For educational practice, you can try out either server 2008 or 2012 on a VM rather than real hardware.

However if you must have it installed on a real box, use one with as much RAM as you can...

Even though GTX680 is more power efficient than 7970 and priced lower, it's still too much for what I can afford. Waiting for GTX660.

The two Abit boards I had include a BE6 (440BX) and a NF7-S v2.0 (nforce2). Both of them had performed flawlessly until they were sold on Ebay.

Sad to see them disappearing completely.

Layer 3 switch is pretty much a router except it doesn't come with WAN ports and some of its routing logics are implemented using fixed path hardware instead of software.

Things like Link...

considering that Ivy bridge will be launched Q1 2012, there is no need for me to get Sandy Bridge E which is a power hungery and expensive platform.

Bleeding edge makes customers bleed. Never jump onto the new tech too quickly.

Yes, Quadro NVS 290 only consumes about 21W of power and is passively cooled. This is considerably less than the 106W of GTS450.

However NVS 290 is based on the G86 chip which is 2 generations...

The Quadro is meant for workstations whereas Geforce is for gaming. I believe the driver for Quadro is not as optimized for D3D as ForceWare.

If you are buying this for home PC, get the Geforce.

It's good to hear that Nvidia do have somthing to keep themselves competitive against AMD HD6000 series.

However personally I'm more interested in a fully enabled GF104 product than the power...

I had similar issue with this exact same board before (in my case there was no beep even when the CPU and ram were not installed). Turned out to be a defective BIOS chip.

If you find someone who...

Agreed. IMO the AMD stock heatsink mounting mechanism is far more superior to the Intel one. I was also shocked by the poor design from Intel when I got my Q6600 after I had been using AMD for a long...

Two possible issues I can think of:

1. the GDDR3 memory chips on your 7800GS are failing

2. motherboard AGP slot is damaged (since you mentioned it produced unusual noises)

I've been using cards from both brands for a while. Overall I have to give my vote to Nvidia drivers.

AMD drivers while much better than before always contain small stability bugs such as...

As long as the board has a single PCI-E x16 slot, it will support both Nvidia and AMD graphics cards regardless what chipset is on it.

For Xfire any Intel or AMD chipset based boards that have...

I've tried DOD Source with a GTS450 on 1680x1050. The FPS ranged from 70-150. This is with 4x MSAA (internal game setting).

Having two HDDs developing faults in such a short timeframe is rare.

Have you tried with a different SATA cable or another SATA port on your board by any chance?


Regarding WD RMA process...

These are for people buying off-the-shelf Dell, HP, etc. PCs. Anyone who knows how to swap a CPU will not take the bait.

Wondering whether someone will hack the software and make it work with the...

The Antec TPT650 PSU in my server has been bottom mounted with its fan facing up for 2 years inside a Lian-LI PC-A70A case. Never had anything falling into it.

The odor mostly like came from some melted materials. If it really was from inside of the PSU, you would need to let the PSU heat up before you can smell it. Having the motherboard connected alone...

A 450W unit is plenty for that setup. I've even seen people running similar setups on a 350W PSU.

I had a similar incident before and it turned out to be an Antec PSU gone bad. So I suggest you move one of the PSUs from your working PCs to that box and try to see if the smell is still there.

I've recently started enabling all the power saving features on my AMD rig (used to only apply power saving on my Intel rigs, never used CnQ with my previous A64). Initially everything looked good....

If you put two Velociraptors in RAID0, you might be able to get 6.1 to 6.2. But that's the max you will ever see for a mechanical HDD.

A single SSD will give you slightly over 7 and in order to...

This PC is for those ultimate die-hard gamers.

Honestly speaking this is a waste of space, electricity and a big source of noise for a standard home user/gamer.

One of my WD Blue 500GB died last week and after checking their website, I found out there was still one month warranty left with this unit. So I RMA'ed the drive last Wednesday.

Surprisingly the...