a couple of systems based on the ISK110s brother the ISK100, and had decent success in cooling the CPU by dremelling the fan off the stock cooler and gluing a quiet 80x25mm fan either on top of the heatsink, or to ...

My beef with this case is the same as I expressed about one of it's cousins (the Q25 IIRC), it seems like a missed opportunity to make a perfect mini-server case with six hot-swap drives. All the faffing around with the drive mounting on the base of the case is silly, the drive cage should be extend...

Interesting to hear confirmation of the tonal noise of the higher RPM Gentle Typhoons. I currently have two of these sitting idle in my box o' fans for this very reason. One of these is the 1850 RPM mentioned in the article, but the other is an 1150, which unfortunately exhibits the ringing tone wh...

quest_for_silence wrote:If I can afford a naïve question: why, if Sandy Bridge is so efficient, the CPU temperatures are so worse than the previous ones (15-25°C more, with reference to the Athlon II X4 platform)?

Because temperature and power consumption are not the same thing.

I wouldn't use rubber bands, they'll perish in a warm environment. Zipties should be OK though.

I've used thin wire (the plastic-coated variety you get from Maplin) a couple of times to secure fans to heatsinks.

Currently I consider Samsung HD204UI as best buy. I heard that it doesent have head parking issue, and its about $15 cheaper than WD20EARS. Unfortunelly, according to reviews it is 1~2 dB louder than WD20EARS. What do you personally think, should I go with the Samsung? Alas I can't really provide a...

There's an app called WDIDLE3 which can change the wait time before head parking, this works on the 1TB and 2TB WD green drives I believe (as in ... I've used it on 1TB and 2TB WD drives, the 2TB were the EARS I believe). It runs from DOS, but you only need to run it once as the drive stores the set...

To first order - it doesn't matter. A few degrees won't make or break anything. I've tried all of those mentioned so far in this thread and found no noticeable difference that I trust. Mostly I'll pick a tube at random, or just use whatever comes caked on the bottom of the stock HSF. I have yet to r...

quest_for_silence wrote:I mean it's not the point.

Not the point of what? Folding is never going to be the top of the priority list for any of the IHVs.

I don't understand why it should be surprise that NVIDIA want to differentiate their HPC/GPGPU cards from their mainstream graphics cards. They have done this for a long time, as have their primary competitor, in certain ways at least. If AMD weren't flapping about trying to find The Rock Of Relevan...