I know you got a preproduction model, but I wish they would have included HDMI out, or just drop VGA in favor of DVI-I so you could connect one of these to a TV with an adapter. This would be a good board to stick inside a Nintendo chassis and use as a retro-game rig/media extender (assuming x264 ac...

The 750 CPU is pretty efficient, and you may not even need the (almost)push-pull configuration if you were to reverse the cooler unless you're overclocking/volting. You already have 2 exhaust fans in the near vicinity- try removing the CPU fan altogether and see how your temps go. It's a long shot, ...

What SSD would be a good one to buy to put into the laptop and that I could be sure would be compatible? Is this a hard process to replace the hard drive? The 2nd gen Intel drives (part #: Intel X25-M SSDSA2MHxxx G2 yyy, where xxx is the capacity and yyy is the revision), the OCZ Agility & Vertex l...

Assuming you have the small form factor version of the 745, you should still be able to fit this mITX board: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813136073 More mITX boards should start showing up in the future as well, especially when the i3 line rolls out. Keeping it at the curren...

I thought we want something >30A to be good for 5770. Am I not reading correctly? 30A x 12V = 360W, so no, you don't need anywhere near 30 for just the vid card, not even for the full system. From the review on here, the Enermax Eco has two 24A lines, which is more than enough. Otherwise, those are...

I don't think the upgrades you're looking at are worth the cash. Iirc, Anandtech's article mentioned solid state drives used by OEM's use Samsung controllers and weren't very high performing. You're better off buying your own SSD with the $445 and replacing the drive yourself. I don't think the 7% ...

I don't know how concerned you should be, but it should improve matters a bit if you undervolted the CPU (as long as your board allows it) to lower those peak power scenarios. Also, I'm surprised at your stressed power usage. My HTPC pulled 95W at the wall using a standard, (presumably) less-efficie...

I was surprised too. My 1.5TB Green feels brutally slow/unresponsive at times, which I assumed was slow random access, but maybe it's the head un-parking. Very good storage drive but doesn't feel anywhere near as "snappy" as my 640GB 2-platter Blue as an OS/App drive.

How very misleading of them to advertise the lanes as 2.0...
Oh well, thanks for all the info, guys!

Ay carumba! Thanks for the links. That's a really odd implementation... What I don't understand is why they don't cannibalize the 8 2.0 lanes of PCI-E on the P55 instead of the CPU's PCI-E. Besides, doesn't this board only has 2 USB3 ports? So it's not like they'd run out of bandwidth by using the P...

^??? Where are you guys getting this info from? P55 doesn't use PCI-e 1.x, it uses 2.0, it even displays this in the block diagram I linked above when it says 500MB/s per lane. And P55 has 8 lanes, not 4, regardless of board vendor. Intel makes the chipsets, not the board vendors, so every single P5...

The PCI-e in the P55 chipset (as opposed to the lanes exclusively dedicated to video, which are in the CPU) have room for 4 GB(Bytes, not bits)/sec which is independent of USB,LAN,etc. and is better than the X58 @ 3GB. The 1366 platform has more lanes on the CPU for video cards than 1156, but less f...

With just a few mins under P95 load, my maxVID seems to be 1.2875V and minVID was 1.1000V, though I did see it momentarily switch to a different value (probably one step higher or lower). The voltage in CPU-z consistently showed 0.912V though (both idle and load) as I had it side-by-side with RealTe...

Facebook?
I think I'll just pay more attention to the headlines on the front page here...
In any case, good luck with your build!

I agree with Mike and Rogue, you don't need to go all-out fanless. Like Mike said, you should try to make a regular 80x25mm fan fit (if possible). As for the SSDs, I share your pain and what's worse is that I'm seeing the prices going up lately :shock: The OCZ Agility 60GB went down to the CDN$150's...

^You're right about the OC, though I don't think it's fair to say the 1156 ones are that much worse at it (unless you insist on stock volts only). I'm not an OC guru, but Anandtech got an i7 860 up to 4.016GHz @ 1.334V on the POS retail cooler. That's pretty respectable isn't it? By comparison, they...

No problem :P If that motherboard allows it, try undervolting the CPU to reduce temps by a little bit and the load on the PSU. If all you are using is the onboard video and the PSU fanswap doesn't work out to your satisfaction, you may want to consider the PicoPSUs and the like. A 120W brick should ...

Interesting concept. Is the wall of fans adjacent to the rad blowing the hot air out of the case or in? From the picture it looks like they're blowing in... I hope this doesn't compromise your temps (as I think Frenchie was hinting at). It's very cool of Asus to have such a contest, how did you hear...

^ Agree with the cooler comment above. Zalman is neither good enough in the cooling nor the quietness departments to justify it's prices. You can do a lot better for less $. See the Cooling section reviews for a starting point.

Welcome to SPCR and that's a doozie you dropped for a first post! It's hard to comment on such a setup because there isn't a lot of information available about these cases. Their site isn't helpful either as they post seemingly contradictory info between their mobo compatibility list (which lists a ...

The tri-cores seem to be the best compromise of value and performance/future-proofing in my opinion, so thumbs up on that choice. As for the RAM, maybe I'm missing something but it looks like the cheaper kit @ CL6 is better, unless the second one runs at a much lower voltage ie:1.3,1.4V. Standard vo...

HTPC CPU: Pentium DualCore E5200 2.5GHz w/ semi-passive minja Mobo: Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H (the GF9400 one) CPU-Z shows 0.912V (had it at 0.896V for a week or so but eventually did get an application crash that may have been due to the low voltage, so it's now 1 step higher). 0.912V is a stable vol...

Looks very nice! I'd recommend spending some time undervolting the CPU/stability testing, if you haven't done so already. I managed to trim ~5 deg C on my Q9450 by going from 'auto' to the lowest CPUv that was stable, ~0.2V less than auto.

I don't know too much about RAID, but don't see how mirroring (ie: RAID1) can do absolutely anything to improve performance- if anything it may even reduce it slightly. If you meant RAID0 (striping), I'm not sure that will help the random reads/writes, which are brutal on the greens. The continuous ...

I don't know about the PSU you chose, but the rest of your components seem to be matched well and you should be able to run it reasonably quiet. As an owner of the Green 1.5TB drive, I'm finding it's noise to be good, but day-to-day use performance to be seriously lacking compared to the popular 640...

I've been running 2 120mm S-Flex fans on a single Fanmate2 for over 1.5 years in my HTPC with no apparent issues so far. I'd say give it a try!

If you're sticking with a single video card and don't care about the upcoming hexacores (and extreme overclocking), and want some more performance at a lower cost/thermal envelope, swap the i7 920 for a 860. Performance comparison here: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/sh ... i=3641&p=7

Whoops, I inadvertently copied what I took to be a typo in the OP. I meant to write 1366 instead of 1136.

I'd first try running the stock fans at 5V since it costs you nothing. I'm guessing that the "lead that splits one molex connector to the 3 fan connectors" only uses 2 of the molex pins. You can probably swap around the pins inside the molex connector to use the 5V line instead of the 12. It takes n...

Besides, who knows how much longer Blizzard will sit on its hands before the games are finally released. SC2's development is dragging on for ages. Very true; they recently announced that "D3 won't be out in 2010- maybe in 2011-2012". More on topic: the 8400GS is your biggest problem by far. lm's p...