Yea the 2TB version at least is very hit and miss. It does well in some synthetic tests (particularly read which seagate always seems to focus on because it gives them the biggest number to write on the box) but awful in access times, IOPS, boot times and most importantly it sucked donkey balls when...

All PCIE twopointzero cards work in PCIE 1 x16 slots just fine, its completely backwards compatible, just as PCIE1 cards work fine in PCIE2 slots.

1GB of GDDR3 RAM on a 128bit bus? Whoever does that should be sued for false advertising. You cant use more than 512mb on that bus.

Why the smeg didnt they put in SSDs rather than raptors?

Why oh why would you ever need 2 GTX295's???

Any chance you could put it into txt or pdf format as well? Would save me downloading OpenOffice.

Im hoping for some competition for the 2TB greenpower to drive prices down to make it better value, although this drive should be very good if its anything like the 1TB versions, and give an option for those who dont want the hassle/risk of buying the seagate 1.5TB.

I havent read any reviews recently which said they had problems with 3D rendering programs and ATI cards. Since all the work is done by the CPU still, GPU doesnt matter much. This is likely to change in the future though, but unless you plan to keep the card for 2+ years i wouldnt worry about that.

For the PSU something like The Seasonic M12D 850w ( SPCR review . Its equal 1st in the SPCR ranking along with the enermax mod82 but with longer power cables. Your system will probably not use more than 400-500w even with the beefiest GPU, so either will be fine choices. While the TRUe is a very goo...

Plekto wrote: Q: does anyone know when 32mn process chips will be coming out? A TDP of 20W or so would be amazing.

In around a year. Q409/Q110 was what i heard.

I would suggest getting one of the new phenom II's rather than the older Phenom 9850. Better performance, less power, cooler running.

I suggest the WD RE2 160GB. It's small and fairly quiet. But you need to run it as raid 1(recommended, actually) as they are raid-only drives meant for server rooms. Since when have RE2 drives been requiring RAID? They are slightly optimized for typical server usage, but it will run on its own in a...

Wouldn't the hard drive be a serious bottleneck with all the other really high-performance parts? Might be worth it to get a small SSD or Velociraptor as the system drive. What will this computer be used for? The HDD would only be a bottleneck for loading times. If you think waiting an extra 5 seco...

So, getting to the actual drive.
Very quiet seeks, especially for a 7200rpm. Makes you wonder if seagate ever notice that Green is in vogue right now and made a 5400rpm low power drive it would could be the quietest high capacity drive we've heard (or not heard as the case may be).

What are you going to do with the system? DDR3 1333 is pretty much the same speed as DDR2 1066 (due to higher latencies), if you use software that is senstive to memory speed then i suggest you cough up a bit more and get 1600. Overall the system seems pretty balanced but i cant help but feel that a...

Thats quite insane. No wonder nvidia chipsets are a rarity at SPCR. Maybe something to do with the 680i that doesn't power down the CPU during idle or something.

lucasyork wrote: I reckon it may be too noisey for music?

It will be noisy by SPCR standards without fan swapping/aftermarket heatsinks, but it is extreme overkill.

You dont need An E8400 to play online poker. I suggest the following: AMD 4850e CPU Any cheap 780G motherboard 4GB of cheap DDR2 800 Single platter 320GB WD Blue or 500GB WD Green HDD Corsair VX 450w PSU ATI 4670 GPU (w/ 2DVI ports) Mini Ninja passive CPU cooler Any case 800rpm Slipstream Fan on exh...

For HTPC AMD seems to have the edge over intel, mainly due to the IGP's being far better. I would suggest you go for the 4850e and couple it with a cheap 780G motherboard that has the connections you need. the chipset will handle nearly all the load of playing back a blu-ray movie, letting the CPU i...

Just got a power meter today £10 off amazon, bargain!), havent tried it out on my main system yet (the wall socket is behind a cabinet, right pain in the ass to get to), but my file server's power socket is easily acessable, so heres some numbers. I Idle:A satisfying 47w. Fully stressed:(x264 encod...

How is comparing AMD's latest and greatest to a processor almost a year old a "fair comparison"??? Because for those who are buying a CPU/whole system, it doesnt matter if a $2,000 i7 system beats an $800 Phenom II system, because they are different markets and not competing against eachother for p...

Once you buy a power brick the PicoPSU costs about the same as a good SPCR type ATX PSU. Yes its more efficient than most at the low wattages (around 85-87%), but a good 300-400w unit will still have 80-82% efficiency in the sub 100w area, which only amounts to a few extra watts of wastage, not anyt...

A zalman famate II costs less than £3, shop around for cheap/free postage. Its a great little accesory. I keep mine on min during normal use then crank it up while gaming, when i cant hear the fan anyway.

PCIe slots arent designated 'video' or 'data'. They just transmit data from one place to another. It shouldnt have any issues.
Its difficult to say weather or not its a board issue or the SATA card itself at fault at this point.

A small SSD is not that expensive either. The cheapest SSD's arent too expesnive sure, but they have pretty poor performance and are slower than the latest HDD's in many tasks. At the moment you need to go pretty high end SSD's to get a decent improvement across the field comapred to the best mecha...

dhanson865 wrote: Remember that partition sizes larger than 2TB on windows is going to be more of an issue so you may choose to partition the array anyway.

I thought that is just a issue with XP, or 32bit OS's (one or the other), vista doesnt have that problem as far as i know.

pixel_pimp wrote:Presumably, if I then upgrade to 64-bit version of XP, I'll see a bit of a speed bump.

No not really. 64-bit programs arent necessarily faster than their 32-bit versions, they can just take advantage of more RAM if needed.

I dont see why they had to underclock the GPU to get it passive, it would seem more than capable of cooling the reference speed, they could even make it a few fins longer if they had to.

On the HDD front i have 2 of those drives and they are dead silent in my system, and blisteringly fast. A good choice. The Zalman isnt the best or quietest cooler. It'll work, but it will probably be audible. On that mobo, its alot more expensive than others, will you really need whatever extra feat...

Also doublecheck on this, but I believe the 5xxx series don't have virtualization built in?? So maybe going higher would be better, could be a handy thing either now or in the future. For the vast majority VT isnt useful and on the Intel side its often a fairly hefty jump in price to get a CPU with...