I purchased a 640gb blue model about a month ago. It is without question much quieter than my single-platter 160gb Seagate drive in pretty much every measure I can discern. I'm very pleased with it. I got 3 years out of my 160gb drive before I finally managed to fill it up, so if I can get 3 years o...

I use Acronis True Image home edition personally. It lets you create a boot CD so you can boot up from the CD and do a "cold backup" of sorts of your whole OS drive. By having the OS down, that's the most certain way to make sure you can restore that backup to recover the whole OS and all data/appli...

NewEgg seems to have at least a few people working there who have some very shady business tactics. They seem to want to skate on things that they have plausible deniability with. The latest is that they recently changed the title of a 9800GTX to a 9800GTX+ http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...

Generally if it ran fine on a 512mb card, then yeah, you're fine. You'd know it otherwise. From the reviews I've read, once it's really dead on video memory due to too-high AA, you get a non-linear drop, like going from 70-55-40fps to 2fps on each increase of AA. The point when it drops from 40 to 2...

You dont exist, prove me wrong dipshit. Andy That's such a dangerous position to be in, but the downside is you can't find out that you're wrong until its too late. I feel sorry for you, and I don't mean that in a bad way, but with an attitude like that, it's obvious that you're hurting inside and ...

Oh, durr, I didn't even look at what country you're in. That explains why the 9800GTX+ was so expensive. I just figured you must have gotten it a year ago, I didn't realize it was a different currency. Anyway, if the card is dead it's worth a try to RMA it and see if they'll cover it. They are suppo...

However, I'm not sure what they mean! 'drop shipped direct from Intel' ? Can someone please translate it for me? Considering Intel only ships in batches of 1000 or something, I'm not sure what that means either. I'd think they still have to go through a distributor to get a single chip. I can't pic...

Ouch!! Sorry to hear about your loss. In my P180 tower case, my Gigabyte card's heat all goes up, which is of course right into the CPU also. With Folding at Home running on both the CPU and GPU it tops out pretty high; around 68 degrees or so, which caused me to stop running Folding on my CPU. My G...

Well there's two ways to measure power usage. There's absolute power draw, which is most relevant for systems that spend the overwhelming majority of their time idle. Then there's power per computation. This is where things like teh Core i7 show up, with many reviews showing the power draw of simila...

Good suggestion on removing PCI slot covers, however that case comes with slot covers that have holes in them already so i don't think it'll make any difference. The fan thing I can try, i've got a spare scythe karma 80mm floating round that I can use. I'll try that when i'm at home (at work right ...

Just curious, but did you try removing one or more slot covers on the back? I have a Gigabyte 9800GTX+ too and in a tower case, it helped a bit to remove the slot cover of the slot on the heatsink side of the video card. It's something worth experimenting with since it costs nothing and you'll be ab...

Good info to share, thanks!

According to the reviews that I've read, most of them showed that the GTX 275 is faster than the 4890 on average. The high power consumption, worries me. It shows that this card will generate a lot more heat than the 4890. From what I've been reading, that often comes down to if they overclocked th...

120W in load seems kinda low. Maybe they should try a newer benchmark for that, i.e. furmark. Would be interesting to know the actual maximum power consumption. Kind of - for me ATI Tool is the most relevant since it's roughly equal to what the games I play max out at as well as what the most inten...

We're not all rich enough to be able to afford the latest and greatest in expensive hardware. The Q8200 and Q6600 are roughly the same price in the US currently, but I'm not sure about other markets. :?: Q6600: $185 Q8200: $170 Q8300: $190 It's not so much a money question as one of architecture. T...

[quote=XbitLabs]Well, this guide must be intended for deaf computer enthusiasts because if you follow the advice, the card sets the record of producing the highest noise we’ve ever heard in our tests. Over 64dBA at a distance of 1 meter from the system case is too much to be near the computer for ...

The Q6600 has an 8mb cache and a 266mhz FSB, which gave it a high multiplier and thus a lot of overclocking ability if you were willing to put in the time and effort to cool it well. As a 65nm chip, it's always going to draw more power and put out more heat than any of the 45nm chips (Q8/9xxx). Whil...

I agree that computing is moving away from hot CPUs and ATX sized cases, but miniaturization will mean more 60mm, 40mm and (heaven help us) smaller fans. Unless the designers (and consumers) value silence, they will just be making small, low-power and noisy devices! You won't run out of products to...

The Gigabyte is the shortest card too; even my 9800GTX+ is only 8.3" in length. It's still not perfect though; it doesn't exhaust heat out the back of the case, nor do they use full-speed memory on the 1gb model. At least for the GTX+ it's only 2000mhz, as opposed to 2200mhz for the reference design...

Seems like a predictable outcome. Sparkle is the cheapest brand on newegg, and their card is the crappier of the two varieties. It's the longer card, needs two power connectors, and has a loud heatsink. My Gigabyte 9800GTX+ with factory Zalman cooling is loud like a tornado at full speed, but peaks ...

haysdb wrote:Is the ATI client less robust than the NVIDIA client?

That's what I was getting at. Crashes appear far more common when you read the ATI GPU forum. It seems nvidia got the jump on driver reliability.

Still scratching my head! How does looking at the past and complaining about a congress and president who are no longer in power fix a problem that's scheduled to hit us in about 30 years? Military spending is being changed even now, and can always easily be changed. Social Security, medicare, medic...

My points have also gone back to the 4 thousands, sometimes low 5 thousands. I'm still running the 185.20 drivers. My theory? There were and still are some "exceptional" work units. I had one yesterday that drove my GPU temperatures into the 70s and was giving me ~6000 PPD iirc. That same GPU is fo...

I'm still scratching my head here. Defense spending has nothing to do with this - the real problem is that given current trends, it is Social Security, medicare/medicade, and paying interest on the debt which will dwarf everything else before my generation even gets to pull our first S.S. check at a...

Archives are done to be able to see information from a certain point in time. Archives are best done to write-once media, and are common in situations where SEC regulations govern (i.e. show me how much money that trade was for 3 years ago... no, not what someone might have altered on your disk sin...

What a great article! It sounds like confirmation that SSD is the future, but it won't overtake magnetic platters for at least a few more years most likely, which is what everyone had figured anyway. Sounds like that "TRIM" command is also the next big thing for SSD performance and extension of life...

There's a lot of issues with the GPU client. You should go through the messages in the ATI specific issues forum since crashes are common. Try to find someone with a crash situation that sounds similar to yours and see what they did to fix it.

It's obvious that this will not be settled by debate, it needs to be settled by a trial. I think Brittan or Germany should take a leadership role here and try it out for at least 10 years, and if its going well, expand to the whole EU for another 20 years. At that point you're just starting to talk ...

When I was shopping for power supplies, I noticed that almost every single PS has at least 1 out of 10 reviews be an angry customer reporting a total failure. This includes the PC P&C power supplies. Here's the reviews for PC P&C 610 watt power supply . In the first page of 50 reviews, I count 4 tot...

In the days that have passed, it has been brought into question if the 185.20 drivers are producing accurate results or not. Just curious, which version of drivers are you using? Those are really high points from just a pair of cards, wow. My 9800GTX+ has done around 6700 on its best single day in t...