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I haven't heard it myself, but every review has said that it is very quiet. It's a sub $200 liquid cooled case, completely self enclosed. It will quiet down your computer and cool it down a lot as well. The company is Koolance and I first saw a review of it at HardOCP. Nicodemus

I haven't heard it myself, but every review has said that it is very quiet. It's a sub $200 liquid cooled case, completely self enclosed. It will quiet down your computer and cool it down a lot as well. The company is Koolance and I first saw a review of it at HardOCP. Nicodemus

Here's a great summary of the architecture for people (like me) who aren't engineers on HardOCP: http://www.hardocp.com/articles/nforce/index.html

Also, in addition, I personally really like AnandTech, so here's a link to his detailed article: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1484

(And no, I'm not a 'karma whore' ... who _really_ cares?)

I could be wrong but the name sounds very familiar, I seem to remember reading about them on Hardocp recently and they are a division of the bizarrely named Corp that also owns Via.

HardOCP.com's review has more details (the link on Koolance's home page doesn't point to the beginning of the review).

Take a look at HardOCP for pictures of the new board (Abit MicroATX featuring NV22 and the Crush 12).

the prebuilt, guarenteed water cooling case reviewed here (the address is http://hardocp.com/reviews/cooling/koolance/ for the goat weary) is strongly suggested, it seems to be the best way of doing it, by getting the loudest parts of the case cooled by a simpler, quieter, cooler solution....

I can't seem to remember where i read it, (it may have been on [H]ardOCP.) but whatever it was, it stated that the Pentium 4 is messed up because it is configured for pure MHz. However, the way that it uses those cycles is very inefficient. it is very common to see 1.33Ghz athlons, or even 1Ghz P!!!'s outperform the 1.4Ghz p4's as far as throughput and other factors besides clock speed.
----------------------

HardOCP did a review of the Koolance a while ago:
http://hardocp.com/reviews/cooling/koolance/

If you get to Hardocp.com they should have a few links to case-modding pages and other relavant info.

Anyway, as a guy who appreciates even case-hacking, I hope you go with something cool. There's nothing quite like having a unique-looking box to show off.

Just saw this custom clear case over at HardOCP. Very nice, clean work. URL is "http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?threadid= 132652" for the goatse.cx weary...

Karma whoring? Gimmie the KY!

You knew it would happen: Kyle at [H]ard|OCP got his hands on one of these and overclocked it. And just look at the results.

You knew it would happen: Kyle at [H]ard|OCP got his hands on one of these and overclocked it. And just look at the results.

You knew it would happen: Kyle at [H]ard|OCP got his hands on one of these and overclocked it. And just look at the results.

This is a completely redundant article rendered nearly impossible to read because of miserable grammar. Plenty other websites have more detailed articles about far more effective and inexpensive ways to tweak your system. And they take the time to edit their work, do benchmarks and such.

The guys at [H]ardOCP addressed this issue. Look under Sunday, April 15, 2001 - Ed 2. "We have never seen nor heard of the CPU throttling being active on any person's CPU and certainly have not experienced it ourselves (unless we FORCED it to happen) under conditions more strenuous than 99.9% of the P4s in the field will ever encounter. I do not suggest that DIYers or hobbyist go the P4 route if they want to buy a system for themselves, but bashing it on this front is simply bad journalism and transparent to many people." Sorry, I don't know of a way to direct link to an article on their site...

HardOCP did a comparison between the GF2 and the GF3. Of particular note are the benchmarks of DroneZ, an upcoming OpenGL-based game that has special modes optimized for the GF3's features. Using the generic settings, the GF3 was about 15-25% faster. But with the extra GF3 stuff enabled, the GF3 was faster by a factor of between two and four. Remeber that this is with an OpenGL benchmark, not D3D, so don't start worrying that nVidia is ignoring OGL. I imagine that John Carmack will be taking advantage of this kind of stuff in DOOM3, as well.

If you want to know what is the best value for the money, look around at Hard|OCP and Anandtech. Every few months Anand's site does system price guides, putting together various systems on a budget. The latest price for a lower-budget gaming system was $1,045. This was in November, so you can get an even better system for that amount, or that same system even cheaper. (Price includes montitor, but not software).

And Hard[OCP] is going broke.

HardOCP predicts good performance with higher speed processors, and initial tests seem to confirm this. You need a fast (~1GHz+) processor to see significant benefit, though.

Sure, that was a slip-up on Egghead's part, but imagine it happening to them because of customers hacking the prices. No wonder Egghead.com has now made it to this list.

The Athlon was also bleeding-edge overclocking; they now have a device for $20 to $50 US that will allow you to overclock a Slot A Athlon without cracking the case and desoldering and resoldering resistors.

The only real drawback I've seen to overclocking is the possiblity of frying your processor, motherboard or other components. The person who got me into overclocking toasted 6 Abit BP6 motherboards trying to figure out how to get a Coppermine Celeron to work in the board. While studing the pin diagrams and attempting to reroute traces on the motherboard isn't the norm, it does happen.

Aside from horror stories like the one above, there are two things to watch for when overclocking: heat and over-voltage.

As for heat, don't skimp on the heat sinks and check a page like [H]ard|OCP or Toms Hardware (links below) for heatsink information, case modifications and the like.

Voltage can be trickier to deal with. As bus and processor speeds become higher and higher, the transistor count rises and, hence, the current required by the processor, chipset and other components of the system. Modern processors lower the voltage significantly in order to conserve current. Some processors require 2 volts (or less!) in the core. If you're familiar with electronics at all, you'll soon see that the signal to noise ratio becomes a real factor. The solution is to increase the signal by raising the voltage. It's a tightrope act; raise the voltage too high and you could fry your chip in microseconds, not high enough and it doesn't add any noise rejection but does add heat.

Something that used is cited as a factor now that I don't really find relavent is processor life. Transistors do not last forever. Stuff that goes on at the quantum level degrades the PNP/NPN junctions over time. Granted, in most situations this can be over the course of years or decades, but with transistors as small as those in a typical processor die, it's generally on the lines of 5 to 7 years. That's if you run them at the manufacturer's suggested voltage. Increase the voltage, decrease the life.

That being said, with processors doubling in speed every 18 months or so, I don't really see any current chip being in service on a desktop 7 years from now. Even if you were to cut the operating life of your processor in half from 7 to 4.5 years, would it matter much? Incedentally, I have a Linux box here running on a Pentium 166MMX overclocked to 233. I bought the processor and motherboard in '97 or '98, if I remember correctly. It's been on 24/7 for all but the few days it took to move from California to Phoenix.

If you're interested in overclocking, the best way to get into it is to search the hardward sites, read their guides and try it.

It will also help to know a bit more about the x86 architecture. For example, understanding the workings of SDRAM fetch settings in your BIOS, how to figure out the PCI bus speed after overclocking your motherboard's bus from 133 to 145 and so on. [H]ard|OCP and Toms Hardware (links I promised above =) have some very good information on just that sort of thing.

If I missed anything or blew a couple of concepts, feel free to offer a friendly correction. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask!

Good luck!

I guess you haven't heard of overclocking graphics cards. There are web pages devoted to it. Here are a few:

How to OC your video card
and
Another good one
and
Heatsinks for your video card
and
What to look for in an Overclockable video card Also, many times, overclocking involves increasing bus speed, ala 66Mhz to 100Mhz, etc. The fact that you said that alone tells me you don't know very much about overclocking. You might want to read up on the various facets of overclocking, you might look at your computer in a totally different way.
P.S. Why is it ok for people to perform a software upgrade to get a 33Mhz IDE bus to run at 66Mhz (vendor approved, yes I am talking about the BP6 bios upgrades) but its not ok for people to change a setting or two in their bios? I bet all the people bitching about overclockers would download and install a patch to get more performance out of their computers if it came from a vendor but they are reluctent to try something on their own.

SealBeater

Everytime there is a story about overclocking on Slashdot the naysayers flood the forums with comments about how terrible an idea it is to overclock. They say things like "You only save a little bit and spend more on cooling..." or "Your chip will be unstable and then have a shorter life."

I would like to clear some things up about overcloking for the uninformed people.

Firstly, the stability issue. Overclockers hate instability. Most of us go way out of our way to make sure that the system we are running is not going to be acting all flaky when we overclock. The whole point of overclocking is to get the most out of the system, and if your system is freezing all of the time you aren't getting much out of it are you? We accomplish this by running benchmarks and torture tests to make sure that the overclock isn't adversely affecting performance or stability, if it is then we step it off.

Second, with the exception of a few extreme instances, most overclockers save money for the same performance. We don't all go out and buy peltiers and liquid cooled heatsinks. Most of us spend more on cooling than the average person but not by much, and our cooling system usually lasts through several cpus. Compare the $50 hsf I'm using now with your $10, so I spent $40 more than average, big deal, I saved $300 on the cpu and I'll use this cooler with my next upgrade too.

Which brings me to the savings. We save a lot of money for the performance. When I purchased my Celeron300A I spent $109 for it and after I overclocked it, the performance I got out of the chip in games at the time was almost identicle to a P2-450 which was selling for well over $600.
Now thats about as good as overclocking gets, but there are many other examples of chips since then that have done almost as well.

That celeron300a I spoke of is still running at the same overclocked speed as the day I put it in, and it's rock solid. You want stability, there you go.

On top of all of this, overclocking is fun! No really. It's an enjoyable experience, you learn a lot about hardware, and at the end of the day you can be happy that you have a screaming fast system for a fraction of the price you could have spent.

If you want to think about overclocking try checking out some of the sites around the net:
www.overclockers.com
www.hardocp.com
www.anandtech.com
www.tomshardware.com

Try it, you might like it.

Oops, sorry guys (& gals)...the HardOCP link I copied was wrong (they didn't have one of them set up quite right on their page). Here's the working one:
http://www.hardocp.com/articles/nvidia_stuff/gf_3t ech/index.html
-pepermil

In case anyone wants a quick link to the other big reviews...
Sharky Extreme: http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/articles/nvi dia_geforce3_preview/
AnandTech: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1426
HardOCP: http://www.hardocp.com/articles/nvidia_stuff/gf3_t ech/i
-pepermil

Omg I just got Hard thinking about it! Seriously - I love women's tenis. Lindsay Davenport is my girl. Holeesh!t! Lots of people seem to go loco over Anna cause of a few pics of her being particularily arid in the jungle. Davenport is where its at man. Tenis skirts own - thank you Wimbeldon (sp?) for not changing that rule. Amen.

Question - what is the difference between 'lights' and 'hard'?

Answer: You can go to bed with the lights on.

It would be very hard to stay with those dimensions since you'd also have to fit at least a power supply, hard drive, dvd drive, and a couple PCI cards in there as well (audio, network). For a reasonably fast processor (such as would be requisite for good DivX/MP4 encoding/decoding) and the AIW card, a 300W power supply will be necessary. Again, ATX format PS is the most flexible so you've got another big chunk (roughly 5 1/2 x 3 3/4 x 6 inches - see ATX Specs). Also realize that you'll need a good heatsink for your CPU (I'd recommend a Duron or Thunderbird whose included heatsinks are 2 inches high). Using an NLX/Micro-ATX/FlexATX form factor (specs) buys some size, but limits peripheral/mobo choices. Also check out this quick form factor guide and comparison chart.

I haven't settled on a choice yet, but you might look at the following (these cases are typically about 17 x 17 x 6 inches, which is smaller than the Qbex you mention above). Key components are Abit KT7A, Athlon ~1GHz, ATI Radeon AIW, Pioneer DV-105S, IBM 75GXP HD, NetGear FA312, and Soundblaster Platinum.

• Lian-Li miniPC 31 - very spiffy aluminum case (black with silver) ... very pricey as well.
• SuperPower Landmark KS-699 - Small and decent looking, but will need to upgrade power supply and heat could be an issue.
• Palo Alto ATCX Convertible - Supports custom faceplates, buy without PSU (only 235W).
• CoolerMaster ATC 100 is similar to the Lian-Li, but slightly larger.
• Neoseeker has an interesting case listing, with collated reviews and rankings, but not a lot of independent data.
• If you get inspired to do a custom job, see HardOCP's article on case modding, which may be helpful.
• Slashdot has run many past articles on cool cases and quiet PCs (search for them, too many to link).
• Another tip: consider the Pioneer DV-105S or similar slot loading DVD drive, so you can orient horizontally.

Personally, I think the thing to concentrate on is the loudness of the unit, rather than its physical size (and, to a lesser extent its stylishness). I have a Tivo (Phillips HDR312 with 1 30G Quantum) and find it unacceptably loud when watching movies unless placed in an enclosed cabinet (its considerably more quiet than a PC). My focus on cases is just for something that can fit inside my audio cabinet and which can flow enough air (preferably out the back) to keep the system reasonably cool. If I get something really good together, I'll probably just build myself a custom case once its all settled out (but there is lots more important things to do for integration software, remote contol, DivX support, mp3 management, etc. first IMO). Remember you are also going to have a tangle of cables to deal with if you want good integration to an A/V receiver or multiple components.

Some other options to think about:

• Mac Cube, which is already compact, stylish, and quiet. Unfortunately, it lacks S-Video, tuner, and S/PDIF (digital audio) connections, costs quite a bit of money, and has limited software choices
• Laptop PC - compact and sometimes stylish, but may not have the horsepower for DivX and would probably require a lot more software to integrate functions, pricey (maybe buy used with dead LCD).
• Sony VAIO Slimtop or similar - small with many multimedia features, but you have to pay for LCD and don't have component flexibility.

Good luck, and please email me if you find anything else good or build software around the AIW and/or remote controls.

Regards, RJS

Having a case made out of LEGO would be great... need a new piece of hardware? Out of drive bays? No problem! Just build another one!

Also, a LEGO computer case would go great with the LEGO desk I plan to get when I become obscenely wealthy.

(I should probably mention that LEGO and related marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of the LEGO Company , which does not sponsor, authorize, or endorse this post. You have been duly warned.)

--Psi

Max, in America, it's customary to drive on the right.

Having a case made out of LEGO would be great... need a new piece of hardware? Out of drive bays? No problem! Just build another one!

Also, a LEGO computer case would go great with the LEGO desk I plan to get when I become obscenely wealthy.

(I should probably mention that LEGO and related marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of the LEGO Company , which does not sponsor, authorize, or endorse this post. You have been duly warned.)

--Psi

Max, in America, it's customary to drive on the right.

Courtesy of [H]ardOCP: http://hardocp.com/hart/images/hard09.jpg

DISCLAIMER: I clicked on preview, and the links worked there ...

DISCLAIMER: I clicked on preview, and the links worked there ...

Ars also has a great write-up on the (pin) ins and outs of memory. Only they started at the very beggining with SRAM and stuff. They did a really great of not only explaining the (physical) layout of memory but the theory behind every step and technical innvoations too. A lot of it was way over my head but I liked reading it anyways...
RAM Guide: Part I DRAM and SRAM Basics

And one other thing...
And it even features lots of diagrams (although some of the tables seem to have been designed by someone who is color blind, using white text on very bright backgrounds.
Check out this graph... I have no idea what it's explaining but its really spiffy and colorfull!
"Me Ted"

Hardocp
sisoft, q3, ZD benchmarks

Reviews are all over the net now...here is some of them:

Anandtech
HardOCP - on HardOCP's frontpage you can find more links to reviews.
Toms Hardware hasn't got his review up yet, but I bet it will be soon...

Greetings Joergen

Reviews are all over the net now...here is some of them:

Anandtech
HardOCP - on HardOCP's frontpage you can find more links to reviews.
Toms Hardware hasn't got his review up yet, but I bet it will be soon...

Greetings Joergen

Then I thought about it. The smaller the cut, the smaller chance for error. Objects follow the path of least resistance. If you just make a small cut into one of those grooves, then peel the cable apart, it is almost impossible to screw it up -- you are less likely to make a bad cut, and the thinner shielding in the grooves will ensure that the ribbon will split right down the middle.

WARNING: the above comment does not link to goatse.cx

They'll probably look something like this.

Actually he went to Wal-Mart and bought a silver pen and just colored them. The full article is here
BR&g t; -redial

Yeah I know reply to my own post but whatever.. Loaded up the old favorites list and had some more for your viewing pleasure:

Cardboard Box

The Lego Case

Actually there is a whole group of people who are into this kinda of thing. You will usually find at least one at any LAN party (there is almost always a prize for best case). I've even heard of a group trying to come up with a Sphere case. Since that site got /.'d check these out:

Cassejunkiez Gallery

Case-mods.net - Definately Check this out! Very cool Case mods

The Turbine - I posted this earlier, but just in case (pun intended)

The All Aluminum Case

-redial

http://www.hardocp.co m/n ews_images/2000/oct2k/103000e.html Ewwie!

HardOCP had a link on their page yesterday pointing to TurboTech and an pretty damaging, but generally truthful, editorial... If you are an Intel fan, well, skip this message :)

http://www. tur botech.ch/articles2000/001001-intels_darkening-01. html

HardOCP quoted this part, which is a pretty good one:

September 2000 - Intel's blackest month in countless years. Following the official withdrawal of the 1.13 GHz PIII in the last days of August, in the wake of this face-loss it also became pretty obvious that Intel will have to ditch the grandiose plans of breathing new life into the dying P6 core with a 200 MHz FSB, a 0.13 micron process, and larger on-die L2 caches. It seems the Coppermine core (the last and most advanced modification of the half a decade old P6 core, introduced in the Pentium Pro 150 MHz in the mid-90s) simply won't be able to go much further.

HardOCP had a link on their page yesterday pointing to TurboTech and an pretty damaging, but generally truthful, editorial... If you are an Intel fan, well, skip this message :)

http://www. tur botech.ch/articles2000/001001-intels_darkening-01. html

HardOCP quoted this part, which is a pretty good one:

September 2000 - Intel's blackest month in countless years. Following the official withdrawal of the 1.13 GHz PIII in the last days of August, in the wake of this face-loss it also became pretty obvious that Intel will have to ditch the grandiose plans of breathing new life into the dying P6 core with a 200 MHz FSB, a 0.13 micron process, and larger on-die L2 caches. It seems the Coppermine core (the last and most advanced modification of the half a decade old P6 core, introduced in the Pentium Pro 150 MHz in the mid-90s) simply won't be able to go much further.

Kyle at HardOCP posted up a link to an interesting synopsis of an AMD seminar. AMD confirmed that VIA would be supplying an SMP chipset which will be able to run two Socket A CPUs.

These should be available this fall. As we all know; VIA has no problem introducing a new chipset to the motherboard manufacturers and no doubt will have no problem getting boards made with their chipset. As many of us know, the same Irongate chipset that many of us use for Slot A Athlons was perfectly capable of running the Socket A CPUs as well and was always available to motherboard manufacturers. Despite this, manufacturers still opted to use a VIA chipset instead and delay availability of their boards because of this.

The advancement of 1.5 generations could easily work out to be 3x ahead of what's out there now. Maybe the marketriod was misquoted, or maybe it was stated incorrectly -- whether the statement was incorrect on purpose or not is another issue. If you've been reading Hard|OCP, you'll find some pretty negative views of Derek Perez, NVIDIA's PR guy.
--

Transmeta seems to be succumbing to the same thing AMD succumbs to: marketing arrogance. Remember those claims by AMD that the Athlon was faster? And remember how they were shot down when it was found that a similarly clocked P3 could perform better in high-demand applications? Sure was a wake-up call to AMD's marketing team; they couldn't use faster performance in their ads 'cause it just wasn't true.

Or here.

Before you ask who pays this "Tom" guy's wage you shold at least consider reading the article (thus helping to pay tom's wage) and following the links, for example to HardOCP.

Then you would notice, that
a) Tom gave intel ample time for reaction (he even called them prior to posting his first article) and really tried to get in contact and get some statements out of intel afterwards when it should have been intel (being concerned about their product) contacting Tom
b) Later HardOCP confirmed, Tom's findings, namely that Tom (and they too) got a production CPU that wasn't up to spec and that no 1.133 GHZ PIII could be relied on compiling a Linux Kernel

Considering the chain of events (especially intels noncommunication) I consider it highly likely that intel would have tried to hush it all up hadn't Tom acted as he had.

Also things would have been much worse for intel if the glitches where discovered later, since then there would have been much more systems already sold, and maybe intel would have started a major PR campaign about the fastest processor on the market (or somesuch). So Tom might have saved intel from a much bigger faceloss.

Had intel reacted quicker on Toms first article they could have come out of the story even better, and hadn't intel brought their 'fastest processor' to the market with uncalled for haste to beat AMD's announced 1.1 GHZ Athlon the whole story wouldn't have happened at all.

So please stop shooting at the messenger when hearing bad news.

Yes, I believe that the articles over at HardOCP mentioned something about clocking them at 850 and having them be stable. Someone in the Slashdot article mentioned that these things may have been pushed out the door a little bit too premature.