I'm looking for the most portable laptop that can still run Civilization 5 acceptably, and I'd prefer to buy sooner than later.
It appears that Sandy Bridge's integrated GPU is enough for my needs. Given SNB's excellent battery life potential, I'm trying to find the smallest SNB laptop...
Scali has prepared a patch for NVIDIA's "Endless City" tessellation demo that disables the VendorID check so that DX11 Radeons can run it.
Does anyone feel like trying this out? Should be interesting to see how AMD fares...
I've got a cabling situation where I would like a 4-pin power connector that connects perpendicular to the wires, but I can't find anywhere that sells these in Canada. I'm considering trying to hack apart a regular connector but I'm not sure there is an easy way.
Any ideas?
My Deathadder was comfortable, but the left mousebutton has started to report double-clicks when I'm single clicking and the mouse wheel needs to be pressed very firmly to register a click. I'm rather disappointed in the build quality because I found the shape pretty nice.
For my next mouse I...
I've got a rather small case that I'm planning on watercooling (again) and so flexibility is a concern. I also like the look of compression fittings a lot more than the plastic barbs I currently have. I'm looking at 3/8" primoflex pro LRT because some independent tests show it to be a strong...
I've got a Lian-Li A05, which has fairly limited room for PSUs and cables. Right now I've got an Antec Signature SG850, which is a nice unit but I'm finding it extremely frustrating to manage my cables in there. The SG850 is long enough that I can't cleanly tuck the cables behind the hard drive...
So Sandy Bridge will support Intel's new instruction set, Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX). Even AMD's Bulldozer will be able to support AVX. Maybe I just don't know enough about instructions and how they are used to increase performance, but I'm having a hard time seeing how these will be used...
Anybody who's been following CES this year knows that 3D is the major feature that is being talked about almost-everywhere. I know that not everybody likes the 3D effect and that some feel that this just another 3D revival that will die out soon. Personally I love 3D so far, and would love to...
I'm looking towards buying a motherboard that supports SATA 6gbps with the intention of eventually running two SATA 6gbps SSDs in RAID0 when they become available. So far as I know, all SATA 6gbps motherboards on the market use either the marvel 88SE9128 or 88SE9123 chip to provide SATA 6gbps...
I recently bought an HD4870 and for the most part it's been very pleasing.
However, occasionally I will attempt to start a game and I will get an error such as "Unable to create Direct3D."
Once this occurs I can further verify that DirectX is not working by launching dxdiag and running the...
Howdy guys. I'm normally a pretty careful user when it comes to not opening suspicious attachments and not installing every web plugin etc. I run AVG8 Free and I'm behind a linksys router. Running WinXP MCE
Unfortunately, I've recently noticed some odd behavior. Namely, when I perform a...
I'm not sure why but since switching to an HD4870 1GB, AtiTool runs extremely slowly and is unusable, especially since ending the program via Task Manager (since it's too slow to close normally) seems to consistently hard-lock my computer. So I'm looking for an alternative program to check for...
I know it's not exactly the newest or the best paste out there, but I've had a tube of ASC for several years now and haven't run out yet. However, the last couple times I've used it, I noticed that it comes out of the tube in two distinct phases, a white liquid and a clear liquid. Funny that...
Hey,
I recently had a hardware problem, and for a moment I thought my hard drive had died. Fortunately, that was not the case and the hard drive is fine. Yet the experience reminded me how foolish I am for not doing regular backups or anything.
I've got about 400GB of data that I'd like...
- lapped E6600 on a P35-DS3L in an A05.
- lapped TRUE using AS Ceramique paste. Fan at 7V.
- 3.15GHz at 1.45vcore
- CoreTemp is reporting 80-85°C during load. Idling at 72°C
What the heck? Shouldn't the TRUE be doing a much better job? I hadn't checked the temps for a long long time and...
I'm running an Audigy2 ZS on winxp. A friend had purchased an Xtreme Music a year and a half ago and tried running it on Vista, which of course didn't work at the time. Frustrated, my friend has stuck to using onboard, and the X-Fi has sat in its box all this time. Anyway, I recently asked him...
Looks like OCZ is wasting no time. link.
I wonder if they've managed to resolve the issues with sustained writes that the first Core Series had. If prices have fallen also, these drives will be very tempting.
I guess I don't really have a handle on just how inferior the 945G chipset is. Would I able to play older games like Painkiller, Mafia, or Max Payne at 1024x600? I'm thinking of getting an MSI wind and I've got plenty of old games I never got around to finishing.
Okay, maybe those games...
So I bought a new system drive and am in the process of reinstalling windows and everything. It would be super nice to be able to keep my old hard drive hooked up and copy things over. IE, I'd like to be able to select at boot which hard drive to boot from.
However, on the DS3L the boot order...
I bought the Corsair HX620 because
1) The cheap POS mushkin PSU I bought turned out to be worth the tiny amount I paid
2) It was the quietest power supply at the time according to spcr.
However, since I bought my lian-li A05 I've been able to hear some odd noises that I couldn't hear in my...
So, I made a pretty amateur mistake: I bought something without doing any research behind it. I noticed the high platter density and low cost so I bought a samsung F1 1TB drive. Worked just fine out of the box, no errors during formatting. It's FAST and it's QUIET. I was pleased enough to let...
I thought only burn-in only occurred with plasma, crt, or other phosphor based displays because the phosphors degrade with use. However, I'm clearly seeing burn-in on a Dell 2007FPb A05 LCD monitor at my work, although it's only really noticable on grey backgrounds. I'm really just curious what...
I just replaced my watercooling loop with a TRUE because I was tired of watercooling. On first power-up, however, my Scythe "Kaze Jyuni" fan wasn't really spinning. (is there a limit on what kind of fan the motherboard CPU_FAN plug will power?) so I unplugged it so I could put it on +12v from my...
I've read the FAQ here and it says that my XP license is tied to my motherboard. However, I've had two motherboard failures in the past year and a half, and I've been able to reactivate windows each time without fuss - shouldn't I have to call up MS and explain that the boards failed? I'm...
I've got a matrox videocard that has two DVI ports, but I'd really like to have three monitors going. My machine also has a VGA port on the motherboard, and I was wondering if it's possible to have both adaptors enabled.
The device manager shows the integrated chipset but the device status...
It seems these days more television networks are willing to release content on the web at no cost. Take south park, for example - I recently read you can watch every episode released at no charge...
The problem is that I live in Canada and a lot of this content is limited to residents of the...
Not sure if this is the right forum to discuss this, but I think it might be a networking issue of sorts.
I have a site with two servers, we'll call them "serverA" and "serverB", and there is a folder common to both computers I'd like to have synchronized, so I thought I'd use DFS...
I've got a lot of Oblivion mods and it's starting to kill my framerate with a 8800GTS640MB. I need more than 512MB of video memory, but according to Anandtech the two best solutions for oblivion are both 512MB (3870x2 and 8800GT SLi). I know the 8800GT comes in 1GB variety, but I only have one...
Every once in a while, my sound card stops working. Going into Control Panel -> Sounds and Audio Devices brings up a prompt saying that I can "enable" the audio device but I have to restart afterwards. It happens spontaneously from time to time and it gets bothersome.
Sound card is a...
Okay, so at home whenever I go Start->Run then type "cmd" to open a command shell, the directory defaults to 'C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\' and that's annoying.
At work, the directory defaults to 'M:\' (a network drive I don't even use) - that's even more annoying.
I know...
I've got an odd issue with my P5K.
Only some of the SATA ports work at all. I first noticed that I was losing connection to one of my hard drives and thought it was dying. I tried switching which port the hard drive was on, and presto it came back. I double-checked by trying that malfunctioning...
So this was my first time watercooling. I've stuffed a dual-rad loop into an A05. There's a 120x240 rad up top and a 120x120 rad on the rear intake. I've put the reservoir in the niche behind the hard drives and left the pump on the case floor on some soft cloth (to damp vibes). I hadn't really...
I recently switched motherboards and ever since I've had troubles with one of my HDDs. The drive will spontaneously fail to respond. Everything will be working fine then all of a sudden Windows doesn't see it anymore. After a restart, things are usually good again, but not always.
It's becoming...
I was casually perusing the intertubes and passed through the AVS forum. There's a sticky regarding bias lighting.
From what I gather, the idea is to put a neutral 6500k lamp behind your display. The added illumination helps reduce eye strain and tricks your eyes into seeing more contrast in...
It seems that I occasionally lose internet access on my gaming computer. The other computers on my home network don't suffer this problem. I've tried pinging my default gateway and everything seems good (<1 ms, 0% packet loss) but neither FF or IE will load pages, Foobar2k won't connect to web...
I'm not expecting miracles out of this chip anymore. It's stable at 385MHz FSB (x9=3.4GHz) with 1.45vcore set in BIOS, which CPU-Z shows as 1.31V during load. I've been considering pushing the Vcore higher since I still have a little bit of thermal headroom. I've heard that I shouldn't push past...
I had to remove the backplate from a dead motherboard (so I could return it), and it wasn't exactly easy because the foam pads were extremely sticky. I ended up prying the backplate off with a screwdriver, and in the process the foam pads got torn apart.
I got a replacement board so it's time...
I guess I fried my P5B-E. Only a few weeks after my warrantee expired too :(
My local store carries the P5KSE but not the DS3L. Is there a big enough difference to warrant buying online?
I upgraded from a big typhoon in a P180 to watercooling in an A05. Of course the first thing I did was run Orthos. Temps are great but after 5 minutes I had an error. Tried again and the whole rig crashed and rebooted itself. I'm running stock on a E6600.
I'm not sure what could be causing...
I was trying to undervolt some yates to 7v, testing it out on my mushkin 550W PSU. As soon as I connected the fan's black wire to the molex's red wire (thus creating the 7V between 12V and 5V) the unit turned off and won't turn back on.
The Mushkin unit was very cheap and rated poorly at...