On Intel boards putting a video card into the PCIe x16 slot disables the onboard video. However, putting the card into the x4 slot may work. With a 4350 it probably won't affect performance that much. As to drivers only Vista really has a problem with cards that use different drivers. 7 and XP don't...

Ball mice don't have optical sensors... Yes they do, at least any that you would find from the past 25+ years on a PC. In fact the first ball mouse made back in 1972 used optical sensors. The two wheels are actually shafts with disks on the ends inside the mouse body. The disks are optical encoding...

If you are going with a full size or m-ATX case why just go with an m-ATX board? Then you can start with 6+ SATA ports instead of the 4 on the AT3IONT-I. With the right board and CPU it shouldn't pull that much more at idle than an ION board.

I've seen similar things happen on other drives and often they've been fine. A single bad sector is cause for concern, but does not automatically mean the whole drive is doomed. I have a Seagate momentus that had one bad sector repaired about two years ago and it's still running strong. I would not ...

Check if you can do DVI->HDMI with sound. If the card gives you an HDMI audio device you probably can. DVI is the same signaling as HDMI so it can carry sound too, it just doesn't usually.

It's probably failing capacitors in the back-light circuit.

If you are good with a soldering iron then it's probably an easy fix. Pop it open and look for any capacitors that are bulged / leaking. Replace them and it should be good to go.

It should work fine with that card at x1 speed. The only possible issue is that a x1 slot is only rated to provide 25W while a full x16 supplies 75W. Your mechanical x16 slot should still provide full power, but even if it doesn't 25W should be enough for a 5450. I used to run a 4350 in a x1 slot wi...

My server's motherboard is a Gigabyte EP45-UD3R. As you found out it has to be an Intel board.

I just benched my RAID-5 with ATTO and got a write speed of 350 MB/s and read of 510 MB/s. Check the dates on the reviews and the drivers used. Intel's older drivers weren't very fast.

FreeBaGeL wrote: What about when writing from the server to the SSD?

About the same. 90-100 MB/s is about as fast as my network goes without further tweaking.

So if you're copying a large (say 4gb) file from your server to another computer on the network, what is your actual write speed? Gigabit tops out at around 125mb/s I believe so is that what you're getting? 125 MB/s is the absolute max in theory. In reality you'll never get that when you factor in ...

Aren't write speeds a lot slower with software Raid-5? I'm going to be transferring some large files back and forth (the source files for video editing) fairly often, so if I'm looking at a difference of 10mb/s vs. 100mb/s that's a big deal. Lots of software raid-5 implementations have slow writes,...

Unless you are really going to pound on it, why not just get an Intel board with RAID 5 and save a ton of cash by not getting the Areca? Contrariety to popular belief, the on-board Intel raid is quite good and more than adequate for a high-end home server. This article shows that the Intel raid is m...

4 3.5 drives plus 1 (presumably) 2.5 OS drive would be pretty tight in that case, but probably doable. For more SATA ports a standard SIL 3114 card would probably do fine. That would give you 6 ports total. The ones I have seen are bootable, but you may need to flash it with the non-raid firmware. D...

It's doubtful that any actual damage or even corrupt data has occurred on your drive from just a dislodged cable. SATA is fully check-summed so bad data on the cable should have been rejected by the drive and not written. It's however possible that something that Windows needed to write got rejected...

I've had several different types of flash (USB, CF & SD) of various brands used in my car for a few years now and never had a problem even on the hottest days. They also survived temps well below 0°C. I tried a USB HD but my stereo could not index it in a reasonable time so I never kept it in the c...

Neither Vista or 7 will work with a 865 onboard video. The 865 is a DX8 chip at best and Aero needs a DX9 card. Only the GMA950 and above support Aero.

I've found that with a 7 volt molex mod that the sensor no longer works because the "ground" of the fan is actually +5V.

Using just +5V seems to work just fine.

While it does sound nasty, the hard drive not being seen by the XP install CD is probably just not loading the AHCI drivers.

You can load the AHCI drivers from a floppy or turn off AHCI in the BIOS. If you tried a Vista or 7 install it should also see the drive just fine.

If you are most concerned about portability / easy recovery then Windows RAID is what you want. Assuming at least one of your drives is still good then you can recover with any modern Windows PC. It doesn't have to have the same chipset or even CPU, a complete AMD system would work. Just plug in the...

If there is only a few bad sectors you should try running the manufacturer's diagnostic tool. Do a full scan and see if it lets you "repair" the bad sectors. Usually this is just remapping them to spare sectors. Some drives do this automatically and some need the diagnostic tool. Most drives have ab...

I have two Kama PWMs hooked up this way and they work fine. It's really simple to split PWM fans so that adapter should work fine. I hacked my own adapter with a wire joining the two PWM pins and the second fan powered from a 3pin to molex adapter. The first fan runs about 75 RPM higher than the sec...

flapane wrote:I'd check cpu load, too.

I'd have to take them apart and swap CPUs to make a fair comparison. The G41 has an E5200, the G45 only has an E1200. I may do that at some point.

I did have the E5200 in a G31 before and the CPU load was higher than the G41, but I don't have any hard numbers.

I just ran DXVA checker on both a G45 and a G41 board. Both running the latest Intel drivers on Windows 7 x64. The only differences were that the G45 had these two decoders that the G41 did not: One mode listed as a GUID, googling indicates it is the VC-1 decoder The other is "ModeH264_VLD_NoFGT-Cle...

I kind of doubt G41's VC1/H264 offloading from my experience, but G31 wouldn't be better in this regard, either. But G41's 8GB RAM support is a moot point given only 2 DIMM slots on almost every budget mATX motherboard. Unless 4GB stick price drops by a great margin, 4GB is the realistic value for ...

I don't think you need to worry much about the 5V line. 3.5 HDs run the spindle motor on 12V. If you are worried you can look at the specs of your drives and add up the 5V draw. I'd say a good 350W would probably be more than enough if you drop the gaming GPU. Onboard or really basic is all you need...

As far as I'm aware, G41 and G43 don't do hardware acceleration of H.264 or VC-1. That's what differentiates the G41 and G43 chipsets from the G45. The G41 and G43 do partial H.264 and VC-1 acceleration, just not full decode like the G45. It still helps reduce CPU use a fair bit over the G31 if you...

There is the Sapphire 100298L (Radeon 3450) which is close to what you want. It's AGP, fanless and supports Windows 7. It's about $55 here in Canada so hopefully that works out price wise.

There's also a bunch of Nvidia 6200s which would fit the bill.

While I'm lucky that there are a couple of good local shops, when I can't get something in town I usually use NCIX.


No affiliation, just a happy customer.

If you are using XP do you have the Cool n' quiet driver installed and the correct power setting?

Have you used CPUz or similar to verify that the clock is going down?

I got my 95W TDP Athlon 64 (but single core) at about 60W idle from the wall. CPU clock was 1 GHz when idle.

Both your 9600xt and GMA950 have about the same level of video playback acceleration, which is to say not much. They both have motion compensation but that's about it. The big difference is your CPU. The Core Duo has SSE3 which will help with video decoding. The XP-M only has SSE1. The Core Duo also...