So I went ahead and bought and installed the Zalman VF-900 but I can't figure out where to install the fan power. Doesn't look like there is an available connector on the motherboard? By the way, there were 8 RAM heat sinks included with the package, but I counted 9 exposed chips on my 7800GT. Will ...

Thanks for the help. I downloaded and ran RivaTuner. But no fan control tab shows up! A google search suggests some defect in the 7800GT fan controller prevents RivaTuner (and other programs) from controlling the fan speed. Is this a well known problem? Now I'm afraid even if I get a new fan, this b...

I recently purchased a new Dell Dimension 9200 desktop machine. It's actually pretty quiet. I installed an Nvidia 7800GT video card I had from an older home-built machine (I have the newest 162 drivers). The card is quite noisy when playing games, but fairly quiet otherwise. My major problem is that...

Trunks, Thanks for the tip about the Abit forums. Should have thought of it myself. Looks like I have the USB2 problem people are raging about over there. Apparently, there is serious system instabilities that result from the combination of enabling USB2.0 on an Nforce4 Abit motherboard and having a...

Thanks all for the suggestions. Prime95 not a problem, nor memtest86 (20+ hrs). Power supply is a new SeaSonic 430 watt. I have no PCI cards. If I use safe mode, the system runs fine. But, if I use selective startup (from MSCONFIG) to disable all services and startup programs, the computer still fre...

Thanks everyone for the advice. I downloaded and burned the memtest86 utility. I don't get any memory errors on either the 2x512 and 2x1024 DIMMs in slot 3&4. And the system never froze, even after I left it on overnight to do the testing. The bottom line is that nothing seems to have changed. I sti...

With the recommendations and advice from this site, I built my quiet PC this summer, with the following components: * Antec P180 Case * Seasonic S12-430 power supply * AMD X2 3800+ cpu * Abit AN8 Ultra NForce4 motherboard * Scythe Ninja (passively cooled) cpu cooler * NVidia 7800GT * 1Gb Geil perfom...

Here are the results of my software RAID5 (free, built into Windows XP and exposed with the hack from Tom's Hardware). I am using 3 Samsung 2504C (250Gb each). Not sure why the image was corrupted, but here it is. CPU usage is high at 55% but not sure if this really impacts me with a AMD 64 X2 3800+...

I'm planning to implement software Raid 5 with 3 of the same 250Gb SpinPoint drives. It's processor-intensive, but I figure with a AMD64 X2 3800, I'll have some processing power to spare. And the price point is nice.

Sorry, I meant to say Arctic Alumina. Can that substance hold up over time? And is the performance of Ceramique that much better?

I have some old Arctic Silver 5 -- maybe 3.5 yrs. Is it still good?