One more question: did you add those molex connectors? I'm just wondering what the psu originally came with... none of the pics I've found here or on ebay show all the stock connectors. I'm just trying to figure out how much modding I'd need to do on this thing.

Ah yes, I noticed right after I posted that that the plug is male and not female. Oh well. Can you tell me if the mini connector has different gauge wire / pins than a normal ATX connector? I'm hoping I can just get a tool to pull the wires out of the mini one and plug them in to a normal one.

I'm surprised this thread hasn't garnered more interest... I think this looks like an awesome solution over a pico psu for a relatively low power system. I'm looking to build such a system and would like to copy this idea. I have decent soldering skills, but would rather not have to solder if I can ...

speedboxx wrote:

Neven wrote: An idle power consumption of 26W with this set-up is actually very weak. I have seen quadcore set-ups that consume less power at idle.

Proof/link?

Maybe he was referring to electrodacus who has posted a system idle of 31W with a heavily undervolted quadcore (the cpu was using 24W of that).

I can't believe you posted that many pics, yet didn't include any of the completed system

DiscWizard won't work if neither of the disks are from Seagate or Maxtor? I believe DiscWizard is a Seagate rebadge of Acronic TrueImage that you can use for free if you are using it with a Seagate drive. Otherwise it will not work. But you could just buy TrueImage. Note that I do not know for sure...

MikeC wrote:I think AMD is already totally competitive with Intel -- or superior -- for idle power. I checked the power at the 12Vx2 socket for this 240e some weeks ago and measured idle power at ~5W (iirc).

Now if we could just find the 240e for sale anywhere

I can't see an argument for buying a desktop these days unless you want to play games, have specialist requirements for storage/memory, or, like many here, enjoy building computers as a hobby - a mid-range laptop suffices for anything else. What about noise? This is SPCR after all. I love the size ...

You could just buy the board and then get the cable super cheap off ebay or monoprice and give it a shot. ;) Yeah, that's probably what I'll end up doing. The only sticking point is that, if I have to buy a video card anyway, I might prefer an MSI board (the mATX one reviewed here recently, 785G-65...

If someone (Gigabyte for instance) wired their boards to also send an analog signal (svideo) out over VGA then it will work. If they made their board like everyone else nowadays then it's not going to work. Which is why I'd think their tech support should be able to tell me a more definitive answer...

I want to get a new 785G board, preferably Gigabyte, but I still have an older tv setup and need s-video. I asked Gigabyte tech support if these boards support vga-to-svideo adapters like this and their response was that it "should work". Not very convincing. I asked MSI about their 785G boards and ...

Thanks for the review. I've been looking at the non-sideport ATX version of this board, GA-MA785GT-UD3H, so another data point in its family is welcome. Think it's safe to assume that an ATX and mATX version of the same board would have very similar BIOS options and power consumption? Also, on this ...

Thanks for the review.

I liked your post-script.. nice little system. Where did you manage to find the 45W 240e? I have had a hard time finding them in the US so far and really want to use one, though I might just undervolt a 240 if it gets me to almost the same power consumption.

I believe the 30W setups you read about are using a single laptop drive. You have 4 drives... Samsung specs your 3 at 5W each in idle, the Seagate could be another 8-10... let's call it 25W for drives. That takes your 80 down to 55W. How efficient is that PSU, especially at low loads? The 30W guys u...

I have sat on my desk, and sew setup, MSI 785GM-E51, Athlon II 245, 2GB DDR-3 1333, and a Samsung F1 320GB HDD, running XP SP3... You might need to get a new HDD/ODD at the same time as modern motherboards only have one PATA channel I've actually been looking at Gigabyte's 785G boards, though I don...

thanks for all the replies. sounds like older vga cards didn't do much with video acceleration, which would explain my current issue. i always had it in my head that they helped with that... guess i was wrong :oops: i don't think it makes much sense to try to guy a "new" socket A cpu or AGP vga card...

I have an aging machine... xp-m 2400+ with an ATI Radeon 9600xt graphics card. Lately I keep running into more and more videos that it struggles to play. I know this machine is pretty old, but I would have thought my video card would do some hardware acceleration on videos and allow to play some fai...

I used DD-WRT in "repeater" configuration to do what you are looking for. It extended the wifi signal to the far end of my parents' house. Works great. google your router and "repeater" to see if it supports something similar, or look into putting 3rd party firmware like dd-wrt or tomato on it if it...

Nice review. I'm building a fairly low power system soon (785g mobo with 45-65W Athlon II) and had mostly settled on the Nexus Value 430. Looks like this Enermax is a good competitor... though it's probably a wash as to which is better. I work for a helicopter company... I'll have to bring in that f...

Anyone know if you can output thru the DVI and VGA ports simultaneously? I know the HDMI port can't be used at the same time as the DVI, but I can't find anything on my question. I am considering one of these boards, but need two displays... the second display is my older TV, so I need s-video out. ...

Very nice, I like it. I bought an Apple Cube case (empty guts only, no PC) years ago thinking it would make a neat server some day, but never saw a good motherboard for it. Mini-itx fits in there, but there was always the issue of tall heatsinks or trying to figure out how to get custom heatpipes to...

I bought a CyberPower 685AVR UPS a little over a year ago. It seemed to work fine for a few months and then I would come home to find it emitting a continuous beep and the power to the computer would be tripped off. No power failure had occurred (I have clocks that flash 12 with the slightest interr...

tbessie wrote:That'd be hard to test, since I install Ubuntu Server, which doesn't come with any playback facility. I could install X, etc. to check it out, if I feel motivated to do that.

maybe just try a liveCD for local video playback testing

"Responsiveness" will not increase the actual productivity by itself. It will in situations where responsiveness was previously bad enough to aggravate. Frustrated users are not productive users. Absolutely. At work we have older spec'd machines (3GHz Pentium IV) which should be plenty fast for wha...

Wow, nice desktop... is that Vista or Win7 or what?

Tivos probably aren't available for you either, right? I had great success in quieting mine by putting in a different drive and fan and decoupling them both. Maybe you can find one locally that can swap drives and/or has enough interior space to decouple them.

Thanks for the links guys, I hadn't seen them before

I keep thinking about upgrading, so I'm starting to do my homework. I currently have an older ATI Radeon 9600xt. All the review sites I can find only tend to benchmark discrete cards vs other discrete cards, and integrated graphics to other integrated ones. I want to have a sense of how my current c...

I leave my wifi wide open so my other housemates can easily jump on. This makes no sense. What OS are they running on their laptops that's incapable of remembering a WPA passphrase?! It's not just laptops... Nintendo DS's, Tivos, older PocketPCs, etc. can't use WPA, just WEP. I actually recently sw...

Oh noes the conspiracies o_O Why can't you just go and ask him what he is doing? Because here in America, anyone can be packing heat, so we are all fearful of confronting a stranger acting weirdly lest he whip out a gun and shoot at us. That, and my passive-agressive streak needs to be satisfied no...