Thanks washu. :) The strange thing remains though why the CnQ A64 never gets cooled down to room temperature on long idle runs if it is HLTed by newer OS (and indeed quite a few sources say HLT is embedded in them). An A64 is still using (and wasting) a lot of power even when CnQ and HLT are in use...

There's one more thing I was wondering. Is there any software-cooling (power saving) for HT-enabled Northwoods, or something alike? As I said before, Windows already does this automatically. It executes the HLT instruction when the CPU is idle. As long as you are not running Win98 or older you are ...

To answer your basic question, HT or no HT: you would have to test. A modern version of Flash will attempt to use HT (as it appears to be a 2nd core) but it may not actually benefit. Old HT on P4s is much less efficient than on modern CPUs. Running the "wrong" code on the HT core can slow down the m...

@gamebox: Yes, XP 32 bit executes HLT automatically. Win2K and ME do as well. The behavior you see is because the KT133 chipset is buggy and doesn't allow HLT to work properly without a workaround, which VCool does. If you had the same CPUs on a better chipset you would not need VCool. You don't nee...

Why would an Athlon 64 based system be a "power hog" as you reffer? The CPU idle consumption is about 29W, the GPU consumes 7.7W idle/9.9W decoding HD, A modern Haswell or Baytrail CPU can potentially idle at under 1W and that includes the GPU. Even when running full bore, all but highest end or ov...

Unless you are running Win98 or older, utilities like CPUIdle are useless. All modern OSes execute HLT automatically when appropriate.

Sounds like the monitor's power supply is going. Probably bad caps. Usually it is the backlight capacitors that go, but the finicky powering on points to the main PS.

If you are good with soldering then it is fixable, but otherwise it is new monitor time.

While for many things either AMD or Intel will be "good enough", RAW photo editing is not one of them. RAW editing is still something that can max out even brand new CPUs. I haven't used NX2 as I don't shoot Nikon, but I've used several other RAW editors and they all want the fastest CPU possible wh...

There is the GRYPHON Z97, but it's expensive. Might be worth it to save the cost of a GPU.

For less money there are B85 and Q87 based boards with displayport: B85M-E/CSM & Q87M-E/CSM

MoBo: Asus H97M-PLUS - the only thing it lacks is a decent 2650x1600@60GHz output GPU: cheapest fanless dual-link DVI video card for my U3014 Dell - wanted to use the on-board GPU initially. Sadly crappy Asus only outputs 2650x1600@60GHz over HDMI which crappy Dell does not accept accept as input o...

Any RAID card that is cheaper or even close to a new Baytrail MB (~$100) is not worth it. Software RAID will be better. RAID 0 or 1 has almost no CPU impact and RAID 5 or 6 is still very low on any even remotely modern CPU. As always, RAID is not a backup. If you can only afford 2 drives then use on...

Windows 8 Storage Spaces does support RAID 5, and performance is pretty good. I'm not sure what you define as "pretty good" performance, but every benchmark I've seen and my own tests show that storage spaces has terrible write performance when using RAID 5 (parity space). Write speeds are well und...

Ah yes, hardware RAID controllers. Not really built for low power operation. Not just hardware RAID controllers. Lots of Fake RAIDs have this problem too. They are nothing more than a standard controller shiped with a RAID BIOS + Driver. Remove the BIOS + Driver and you have a standard disk control...

Do people really have such a huge problem sleeping their HDDs? I just enabled the option in Windows and it worked, on multiple machines. Are there problems with certain motherboards or chipsets or something? A fair number of RAID controllers don't allow spindown even when not using the RAID functio...

To expand on what Luca said: It's unlikely that it is your CPU overheating, it is probably something else. Overclocking your CPU might be the source of the heat, but not the affected component. Do you have any other temp sensors you can monitor? Might help pinpoint the issue. That being said, my sem...

Ok, that sounds like a Truepower 550W v2.0, not the original. That is fine, but close.

well it's more for the speed and cache size i got the E8400 on it, i tried Just Cause 2 on it, with fairly high details, and it seem to run fine on it. There is nothing wrong with the E8400, it's a good CPU. You are just seriously overclocking the FSB of the chipset to run it. Antec Truepower 550W ...

RaptorZX3 wrote:i do have a Core 2 Duo E8400 on it, LGA775.

While your MB "supports" this CPU, the E8400's 1333MHz FSB is *VERY* out of spec for the 945. Not a good idea.

quest_for_silence wrote: To gain about 130Mb of more RAM? Do you think you will gain any performance advantage?

There would be no memory gain, not even 130 MB. The address space would still be used.

so if i get a slightly newer MicroATX board without the 945 chipset, but still using DDR2, i should use it, right? Make sure it actually supports memory remapping, but in general yes. I've seen a few 965 boards that did not enable memory remapping even though the chipset supports it. Others have th...

the thing is the board have 2 slots, and 2gb in each, so how can i lose that much memory when i have a dedicated video card and all that with a 64-bit OS? Simple, the chipset physically cannot address more than 4GB. Your video card's memory has to fit into the address space, which displaces the RAM...

Or maybe1007U motherboard. Would like to know more. What You think? Thanks I think the 1037U based boards are a safer bet. They should run FreeBSD without issues. They would also be faster than the AM1 CPUs in anything that can't make use of more than two threads. For anything that can use over two...

How is noise? What case/PSU do you use. At one point I was thinking of M350. Thanks Noise is not bad, but it is not silent. I use it as a router in my server rack, so I don't really care. There is a fanless 1037U board, the Gigabyte GA-C1037UN-EU. Case is a generic mITX case that is slightly larger...

The 945 chipset cannot remap memory above 4GB so any memory addresses taken up by your video card and other devices is simply lost. Doesn't matter if the OS is 64 bit or not.

With a 1037U board (BSD should have drivers for that I assume), you may be able get everything under $200 by cutting corners. I have FreeBSD on a 1007U board (same as the 1037U with a lower clock) and it works very well. I don't run a GUI on it, but the GPU is the same as any other Ivy Bridge chip ...

Is it better to look into AMD stuff? There are of course exceptions, but in general once you are past the P4 generation AMD CPUs will use more power than Intel CPUs for the same performance. Look at newer Celeron/Pentium machines to keep costs down. Celerons got a somewhat deserved bad reputation i...

If you are sticking with the core 2 generation, get a MB with a G45 chipset and the GMA X4500HD. That is the only Intel desktop chipset for core 2 that has full video decode acceleration for h264.

I want to change the default install location for my programs....the ones that do not give me the option during install to manually change them... This is possible, but I'd suggest you don't change this setting. First off, how many programs that don't allow you to chose their install directory are ...

Great write up OP. So we know that idle is still the same power consumption for both haswell and these systems... What are we looking at in terms of the difference in price between building a haswell low power system and an AM1 or Bay-trail with similar components? If we're looking at the differenc...

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