Nah, a 320MB 8800GTS is like, $60 more. Worth it, too. Quieter than you'd ever expect, and perfect for 1680x1050.

Oh yeah, and you can use the NVIDIA driver to check your GPU temp, it's in there somewhere that I can't think of because I spent all night benching and taking a friend to a hospital in some combination that's obliterated my train of thought.

I agree that passive does not increase amount of heat BUT how could bad cooling make case temps go down ?? I can't see how it would make case temps go down either... surely the calories will stay in the case until they're evicted one way or another, however (in)efficiently the individual components...

Well, we weren't allowed to toss in our own media, and the only content being shown was HD or recorded renderings (the new Ruby demo), and I don't have any of these cards yet (nor should anyone, and the guys at DailyTech have been gambling with their credibility on this one; they got into huge shit ...

Yeah, Canon A-series FTW. Pretty damn good point-n-shoot. Also, very rugged. I know a couple of dual-sport motorcyclists who swear by them. Here are the shots I took at the AMD event in Tunis: http://www.flickr.com/photos/26999530@N00/page3/ I was playing around with exposure length, so some of them...

How can I test my system to see if the E4300 is a bottleneck in games... I guess run a 3D benchmark with it running standard speed, then over clock and try again. Overclocking your CPU will improve game performance undoubtedly; this is true across the entire spectrum of games, not just those that f...

No, you will not need a new socket to take advantage of this. It is a PowerNow feature. Yes and no. AM2/ 1207: Single power plane, the northbridge runs at the same voltage as the processor, but the CPU can power down gates and reduce individual core speeds. AM2+/ 1207+: Split power plane, can run n...

I was under the impression that more than a few heatpipes used any number of vapors, not limited to water. Water+ethanol, water+ammonia and water+methanol were common, too. I'm also pretty sure that it's import that the vapor be at a slight vacuum, or at least very low pressure, so that there's a fo...

Is this normal and acceptable? What would happen if I moved to a passive heatsink on the CPU too... my internal case temps would spiral I expect.

Passive cooling doesn't increase the amount of heat in a case. If anything, with bad cooling case temps go down ;)

Those are from an HD 2400 IIRC. In both cases, the load was minimal and maybe peaked at 30%.

Oh yeah, and H.264 decode CPU load on both cards runs about 15-20% average.

Let me see if I have any photos. . .

HD 2000 will all use HDMI 1.2.

This I confirmed.

Whoops, missed the Fusion bit. Sorry. . .

Some day I'm going to take an HTPC and put a full-size heatsink inside with a whole cut through the top of the case, and just let it chill all passively.

I fear that my Dremel skillz are not 1337 enough. That and HTPC cases don't come, you know, cheaply.

Another good review site, actually, probably the best camera review site, is http://www.dpreview.com/ Incidentally, a good, inexpensive DSLR that you might already have lenses for is the Pentax K100 and K110 (the 100 has image stabilization, where the 110 does not) and is considered one of the best ...

You can definitely get away with passive cooling by ducting a Thermalright Ultra 120 (@ 745g) to an exhaust case fan. You'll probably have a sh!tload of overclocking headroom, too, at almost no noise.

http://www.anandtech.com/casecooling/sh ... i=2941&p=2

Depends on the chipset, but i965, 690, and MCP61 all run about the same. 690 is the better of the two AM2 chipsets given the features, and realistically, the best of the three. All three are going to idle under 100 and load around 100-145 watts (depending on processor and configuration). http://www....

Sorry, I should have been a little more clear; AM2 nForce 5-series is a little dated, (even more so 4) but right now there's not much full-ATX alternative. Also, Uli support is. . .wonky, and I'm not sure what NVIDIAs position is on it. I'm curious though, why does it need to be full ATX? It's true ...

100C is much more fatal to PSUs than modern CPUs,cap life halved every 10C increase. Yeah, I know what you mean. It's pretty uncommon to run a PSU to the end of its life, on the other hand. It always seems like the motherboard goes out first, and by the time a motherboard dies, a new PSU always see...

Oh, and a Celeron draws more power than a Core 2 Duo, IIRC, so that would be a fairly power-hungry combination (Celeron+Intel chipset).

If you're running Windows compatibility issues should be nil, so don't worry about what motherboard/processor to use. (I'm assuming Windows since you mention Foobar and iTunes.) In which case AMD is your power-saving friend. Get a 690 board, and a dirt-cheap single-core CPU. If you're going to do an...

Get a case with a PSU, that will save you quite a bit. I think the big part of the problems is SFF. You just can't get enough surface area on that processor to cool it. By the way, the PSU cooling the chipset is a good thing: PSUs can tolerate very high temperatures, and something has to cool that c...

Are you set on nForce chipsets? (For that matter, AMD? I know, but I mean, Intel is already a little more future-proofed right off the bat, and the i965 chipsets are great overclockers (if you're not going to upgrade, that's the only way to add performance) and I think the 570 is getting a bit dated...

Nah, I bet AMD prices them in-line with C2D performance. They don't care how much Intel makes, in all honesty, it's irrelevant to how much they have, so they'll jump on Intel prices and leverage a synergistic--make more money.

There's one difference here working in ATI's favor: They make the Xbox 360 GPU. I mean, if you want to see their platform at work, check out Viva Pin~ata. It's gorgeous, and Valve is already working on coding hacks to make the stuff run (less well) on NVIDIA cards, so the technology won't just be li...

Hey, thanks, that's good to know. I've been wanting to do a MoDT article, but have had to back-burner a lot, and I guess I haven't stayed in the loop.

IMO is has two drawbacks, one is the torque applied (but not as bad as the Condor) and the other one - the scrooges still use only two heatpipes. I dunno, the 8800-series cards all use a single heatpipe to good effect. An HD 2900 XT, with it's slightly-higher thermal envelope uses two. GPUs all see...

More to the point, when HD content becomes accessible, AMD will be releasing their HD-accelerated chipset.

A little bird told me so. It also said late Q3.

I'm just building an almost identical configuration but i'm stil troubled with the cpu heatsink; some temps on the Scythe Mine please Sorry I missed this: Athlon X2 6000 with C'N'Q enabled hovers around 35 idle, 50 load. I had an X2 5200 and it ran about the same, idled about 32. Both are 90nm part...

And using newest games. Actually it's a question of "future games vs past games". At old games, 8800GTX rules, because of double texture unit count. At current (new), 2900XT is between 8800GTS 640 and 8800GTX. At future shader-based games, 2900XT is to win. Thanks, beat me to it. Also, asking aroun...

Right now I don't see what is preventing internet bandwidth from skyrocketing up. People in Sweden have 100Mbit/s connections and they're not expensive either. Ah, ask a local Congressman. Bandwidth limits are heavily limited by media lobbyists. Prices are more-or-less fixed. Whether or not it's a ...