I'm in a very similar boat to Anvar. I want a SATA DVD writer, but where I am (New Zealand) the only options are Plextor 760SA (*very* expensive - NZ$290 compared to NZ$55 for a cheap DVD writer) or LG GSA-H30N at about $75 (which has only just appeared on the market in the last week or so.) Does an...

SCSI, 36Gb and 73Gb capacities, claimed to be the highest performance hard-drive ever. No word on price or noise.
[url]http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/11638[/url]

I look forward to an SPCR review.

They make a case out of expensive, light weight material - so their target market should be weight-conscious consumers, right? Then they produce a very large tower, with space for 12(!) disk drives. The logic escapes me. (Well, not entirely - their market is people with more dollars than sense. A go...

It looks like they still put the expansion cards the wrong way around, with chips on the bottom. (Perhaps the cases will mount the mb on the other side, but the reference to being able to put it into an ATX case suggests not.) They also haven't followed BTX's lead of lining up the CPU and video hard...

Here's another article, but it doesn't say much useful:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/01/10 ... r_sff_pcs/

Does the new revision allow you to attach a Ninja to the existing heatsink bracket on the motherboard? I had to move a Ninja from one K8 motherboard to another - it was a huge pain to remove the metal backing plate, as it was stuck on by adhesive foam. I used a plastic laminated page as a flexible k...

Here's an article about AMD's fusion plans: [url]http://www.sci-tech-today.com/story.xht ... 300CLPZM6F[/url]

However, it isn't terribly informative - in particular, we're left in the dark as to how powerful a GPU they'll be fusing with the CPU.

Yesterday:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20061113
Today:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20061114

The column/blog I originally pointed too has lots of comments, some of which make what look to me to be well grounded objections to some of the claims. I think we need to be skeptical on this for a while yet. Although I'm not an expert, I would think that for a technology a year away from commercial...

P.S. This looks to be the patent: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5968627.html

This is the only other information I've found about this online so far.

I've just seen http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20061026_001143.html . The idea: replace the platters of hard drives with something much lighter. You get smaller motors and lower power requirements (70-95% less), faster spin-up, faster maximum speeds, more platters per drive and so gre...

I'm guessing it is a real pain to assemble a system in this thing, and this may have been part of the reason that a fully assembled system was sent for review, rather than just the case.

Dear Seasonic:

Pease make a similar model with modular cables, 300W max power and a suitably down-sized price tag, and you'll have a nearly perfect power supply.

My understanding of their argument is: 1) Motherboards already have to do all this voltage changing - there is little or no extra complexity on the m/b to take only 12V. 2) With the current system, some motherboards will draw much more (e.g.) 5V than others - so the PSU has to be designed for the hi...

Googleblog (with link to white paper): http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/towards-more-efficient-computing.html NYT reporting: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/technology/26google.html?_r=1&oref=slogin The idea is motherboards which take just 12V DC, and do the other required DC conversions on ...

I'm unimpressed by your first objection - you'd either have fast VRAM soldered onto the motherboard, or have a new socket for DIMM VRAM modules. However the second objection about memeory architectures is the sort of thing I was looking for, thanks. So you might be able to make a motherboard which w...

A major problem (from our point of view) with GPUs is that, coming on an expansion card, you can't attach a Ninja-like heatsink. In a modern gaming rig, the GPU generates more heat than the CPU but is restricted to a much smaller heatsink. So - wouldn't it be wonderful if the motherboard just had a ...

Gigabyte GA-K8N51GMF micro-ATX, socket 939, PCI-E, passive chipset cooler, works fine with speedfan, pretty cheap. I couldn't find BIOS control over fan speed, so fans are at full speed until speedfan starts running. I only have one fan (using the "system fan" header) so I can't guarantee the other ...

"can i use my 20 pin cable on the PSU, with the 24pin connector on my motherboard. " It is working fine for me. "how would i position it?" The only way it will go. Whoever designed the plug and socket knew the true meaning of Murphy's Law - they won't fit together wrong (at least, mine wouldn't.) Ch...

nici: Yes, you could silently improve the airflow by adding extra heat above the computer. This thought had occured to me. I expect it would be expensive, unless you needed the heat in the room anyhow. jaganath, croddie: We don't (directly) care about the velocity of the air in the chimney. All we c...

A little while ago, I was installing a Ninja and forgot to plug in my system fan - that being the sole fan in my system. (See my sig for system details.) I then ran my computer (not very hard) for several hours before any problem developed. (Interestingly, it was the optical drive which gave up firs...

From the Editor's Note: [i]When thinking about heat transfer, it's useful to consider thermal pathways, points of constriction, and the speed of heat transfer. The fact is that a heatpipe or any thermally conductive path can transfer even thousands of watts — if the pathway is narrow, it will just...

I'd like to second Aris's desire for a mini-Ninja. From my cursory researching, it looks like many of the SFF cube cases have a power supply just where it is worst for CPU heatsink vertical clearance. Perhaps something with a horizontal fan (XP120-like) but widely spaced fins (for low airflow), with...

Transfered from another post, here's my list of passive 7600GS cards. MSI NX7600GS-T2D256EH: http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_spec.asp?model=NX7600GS-T2D256EH&class=vga XFX PV-T73P-UDL (3,7) http://www.xfxforce.com/web/product/listConfigurationDetails.jspa?productConfigurationId=198678 (Factory ...

Could we have more but shorter negative reviews please? The important points of this review can be covered in half a page: modular cables, good presentation, no active PFC, lousy efficiency, noisy. Rather than one big negative review like this, I'd like to see a collection of (say) five short negati...

X-bit labs have a new article comparing current videocards by power consumption and noise. Frustratingly, other than dividing the cards into five categories, they don't give any indication of performance.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/ ... noise.html

Thanks - it looks interesting. The small-passive-heatsink cards have a heatpipe coiled in the back of the card. If this one has a heatpipe, the press release doesn't mention it. I wonder how much effect this has?

I'm looking to get a new PCI-E video card, and the 7600GS looks to hit my price/performance/passive cooling sweet spot. I have a low airflow single fan (undervolted 120mm Nexus) system. The heatsinks on most of the passive 7600GS cards look very small - will they really work in a low airflow system?...

I'm not sure the point-of-origin problem is completely solved (or solvable.) The directional microphone takes noise from a small area. For a large object, the object may be larger than the volume to which the microphone is sensitive. (In radio astronomy terms, I'd say the beam of the antenna is smal...

On your cases summary page, do you think you could include volume as well as weight? It is hard to get a quick feel for how big these cases are.