Compulsory voting brings out the worst in democracy, which is the devolution to mob rule. No longer do policies get made for the greater good, they are simply whatever the mob wants. Global warming is a hot button issue for most members of this board and you can kiss any kind of green policies goodb...

I have another question to God. Why did you let this idiot post this video on youtube, in response to the second video linked from Pat Condell. If you God existed, you would have stopped that video being posted, maybe even stopped the video camera from working. I know that "free will" has been post...

All DVI ports can output an analog SVGA signal with a converter. Video cards usually include at least one, sometimes two, but you need to check the packaging to be sure. Nowadays its becoming more common to find a DVI to HDMI converter in there, so if you're running two analog monitors you might nee...

The Intel N and Z series Atom models cannot run x86-64 code. Hence, if Microsoft wants to continue to compete on nettops, they need to continue to sell a 32-bit operating system. We saw how ferocious Microsoft is when they pulled a 180 on the discontinuation of Windows XP as soon as they saw linux f...

I love ATI as much as the next guy, but ATI/AMD's video drivers have left a lot to be desired in stability for non-mainstream games like Flight Sim or OpenGL ones like X-Plane. I'd stick with nVidia for now, at least until we see clear evidence of a major push for driver stability comes from ATI.

As a former FSX junkie, you're going down the right road there. FSX was originally designed to be a single-core program. Only with SP1 did it become multi-core aware and with SP2 it makes good usage of at least two cores. It is a CPU hog however, and a 2.8 ghz processor is pretty limited, but I gues...

How it can be true? See here for details. That's a great article! Excellent piece -- and yet more evidence of Microsoft's rabid capitalist/monopolist core. I like that he pointed out that in theory, a 16-bit processor can only address 64KB of memory and right from the start, DOS was designed to add...

I liked the Anandtech analysis: http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3675 Bottom line - this is good for AMD, as it gives them the ability to continue to try to compete with Intel and not have to suffer the oppression of Intel's constant market manipulation and hardball tactics specifical...

The Kingston has fantastic performance if you are doing mainly reads, but not writes. It does great in read performance. For most general usage, that's what you spend your time doing - reading from the drive to boot up, load applications, and so on. If you were doing a lot of file conversions, datab...

I like bing search better, but I'll be honest, ever since I switched to Firefox and started using Adblock, the search engine choice makes a lot less difference anyway, since it already blocks all the obnoxious ads.

Hi, I hope each and every one of you can watch this Frontline show, called "Sick Around the World" with T.R. Reid: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/view/?utm_campaign=homepage&utm_medium=proglist&utm_source=proglist All will be clear after you watch it! Really. That's a mi...

It's quite laugable really that you have to spend that much for an OS. Not for all people. All US students (with a college email address) can buy Win 7 Pro x32 or x64 OS's for 30 dollars. Legally. yeah, it's expensive if you're not a student...still worth it IMO. Add me to the list of WinXP users w...

Does anyone really think there will be a positive outcome for US military presence in Afghanistan? Really? So why are we there? Think about it. We're there because Obama wants to stay there for as long as it takes to win, that's why. He's the best president in the history of the United States and h...

I suspect it will be a few years before SSD's, their firmware, and the OS drivers are as solid as magnetic hard drives. The technology is superior in everything but cost and stability at this point, and the stability is rapidly getting there. EDIT: As for your Intel X25-M boost, it's the firmware it...

ATI satisfies marketing not longevity, they went the way of silent and hot for idle and cranked and choked for air on load a 2 years ago. Just look at the "shroud" design. One of the choked holes even has a PCI-E power connector in it to further jam it's miniscule ability to pull in air. not a good...

Great review, although to me, it highlights the odd state of desktop computers nowadays. Most likely, the migration away from desktop computers towards laptops has saved more electricity than the 80Plus program could have ever hoped to save. I was going to lament that there's no good 80Plus Gold rat...

I think wireless networking played a role as well. All 3 of the things Luminair mentioned really come into their own when you consider wireless networking. 1) Laptops - With wireless networks, you can now use your laptop anywhere around the house, or even on the go. Hotels, coffee shops, work sites ...

You should consult the owner's manual. Sometimes certain slots are only capable of 8X or 4X transfer rate rather than the full 16X transfer rate. Especially with it being a P55 chipset motherboard, there is a good chance only one slot is 16x capable - usually the one physically closest the CPU socket.

There's a bunch of way to quantify "better". Cost Noise General computing FPU performance Motherboard size Power consumption Probably more, if you really wanted to get into it. In general, the Athlon will be faster in every possible measure and a lot cheaper. I mean, you can find them for $10 or som...

what im dieing to find out is if the 5870 can operate semi passively with the S1 ie slap a S1 on it without any cooling fan and have a front intake 120mm fan blowing 1-2mm behind it basically i want to have a pair of 5870 in the SG03 and use its front intake as cooling fan At idle it would obviousl...

Hard OCP's site alone hurts my eyes, much less trying to follow their review of the product. Their charts are confusing. The products and in-game specs differ even in evaluating the same game. What the heck.. apples to apples? Actually HardOCP provides the reviews on games that gamers want to know ...

Well technically my first "computer" was a TI-99/4A, and next after that was a Commodore 64 with a single-side 5 1/4" floppy drive, so I guess my first computer with a storage device was my C-64. The fun fact there was that it only had a single read-write head for the floppy drive, so you could only...

There's a whole ton of reviews on these cards now, and from what I'm seeing, it basically breaks down like this: ATI 5750: Similar performance to 4850, GTS250, but with more features and lower power draw. ATI 5770: Similar performance to 4870, o/c GTX260, but with more features and lower power draw....

HD 5850 725 MHz core 1GHz (4Ghz QDR) 1GB GDDR5 memory 1440 SP 72 TMU 32 ROP Expected power consumption 170W load and 27 W idle The chip is one hell of a beast, expected to be 60% faster on average than 4870, sometimes up to 100% 5850 has part of SP turned off to sell faulty chips The story gets eve...

Just about anything single-core will be a good bet, and your 3200+ would be hard to beat. The San Diego core chips were some of the best in terms of undervolting, the slowest of the high quality ones being the Opteron 165, at 1.8ghz. I believe the 3200+ was the Venice core 2.0ghz, which is still a v...

That's not good. The P55 chipset has 16 PCIE lanes available, so you can have 2 slots with 8 lanes each. The 1366 board? You can get quad slot boards. Even the X38 chipset for 775 has 32 lanes. This is skimpy for those who want folding farms. Too bad the 920 eats more watts than the 860. I don't th...

Ugh, it looks like every review site got sent an i5-750 and an i7-870, but I can't find any benchmarks comparing the i7-920 to the i7-860, which share a price point. Obviously, the 860 will be the winner in power consumption, but I still want to see the performance numbers. HardOCP included an i7-9...

Back to topic: These processors look like serious trouble for AMD. There are now even less reasons to get a Ph II quad-core, which leaves only the X3 parts and the HPC market where AMD is objectively better. Good for the consumer in the short term, bad for competition in the long term... *crosses f...

For a short while I had an ASUS 9800GT with a similar appearance cooler on it. Considering the 9800GT has a much lower TDP and the ASUS was a notoriously hot card (80+ C under FAH load) I would say the chances of that being a sufficient heatsink for a 260GTX are poor. Either it will be hot or loud, ...

I had an Opteron 185, which was the fastest/hottest of all S939 chips. It was so hot I couldn't even run it at the stock voltage of 1.35v without having it overheat using an HDT-S1283 and 800rpm fan. I'm sure with a faster fan it would have worked out, but that defeats the purpose of a silent comput...