Lovely to see another roundup. Includes most of the fans I was curious about, too! Noctuas would be good to see for comparison's sake, but they have a deserved reputation as it is. I'm a little surprised the Corsair fans didn't fare better after the hype, but then again that is just hype being hype....

Rumour has it that all of these minor shortcomings will be addressed in its successor, HolyNight. Next years features should have no influence on shortcomings of the reviewed modell. So i do assume the rating doesn't include a promise to bring a better modell next time. I believe that is what they ...

Since it's a bulk card you'll be hard-pressed to find actual figures. Its big brother has a <90 W maximum load, so I think you should be fine with your 350 W PSU, assuming it is 80 Plus rated (and further assuming you don't have two overclocked 100 W CPUs or something as crazy).

The MSI N650Ti-1GD5/OC, as the model name implies, is factory-overclocked, but it's a very light overclock (some two dozen MHz, 954 MHz), so I've left it as-is.

You can tweak clocks, power limit and even vCore with Afterburner. My MSI hasn't had any coil whine, rest of my assessment is here: http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=65468 . Unfortunately for you I haven't swapped out the cooler, but I listened attentively for a month and fro...

You can lead a horse to water, but yada yada. We have at least one happy camper with a recent AX760 purchase: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=65808&p=571764&hilit=AX760#p571764.

Steve's got a point about the fan profiles. Too few have their fan profile graphs up on the product specs page, but it's always a good idea to try and match your situation. Example from Nexus' site: http://www.nexustek.nl/images/RXSeries_noiselevelgraph_all.jpg (the model name equals the rated watta...

I was leery of the Kingwin/Superflower names - they do sound like plastic toy makers - but the units do review very well. People have had samples with issues, but the same goes for almost every other name in the business when it comes to the high efficiency models (and especially the generic brands ...

Look at those individual coffee containers you put in the machine. The at home price is $1+ per cup, the grocery store shows prices exceeding $30/pound. For a trivial amount of convenience, jeez I am part of one dumb species. No thanks by the way. Convenience can be everything for some people. Let'...

Same for me about the LED backlights. Ideally great, in reality just used to simulate lamps and claim energy savings. No effort made to change basic structure to rectify bleeding, not even to make it uniform, which I have seen Lenovo so with some earlier monitors. Big names don't benefit from rockin...

Most companies today simply want to rebrand (or initially brand) something cheap with a huge profit margin. A glorified get rich quick scheme. That's how I've been feeling about a lot of products. I think one of the most outrageous examples I've seen so far was pre-peeled bananas: http://www.austri...

Ditto, aristide. "Mainstream" Asus products have been good value, but that value has come at a price - so to speak.

I was almost going to say I would be surprised if anyone on SPCR uses their monitor without calibrating it, but then again best not to assume too much.

The German site is Prad.de. Good site; fewer reviews than one would like, but all solid stuff.

What makes you think it's the RAM makers making the killing? The markup is at the final stage. What you want to do is get into the business of selling overpriced memory upgrades to consumers who just click the "upgrade" checkbox when ordering. This. Just look at the profits made by the different st...

xan_user wrote:OT;
but does mayo go bad when used as thermal grease?

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/ ... 012/1468/5

Love that one. Shows you that you just need an interface.

Also, a lot of stuff did worse than household condiments. I am not surprised.

It does hardly anything for employment figures, during or after service - it's nothing special as everyone does it So less people in the job market so lower unemployment than if you did not have conscription. Indeed, when British troops began being demobilised at the end of WW2 they were very caref...

We've got a huge area to cover with a very small number of people (compare to Japan/JSDF or Israel/IDF). Our closest ally has all but dismantled their forces (I think they're supposed to be able to defend the country for a week?) and there's a big, unpredictable, war-waging neighbour on the other fr...

OT / re: thermal goop The cheap "white" (I forget what they're made with) TIMs have been the messiest for me to work with, hardest to clean too. AS5 has been alright, and their Ceramique is supposed to be even easier. The Noctua stuff comes in a syringe like AS and that was very nice too - gotten tw...

BIOS control would be ideal, but so far it's been less than acceptable, both in functionality and reliability in my case. I burned out a video card because a BIOS-controlled fan stopped and the machine could not take any action to warn me or rectify the situation. The Silent settings so far haven't ...

There's a reason why countries like Finland call their forces the Defence Forces. And just to stay on the general level, which is what this picture is about (sans the idea posed by the original poster), that money is used by an organisation that exists for War. The USA's global political, economic a...

no 8s sleep thingy causing hundreds of thousands load/unload cycles in few months Take that with a pinch of salt, the cycle scare reached FUD levels of paranoia. In my case as a desktop storage drive I use every day, the count is 88,817 - in 735,9 days of Power On Time, which comes to a little over...

First of all, I'll second the observation that the power figures are too high. Would need more info to specify actual need. Second, you do know those Corsair AX models are made by Seasonic, right? If you're wary of the Seasonic-related whine reports, I would steer well clear of all that and pick som...

Just FYI it was the rubber gaskets that caused the smell. Fractal changed those and the problem was eliminated from later production runs. I can only comment on the difference of the FD Define Mini and my old Antec P180B. The Mini is definitely sturdier and the heavy, textured FD material silences n...

The figures are nothing short of staggering. You could also compare it to the GDPs or national budgets of other nations - or the US' for that matter - and get equally impressive imagery. That is a society steered towards War, no doubt about it. I doubt the industry's interests are a trivial matter e...

i just used a 8+ year old tube of Arctic Silver 5, and it performed, at least to me (unscientifically), as well as the tube i just bought last month. I can vouch for this. My AS5 was "good as new" for several years - it worked and performed well on platforms from the first A64s to the last Core 2s....

Anyone who has come to realise this or is interested should watch/hear the speech Cory Doctorow gave, "The Coming War on General Computation". It's long, but worth it.

I believe someone here must've linked it before, but as my memory does not serve, I can't give them credit right this moment.

I looked into this at one point, since my monitor is not the best design. LEDs would in theory allow for a more even illumination of the display, and could be turned off individually to allow for deep blacks, but I don't believe I came across any major differences regarding colour temperature or lig...

Since this isn't strictly silence-related, I thought I'd put it in Off-Topic. The problem: Asus software has a memory leak. The story: Noticed something had eaten up a lot of RAM while playing Bad Company 2. Typically the consumption is high, but this time over 80% of my 8 GB were gone. I quit the g...

As suggested by the others in this thread, I would check motherboard compatibility lists for the sticks (or just 8 GB ones in general, if your preferred model isn't there). Googling your planned component combination is another way to explore compatibility, as you've already done. Motherboard and RA...

Asus GeForce GTX 660 DirectCU II OC 2 GB reviewed at X-Bit Labs.

They plot the sound levels (to a degree), commenting that "[this Asus card] is in fact one of the quietest graphics cards we’ve ever tested."