I want to give western digital another chance but all their drives except raptor and raid have a 3/1 year warranty. Seagate has a standard 5 year warranty and I know Seagate is slow and louder. If western digital has confidence in their product why not a 5 year warranty? I know the drive will be wo...

I had a Western Digital WD3200JB go on me, but before it died, I got an advance replacement RMA from Western Digital and I was able to transfer all of the data off it without any problems what so ever. It had been telling Windows XP that it was dying months before I read about the problem in the sys...

If I was a moderator, I would lock this thread. It appears to have gone horribly off topic around the post that had the lesser evil comments...

I brought all of my Panaflo fans from sidewindercomputers.com. When buying fans, make sure that you only buy the ultra quiet ones and that you undervolt them. Otherwise you will end up buying more than you can use (wasting money) as you progressively make your PC quieter like I did. I have 7 fans ly...

The website says that the fan produces 8.7 dBA. Is that even possible?

I am curious, what are the chances that the AMD motherboards do a more energy efficient DC to DC conversion than the Intel motherboards do? I know that Intel uses an 80% efficient DC to DC conversion on their desktop boards but uses a 90% efficient DC to DC conversion on their server boards so I fig...

Mike, the 2.2GHz Turion has no speed equivalent Pentium-M yet you are saying that the 2.13GHz Pentium-M is speed equivalent when you say that the 2.26GHz Pentium-M has no speed equivalent Turion. Looking at the numbers, there is a 0.07GHz difference between the 2.13GHz Pentium-M and the 2.2GHz Turio...

Windows Defender is the best anti-spyware protection out there:

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/securit ... fault.mspx

I never said it would not be. I did say that it will not be significantly faster though. I would like to clarify this. To be clearer, I should have said: I never said it would not be. I did say that the RAID 5 configuration will not be significantly faster than a single drive at non-sequential read...

I am curious, where did you get the foam?

I would go with the WD5000KS for two reasons. One being that the one time I had any problem with a Western Digital drive, the OS had been reporting problems months before I realized them and yet the drive still kept on going long enough for me to get all of my data off it onto the new drive Western ...

Only at sequential reads. All other reads are slow as the heads are not aligned. Nope. Read performance is _always_ good, even if it is random read performance. The parity data blocks aren't read on data reads. So the read performance is basically just like reading on a purely striped array. Actual...

Cool thanks for the tip. I think I will be undervolting a medium speed 120mm Panaflo though. The 120mm fan is my only exhaust (unless you include the Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer) so I want to make sure that airflow stays at a certain level. I ordered one of these: http://www.sidewindercomputers.com/...

Is the noise produced by your monitor sounds like a high pitched squeal or medium frequency buzz? The latter sound is produced by the cathode lamps and you can get rid of it by increasing brightness up to 95-100 range. If it's the former, then I feel your pain. I also own 2405 and it took two RMAs ...

word. I have the new 150. Quietest drive I've ever owned. Even by touching it , I feel no vibration whatsoever. I continue to be impressed by the drive, and it's precursor, the 74gb model. I am curious, what drives have you owned? Since SPCR has not yet reviewed the drive, I would like some figures...

I don't follow your math. 3x 100$ is 300$, no cost for the raid-controller, consider it's provided by motherboard. Cheapest 500gb drive in newegg is Maxtor and it costs 325$. Hitachi and WD 500gbs are 395$ and Seagate is around 350$. Imo 300$ is cheaper then the alternatives. I was thinking of with...

Erssa wrote:Cheaper and faster and more secure then any single 500gb drive

More secure, perhaps, but definitely not cheaper and faster. RAID-5 is designed to sacrafice speed so that the amount of space avaliable after the parity data is maximized. If you want to maximize performance, buy the Raptor.

I'd recommend undervolting the TriCool to 5v or 7v. Just keep in mind it won't start on low at 5v (and maybe medium too, depending on the fan). Also, I've heard of people putting carpet/foam against the wall behind the computer to dampen the sound a bit. No idea how effective this is though. The on...

As for SA's P4 rig, what is left that is still making noise? The only moving parts are the hard drive and a couple of undervolted fans (when the optical drive is not in use). You have to find out what is the major source of remaining noise before you can tackle it, especially when your rig must alr...

I did not know that. I had thought that every store I brought a case from (only two stores) had lousy shipping practices. ^_^;;

I will look into the fabric store idea. Thanks.

By the way, there are only two mechanical parts (three if you include the optical drive) that are not isolated and they both rotate at low speeds and I have an Antec Phantom so do you really think the mass approach could help?

I have a P150 case and my PC has the following specifications: Intel 2.4GHz Pentium 4 Rev. C Processor w/Thermalright SP-94 and 92mm Panaflo fan undervolted to 5 volts Intel D875PBZLK Motherboard Corsair TWINX1024-3200LL Rev. 1.1 Memory ATI AIW 9700 Pro Graphics Card w/VGA Silencer Rev. 3 set to low...

Shining, is Antec still shipping modified PSUs with the P150 (with broken warranty seals), or do current shipments have the seal intact? And where did you buy it? David After the first few days I did not think anyone else would reply so I lost track of this thread. Anyway, the current shipments hav...

Okay, ignorant electrical question here: would the higher voltage also change wattage amounts? (like a higher voltage would mean less watts?) Either way, I would expect that A) mine probably draws more power; and B) your system is faster :D The A64 architecture is definitely more efficient than Soc...

That PSU calculator gives me 226 Watts for my system's specifications. When in reality it consumes 178 Watts at load, after the AC to DC conversion. Before the AC to DC conversion, it consumes approximately 138.84 Watts, which is about 61.4% of the figure that the mentioned PSU calculator gives me. ...

You might want to reconsider. Your PC should not need more than 300 Watts, much less 500.

I downloaded ATI Tray Tools and tried underclocking my GPU and its memory by 50% to save power. The stock clocks are 325 MHz for the GPU and 310 (620) MHz for the memory. For some reason my PC crashes when I set the GPU to 162 MHz. If I set the memory too low I start to get artifacts on my PC. I am ...

Get an Antec P150 case and suspend your drives in it. You won't regret the investment. If you read .weir's other posts you will discover that he is an impoverished student. No major purchases are possible now or in the short-term future. I had not known that. I thought he was just asking for the be...

I'm making plans to quiet my computer down in the coming weeks and the hard drives seem to be the biggest culprit noise wise right now. I have two WD Cav 80GB-SE's. One is older (silver top) and very loud, the other is newer (black top) and much quieter. The original plan was to put wurth sound dam...

Mike, I am curious, what thermal paste was used for the Scythe Ninja and the HR-01? By the way, is there any possibility that the cantilever effect can be overcome on a 478 motherboard if the "P4-478 Metal mounting bracket" was combined with the "P4-478 Heatsink Retention Kit?" Can they be combined?...