Search found 258 matches
- Sun Dec 24, 2006 6:34 am
- Forum: Newcomers Briefing Room
- Topic: Proposed AM2 computer, input wanted!
- Replies: 19
- Views: 11774
But why does all manufacturers I have seen, say that the minimum recommended powersupply for a X1900 card, is 450W 30A on the + 12V rail. And 550W, 38 A for a X1900 Crossfire setup then? I hope you know what will happend to a underpowered system? Cuz I doubt that the manufacturers not telling the t...
- Sat Dec 16, 2006 3:41 am
- Forum: Silent Storage
- Topic: Drive overheating?
- Replies: 11
- Views: 4179
Yeah wasn't convinced by WD diagnostic tool either, especially after Debian reported corrupt data on a fresh install. Since you are running Debian use smartmontools to look at the SMART data from that drive. Also run the long smart selftest. If there is something wrong with the drive it should show...
- Tue Nov 28, 2006 9:29 am
- Forum: CPU Cooling
- Topic: Lack of Full Featured Quiet Budget Heatsink Selection
- Replies: 13
- Views: 5778
Kesv, can you name some of those cheap aftermarket heatsinks that are worse than the stock ones. Pretty much all that are cheaper than 15€ or so are worse than the heatsink included in the boxed CPU. That same 15€ happens to often be the price difference between the boxed and bulk CPUs. So as a...
- Tue Nov 28, 2006 8:59 am
- Forum: System Advice / Troubleshooting
- Topic: Low-noise system for using Linux
- Replies: 20
- Views: 9165
I have now run memtest 86+ for seven hours, 27 times pass and it was flawless. Ain't that enough of a proof? That just shows that there is no obvious memory problem. You still should run a CPU stress test too. Prime95 was mentioned above as an often used option. Also some of the more difficult prob...
- Mon Nov 27, 2006 12:40 pm
- Forum: CPU Cooling
- Topic: Lack of Full Featured Quiet Budget Heatsink Selection
- Replies: 13
- Views: 5778
The VERY good ones, that are expensive. The good ones that are inexpensive. And the crap that you get when you buy your CPU. Almost, but unfortunately a bit too simple. The heatsink that you get with your CPU when buying the boxed variety isn't actually that bad most of the time. It's usually the f...
- Mon Nov 20, 2006 7:55 am
- Forum: System Advice / Troubleshooting
- Topic: Critique my new system
- Replies: 5
- Views: 3108
I thought the 850 PSU would maybe be needed if I added a 2nd GTX ? The person selling you the stuff might want you to think so. It's worth to read the PSU FAQ: http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=14231 Note that just as important as the total power output of a PSU is the load it wi...
- Mon Nov 20, 2006 1:56 am
- Forum: System Advice / Troubleshooting
- Topic: Low-noise system for using Linux
- Replies: 20
- Views: 9165
Concerning graphics, I can cut performance here. I will never ever play games on that machine. So a rather lousy GeForce will do the job, passively cooled if possible (no noise at all). If you never play games, get the cheapest geforce you can find then. Right now I'd buy a passively cooled gf6200,...
- Sun Nov 19, 2006 4:03 am
- Forum: System Advice / Troubleshooting
- Topic: Low-noise system for using Linux
- Replies: 20
- Views: 9165
Re: Low-noise system for using Linux
I am in more or less urgent need of a new workstation as my old one keeps freezing and after that destroying all my data storaged on my hard disk. Have you tried determining why your current system freezes ? If the reason is just a single component it would be much cheaper to just replace that. My ...
- Tue Nov 14, 2006 2:40 am
- Forum: Silent Storage
- Topic: AAM only effective during Hitachi test
- Replies: 8
- Views: 4812
Re: AAM only effective during Hitachi test
My question therefore is, why is it that AAM seems to be incredibly effective when I test it within the Hitachi tool but isn't anywhere near as effective in normal use? The drive is literally going from being astonishingly quiet in the test to being borderline unacceptable elsewhere. One reason cou...
- Mon Nov 06, 2006 1:15 pm
- Forum: Fans and Control
- Topic: Basic Question: Undervolt vs. Reducing the Fan Speed
- Replies: 10
- Views: 6507
There are two ways of lowering a fan's speed. Voltage regulation and pulse width modulation. Voltage regulation just drops the voltage fed to the motor. Pulse width modulation (PWM) uses constant voltage, but turns the power on and off in rapid 'pulses' effectively reducing the speed. You can purcha...
- Mon Nov 06, 2006 1:06 pm
- Forum: Silent Storage
- Topic: Curious about Western Digital drives
- Replies: 1
- Views: 2503
Re: Curious about Western Digital drives
1: Ignoring price differences, are there any reasons not to use an enterprise model in a desktop, single user, non-raid setup? WD themselves state that the error recovery algorithm used by the raid edition drives is not suitable for desktop use. However, what it means in practice is that the RE dri...
- Thu Oct 26, 2006 12:01 am
- Forum: Silent Storage
- Topic: Samsung 400 GB: good choice for AV use with a Mac laptop?
- Replies: 16
- Views: 7956
I'm more confused about the internal interfacing. From what I've been told I can only use a standard IDE drive and not a SATA drive. Can someone confirm or deny this? If I can indeed use a SATA drive I should buy one for the extra speed over IDE drives I guess. External enclosures are usually made ...
- Wed Aug 16, 2006 3:21 am
- Forum: Fans and Control
- Topic: Need a good 80mm fan
- Replies: 2
- Views: 2452
Re: Need a good 80mm fan
Since my case has a 80mm fan slot behind the harddrives, I decided to get a little cooling for them. I need it to be pretty quiet at full speed and still have a decent cfm. The fans listed in the recommended section are still good: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article63-page2.html Note that any ai...
- Sun Jul 23, 2006 12:24 pm
- Forum: Power Supplies
- Topic: power supply quality and hard drive reliability
- Replies: 4
- Views: 2703
Re: power supply quality and hard drive reliability
From time to time, I've read articles/reviews that link the reliability of hard drives to the quality of the power supply's output--the stability/smoothness of the DC, I guess. A quality PSU is bound to help, but a PSU alone is not enough. The quality of electricity in your building is another fact...
- Fri May 26, 2006 3:25 am
- Forum: CPU Cooling
- Topic: What's the least you can get away with?
- Replies: 9
- Views: 5032
Re: What's the least you can get away with?
I have a 3500+ Venice running with the stock cooler and it idles around 31C. Using an 80mm adapter, what's the quietest fan I could get away with using, and still maintain good temps while gaming? Idle temps are not really indicative. You need to monitor the loadtemps. I think you should just go ah...
- Mon Apr 17, 2006 1:27 am
- Forum: System Advice / Troubleshooting
- Topic: Pentium 4 System Running Slow, WHY?
- Replies: 9
- Views: 4334
Yes. UPDATE: My friend ran HDTach, and again, mind you this is on a CLEAN install of Win XP x64 without any real software installed. CPU Usage: +-2%: 86% Avg/Sustained Read: 3.5 MB/sec Random Access: 15.7ms Looks like for some reason or other, the system is not using DMA modes for drive operations,...
- Sun Feb 12, 2006 4:39 am
- Forum: CPUs and Motherboards
- Topic: new mobo, files still there?
- Replies: 8
- Views: 3441
Re: new mobo, files still there?
Unfortunately my HDD was S-ATA, so I'm wondering if the data will still be accessible to me when i get back the new board. SATA is really just another way of physically transmitting the data. Logically there is no difference from older PATA drives. Your system is still reading and writing blocks of...
- Tue Jan 10, 2006 2:25 am
- Forum: System Advice / Troubleshooting
- Topic: Server at home
- Replies: 27
- Views: 10315
At this point, I'm not using RAID at all -- just counting on smartd to detect potential trouble and shut down the system :) I hope you have backups, because by the time smartd detects a problem your data can already be corrupted. Also smart only predicts some 50-60% of possible failures. Incrementa...
- Thu Jan 05, 2006 6:14 am
- Forum: Silent Storage
- Topic: SMART: Raw Read Error Rate problem
- Replies: 1
- Views: 1732
Re: SMART: Raw Read Error Rate problem
I'm not sure whether it's just the monitoring that's malfunctioning, or my hard drive is really gonna die soon. Any input? Usually, if the smart monitoring for the drive works at all, it works correctly. Most of the logic for smart is embedded in the drive firmware and the monitoring software just ...
- Tue Nov 29, 2005 5:33 am
- Forum: The Silent Front
- Topic: Loud Xbox 360
- Replies: 88
- Views: 101908
I think you would be quite surprised. It may be 3 cores, but they are greatly simplified in comparison to modern PC CPUs. I think 25-35W would be a good guess. On another hand, expect the GPU to be more around 60W. Really? That's interesting. ArsTechnica did a pretty good job of analyzing the XBox3...
- Mon Nov 28, 2005 11:22 am
- Forum: Silent Storage
- Topic: Booting from an external hard disk
- Replies: 5
- Views: 3063
Re: Booting from an external hard disk
Is there a significant performance hit? USB2.0 can reach a speed of 480Mbit/s. That works out to 60MByte/s. So in theory it won't limit the transfer speeds of a single harddisk. However, if you look at tests of usb hdd-enclosures at places like Tomshardware, you can see that only a few of those enc...
- Fri Nov 25, 2005 3:56 am
- Forum: Cases and Damping
- Topic: Does M-ATX boards fit in ATX cases?
- Replies: 6
- Views: 3278
Re: Does M-ATX boards fit in ATX cases?
Also, how many mounting holes do normal Micro ATX boards have? I think my motherboard is strange because it has 4 mounting holes: one at each extreme corner of the board. What board is it ? If it only has 4 holes it might not be a MicroATX board at all. The specification shows nine mounting holes f...
- Thu Nov 24, 2005 4:37 am
- Forum: System Advice / Troubleshooting
- Topic: HELP with cpu cooling/noise advice needed
- Replies: 2
- Views: 1772
Re: HELP with cpu cooling/noise advice needed
my cpu is running too hot at 51 decrees C Is it now ? 51C sound reasonable for a 3.4Ghz P4. Depends if that is idle or load temp ? Idle doesn't really matter much. Just make sure that your load temp is less then 70C and the machine runs stable. For the rest start with the recommended sections. Btw....
- Thu Nov 24, 2005 4:13 am
- Forum: Fans and Control
- Topic: Please help me identify Speedfan temps
- Replies: 4
- Views: 2943
Re: Please help me identify Speedfan temps
1 - Do you know a way to find out what the different temps are? I've used Prime95, but I just can't figure it out. There isn't a fast rule which temperature is which. Usually the maker of the monitoring chip has issued a recommendation, but the motherboard makers don't always follow that. Generally...
- Wed Nov 23, 2005 1:47 am
- Forum: Power Supplies
- Topic: Antec NeoHE "High-Efficiency"
- Replies: 606
- Views: 606170
Makes sense. So I should go with the 550W since it has higher amps on the 5V and cross my fingers? Depends on if you are willing to experiment or not. While replacing the Smart Power I was told that the shop was aware of some issues with Epox motherboards and the PSU in question. My recommendation ...
- Mon Nov 21, 2005 3:22 pm
- Forum: Video Cards & Monitors
- Topic: Upgrading my Matrox G550 - music computer
- Replies: 2
- Views: 1840
Re: Upgrading my Matrox G550 - music computer
Good colour and non-hogging of the pci bus is a requirement, and to be better at GTA than the Matrox! PCI ? Graphics cards have used their own bus for a long time. Even the Matrox G550 was more common in its AGP incarnation. Any traffic between the gfx card and the cpu does go through the fsb conne...
- Mon Nov 21, 2005 3:04 pm
- Forum: Power Supplies
- Topic: Antec NeoHE "High-Efficiency"
- Replies: 606
- Views: 606170
Looks like it won't work on a GA6CX PIII board? Note that they talk of amperage on VCC_CORE which does not directly translate to amperage on 5V line. VCC_CORE for a P3 is something like 1.6-1.7V ? Anyway while it does draw on the 5V line in old motherboards, it is transformed from 5V which means th...
- Sat Nov 19, 2005 7:35 am
- Forum: Power Supplies
- Topic: How compatible are ATX12V v2.0 PSUs with older systems
- Replies: 0
- Views: 1882
How compatible are ATX12V v2.0 PSUs with older systems
I have a system as follows: Athlon XP 1800+ QDI Kudoz 7E/333 (Via KT333 chipset) ATI 9100 (passive) SP80 harddrive DVD-RW drive This combination doesn't draw much power. I've measured the typical AC powerdraw to be 145W at full load, which should make around 95W of component powerdraw if we assume 6...
- Sat Nov 19, 2005 6:23 am
- Forum: System Advice / Troubleshooting
- Topic: Compaq IDE HDD problem
- Replies: 3
- Views: 1786
Re: Compaq IDE HDD problem
Hard disk interface Ultra-ATA/100 Hard disk controller Ultra-ATA/33 Is what confuses me. The way I would understand that is that the harddrive itself has an interface capable of Ultra-ATA/100, but the controller in the machine only supports upto Ultra-ATA/33. I don't really know anything about the ...
- Sat Nov 19, 2005 6:13 am
- Forum: CPU Cooling
- Topic: Problems installing AOP-6400
- Replies: 2
- Views: 1857
Re: Problems installing AOP-6400
Then i saw that the new cooler came with screws, so i removed the white clips to make room for the screws, but when i tried to screw them in they didnt reach through the motherboard... Based on the instructions it doesn't look like the screws are supposed to go through the motherboard, but instead ...