I now have 2x ST8000VX0022 (Skyhawk 8TB) and 2x ST8000DM005 (Barracuda Pro 8TB) - all four samples have horrendous vibration. By far the worst disks I have recent memory of in terms of vibration (great performance though!) I'd rank a few recent drives I've used as this (good to bad) ST8000NM0055 (72...

My home servers mostly consist of Seagate ST4000DM000 and ST8000AS0002 (SMR, 5 platter, 5900RPM). For backups, I have a couple of WD MyBook 8TB. Subjectively, the ST8000AS0002 has slightly more vibration than the ST4000DM000, but the more noticeable thing was rumbling from seeks. It's completely dam...

I have been using Hitachi 7K4000 for the past couple of years, and they're not bad for 7200RPM drives. The 5K4000 doesn't appear to be available anywhere. However, due to pricing, I decided to give the Seagate ST4000DM000 a shot this time and I can confirm that they sound very, very nice. There is n...

I have an a Biostar M7NCD from 2004 and MSI K9AG Neo2-Digital from 2007 both with traditional capacitors. Neither, touch wood, are displaying any signs of failure yet. The Dell Optiplex GX270 (or possibly GX260) towers we had at my old place of work almost all suffered motherboard failure due to lea...

I recently assembled a HTPC around this case using the following components: ASUS P8H61-M Pro Rev.3 Celeron G530 Zotac GT430 Zone Edition Scythe Big Shuriken 2 Rev B Corsair CX430 Rev 2 I thought I could deal with the stock cooler based on the seating distance, having previously built a SB-based ser...

I bought 4 of these, after having tried the Samsung HD203WI and HD204UI. 3 of them have no noticeable vibration at all (as in, they are sat in a dock spinning but I cannot sense the vibration with my fingers and there is no hum from the shelf), 1 has more noticeable vibration, similar to the WD10EAC...

I moved the 2 HD204UI disks to an old SII3114 controller I had lying around and the problems seem to have ceased. It would appear that the problem is the MCP51 SATA controller, or some kind of compatibility issue between the HD204UI and MCP51.

I have run that tool, and I still get the ATA reset problem when querying SMART when the disk is idle. I guess I will sell these buggy drives and get a pair of Hitachi 5K3000 instead. dmesg [ 8719.657212] ata5.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 [ 8719.657227] ata5.00: failed comman...

Have Samsung truly fixed SMART or have they implemented some kludge to work around the problem? I have a pair of these HD204UI disks, with the 'fixed' firmware, manufacture date March 2011. Although I am not seeing data corruption (and I have done a lot of copying them full and md5 checksumming befo...

I finally pulled the trigger on a Phenom II X4 905e (low voltage version - reason being that I just wanted to plug it in and use it rather than mess around with undervolting). I don't know what I was so worried about! Power consumption at idle seems no higher than the BE-2350 (~85W system with every...

Thanks, that's good to know. I had a look at your previous posts and see that you get nice low 30-40W idle power consumption with the Sempron. Do you have any numbers for how this compares with the X2 3600+?

This is for my HTPC, running Windows 7 Media Center and MediaBrowser.

Does anybody here know whether efficiency of the Socket AM3 CPUs is affected by running them in an older Socket AM2 board, such as my MSI K9AG Neo2-Digital? I'm currently using an Athlon X2 BE-2350 (AM2) undervolted to 0.875V @1.0GHz, 1.075V @2.1GHz. This runs at just the right temperature with a Sc...

I've updated my MSI board with 2 methods - first was using my old laptop to create a boot floppy and then burning that to a bootable CD-RW. Second was via the live update from within Windows. No problems. I dislike the MSI community forums, and the incredible amount of arrogance certain prominent me...

MSI have added BIOS support for AM3 CPUs <95W including Phenom II to the K9AG Neo2-Digital MS-7368 (AMD 690G) board. 125W CPUs cannot be used. Pretty impressed with MSI - 2 years after buying the board and they were still pushing out BIOS updates. I had a rocky start with the board but after such go...

Have you tried changing the settings in Catalyst Control Center by editing the XML configuration file in a text editor? I have a Radeon HD3650, and this works for me - and the clock speed/voltage can differ from what is set in the video BIOS. I run at 1920x1200@60Hz, and at idle it runs at 110MHz - ...

Any video type does it on my system.

I wonder if this has something to do with it:
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3430&p=6

Are you saying that what you currently get is it ramping up the CPU clockspeed to full bore instead of tooling along at a slower speed (ie CnQ ramps up to full bore because it considers the CPU under load)? I can't imagine you have a CPU running at 5% speed of stock so I am somewhat confused. The d...

I'm currently using an MSI K9AG Neo2-Digital board (AMD 690G/SB600) but I'm itching to replace it for various reasons. One issue that bugs me with the X1250/690G is that when playing back video files with the EVR renderer (default on Vista), the minimum processor speed (in Vista's power options) is ...

I find that hard mounting a WD6400AAKS in a SQD produces more vibration noise than when the same drive is clipped into the standard plastic/rubber mount in my Dell Dimension E521 case. In my opinion, they need to be put on foam for any 7200RPM drive, but might be acceptable hard-mounted with 5400RPM...

In my opinion, the majority of "faulty" hard drives are caused by the end-user mis-handling them, with the exception of drives known to have design flaws (IBM 75GXP) or buggy firmware (Seagate 7200.11). I don't mean this in an inflammatory way, so please don't take offence from it. There will be a p...

My "server" is a mix of old parts: - Pentium III 650MHz (Coppermine, 100MHz FSB) - 768MB PC133 RAM (3x 256MB) - Biostar M6VCG motherboard - Toshiba 80GB 2.5" HDD for system - Hitachi 7K250 250GB IDE for network storage - Broken Hauppauge WinTV card that I was given for free (dead tuner, screwed EEPR...

Hi guys, What are your thoughts on monitor power saving and how it relates to wear and tear on the monitor? With hard drives I can see the point about not having them spinning up and down and loading/unloading the heads frequently but with monitors I'm not sure. For example, which out of these is be...

I currently have a system using the MSI K9AG Neo2-Digital motherboard combined with an Athlon X2 BE-2350 processor. I notice that if I set the multiplier to 5.0x in the BIOS (instead of Auto) in order to get 1.0GHz during bootup, then the speed shown in System Properties will sometimes show 499MHz (...

It does appear to be directly related to using the onboard X1250 video. If I put in a Radeon HD 3650 card, the CPU correctly goes to idle clocks. I wonder if it's a BIOS bug with the MSI K9AG Neo2-Digital? Could the BIOS control behaviour like this? Cool'n'Quiet is certainly working, it's just not w...

Thanks. I hope that it would be as simple as that, but unfortunately not. The behaviour remains even with the latest drivers installed.

Those new ATX Inspiron systems look pretty standard, which is a shame. The previous BTX generation of Dimensions and Optiplexes were very good in terms of layout and build quality.

I have a problem with my AMD 690G + BE-2350 build. I didn't notice it until I plugged in a power monitor, but on average my system idles at 55W. When I plugged in a power monitor, I found that it would sometimes be idling away at 70W. This was with zero CPU load. Toggling the power profile to/from M...

Hi, At the moment I have an EPoX EP-9NDA3J motherboard and a GeForce 6200 AGP (ASUS) graphics card. Recently I have been experiencing problems with the motherboard, and I am not happy with the GeForce 6200's VGA quality either. I don't want to go down the AM2 route because that means replacing memor...

This is my quiet HTPC based around the ECE-4252 which has been in the making for about 2 years now! My original build back in 2005 was this: http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y207/CX23882-19/th_a64htpc2.jpg It used a Scythe FCS-50 for cooling the CPU and it worked well but I was always looking for so...

I took ownership of an E521 with Athlon 64 X2 3800+ yesterday. All I can say is "wow". I was a bit concerned when I first powered up because for the first 10 seconds or so it runs the CPU fan at full speed and then eases it down gradually. It's nice to know that there is so much spare cooling capabi...