What is the i7 system using all that 3.3V current for?

I look forward to the day when PCs require only +12V (or +24V, or any other voltage, as long as it's only one).

I was slightly disappointed to see that the ones for sale are plain silver, instead of the funky orange/blue of the review sample. I'd happily buy one if I can get it in the UK. Take advantage of free trade and by from the EU! The prices are usually lower than in the UK. ...I am working on a simple ...

Sorry if this is old news now, but... Last year I read about the upcoming 28nm Radeon 7000 series and thought that I would finally find something with enough of an improvement in performance/watt over my HD 4770 to be worth upgrading. Then today, since it's now Q1 2012, I thought I would have a look...

I recently replaced my Vertex 2 because it was having the BSOD problem with S3 sleep. This was supposedly fixed for the Vertex 3, but they haven't managed to fix it for us owners of older drives.

Congratulations on getting it all together in such a professional looking package.

It could be worse; it could be like eSATA which has no power connector at all!

There is a difference between the politics of oil, and drilling for oil, which is a matter of regulatory compliance and adherence to safety issues that are the best interests of society and the companies involved. If a company violates drilling regulations or commits an act of gross negligence (whi...

...Neil, for some reason you seem to want to make everything that happens on this planet a political battle... Maybe because everything important that happens is a political battle. If someone commits a criminal act of gross negligence, that is not politics. It is a matter for the judicial system (...

m0002a wrote:...Neil, for some reason you seem to want to make everything that happens on this planet a political battle...

Maybe because everything important that happens is a political battle.

Unfortunately, if someone is bothered by an infrared LED they are likely to have larger problems than computer mice. Could you please rephrase this so I can understand exactly what you are saying? He probably means that although there are a large number of people claiming to suffer from electrosens...

Finraziel wrote:Ball mice don't have optical sensors...

Some did; I had a few myself in the past. I found a page with some good pictures of such a mouse.

...I want to be able to watch a movie over HDMI with sound over the same HDMI, while, at the same time , use the PC for browsing etc. and listening to a separate (not-movie) sound via the main soundcard. (One person would be watching the movie, the other would use the PC.) Is this possible? Yes. Fo...

A bit odd that there is no DVI connector on display of the OP. Yeah, it put me off when I saw that, even more so because it only comes supplied with a VGA cable* so I had to pay a bit extra for an HDMI cable. I decided it was ok though, because it is quite nice to use the headphone output on the mo...

LCD monitors with LED backlights have been expensive in the past, but I had to buy a new monitor recently and saw that they have come down in proce a lot. I therefore decided to try one, and picked up a BenQ V2210 Eco . One of the first things I did was connect it to my power meter, and the power co...

PlanetOfTheApes wrote:...Are you increasing the height/distance that the air inside the case needs to travel to exit outside the case ?

In other words... a chimney!

A chimney? I once considered trying to squeeze my PC into the actual chimney above the fireplace here, but the fire makes it a bit impractical.

xan_user wrote:I guess I rather have a bot than a wardrobe of tinfoil hats.

No need for a tinfoil hat - I've had to clean enough crap off of various people's PCs, including infections caught by merely viewing the wrong page at the wrong time.

What banking details? You mean like how my credit card was scanned by a hacked gas pump last year, or the waitress that copied the numbers while she was in back running my dinner bill through?.. Surely the fewer ways to steal that stuff the better? So im in a bot net for a few mins/hours...? Just f...

There are a lot of exploits that are stopped by NoScript. However, the fact that so many sites break in non-obvious ways if JavaScript is turned off (mostly badly written sites that don't actually need JS at all) means I never recommend it to non-techy users. Adblock Plus does a pretty good job by i...

NeilBlanchard wrote:Man, I wish I knew where this "rule" about all sleeve bearing fans not being able to run horizontally came from?..

Every single sleeve bearing fan that I've used horizontally has ended up unbearably noisy within a year. Maybe some work alright, but I find it easier to just keep them all vertical.

Mr Evil > Inverting the terms doesn't change the situation. The 1333 set is better by the same margin as by RoGue's calculation. In your case, you're citing latency where lower is better, and RoGue's result in an "effective clock speed" where higher is better. As long as all the other latency param...

Lower latency is better, but the actual latency is not just the number shown in the specs, but that number multiplied by the cycle time (the inverse of the clock frequency). So, the latency for the DDR3 1333 CL7 is: (1 / 1333MHz) * 7 = 5.25ns The latency for the DDR3 1600 CL9 is: (1 / 1600MHz) * 9 =...

...Years ago a Canon rep spent the day at a local Best Buy store. As people were leaving with $30 Lexmark printers she asked them why. Price of course. She asked them to look at the $50 Canon printer and the cartrigde prices. The Lexmark had $30 cartridges, the Canon had $7. Needless to say just ab...

APFC should keep the power factor well above 0.9 for normal loads (it will be much less in standby). You could try looking up a measured value for your particular PSU (the 80 Plus website is a good resource for that sort of thing).

Power factor can make a very big difference. For instance, a PSU with no power factor correction might have a power factor of 0.6, which means that if you were to see an apparent power consumption of 100W, then the actual power would only be 0.6 x 100 = 60W.

They're a bit slow reporting this, I saw it years ago.

You will see stuff like that in all sorts of electronic devices. It's there to damp vibration (see the multitudinous complaints of "coil whine" on this forum), or simply to hold the component in place. Sometimes it is applied rather sloppily, but it's nothing to worry about.

Electrolytic capacitors most certainly do degrade if left unused, however this takes quite a long time - about five years before significant degradation occurs. Solid electrolyte capacitors have a much longer shelf life.

If it's white noise, then it's almost certainly from the sound card (or the amp itself), not a ground loop.

A simple way to mitigate the problem is to turn the volume on the computer up as high as possible, and the volume on the amp down to compensate.

No, but Google does. Ones that have it in stock are colour-coded green too.