It's most likely you fried the control circuits in the chip that runs the header. The header itself, along with the connectors, cables and traces are very robust, although a direct short could evaporate a trace. I had a similar failure some time ago when I was installing a home-made splitter cable. ...

So we bought some new LED holiday light strings to put on the house. Two strings (all we really need without going crazy) draw about 6W. Great, right? Well the timer to run them draws about the same amount! So: should we run the lights on the timer, appearing to be good citizens, or run them 24/7 an...

Right.

Just get a bunch of those car visor CD holder crap gizmos, and a cardboard box.

I've been putting my discs in Viva Elite Blu-ray cases (the ones the studios use, not the cheap knock-offs you find at Amazon et al). You can get these from Casetopia. The best density is with the 6-disc 15mm case and the 2-disc 6mm slim case. These are sturdy and high quality, but they aren't cheap...

Gee, when I saw that headline, I thought it would be the Gangnam video...

"For many Republicans, life begins at fertilization, and ends at birth"

Read that somewhere; wish I could attribute it.

Hyperbolic but not inaccurate. (death penalty, wars of choice, no public health care or welfare, etc, and of course personhood)

m0002a wrote:One of the best ways to save power is to stop Folding@Home.

Running WCG/BOINC (pretty much the same as F@H) adds 100W to my base, less than $1 a day even at California PG&E tier 3 pricing...

All the reviews I'm seeing here are for overclocked cards.

Is there a card that can be undervolted that also has a quiet cooler?

I'm looking to replace my old (undervolted) 9800GT with a card that supports folding...

oh, but i understand the most important ones feed vcore voltages -- The caps in that photo are standard electrolytics. But they are around the south bridge, which rarely gets hot. The most important caps on a motherboard are clustered around the CPU socket. They get hot because the CPU and the VRM ...

I've posted pics of the capacitors from newegg -- is it solid or metal or electrolytic? Um, where? On a related topic, it's not only motherboard caps that have issues. The main board in my Samsung 244T display failed because of bulging capacitors. Replacing them (with a kit found online) revived th...

I measured my vampire load the other day (also using the new smart meter display) by unplugging both the computer complex and the home theater complex at a time when no appliances were running. The result was 99W. Pretty high. Most likely culprits: living room stereo complex, cordless phones & answe...

About $1 of styrene would separate the GPU and CPU airflows...

I'm very happy with the Prolimatech Megahalems. Very close to the original Scythe Ninja in performance, and with a better mounting system.

Scythe, on the other hand, hasn't IMHO made a really good heat sink since the original Ninja (SCNJ-1000).

If you're running any software (eg, SpeedFan, AIDA) that monitors the disk temperature (via SMART), it will spin up the disks even when they are idle.

I tried several times to get XP to spin down my idle disks, and eventually gave up. In my situation, it was best to let them spin all the time.

If I'm to rebuild, what will I need to buy again? e.g. Will my scythe ninja work on newer sockets (I do still have the other brackets it came with)? RAM, CPU, cooler, and everything..will even things like PSU need replacing, given that specs about 12V or something changed in the last couple of year...

Be sure that AHCI is disabled. That's what needs the F6 driver. XP support of that feature is spotty at best.

The most recent ASUS boards are probably the best compromise. They have several headers and each header can be controlled in either 3-pin or 4-pin mode. Someone there realized this is a good marketing feature. I've got a recent Asus and it has only one chassis header :( http://www.asus.com/Motherbo...

With regard to fan speed configuration: I find it best to set a fan speed range limited to the slowest value that provides adequate cooling under anticipated load (be it idle or folding), and the fastest value that I'm willing to listen to. Then in the controlling temperature configuration, setting ...

Why can't or don't they offer controllers that can be controlled from software? Lots of motherboard still don't offer decent fan control or a decent number of fan headers. Are any even able to completely stop certain fans? With SpeedFan running, this isn't possible as it is constantly polling each ...

I'd like to drop by. Might stay for dinner depending on which restaurant it is.

And sometimes just a tiny voltage boost will get you stable for a minimal impact on temps. True enough. My current rig was stable at 4.4GHz with only a 0.04V boost. I run it now at 4.2GHz with a 0.01V undervolt. What I was warning against was the kind of stuff you see on the extreme sites, with peo...

You probably already know this, but I'll mention it for the thread: power goes up linearly with clock speed, but with the square of the voltage. That is, P=C*V*V. So only boost voltage if you have good cooling. I've been an Intel overclocker but not an AMD one, but based on what I've read, AMD CPUs ...

When I bought a (runCore) PATA SSD for my old laptop, it came with an adapter and a miniCD with some version of Acronis. The software wouldn't boot (!), but the adapter worked just fine with my commercial copy of Acronis. YMMV.

Recent versions of Acronis (I have 2010) let you edit the partition boundaries prior to copying. I set my destination SSD to have a 2 MB hole at the start which aligns the main partition nicely.

Libraries in Win7 are just collections of pointers. What matters is where the underlying folders are located. In some cases you can use windows options to relocate folders. In other cases you need to change the registry. In still others, you have to use junction points, the windows equivalent of *ni...

Install the TreeSize utility and run it once in a while to see if any directories on your SSD are growing. I did this and discovered that the CyberLink PowerDirector video editor was storing zillions of small "temporary" files in the Program Files directory, instead of in tmp, temp, or usr/tmp, and ...

wayner wrote:But why do the masses need high airflow in an era of Ivy Bridge CPUs with i5s that have TDPs of 65W with integrated GPUs that are more than sufficient for the masses, not to mention reasonably priced SSDs? Why do the masses need high airflow in 2012?

graphics cards

PWM can and has been implemented on 3-pin headers. A controller chip would shape the pulses, and a capacitor on the supply side of the chip would smooth things out for the MB power plane. But this implementation cost a couple of bucks, so it was generally available on only high-end MBs ($200+), and ...

MikeC wrote:Some boards have both VR and PWM control even for headers that are 4-pin; the Asus Z77 series boards, for example.

Wow. That might be the only one... And a reason to upgrade from my Asrock Z68.

1) How do PWM fan headers work? There are 4 pins. Ground, 12v, sense, and pwm control. Does the pwm control pin supply the actual current to power the fan? Or does the fan still take its current from the 12v pin, but have internal electronics tha vary fan speed? 2) PWM type control can be implement...