teqguy

Regseeker is bloated and loves to remove entires it shouldn't remove.

I could care less where or whom it came from... I would discredit it even if it came from major LCD manufacturers. The fact remains that it's a bad idea to exert any pressure on the LCD panel.

This seems bogus to me, considering the liquid crystals are sandwiched between polarized panels that are very susceptible to cracking. Exerting any pressure on them isn't worth the risk of fixing a dead pixel.

I don't know about you, but 18MB of ram with one page open, sans skins and extensions seems a little hefty to me. Both of those seem rather frivolous to me, considering I don't get much spam and signing up for websites is at most a two minute process.

This usually tends to happen when either there's a problem with bandwidth saturation or misconfigured routing tables. The answer to your problem might be what the two of you are doing when these disconnections happen. Are you using the same software at the same time?

One more thing to add: remember to use them sparingly. Thermal paste is only supposed to act like a micro-filler for any imperfections in the heatsink, so a thick layer is unnecessary and might even hinder your performance. Furthermore, people make the mistake of thinking "It's pure silver paste, silver has higher thermal resistance than copper, therefore applying a lot of it should help", but as I mentioned above, there's a penalty in thermal transience among different elements. Granted, this penalty is far less with silver to copper than if you were going from aluminum or nickel to copper, but elemental purity could still prove to outperform Arctic Silver. As for unreal's comment, is it just me or does Ceramique tend to get gummy over time?

Here's a neat trick I use: Screw a thumbscrew into one of the gold screw standoffs for a completely tool-free setup. Just make sure you screw the thumbscrew in more tightly than you would screw it into the motherboard, so you don't end up being unable to unscrew it later... or you could do what I did and use JB Weld compound so they become one screw.

To quote the thread starter: "Editing videos is by far the heaviest stuff I'm doing on my computer so any power boost is welcome." First of all, Prime is one application... and it's not even in the same category of interest being discussed. Second, core affinity is an entirely different animal than thread affinity. Core affinity applies to load balancing, while thread affinity applies to multithreading and SMP. Third, while it seems adequate that the software is actually aware of a second processor/core, performance would be better if the operating system was aware of it and could actually put it to good use. Actually, SMP has been around long before that, but that's beside the issue. The fact of the matter is, software that can take advantage of multithreading and SMP has been available on both an open source and consumer level for a long time... a lot of which deals with multimedia tasks, such as video editing and encoding. So, to reaffirm my original point, "upgrading" from a dual core Athlon to a single core Opteron, despite cache size and clock frequency, will end up being a downgrade in tasks like these.

Better yet, use uTorrent and save yourself the trouble. BitComet is a widely banned client for its ability to make private torrents available in DHT, thus allowing the torrent to be made public.

You're better off using a tool like NiBiTor to edit the bios that came with your card.

Well, that leaves you with one of two options: Remove the thermal pads and use a dab of Arctic Silver or Ceramique between the memory and the base. Cut off the area of the base that makes contact with the memory and use ramsinks(I recommend Swiftech's due to their high density). In either case, I would definitely recommend the Silencer over the V-1U any day. Oh... and for additional cooling efficiency, you can always duct the Silencer from an intake fan and have its airflow completely auxillary to the rest of the case.

Oh... then that's not possible without installing a diode. However, I would advise against doing this unless you attach it to a heatsink that's larger than the memory. If you try to sandwich it between the ram and a heatsink, you'll basically eliminate the heatsink's capacity of cooling the memory.

It sounds more like a tool to record or write macros. For example, say you wanted to create a bunch of disks with different names, but don't want to spend time changing the disk properties between writes. The macro would edit this property, initialize the write, and then all you would have to do manually is just pop in your disk.

While it's always nice to have more memory to play with, the fact of the matter is that current software simply doesn't take advantage of it... as is the case with high bandwidth interfaces, high bandwidth memory, dual core processors, and the extended 64bit instruction set. Even with the case of high end games, the average video memory usage is about 40-90MB, as textures are temporarily cached and then flushed.

Why you would want or need to have 40 Firefox and 40 Internet Explorer windows open is beyond me.... Oh, and not to nitpick, but that wallpaper's color scheme doesn't match the theme at all.

The primary reason for overheating is not the fact that the heatsink is inefficient, but rather that the ambient temperature isn't low enough to allow the heatsink to be effective. Ensure that you have at least one intake fan and one exhaust fan(the power supply fan doesn't count), and that there's enough clearance at the front and back of your case for airflow. Taking the side panel off is a temporary solution, but it's not as effective as air passing in a linear fashion through the case.

CCleaner is probably your best bet, as it not only cleans the registry(safely, might I add), but also temporary files. EasyCleaner would be my second choice, because it's relentless when it comes to hunting down unnecessary keys. Finally, although it's no longer free, JV16 PowerTools is always a favorite for cleaning the entire system.

It's an additional 512KB of L2 cache... and when you consider you're working with files that are hundreds of megabytes in size, that additional 512KB won't make as much difference as going to a faster storage medium to read and write to. I've yet to see that option available in Windows without the aid of a third party tool, such as the one offered by Tom's Hardware. Actually, with a PCI card, you're limited to the same 60MB/s average a hard drive has. SATA or PCIe would be better solutions, but even then you're stuck at 150MB/s or 500MB/s, respectively. In comparison, the slowest DDR memory available running in dual channel mode will get you about 3.4GB/s of theoretical bandwidth, while the fastest memory currently tops off at nearly 12GB/s. Not to mention, the latency is a lot less going from ram to the processor, instead of from ram to an onboard controller(to translate the ram modules to 'x' interface), to another onboard controller, to the southbridge, northbridge, and then finally the processor.

Actually, unless you specifically select that you want to use a multiprocessor hardware abstraction layer, the default HAL(ACPI Uniprocessor) will be installed and remain installed until you manually change it. Simply displaying multiple processors in Device Manager is not enough to "acknowledge" that the system has multiple processors AND is actually managing them properly. Windows does not provide an option of doing this, nor do many people even understand what thread affinity is, let alone how to set it. You don't need additional hardware to make a ramdrive, so I don't see where you're factoring in the added expense. Microsoft provides a tool to make a ramdrive, or you can use a graphical tool such as this: http://superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php if you want to manage it easily. To reaffirm my point, the benefit of a ramdrive in tasks such as encoding is to eliminate hard drive I/O entirely, which slows down the process tremendously. In any case, switching from an X2 to an Opteron will end up being a downgrade.

Let me get this straight... you want to upgrade from a 2.2Ghz X2 to a 2Ghz or 2.2Ghz Opteron? I don't know if you realize this, but video editing and encoding benefit more from thread parallelization and load balancing than just raw clock speed. You can overclock an Opteron to your heart's content and it won't be able to equate to the performance you'd get if you had an encoder that supported SMP, SS3, and all of the other nifty features you're probably not making use of. Before even considering spending any money... ask yourself if you have everything properly configured and tweaked for maximum performance. For one, Windows does not automatically detect that you have a multicore/multiprocessor/hyperthreaded system... you have to first uninstall the ACPI Uniprocessor manager in Device Manager and replace it with the Multiprocessor manager. Second, even after Windows is informed that you have such a system, it does not automatically make use of the additional processors/cores. This is because Windows does not feature thread affinity, as demonstrated by Tom's Hardware. If you really want to invest in something with an inherent benefit, watercool your X2 or fill up your DIMMs with 4GB of ram, then use half of that for a ramdrive. Then, store the file you're editing in the ramdrive and encode it to and from the ramdrive. Hard drives pale in comparison to a ramdrive, when you figure the average hard drive bandwidth is limited to 60MB/s, while a ramdrive can easily hit over a Gbit/s.

It typically depends on the card... not all of them come with a thermal diode. However, both Nvidia and ATI do include temperature monitoring via the card's control panel... they're just usually hidden by default.

It strictly depends on what your intentions are for this system. Provided you're not using it for anything intensive(rendering, video editing, gaming, etc), the Intel board will more than suffice and anything else will be a waste of money. As far as the heatsink is concerned, I believe you'd do better with either Swiftech or Scythe's Ninja. Thermaltake hasn't really produced a decent product since... well... ever.

Ceramique's particles are more densely packed than Arctic Silver's, but because of Arctic Silver's thermal resistance, they tend to perform about the same on most tests. What would be nice is if you could filter out the aluminum oxide, boron nitride, and the polysynthetic oils to just end up with pure silver. You could then take the particles and add it to the remaining AS to end up with a thermal paste with a higher density of silver. Another thing to consider is that there's a slight loss in efficiency of heat transience when you're dealing with multiple materials... so OCZ's copper thermal paste might be worth a shot too(provided you have a copper heatsink, of course).

Thank you. Oh, and for the record, I prefer Maxthon over any other browser I've worked with so far. A lot of what you would get through Firefox extensions are built right into Maxthon without adding the overhead you typically get from loading numerous extensions in Firefox. Browsing websites is more easily facilitated by "scrolling" through them with your mouse wheel and holding shift when you want to go back or forward, by using hotkeys, or via mouse gestures you create. To open a new tab, the key combination is CTRL + N, which is also a welcomed benefit for traditional IE users. Resource usage is very minimal; Firefox uses an average of 18MB of ram with one page open, whereas it takes about 30 pages open to reach that in Maxthon. Security wise, Maxthon blocks all ActiveX components and gives you the option of either installing them or blocking them permanently via a drop down bar, so if you ever really need it, it's still available. Finally, aesthetics play a major role in choosing a browser... and in my opinion, the default Firefox theme simply doesn't cut it(a skin would just increase resource usage... not to mention, I have yet to find a skin for the minimalists of the world). I'm sure most would agree that more compact toolbars are better, because that would mean websites would have more screen real-estate. Unfortunately, even when you combine the toolbars and address bar so they're on the same line, the tab bar sticks out like a sore thumb. Sure, you could hide it, but then you'd be disabling the main reason most people prefer Firefox. In comparison, Maxthon's tab bar is nearly half the size of Firefox's. Granted, Maxthon isn't open source, but as I mentioned before, most users don't even take the open source mentality into consideration, let alone appreciate it for what it's worth.

Every pro-Firefox/anti-IE rant begins with the same opening line: "Internet Explorer pales in comparison to Firefox due to the fact that Internet Explorer is less secure". My answer to them is simple: blame the OS, not the browser. Most of the security risks that proliferate from websites are ActiveX objects that sneak onto the system. ActiveX is a proponent of the COM library, which is found in Windows, not Internet Explorer. Therefore, to eliminate security risks when browsing in Internet Explorer, the most simple solution is to just disable ActiveX. Furthermore, why should anyone have to turn to third party software to feel "secure"? Nine times out of ten, the fallacy lies not with the software, but the uninformed user... and I can honestly guarantee that this is a greater threat than any virus, spyware, or malware concievable. We're a society that says(or clicks) "yes" without reading the fine print, opens attachments on e-mails from known and unknown addresses alike, and equips every available "always active" antivirus suite, spyware scanner, and firewall, only to download a file from a P2P network and not worry about the contents, simply because the name isn't questionable and Norton hasn't given any warning. What troubles me most, however, are the Firefox adopters that jump on the bandwagon without knowing which direction it's headed. They could care less about what open source software stands for, as long as they're able to do everything they did in IE... only now they're doing it "in style".