I've seen what people do to crack HDMI encoding, I think you want to avoid that if at all possible. Analog video capture would use way too much disk space.

If at all possible use a tuner.

Have you tested the efficiency?

Relying on specs does not always work, I've heard of at least one brick that missed its specs badly, I doubt its uncommon.

A picopsu might be 89% average efficiency but that's just going from 12v to 5v and 3.3v, but that ignores the efficiency of the brick and at full load you might not be getting "average" efficiency. If your brick is 80% efficient at that load, 25+ watts is lost heat and after you subtract a few watts...

I decided I want to do a little gaming so looking through my spares and internet reviews I decided to build this: i5-3570k, dz75ml-45k motherboard, 8gb Samsung green ram, Asus HD7790 video card, Samsung 840 Pro ssd, and a cheap case. The CPU has a 77 watt tdp, the z75 chip set probably consumes anot...

I have an Xigmatek Gaia that has impressed me pretty well but its not on an i5. For the i5 I'm building, I'm going to try an S1284 something or another. It was an lga775 cooler that is kind of obsolete now but Xigmatek makes a bracket for lga1156/55 so I'm giving it a shot since I found the cooler i...

If you believe the road maps (and I see no reason not to), the good graphics edram versions are all going to be mobile parts. They will probably show up in a NUC or something but they won't be typical PC parts. It makes sense, people who want good graphics for gaming will still buy discrete GPUs and...

Well mostly I think any GPU that draws more power through the slot than through the PCIe 12v plug has a very poorly designed circuit board (more resistance between the PCIe 12v connector and the load than through the card edge, motherboard traces and the ATX 24 pin connector). It looked like the wor...

Thanks, its good to know that the big issue seems to be resolved.

I expect AMD will eventually fix the remaining bug too.

If you haven't bought yet, you can try to put together a budget. If you want to keep looking forward, Haswell is going to miss ddr4 and Intel might be on the wrong side of the HSA thing but at some point you're going to want to stop waiting. I think ivy bridge has some life left in it and you can ge...

I would be really surprised if your GPU was broken up in to two separate circuits that each draw 75 watts. My assumption is that the PCIe connector ground and 12v lines are electrically connected to the ground and 12v traces on the card edge connectors. If the PCIe cable has less resistance than goi...

I haven't checked vampire power but I pay less than $200 a year total because its mostly an alarm clock, cell phone charger, 55" LCD TV, ps3 (mostly for blue ray), microwave, refrigerator and some ccfl lights. My computer isn't 24/7 yet but I think that will add less than $50. And by the way its not...

For people who don't know, transistors are kind of like dimmer switches and that region between all the way on and all the way off is called the linear region. Like a dimmer switch set at half on, a transistor at half on will generate a lot of heat. That's not efficient so (step down) switch mode po...

I'm trying to do something similar but without the small form factor, mATX in a larger case is a lot easier to build. For a CPU, I say forget the i3 and get a Xeon e3-1220l v2. Its what the ivy bridge i3 should have been, with speed step or whatever they call it so that you can do some over clocking...

It makes sense to try to consume less energy but you need to look at actual cost. 100 watt idle is 2.4 kWh a day, on the $0.30 tier, that's $0.72 a day, if you are really concerned or not in a place with California energy rates, that it $0.36 a day. In comparison to my California rent, that's nearly...

I'm guessing that it might make more sense to connect the remote sense wire to the PCIe connector because the motherboard probably does not draw as much 12v current as the video card and the picopsu is a dc-dc switcher, the 5v and 3.3v lines are going to be regulated the same unless your 12v line dr...

I found it easier to remove two of the rubber parts from one side of the fan frame, slide them between the fins, then slide the fan on sideways and pull the rubber parts through the holes in the fan frame to finish.

Hard to describe in words, I hope you know what I mean.

The Gaia fan mounts similarly and I removed it by pulling the fan and two of the little lugs to one side, popping out the lugs and rotating the fan to the side to detach the other two.

The S1284 is probably similar but I haven't gotten my hands on one yet.

I'm going to be trying an Xigmatek s1284 soon. Its an older heat sink but they make a bracket for 1155 and it has four large direct touch heat pipes. It is also heavily discounted at a local computer shop. I can tell you that the Xigmatek Gaia works very well on an i3-3220, idle near 30c, load aroun...

I've built several PCs over the years, some very loud when I was trying to stretch performance because my budget was holding me back. More recently I've been trying to tone it down without sacrificing performance too much. I also like to use very efficient parts with little power consumption because...

I'm expecting my 7790 to arrive on Monday.

Do you have any updates?

I haven't investigated the driver issue but I guess I should start by looking for 13.4.

Thanks.

Intel To Release Haswell Processors & 8 Series Chipsets in April 2013 http://www.legitreviews.com/news/13682/ It will use an LGA 1150 with the same 75 mm between each screw hole as the 1155 and 1156 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_1150 The integrated VR and shared cache, among other features compe...

There must be a reason most consumers don't buy Xeons... other than lack of availability in consumer channels. Do you know why that might be. I have often wondered... but never really paid much attention to finding out why I might want a Xeon. I guess its just safer running with my fellow lemmings....

I'm surprised that no one seems to be lapping the bottom of the heat spreader to set the die to ihs gap to 0.000". You just need a depth mic and some patience. I haven't seen custom heat spreaders either, I think there might be some gains to be had by making one the maximum size that will fit throug...

80+ isn't meaningless, if we didn't have the standard it would be very difficult to find light load efficiency data. 400+ watt PSUs are probably overkill for a small server. Intel i series processors usually have quick synch which is a hardware assisted transcoding technology which should handle on ...

All the picoPSU does really is DC-DC conversions from 12v down to 5v, 3.3v etc. Since a modern system draws most on the 12v rail and the picoPSU essentially just passes through from the brick, what matters most is what the brick can deliver. I usually let the brick feed the ATX 4pin-connector direc...

I am not sure about silent but for a small server/lab, the layout of this case looks nice: http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/tower/731/SC731D-300.cfm Of course I found that one after I spent a bunch of time modding a cheapo case and winding up without the sideways HDD tray which means swapp...

For those of you concerned with drive temperatures you should read this: http://www.google.com/search?q=google+hdd+study&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a Click on the PDF. See figure 4.1 Don't worry too much about drive temperatures. Also read the conclusions. ...

The heat in the PSU issue really died when 80+ PSUs became widely available. Unless you've got dual GPUs, lots of high rpm HDDs and a really hot CPU, the internal case temp isn't going to be very high as long as your air flow is decent. The place where things can go wrong is in the air flow. PSUs ar...