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Just thought I'd see if anyone knows of anything like what I'm looking for or has some thoughts on how to get it made without spending an arm and a leg. I own the house and this is for my "permanent" home office -- probably be here and use it for 20 years, so if it's a couple grand it's a...

Once upon a time I got all excited about 43" 4k monitors becoming reasonably affordable and went and got one. That was about 4 years ago. I've always been a junkie for real estate. I run a couple side screens in portrait along with the 43", and before that I had a 3x27" 1440p surround setup...

I've been looking around for a case that's larger than ITX but doesn't weigh a ton. Finding a 10lb case isn't hard, but I'm wondering if anyone still makes all aluminum mATX or ATX cases? Bonus if it has a handle, but if not tossing it in a bag will do. Have any suggestions? I'm ok with an...

I'm looking to finally do the network overhaul I've been thinking about for a while, so I need to figure out what equipment to buy. I've been looking around but don't have much of an idea what's good or what all is out there. I need 10gig for a programming project I want to do. I'm also...

I'm looking for a pair of headphones for my dad for Christmas. Yep, he plays computer games at 68. Not the twitchy fast paced stuff but last time he mentioned a game he was playing Skyrim again. At any rate he likes the idea of a pair of wireless headphones just to get rid of the wire. The...

I've been thinking about upgrading the CPU in my old rig for a while (socket 2011, i7-3820, 64GB ram) but couldn't make up my mind between an 8 or 12 core Xeon. The 12 core E5-2697 is clocked lower but would be a little better for work stuff. Then yesterday I tried the Newegg shuffle for the...

I'm looking for a new KVM switch. I'm kind of of the fence between dual head and single monitor. I can always just get a straight DP switch for the second screen, and I think I might like to be able to switch them independently. I currently only need to control 2 machines, though I'd consider...

I managed to land one of those shiny new NVidia cards, so now I'm looking to see what it can do. The CoD game that came with it isn't my thing. I mostly play RPGs and strategy games, but like adventure and puzzle games once in a while and I'm kind of in the mood for one. Anyone have any...

Short version: Are Cooler Master Silencio fans any good? Looking mostly for quiet and durability. Long version: I'm slowly working on a new machine for my 67yo father for Christmas. He's using an Ivy Bridge i5. I think it's a 3570k, though I'm sure he's never overclocked it. So far all I...

I'm looking for a new laptop for a friend. She has a work issued Mac, but wants a PC too. It will be used for general office type stuff, web browsing, etc., so no need for fancy graphics. The catch is she's hard on hardware. Her Dell Inspiron (Nehalem/Westmere era i5) has held up pretty...

I'm looking for a 1080p display around 27-32" that would mostly be used as a TV but can also serve as a monitor and is easy to move around, fits in a car, etc. I'm thinking I'm looking for a TV since it needs to have a tuner & speakers. 1080p because 720p monitors make me gag & 27-32" for...

Anyone else running Infiniband at home? I just got my DDR Infiniband network & systems set up to the point where I'm mostly happy with them. I still have to try out NFS & iSCSI over RDMA (remote direct memory access), but everything else seems to be working pretty well. As far as...

I picked up a couple of 16 core, quad socket F machines from work recently. One's a Barcelona machine with 2.3GHz 8356s and the other has 2.4GHz Shanghai 8378s in it. Both have 32GB ram. I don't have much use for them at the moment but how could I resist a couple of quads? So I think I'll do...

I was at the mall this afternoon and wandered into the Apple store to check out the retina display on the MacBooks Pros. At first I was just plain irritated with the touch pad. I had to press way too hard to get it to do anything. My iPhone just does what I tell it, but with the MBP it was...

I'm looking for some sort of free/cheap web page design tool to do some prototyping with. I can write HTML by hand no problem, but I'd like something that will let me play around with different looks and layouts with a bit less hassle. In the past I've used Dreamweaver at work, but $400 is a...

I think the HD in my laptop may be about to die, so it's disk shopping time. Machine: Toshiba Tecra M7 tablet, 2.0GHz Core Duo, 80GB 7200rpm HD, 3.25/4GB ram (32-bit proc...) It'll do just fine until I finish grad school next spring. The drive will probably outlive the machine, but I'll...

Ok, first my question so you don't have to read all the background: I'm looking for a high power 120mm exhaust fan that scales down well with a fan controller, and a decent fan controller to control it. 120x38mm is fine & probably preferred over 120x25mm. Ideally I'd like a 5+ channel fan...

Do they put a death clock in these things or something? Well, I doubt it, but it seems like that sometimes. Every drive I've bought new either runs until I decide to throw it out, dies within a month or two of purchase, is DOA, or goes within a year after the warranty expires. I've bought a...

I need a tiebreaker for a vid card purchase. The cards I'm interested in (GTX260 216) come with Far Cry 2, COD5, or both. I hear Far Cry 2 sucks due to being repetitive & having a lot of "fetch" missions if I remember right. I'm not a big shooter fan, but here are my favorites: Call of Duty 1...

I'm looking to upgrade my video card from a 7900GTX. I'm a full time law student and don't really game while I'm in school, so this is basically an upgrade just for this summer. By the time next summer rolls around, anything I buy will be old, so I don't want to spend a lot of $. Basically I...

I've had my head purposefully buried in the sand for a while as far as hardware goes. Thinking about hardware makes me want to buy hardware & play with it, which is just annoying since I'm a full time law student and have to watch my budget. DDR2 is stupid cheap now, and I'm going to upgrade...

I'm tired of sitting at my desk reading and taking notes on my reading for school. I'd like to be able to sit in my recliner while reading and taking notes. Naturally this calls for a hardware solution. I think the best solution is a new TV and a wireless keyboard & pointing device (I'll...

I just retired the pile of old SCSI & FC-AL drives in my file server box and replaced them with a pair of 1TB SATAs I intend to run in a mirror. In the past I've just used Linux software raid for mirrors, which worked fine. Is there any reason to use NVRaid (NForce 4, S393 A64 3200+)? It...

I'm not sure what the hell is going on around here, but the last couple weeks I've been getting hit with a couple of short, sudden power glitches a week. The power suddenly goes off, then comes right back on. Every time it happens my server reboots, which is getting really annoying. I've...

My server box has gone through 2 mainboard/proc combos in a month, both due to hardware defects. I'd been running a dual P3 1GHz setup for about 3 years, when one day the clip on an Intel retail sink just snapped off. It might still work (P3s are supposed to have some sort of thermal...

Just after 5:00 today I heard some sort of sharp crack out of the corner by my server box. I thought I'd just knocked something over at first, but then all of a sudden my network drive just quit working. I opened up the box and found this: One of the retention clips just snapped clean off &...

I'm a complete noob regarding Windows firewall software. While I've had a firewall for years, I've always used a Linux box as a firewall. The Linux box protects the rest of my network & I just disable the firewall on machines behind it. Since up until now I've only had desktops (well...

Ok, so I've searched and didn't see anything that looked likely. My apologies if this is more appropriate to the Mobile Computing forum, though it is NVidia video specific. I'm just curious if it's possible to soft mod a Quadro NVS 110M laptop video chipset into some sort of GeForce Go...

After finishing college with a CS degree & working in IT for 8 years as a Java developer I've finally taken the lappy plunge in style (to the tune of about $3000). Bloody expensive, but anything less than a dual core & 2GB ram sucks for J2EE development. Up until now I've been a monster...

I've finally gotten around to getting a KVM switch. Damn I've needed one of these things for years. No more screwing around with extra keyboards & mice or re-plugging video cables to work on another system or my server box. Here's my (slightly fucked up) setup: 19" CRT -> Main Rig...

I'm heading home for Thanksgiving tomorrow and my Aunt's family is coming along with a couple of my cousins. If I remember right a 15yo girl and a 13yo boy. Now, my parents, being empty nesters, are rather short on entertainment equipment. I've got this PS2 I inherited when my brother died...

Ok, so I had a random thought and felt like sharing. For a while ATI had this "first digit = DX version" thing going on. Well, sort of. Hindsight being clearer than foresight and a lot clearer than whatever marketing comes up with, I figure I'll renumber them. Just for fun, mind you. And...

I just built a basic rig as an X-mas present for my sister-in-law's mom and younger (13) sister out of a mix of new stuff and spare parts. Her mom isn't a gamer, and AFAIK her sister is only really interested in The Sims 2. I didn't want to stick them with an AGP system, but at the same time I...

Anyone have a clue when these chips will be available & how much they'll cost? I know they're out already, but so far they've apparently only been found in OEM machines. I'd like to use one in a machine I'm going to build for a relative as a 939 A64 will blow the budget. If they don't come...

I'm considering setting up my sister-in-law's parents and kid (13 yo) sister with a rig for x-mas. I've got all the parts except for a mobo, ram, CPU, and XP Home unless I decide to toss in a DVD burner. Normally this would be easy, but I can't find any benchmarks or reviews of NVidia's new...

I haven't bought myself a new hard drive in a couple of years. SCSI drives being rather pricey, I decided to give refurbs a try and so far so good. A couple of years ago I picked up a 10 pack of 18GB 10k rpm FC-AL drives off eBay for $200. Then last October I bought a pair of 36GB 15k.3s...

I've got a dual Opteron machine that currently has 2x1GB PC2700 on CPU0 from my previous Athlon MP rig. It looks like it should work fine in theory, but has anyone tried running PC3200 on one CPU and PC2700 on the other?

I got a Palm Treo for work a couple of months ago mostly so I could run ssh on it & fix server problems without having to go find a computer. Anyone know of any good games for the thing? I'm new to the whole Palm thing. I stuck a 1GB memory card in it so I could use it as an MP3 player, so...

Argh! This blasted board won't recognise a PCI graphics card. wtf? If I set the primary video on the bios to PCI I still get the AGP card. If I remove the AGP card I get no video and the machine doesn't boot up. Oddly enough it works fine in Windows as a 2nd adapter, but I can't get it...