The current high cost of most mini-itx boards is a real turn-off (so to speak!). If this motherboard comes at a good price, it will be a fantastic option for HTPCs. My preference is still for AMD chips (performance is not too much of an issue for me) but for a tiny HTPC, this little motherboard coul...

Anyone bought one of these yet? I've not been able to locate one of the 320GB platter Western Digital drives here in the UK but have found somewhere selling this Seagate one. Unfortunately, there don't appear to be any reviews of this one around just yet. Ideally, if somebody has compared both, I'd ...

Here's Anand's review of the initial Atom processors/technology: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3276 Looks very encouraging with more than enough performance already for basic computing and a dual-core version of the technology (Diamondville - to be released later this yea...

Hmm, I wonder. Does the UVD section of the chip run separately to the 3D? If so, it might be possible to underclock the GPU for power savings whilst still keeping the impressive HTPC playback options. If you're not playing games, I'm sure a 250MHz GPU speed would be more than enough for all your 2D ...

Blog entry from Anandtech: http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=404 Sounds as though they'll be having some interesting reviews there shortly including looks at video quality/performance etc. It doesn't look as though the NVidia stuff will be out for another month or so though. Edit: And ...

Will a socket 939 3800+ X2 (ADA3800DAA5BV) (TDP=89) use more power, than a socket AM2 3600+ X2 (ADO3600IAA4CU) (TDP=65) ? Or is it better to aim for AMD Athlon X2 BE-2300 with TDP=45? To be honest, I wouldn't pay too much attention to the 65W TDP reported for the 3600+. I have one myself, have unde...

It also wouldn't surprise me if the initial drivers for the motherboard are a bit flaky, not to mention the BIOS. I know that in the past I've had boards which were practically unusable until later BIOS revisions fixed bugs. My initial excitement has abated and I'll wait until the end of March/early...

A good point about the heat of the northbridge. I'm actually pretty busy over the next month so I reckon I can wait and see which of the chipsets is cooler. 3D Performance of the IGP is pretty much irrelevant for me as I'm not intending to do any gaming on my HTPC in any case. It may actually be tha...

Overclockers are by far the most expensive supplier.........that's why I use Scan mostly myself. Was just pointing about availability-not value :P I use Scan predominately especially now that you can get free delivery on orders over £20 excluding VAT – see here for details. Ooh. I didn't know th...

The CPU voltage is adjustable from 0.8V-1.9V. (.025V increments from .8 to 1.55 and .05V increments above that) ... I wish I had a temperature probe to give you some numbers as "hot" is very subjective. Compared to my old Geforce 6150, just about anything is cool. I would say the Northbridge heatsi...

If you buy one, a brief review of the board would be gratefully received.

Ah well. At least it looks as though Scythe themselves know they're getting into ridiculous territory with this heatsink. Surely you'd have to be totally nuts to fit one of these in your system?

Bearing in mind Scythe's Japanese origins, I'm surprised they haven't called it the "Godzilla".

The Kill-a-watt route is the best route, I expect. I bought an equivalent device here in the UK a couple of weeks ago and have been having great fun checking power consumption of the various PCs around my office. We've got a crappy old Athlon XP shuttle system which draws twice as much power at load...

The Silverstone LC19 and ML02 are very low profile and have room for just a laptop optical drive + a 3.5" hard disk (or a suspended 2.5" hard disk in my case). You're very limited as to the coolers you can use, however. I use this Hiper heatsink with the fan running at 5V. This cools my undervolted ...

Try putting the (red-black) Power SW plug in the wrong way round and see if it starts then. My case from an old PC must have been wired incorrectly because, if I remember correctly, I had to swap the plug around to get it to work!

Unfortunately, those figures aren't really a great deal of use without knowing how much power the Isaiah was drawing. The performance figures shown might not seem overly impressive but if it was drawing considerably less power than the other chips it could be that this new CPU is another good option...

Very well specified and it looks like pretty much an ideal layout for my case as well.

I don't think Gigabyte support undervolting in BIOS, do they?

Wow, the northbridge heatsink is really low profile, this thing must run pretty cool! I didn't bother posting this link before: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=174620 That indicates that the person overclocking the IGP was able to double the clock speed to over 1GHz (!) without...

Further basic info about the AMD chipsets:

http://www.hkepc.com/database/images/20 ... 546596.jpg

http://www.hkepc.com/database/images/20 ... 997429.jpg

http://www.hkepc.com/database/images/20 ... 575932.jpg

I've not in-lined the images.

So this is it , i am not shore about the processor is it enough for 1080p mkv or should i just pay 10€ more and get the X2 5000+ / 2.6 GHz Energy Efficient 65W? The Brisbane should be fine for 1080p h264 stuff, although you may need to pay an additional $15 for CoreAVC which seems to be by far th...

I think a lot of people believe that the brisbanes are just as efficient as the Sempron LE. I'm not sure if it's worth the extra money, is what I'm saying. I'd tend to doubt that the Brisbanes could have power draw quite as low as the 65nm Sempron LE chips - they certainly didn't ought to bearing i...

I'm basing my expectations of the low-volt/power performance of the 65nm Sempron on my 3600+ Brisbane: 1.9GHz @ 1.0V and I believe others with the same chip have even got as low as 0.975V at stock clocks. If a dual-core CPU can manage this (and my total system draw at load is just 53W), I'd expect a...

I can't say I've even heard of Kino motherboards and it must be said that I'd be very surprised if they supported undervolting in BIOS. Perhaps they support Cool N Quiet? The Albatron board does support CnQ according to the manual but no mention of other undervolting. Normally lack of BIOS undervolt...

That's pretty impressive, just out of curiosity what PSU are you using? PicoPSU? It's the 120W DC-DC board + AC brick which comes with the Silverstone LC-19 case. Motherboard is an ASRock ALiveNF4G-DVI which also seems to have a pretty low power draw. In a couple/few months, I expect to replace thi...

As an example, my PC has the following spec: AthlonX2 3600+ 1.9GHz @ 1.0V 2GB memory 120GB 2.5" disc Laptop DVD writer Power draw of the system at idle is 33W and full load is just 53W. I certainly agree with frostedflakes that this CPU is a very good choice for a low-power system. The new 45nm Inte...

The most probable candidate is still Golden Orb II. Apparently, it generates only 17dba of noise (massive copper heatsink + low speed fan). The only negative thing about it is just average cooling performance - but it still cools a few degrees better than stock heatsink. Well, with cool E8200 I'll ...

I bought my Stretch Magic from a UK eBay seller.

Just had a quick look there and some people are still selling it. Search for item number 280192666660 for an example seller. I don't remember if it's the same person who sold me mine, however!

The 1mm stuff works fine in my system.

For me, I'd be happy with either of these chipsets in my system. My final choice will probably go down to power consumption or the layout/features of available boards. Hope to upgrade my HTPC in the next few months.

Basically, it's because all the new generation of ATI/AMD graphics chips are going to be renamed despite not really being great improvements over their predecessors. The replacement of the 65nm HD2400 will be the 55nm HD3450. Performance between the two should be practically the same, the only real ...