I will put a dark tape in front of the LED so there is some visual light, but not the disruptive blinking =) Actually I think ultraboy is correct and the blinking led should only be there when suspending to ram. Further I've seen some machines that first suspend to ram and then if they aren't touch...

Is it acceptable to buy two memories of the same model nr and have in dual channel mode, or must they be in a dual channel pack? The only advantage of those 'dual channel packs' is that the memory sticks have been verified to work together. Most of the time you could just pick up two sticks of same...

The new system worked right out of the box. Selected laptop in the windows XP power management, and I was able to suspend or hibernate. Only problem is the blinking power LED. I dont want my computer blinking when I am not using it??!?? I doubt there is much you can do about this unless you disable...

I grabbed an Antec Smartpower 2.0 in 400W today at the store because I absolutely needed something right now to replace it and Antec was the only brand I recognized at the local chain stores. (snip) I hope I didn't just become a victim of my own ignorance and impatience, but I guess I'll find out w...

so if i wan't to buy RE then i must go with min 2 drives set,yes? And use them in a real raid configuration, not raid-0. Preferably with a dedicated raid controller too. Anybody have their opinion about sweet spot between capacity and noise? Try to get a drive with 2 platters max. That will mean th...

WD RE drives are interesting because of MTBF WD has stated that the RE (raid edition) drives are not suitable for desktop use. This is apparently because the RE drives have a more simplistic internal error correction algorithm so they might return corrupted data. This works in RAID setups where the...

I'll probably break down and install one or more of the front fans, but have thought about seeing how the heat builds up without them. Fans mounted in series do no increase the overall airflow. This has been discussed several times before - search for it. What they do is increase the pressure betwe...

is there a chance that this new adapter pretty much killed my hd's? this is extremely bad, since i absolutely need my system in order to finish some projects. Yes, it's possible. I haven't heard about this happening before, but if we consider that those adapters are made as cheaply somewhere in Asi...

To answer your questions 2&3 have a look at the spec sheet 4/ is it true that in the 200/250MB category, the T7K250 is considered the most silent drive or is the WD2500JD a better choice, despite the fact that it has 3 platters if I am correct. You should read SPCR more ;) If you had, you'd know tha...

For software, a nice minimal set: Fedora Core 4, Apache, Java, Tomcat, MySQL, SSH, Subversion Lots of good upgrade paths from there. Even if DVI or SATA don't work, it will still work perfectly for my purpose here. DVI is purely a hardware issue. Linux won't care if the grafix card has a dvi or vga...

I kind of got the impression that S3 would distribute these cards themselves, and not sell the chips and a reference board design to other companies to manufacture. Kind of like how the other smaller GPU companies do it (Matrox, etc.). The interview on X-bit Labs kind of indicates the opposite of t...

Wondering if laptop harddrives are designed with a lower Mean Time Before Failure in mind due to laptops rarely if ever being left on 24/7 the way many people leave their desktops running. Samsung list the following: P120: MTBF 500,000 POH M60: MTBF 330,000 POH On the other hand 2.5" drives are rat...

Specifically, would I have trouble with SATA or DVI or the embedded graphics? Generally Intel chipsets are very solid with Linux. SATA should be supported with the latest kernels just fine. Since this is going to be a server, graphics is not going to be a problem. You only need a console on a serve...

I wonder if they'll have decent linux drivers? Their initial aim will and has to be to capture marketshare. The Windows market is the only one big enough to give good returns so that's what they will target first. It's possible that they will release a Linux driver, but don't expect it to appear fr...

In Linux the monitoring of temperatures and voltages consists of two different pieces of software. First you need a tools package called lm_sensors . Once you have that installed and configured, you can use several nice gui utilities to display the information produced by it. One popular package is ...

I'm planning on running the Phantom 500W (or the 350W if the fan removal is a no-no) in the lower chamber of the P180 with a Nexus fan, so airflow shouldn't be a problem. It does depend on the rest of your system, but my understanding is that the fan in the Phantom only starts up if the PSU gets wa...

mattek wrote: Question: I have considered suspension, would it be worthwhile. If so does it make the other mods redundant?

Yes and yes.

The other mods might help some with your problem, but in the end suspension (or some other decoupling) of the disks is bound to be the most effective option.

Although I have to say, I did find a nice flex-ATX board with a 800MHz VIA C3 CPU and LAN+VIDEO. The 800Mhz C3 is certainly enough for a router. If you want to get full use of GbLAN for file services you need a faster CPU though. There is the question of RAID. If you truly want to equip this system...

_guillaume wrote:Same low whining noise. Any idea how to improve this?

Whining is probably caused by an imperfect bearing. Therefore changing the mounting is not likely to help. You've got a bad sample, just take it back to the shop.

The S775 motherboards offer quite nice features like 4X SATA, GbLAN etc... But would S775 be overkill? I guess there's no sense in buying S478 for the price of S775. It just feels funny buying a more powerful router platform than what I have as HTPC or my main rig! Don't go comparing this system wi...

I was told u cant overclock amd ..but i read that u could overclock intel . Wrong. Both AMD and Intel have made overclocking harder by imposing multiplier locks. However it is still possible to overclock them by various means. Anandtech recently took a look at overclocking an Athlon 64 on a socket ...

Did you have the same 4 hitachi drives running in your system without raid before ? If you did not, then there is the possibility that the combined hum of 4 drives running causes the seek noise to appear to be less loud in comparison.

Although I think using a proper PCI-slot SATA card would be better? Why ? It won't be any faster. A PCI card would make sense if you got a motherboard that didn't support SATA, but would otherwise have all the features you need. On the other hand as long as you only plan to use one or two harddrive...

Do you have any DVI monitor recommendations? The most I can recommend is to have a look at LCD panel reviews at Tom's Hardware . They have some of the best reviews I've seen because they take the time to do a whole range of measurements to compliment subjective analysis. It's really annoying, but w...

Would I notice the difference if I bought a dual-link DVI card (if so what would you recommend) and would I still be able to use my current analogue display? I'm afraid you didn't read what spworley wrote carefully enough. dual-link DVI is only used for purely digital connections and very high reso...

According to Displaymate (http://displaymate.com/testing.html) image quality degrades as you increase the refresh rate (I thought higher was better so that’s new to me) and the recommended refresh rate is lower for LCD monitors i.e. 60Hz vs 75Hz for CRT, although I settled on 70Hz. This is because ...

nina wrote: So I was thinking, maybe it's a driver problem, so I uninstalled and reinstalled the via 4-in-1 drivers.. No solution.

Try just removing the via drivers entirely and running without them. They shouldn't be neccesary anyway and those mobo drivers have been known to cause instability sometimes.

I don’t know if I should get the Seasonic 430W, 500W or 600W based on my hardware. Did you read the recent article about power distribution in systems ? It pretty much answers your question. Even the power hungriest system in the test used less than 200W of power at load. The usual recommendation i...

What do I particularly look for in a Video Card spec which would indicated very good 2d image quality e.g RAMDAC clock speed of at least 350mhz (as usually most of the spec concentrates on 3d performance)? As already mentioned there is nothing in the videocard spec that tells you how good it's imag...

shikhan wrote: Should I stay with something around 500W? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

No, 500W is way more than you need. Read the stickies in this Power Supplies category for more info.