CoffeeFiend

The PCI-e power connector is limited by whichever rail it's hooked up to, so 18A or 22A in this case. There's no way you could push 70A in one of those anyway, the connectors & wires would melt before that. The 70A is the limit of everything that uses 12V on the entire system. Be it from PCI-e power connectors, hard drive power connectors, CPU via its power connectors or the ATX connector, etc.

It means you can draw 18A max on 12V1 and 12V2 (18A each). And then 22A max on 12V3 and 12V4 (22A each). But you can't exceed a power draw of 56A combined between all four. Edit: rewording.

I don't see a single good reason why I'd bother with a Win8 downgrade. The closest thing is faster reboots which would save me perhaps 10 seconds per month (assuming I'm sitting there, waiting for it to boot which is hardly ever the case) They screwed up so many things pretty badly, and I'm not really seeing anything that even remotely makes up for it.The list seems to be all cons, no pros.

That doesn't surprise me at all, even if it's wrong. That's a pretty scumbag move of them... They chose not to listen to customers. Unfortunately for them they won't be able to disregard their sales figures. The sooner Ballmer & Sinofsky are gone the better. Then perhaps we can regain a decent desktop OS and everything else. They can afford a "Vista 2" with Win8 but they just can't screw up Win9 so badly.

I've cleaned up this thread of unnecessary drama. Sorry if some on-topic stuff had to go with it. For the record: we cannot legally share original MS files (from Windows or anything else, be it explorer.exe or whatever else). It's also against the forum rules, and understandably the site owner doesn't like getting DMCA takedown notices in his email. If someone doesn't like it, they can feel free to provide a better solution (while remaining legal of course). Constructive criticism and on-topic discussion is more than welcome as usual. Let's keep it at that please.

i.e. it needs a different interface for touch/tablet usage than it does for desktop/laptop usage. Someone should let Ballmer and Sinosfky know... Even the Xbox360 is turning into a product I'm not sure I want of. They're metro-izing the interface (I prefer the other console's menus), they've added ads to the dashboard (yep, you bought an ad delivery system), and you also need to pay $10/month for the privilege of online gaming or even just to be able to use Netflix's services (while their competitor's consoles don't charge anything for any of that) . There's really only a couple Xbox exclusive games that could possibly attract me (Halo and Gears of War) whereas every other console has so much more. The PS3 has Killzone, Metal Gear Solid, God of War, Uncharted, InFamous, Gran Turismo, LittleBigPlanet, Resistance, etc (and it plays BluRay discs too) and the Wii has all the fun Mario/Zelda/Kirby/Donkey Kong/Metroid/etc games. Microsoft was also the one company that had the least exciting stuff revealed during E3. MS is basically the last company I'd trust my data with. Their online services have always been crappy too.

Someone should let the MS Office team know because it seems fairly obvious to everyone but them. It's pretty darn amazing how MS went from great to complete and utter sh*t in one year. Win8 (Metro, forced tablet UI on desktops, etc). VS2012 (dropping backwards compatibility, being last in C++11 feature support, almost nothing new for .NET devs, etc). MS Office going white-on-white while failing to provide much of a reason to upgrade (and mostly failing on tablets, dropping support for Vista and XP, etc). It also looks like they'll have some legal trouble in the EU. The only product they haven't managed to mess up yet is SQL Server seemingly (2012 is very nice) Meanwhile, the main WP8 OEM will have spent half of its current cash reserves by year end (they've lost €1.41 billion last quarter) because their phones don't sell. Some even think it's time for them to call it quits. Their shares went down 84% since they switched to Windows Phone and they're laying off 10 000 people now. And with the iPhone 5 coming out this fall... Time for some new management already.

You'll have to add a case to that list, thanks to the proprietary Dell cable for the stuff in front of the case... I'll have to look again. Edit: I can't seemingly find any decent benchmarks. There's this one but that's only games. In 100% of them it's slower than the i3, and in all but one case it's slower than the X4 645, even though you said it should be faster than it... Honestly, I'd rather have 2 super fast cores (which is always fast) then twice as many cores that are half as fast (only performs on par with the dual core when the load uses all 4 cores which unfortunately isn't all that often)

Nope. His motherboard is AM2 (not AM2+), so no AM3, AM3+ or FM1 CPUs supported. At least if he had a AM2+ socket then he could still buy a new AM3 CPU from a store. That wouldn't be a bad option for a cheap yet meaningful upgrade.His only option right now is the used market (and sellers seem to want $60 for a X2 6000+ with no HSF which is more than it's worth) Then again, I wouldn't necessarily pick the Athlon X4 631 as a clear cut winner over an i3 after seeing most benches (the i3 is definitely more expensive though) In fact, I'm considering buying a pair of AMD Athlon II X4 645's ($80/ea) to upgrade a pair of older PCs with Athlon X2's that are mostly used for light tasks like web browsing. $80 for a new CPU (keeping existing mobo and DDR2) vs an i3 + mobo + DDR3 (over $200 per PC) makes it a pretty simple choice to make considering the performance will be adequate either ways. By the time the Athlon II X4 645 won't cut it anymore for light-ish usage the i3 will be very outdated too.

I never claimed that ASUS was a "value" OEM either I'll typically buy the ASUS or Gigabyte boards if there's a good deal on them (which ends up being most of the time) but as you can see in my previous parts list (or my previously mentioned Zotac mini ITX mobo), I'm not married to a particular OEM. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, and it changes with every generation of new products. As you can see in benches that were out at the time, you'd get a very modest boost from that upgrade (the main thing you'd get from it is not speed but extra responsiveness, being a dual core i.e. the PC not "locking up" when a core is pegged at 100%). Google easily finds some people who managed to get some faster CPUs working in that Dell but you might have to search pretty hard to find the perfect AM2 chip for an upgrade (it seemingly doesn't accept AM3 CPUs which is the "oldest" thing you can buy new today). If the upgrade is dirt cheap then sure, why not. But I wouldn't sink too much money in an old machine either as an i3 upgrade would provide a huge boost for not too much money (relatively speaking) either. DDR2 RAM is pretty expensive too these days (twice the price of DDR3)

Which part? Where I say I got good support from Gigabyte and ASUS? Yep, it is anecdotal evidence, just like his. I meant that he might have had a bad experience with them before, but there's millions of us on other other side of the fence who haven't. And that no company would get so big with bad support, or that they wouldn't care if they provided bad support thus damaging their reputation and ending up losing their large share of a lucrative market. And as you said, ASrock and ASUS are the same group, and it would be kind of funny if the "prestige" division (ASUS) offered lesser support than their "value" division (ASRock) I'm not saying the same thing at all: I said I don't like ASRock products as much (as in, not a real fan of their actual mobo designs -- call it nitpicking), not that they're a bad product, but it's rather a personal preference, so I'd pick another OEM first. Whereas he claims that both of the most popular OEMs, which also happen to have fantastic reviews everywhere (and countless millions of happy customers) have poor support, without providing anything to back it up. That's something else entirely. Then again, if someone has a spare ASRock X79 Extreme11 taking up space, I'm taking donations Seven x16 slots (two PLX chips!), 8 DIMM slots, 14 SATA ports (8 actually being SAS ports on a fancy LSI logic controller), 8 USB3 ports,etc. It's quite a beast, but it'll be incredibly pricey too.

That wasn't really the intent (not in a bad way at least) but just to point out that the current AMD offerings very much suck compared to Intel's (with some explanations to back it and perhaps help him make his choice too) At the beginning, Intel was clearly the best (the NEC v20 was alright though). Then many years later, AMD had some decently priced alternatives (Athlon era), and then they peaked with the Athlon64. That was a far better CPU than the P4 (architecture, speed, etc), but Intel basically surpassed it with the Core 2 Duo. AMD then released some quad cores that were cheaper and that were a good alternative to the Core 2 Quads but that only lasted for so long. Beyond that point AMD's offerings are extremely deceiving. Their current desktops CPUs seem to be all about having a very large number of useless cores (more cores sitting idle 100% of the time, not helping performance but just increasing your power bill) while having a deceivingly low single threaded perf (making everything run much slower) which is completely the inverse of what most people want or need. And they seem to be focusing on super slow APUs in the mobile world, like laptops with ghetto Fusion E-350 CPU (APU) that's actually slower than an old Intel Pentium D 3GHz from 2005 (there are i3's that are more than 6x faster!) Even on the server side, they're focusing on the same tons of slow cores approach, where their 16 core monster is barely faster than their previous 12 core beast (and even sometimes slower). That misguided strategy of just adding more which remind us of shavers (now with 17 blades!) will only last them so long. They desperately need to increase IPC, reduce cache latency, reduce the penalty of a branch misprediction, etc. That's anecdotal evidence at best. It comes across as baseless accusations out of asrock fanboy-ism or whatever. I've had great support from both ASUS and Gigabyte (even smaller players like Zotac recently), and I'm hardly the only one. Their products are very solid and reliable, and they are top rated on every site with reviews as well. There's nothing wrong with liking ASRock (I'm just not a big fan of their products myself) but to say the two biggest both suck is preposterous.

The specs of the RunCore Pro VI are alright, 562MB/s read (max) 389MB/s write (max) which is alright. There are tons of SSDs around those speeds, including the $65 60GB OCZ Agility 3 at 525MB/s read 475MB/s write. It comes down to pricing mainly, and availability (seemingly you can't buy RunCore products in North America) Edit: comparing based on MemoryC's prices: 120GB RunCore Pro V 560 MB/s read, 525 MB/s write, 50K random 4KB write IOPS, $131.44 + international shipping from Ireland (and customs clearance)... Mushkin Enhanced Chronos MKNSSDCR120GB 2.5" 120GB at newegg (free shipping) 550 MB/s read, 515 MB/s write, 90K random 4KB write IOPS, $89.99

ASUS and Gigabyte are the best two IMO, but that comes with a slightly higher price tag. But there are other decent OEMs like MSI. Here's my current shopping list for my upgrade (ncix.com): Antec P280 XL-ATX Tower Case Black 3X5.25 2X2.5 6X3.5IN 2X120MM Top 1X120MM Rear Front USB3.0 No PSU $104.99 (nicer case IMO) NCIX Gaming Bundle Deal Intel Core i5 3570K Unlocked CPU & MSI Z77A-G43 DDR3 CrossFire Motherboard $344.99 (great CPU and you essentially get a pretty decent Z77 mobo for $100) G.SKILL F3-12800CL10D-16GBXL Ripjaws X 16GB 2X8GB Kits 240PIN DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 Desktop Memory $98.99 (8GB doesn't cut it for me) Crucial M4 Micron C400 SSD 256GB 2.5IN Solid State Disk Flash Drive SATA3 6Gbps $209.99 (a Samsung 830 would be somewhat nicer, but that's $75 more and not in stock) XFX Radeon HD 6870 900MHZ 1GB 4.2GHZ GDDR5 2xDVI HDMI 2x Mini DisplayPort PCI-E Video Card $174.99 (good enough for my needs, fits my budget -- your GTX 570 gets about 25% higher FPS) (keeping existing 750W 80+ PSU and hard drives, no optical drive, probably the same HSF as you picked), for a total of $933.95 Edit: I don't think thunderbolt is mature enough to bother (drivers and OS, devices availability, etc), and there's far less of an incentive on a desktop (which already has plenty of PCI-e slots and tons of video connectors on nice superfast GPUs)

My guess would be: because nobody else builds nice fast CPUs at the moment. That's *nowhere* near twice the system! For starters, the AMD CPU is a Bulldozer which are very well known not to perform so great (even compared to their older chips like the Phenom II), it uses about 20W more of power idle (and like 100W extra at full load) which translates into real costs (and heat), and the i5 3570K wins universally across all benches, and by quite a margin. For example, if you look at a simple but decent synthetic bench like passmark, you see the FX8120 scored 7078 vs 7942 for the 3570K. Yep, its 8 cores are slower combined than the i5's 4 cores. That essentially means you get twice as many cores, but that each core runs at less than half the speed of the cores in the i5. That's a very, very bad thing: unless you do a handful of very specific tasks like LOTS of video encoding, you'll never use anywhere near 8 cores in the first place. You just get lots of slow cores that always sit idle and still use power. And when the vast majority of simple apps only have one thread the i5 wins big -- it'll run those programs (the CPU bound part of it) twice as fast. In fact, the cheapo dual core i3's win against the FX-8120 in a lot of benchmarks -- every single-threaded benchmark for starters (and then everything that doesn't make use of a lot of threads for heavy processing, like basically all sysmark benches). Even a mid-range i5 from the previous generation wins against the FX-8120 in all benches, and the 3570K is faster than that. In fact, THG places the FX-8120 in the same "category" as the Core 2 Duo E8600, E8500, E8400, E7600 for gaming... So again, too many slow cores = bad (slow, power hungry), half the cores that are more than twice as fast each = MUCH better. 70 watts extra (assuming that's true), at a reasonable 8.5¢/kWh (cheap hydro power like we have here, taxes in) * 70W/1000W * 24h * 365 days = $52 extra on you power bill per year. Assuming a lifetime of 5 years on the machine, that means $250 wasted, for a CPU that's actually much slower! And based on his current location and what Google finds, it seems to be closer to 22¢/kWh there, so that would be $135/year, or $675 wasted over 5 years. Once you factor that extra cost in, it becomes pretty clear what the best pick is: $230 for the much faster i5 3570K or ($170 + $675 extra power used by it over a 5 year usable lifetime) $845 for a much slower AMD CPU. Assuming they were the same speed (which they're not), the AMD CPU would have to cost negative $615 (as in, "here, take this CPU and $600 in cash with it") to be worth buying! It's a mid-end gaming card. Considering he wants to do gaming and that it's the main bottleneck on such a system for gaming, I'd say it's a very good pick. Your card is definitely cheaper (by $100) but when you look at any gaming bench, it really shows too (the FPS are almost half of the GTX 570). Now, the card MagicAndre1981 picked is what I would personally call pricey ($400+). It has better performance for sure, but I'm not personally spending that much on a video card anytime soon. Then again, it's by far the easiest piece to replace years down the road when it's become too slow. I never looked at RunCore SSDs before (don't recall seeing them in any bench either, but either ways newegg/ncix/etc don't sell them) but 64GB is definitely on the small side. Yes, Win7 by itself will fit, but modern apps can be quite large (e.g. 15GB for the Adobe CS6 suite), and modern games (which he wants to play) even more so! The last game I played (Max Payne 3) takes 35GB by itself... A 120GB SSD would be very restricting to me, but with 240GB or 256GB I'd be OK. Either ways, I was looking at building a machine fairly similar to what he picked (same exact CPU, same chipset, same SSD, similar video card, etc -- it's also pretty close to my PC at work). My main gripe with it is the ASrock mobo (I'm not really fond of that OEM but I'm not saying it's junk either, just that I'd pick something else).

I still find it funny. You take things far too seriously. Then again, I'm not actually doing anything like Sinosfsky is (or Ballmer): taking away other people's choices, destroying a great product (their core product/cash cow no less) based on short-sighted and poor analysis of data, pushing for UIs meant for touch devices on touch-less computers, choosing to ignore all feedback when it's overwhelmingly negative, creating a desktop OS that will be "Vista 2" to most people in order to sell tablets and yet still fail spectacularly at that, coming out with confusing and mediocre products that are very rough at the edges (barely what you'd call a "v1" product typically) as their best effort to compete against Apple's highly polished solution (that's also well established and hugely in demand), while coming out with various me-too products (e.g. Azure and Hyper-V), being dead last in markets they pioneered (e.g. tablets and smart phones) and overall always being lagging behind other companies in new products, making it a real pain for developers with ever-changing technology (only to abandon it shortly after), etc.

That's quite possibly the best joke I've ever heard! Well, I'd say it had far more issues than that! It was poorly marketed (typical) and there was seemingly no real product vision. It should have been so much more... It failed to convince typical end users to buy it (it had no real killer feature and did very little besides backups), and it offered way too little for enthusiasts who wanted a real home server. I'm looking forward to the the era following the Win8 fiasco. They'll have their chance to make things right, or lose a big slice of the market. Hopefully new top management will restore some sanity. Apple should show Windows 8 too: "None of this nonsense -- we have a real desktop OS"

In other news, Microsoft abandons Windows Home Server. I guess there must be more money into pushing for their 2nd rate cloud services. Then again WHS was good idea with a a poor execution, which is very typical of MS. Meanwhile, Win8 is likely going to RTM in about a week. Their plan seems to be: alienate users by pushing a inadequate tablet UI on existing desktops to p**s off users and drive them to Macs, offer discounted copies to reduce your revenue (the only people who'll buy it at first are the extremists who would have bought it at $150), making piracy difficult to greatly reduce its market share, then once it has its "Vista 2" reputation well established from people using it on their desktops, release your iPad wannabe platform which will be as popular as the Zune or Windows Phone -- just to create confusion due to CPU incompatibilities (and alienate your business partners by releasing your own hardware in the process). There's no way in hell any business is going to touch it, and developer support (mindshare) for Metro seems to be almost non-existent either. Now they just need to make a poor product demo, where it BSODs or freezes, with almost no information available, and trying to demo hardware that doesn't work. That would be the cherry on top of the fail sundae. Oh, wait... How could possibly any of this go wrong? The only MS news I care for now is the upcoming headline "MS fires incompetent Ballmer and Sonofski". Meanwhile, Apple is working on a smaller iPad that will rival other tablets selling at lower price points (basically Android tablets). It's more portable than a regular iPad and it has all the great software (closer to an iPod touch, with a larger screen which is better suited for apps). It should be released sometime between the back-to-school period and the holidays -- perfect timing and execution as usual The're going to sell crazy amounts of them for sure.

I use it fairly often too. There's just not enough space to pin everything I use on the taskbar. So I pin a few extras in the start menu (expanded to 20 items too) which also gives me access to jump lists in there (unlike Metro). And I also use it to search for stuff fairly often -- stuff which Win8 doesn't find (not without unnecessary extra keystrokes). Instead of improving things a lot like Vista and 7 did, Metro just made starting software (the main interaction we have with the OS on daily basis) and getting to things harder.

It totally is. Now try having a drink every time he says app

New monthly stats and time for an update. We've had Win8 betas since last September (DP, then the CP 4 months ago and the RP a month ago) so almost 10 months ago and its market share is still at 0.18% (or 0.09% according to w3counter) The first Win7 beta was released in early January 2009.10 months later (Nov 2009) its market share was 4.06% which is a bit over 22 times higher. Even if you're willing to give Win8 a 9 month advantage and count the release preview as the first and only beta (which is absurd in itself), then it still loses to Win7: Win 8 RP is a month old, and sits at 0.18%, whereas Win7 at 1 month old (Feb 2009) was at 0.22%... By the time Win 7 RC1 was out (May 2009) i.e. 2 months before release, it was at 0.57%. Meanwhile, Win8 is at 0.18% and according to many sources (wzor, winunleaked.info, etc) it's mere days away from being RTM. it'll seemingly be annouced at MGX, which is May 17-20. Meanwhile, the bad reviews just keep pouring in: Windows 8 tablet reviewers give thumbs-down to Windows 8 on PCs or 'No surprises' in Microsoft Surface tablet software Edit: also worth reading: Windows 8 Will Live or Die Based on The Start Screen They've also made pirating significantly harder (no more shared keys like all pirates currently use) and they're also going to make licensing stricter for Technet subcribers. That's only going to slow down adoption of the OS further (not that it's worth using, even for free!) Meanwhile, I keep seeing articles praising the new Apple stuff... especially about photography (and Photoshop CS6) on the new retina display (5.1 megapixel, LED-backlit IPS LCD, great color calibration and gamut, etc). I've wanted such a hi-res display for years and they finally made it true. Yes, they're expensive laptops, but not by a whole lot more vs the same class of "business" laptops (not that I need it), especially if you add to that the price of a similar display. I mean, even the $1400 Dell Ultrasharp 30" (and various other screens that cost up to $3000 like the HP MD301C4) only has 4 megapixels! That's good enough that I can carry it along with my Wacom tablet in a laptop bag and do serious photo work anywhere, without needing large LCDs screens sitting on a desk.

That was great! Also, this is pretty much spot-on:

That's the main thing I'd blame them for (and *so* many others!) It's not exactly hard to write either, especially if you reuse the messages you typed when you committed the new source code into revision control. Then again I'd expect some announcement when they switch major versions (for things like new features -- change in OS support would typically be listed in there too)

It's definitely "for Windows" i.e. not OS/2 or VMS or Linux or BeOS or CP/M or whatever else. They didn't say "all versions of Windows", but either ways "XP and newer" (anything that's 10 years old or newer) covers ~99.9% of Windows users (market shares: Win2k 0.08%, NT 0.04%, win9x 0.01%) which IMO makes it good enough to claim that too. I mean, by some people's criterias here, even if it supported all the way down to Win9x, you could say it's not "for Windows" because it doesn't support all the way down to Win 3.x and even older (that's still Windows!) People who use operating systems that more than 10 years old and have a sub 0.1% market share have to deal with their choices, and they can't blame people for not adhering to their own personal definition of "all versions of Windows". You could say that "all" means "every common version" (that's good enough of a definition for most people really), or otherwise all the way from Win 1.01 (circa 1985) to Win8 (2012) which would be the the most "factual" definition (all of them are supported with zero exceptions -- not that it's physically possible due to 16/64 bit incompatibilities), but definitely not something in-between, hand picked by someone based on their own particular OS choice! Is that a big determining factor? I mean, MD5 and SHA1 hashes are very common (enough to have written my own specialized tool to cover my specific needs), you sometimes see SHA2 (256), and CRC32 used to be popular (and is still used in sfv files) but the rest of them? I've never seen them used for checking file integrity ever. I wouldn't list this as much of a desired feature. If anything I'd say it's just visual clutter as it makes you look through too much text for almost no reason. I'd consider many other factors way before, like hashing speed, several key features (e.g. hashing entire folders at once, making lists of duplicate files based on hashes, how good the UI is, configuration options, import/export options, etc), how stable and bug-free it is, pricing, etc.

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