Slashdot Mirror

MSI did it last year: http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=newsdesc&news_no=591

There are liquid coolers now being sold that are fully sealed rather than sealed using gaskets, and the potential for a leak with such systems is much smaller than traditional gasket coolers, however, there is usually no way to inspect, clean, or add coolant to these (they would need to be replaced).

Looking at the patent, I see two differences to traditional liquid cooling that could be the entire basis of the patent. Claim 16: metal particles in the coolant, and Claim 19: a cold plate (which could mean many things, even wild solutions like a miniature Sterling Engine, though I would think it's something simple).

Here's my breakdown of the patent, at least to my understanding:

Claim 1 - this is specific to a computing system with liquid cooling of the power source.

Claim 2 - the IC included in the power source contains a processor. This makes me think the IC is a controller for the pump because the claim is for the power source, not the laptop itself.

Claim 3-11 specifics about pump and coolants

Claim 12 - used in a laptop

Claim 13 - 15 - dual phase (typical phase change coolant from liquid to gas and back)

Claim 16 - metal particles in the coolant to increase thermal transfer.

Claim 17 - describes pump activity

Claim 18 - describes a heatsink

Claim 19 - a cold plate for increased thermal transfer

Claim 20 - describes the lithography size of the laptop (how small the wires are).

Claim 21 - describes using liquid cooling on the laptop itself.

I already have thelatest BIOS from http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=downloaddetail&type=bios&maincat_no=1&prod_no=249 ...

I will try clean install when I have time. Reinstalling and reconfiguring hundred of software and games is a pain! :(

If this form factor is restrictive, then the Mac mini's energy efficient notebook chipset (Intel 945GM) can be had in a microATX motherboard w/PCI Express x16 slot (Asus N4L-VM DH, $82 at Newegg), a FlexATX motherboard (Tyan Tomcat i945GM), or Mini-ITX barebones (MSI Axis 945GM).

My issue is with the computer shutting down entirely and I have this option disabled - doesn't do anything.

MSI have supposedly found these bugs and are working on it. Forum link.

Unless you were actually going to run 4 graphics cards, there really wouldn't be much point, I mean who is actually going to use a x/16/8/8 or an 8/8/16/x configuration? Neither of these modes allow you to do SLi as slots 2 and 3 are at different speeds, so really you only options are 8/8/8/8 or 1/16/16/1.

All the other high-end boards run SLi at x16 anyway, but at that price point the rest of them are offering better sound (MSI Diamond) or perhaps better cooling solutions like this ASUS board.

Perhaps if you were running 4 PCI-E x1 cards it might be worth it, however if you're running SLi you already lose access to a PCI and a PCIEx1 slot anyway, leaving you with just three x1s. It'd be a smarter move to go for a boards that has say, two x1s, one x4 and a couple of normal PCI slots for backwards compatability (like on the ASUS linked above).

Also, a lot is sacrificed in flexability, for example, if you have a full length GTX card you lose access to IDE-1, and the poorly placed capacitors near the CPU means you'll have trouble installing large aftermarket HSFs, and if you're spending this much on your PC, then you definitely should NOT be using the Intel standard HSF. Those pesky capacitors also mean you have to hit the graphics card release with pliers if you have a beefy card, with there being scarce room for fingers between the card heatsink and the capacitors (Reference: AtomicMPC Issue 62).

A big plus to Gigabyte for Innovation, but it's not really a practicle solution.

PS: The board's been around to two months =S.

But hey, I only struggled with the motherboard for several months and talked to several MSI techs who all confirmed this; it's not like I have any actual idea what I'm talking about, hmm?

But hey, I only struggled with the motherboard for several months and talked to several MSI techs who all confirmed this; it's not like I have any actual idea what I'm talking about, hmm?

This board has 8 sockets on one Opteron and 4 on the other. If you read the fine print in the manual, you will find you must go down to 266 DDR to use 8 memory modules on the one CPU.

I think we're assuming that it is inferior because it is made in Taiwan

Yes, because no good technology is produced in Taiwan. Next time you go to a computer store, look at the motherboards section...

Nowadays most motherboard companies have alternative homepages, but I remember 5-6 years ago if you needed bios updates or driver patches, the pages were always at www.motherboardbrand.com.tw

It still seems to be the case:
http://www.abit.com.tw
http://www.asus.com.tw
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw
http://www.msi.com.tw
http://www.epox.com.tw
http://www.tyan.com.tw

Anyone successfully run Linux/MythTV in an MSI Mega?

MSI make something similar and have a few different models. MSI's look better I think but functionally they're very similar.

Here's the link

http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/slim_pc/slm /pro_slm_detail.php?UID=546

I saw this at Fry's recently - was pretty impressed, includes motherboard, Linux support unknown.

Sony's stuff is never particularly cheap, but what direct competitors do they have for this thing? What's the low-price whitebox alternative?

Something like this?

Or this?

Or this,
this,
this,
this,
this
or
this?

(Add (bluetooth) keyboard where appropriate.. Or something like this.)

Also MSI make a fairly tame (feature wise) mp3 player, but it does have an OLED display to show off:

MSI Megaplayer

Suffice to say, I wasn't game enough to enable it... I can barely remember what I had for lunch yesterday...

Suffice to say, I wasn't game enough to enable it... I can barely remember what I had for lunch yesterday...

Suffice to say, I wasn't game enough to enable it... I can barely remember what I had for lunch yesterday...

Suffice to say, I wasn't game enough to enable it... I can barely remember what I had for lunch yesterday...

The MSI Mega PC is a bare bone system, I think it would count as an "upgradable Lifestyle Computer".

so from scratch assuming all we've got is a big arse plasma screen and a big shiny home cinema set-up to go with it (yeah, _all_ we've got).

Need to get the vid and sound to the home cinema: Well, for sound, find something with a digital output, a lot of motherboards nowadays with onboard sound have the right out puts, so why not go for that and let the home cinema setup do the decoding
(I'm assuming this will work easily, tho I can just imagine the hoards of replies telling me how stupid I am to think I can output an encoded dts stream [for example] out of the digital out put, in which case, buy a nice sound card that can decode dts etc. and output the sound from that thru the digital output...)

Now video, well, most video cards seem to come with SVideo output so why not use that? Possibly you might want to go for something like a Radeon AllInWonder so you can watch TV through the same system. Or maybe not, I don't know, I'm not you.

Now we just need storage. Personally I'd go for an array of SATA drives, purely because I can with my motherboard (an MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R). If I was going to do it i'd set-up some kind of RAID across about 4 drives of about 250-300Gb each, not really bothering much about redundancy because I'd not be using it 24/7, four drives plus a boot drive are easy enough to house, plus there's onboard Gb ethernet so you can put it in the next room and just use a little boxen in the lounge to play the stuff.

As for acctually playing the stuff, I'd be using a wireless keyboard and/or mouse, and I'd probably just rip each disk to the arrray in it's own dir and play it using powerDVD or what ever. With this you can set up what ever system you like for sorting the disks into genre etc., and possibly knock up some kind of html frontend to make it easier to just jump to the disk you want, plus as others have pointed out you can get rid of bits you don't need/want like other language audio etc.

hmm, what have I missed? I'm sure there's something but i'm sure a hundred sarky bastards will point out my errors in just a moment. As for cost, well, I can't be arsed to add it up properly, but a bit less than the cost of a plasma screen i recon, depending on what bit's you already have lying around (it's amazing how much things like psu's and crap bump the price up isn't it?)

(minor and compleatly o/t sidenote: The company where I work building computers uses the afformentioned motherboard quite a bit. They ended up with a 53% fail rate on any boxes with SATA drives in, purely because - the cables fell out of the drives in transit. Their solution? Better cable ties. The result, a reduction to 24% fail rate. The new solution? Glue the cables in place with that silicon sealent stuff. No shit, it seems to work, coz when something goe's wrong and we have to strip the computer apart agian it's fucking impossible to get the cables out, and when we do either the connector on the mobo or the hd end up fucked. Clearly there is a bit of a problem with SATA cable connections atm.)

1. However people generally want FAST (regardless of if they need it or not)

It's a computer which fits in your normal stereo rack. Why wouldn't linux be good for it. Video, music, emu, photos and whatever. Why would I want a clumsy desktop computer when this thing actully looks quite good. It's as good bet as the MSI one.

MSI mega pc

What are you talking about? Dual Opteron boards have been out since pretty much Day 1 of the Opteron's release.

A few examples:
Tyan Thunder K8W
MSI K8D Master-F
Rioworks HDAMC

my girlfriend is an avid gamer and for her birthday i bought her a 256 mb video card. So, it has dual 400 mhz processor and 256 mb of ram. This is more than the 700 mhz w/ 128 mb of ram on my main computer!! *sigh* It's a good thing I love her...

• MSI MATX I865PEM2-ILS
• Samsung black combo 52X24X52+16X CD-RW/DVD
• WAG311GE Netgear Wireless .11ABG+ PCI
• Intel P4 2,6GHz 800/512K
• Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350
• MSI GeForce FX5200 TD128 with DVI and TV-OUT
• 512MB PC400 DDRAM
• Maxtor Dmax Plus9 200Gb 7200RPM 8Mb SATA
• Coolermaster ATC 620C-BX1

The reasoning for the different items are as follows:

A similar model of the motherboard got good reviews by Toms Hardware Guide (yes, I know some people in /. hate Tom). The integrated sound on this board was recommended to me by an ALSA developer. It's also got SATA, LAN, USB and Firewire and, as a nice bonus, both coax and optical digital sound outputs.

Samsung...didn't matter much as long as it had DVD and CD-RW capabilities, black front was a nice touch though.

WAG311GE, one of few cards that support A, B and G wireless networking. Supported in Linux by the MadWifi drivers, unfortunately not truly open source, but neither are any other ABG card drivers.

Intel processor, I usually like Athlons but temperature (and thereby cooling requirements) is much more important in this box than speed.

Hauppage, well supported by MythTV and able to do MPEG2 recording and playback in hardware.

MSI GeForce, has VGA, DVI and TV-Out, also fanless and really cheap. Closed drivers but that's kinda hard to avoid.

Maxtor drive, I really wanted a more quiet Seagate but the SATA models were kind of impossible to find in any nearby store for decent prices. Also most stores seemed to have the ones with the least storage capacity.

Coolermaster, the case isn't "designed" to be a HTPC case (such as this one) which means it doesn't have the same silly price tag. It was also the exact same width as my stereo components (well, 3mm wider) and similar color.

Now all I have to do is wait...

• MSI MATX I865PEM2-ILS
• Samsung black combo 52X24X52+16X CD-RW/DVD
• WAG311GE Netgear Wireless .11ABG+ PCI
• Intel P4 2,6GHz 800/512K
• Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350
• MSI GeForce FX5200 TD128 with DVI and TV-OUT
• 512MB PC400 DDRAM
• Maxtor Dmax Plus9 200Gb 7200RPM 8Mb SATA
• Coolermaster ATC 620C-BX1

The reasoning for the different items are as follows:

A similar model of the motherboard got good reviews by Toms Hardware Guide (yes, I know some people in /. hate Tom). The integrated sound on this board was recommended to me by an ALSA developer. It's also got SATA, LAN, USB and Firewire and, as a nice bonus, both coax and optical digital sound outputs.

Samsung...didn't matter much as long as it had DVD and CD-RW capabilities, black front was a nice touch though.

WAG311GE, one of few cards that support A, B and G wireless networking. Supported in Linux by the MadWifi drivers, unfortunately not truly open source, but neither are any other ABG card drivers.

Intel processor, I usually like Athlons but temperature (and thereby cooling requirements) is much more important in this box than speed.

Hauppage, well supported by MythTV and able to do MPEG2 recording and playback in hardware.

MSI GeForce, has VGA, DVI and TV-Out, also fanless and really cheap. Closed drivers but that's kinda hard to avoid.

Maxtor drive, I really wanted a more quiet Seagate but the SATA models were kind of impossible to find in any nearby store for decent prices. Also most stores seemed to have the ones with the least storage capacity.

Coolermaster, the case isn't "designed" to be a HTPC case (such as this one) which means it doesn't have the same silly price tag. It was also the exact same width as my stereo components (well, 3mm wider) and similar color.

Now all I have to do is wait...

MSI uses AMI, even on their recent mainboards...

Take Athlon(TM)64 3200+ for example, the standard clock is 2000MHz. After adjusting it to the Minimal Power Management, as long as you PC stays under the low loading circumstance, the CPU clock will be located in 800MHz. As soon as there is a program starts running, the CPU clock will begin to add 200MHz each time according to the loading of data.

AMD Cool'n'Quiet! Technology allows the system to dynamically and automatically select the CPU speed, Voltage and Power combination that match the instantaneous user perfomance need. These changes can happen as often as 30 times per second.

Here.

I did see registered DDR400 2 GB DIMMs available here, or so they claim. A bit much for your average Athlon64 buyer, as you say, but you ought to be able to get at least 4 GB from two of those, if not 6 GB from all three slots.

There's a dually MSI workstation board that is vague about its total memory limit (Via K8T800, 4 slots, supports 2 GB registered DIMMs, 8 GB total) though I've seen at least one review that suggested it had a 3 GB limit.

Take a look at a site with some better specs. As you can see, its got the "designed for MS Windows" logo. Plus all the standard interfaces. The LCD screen is probably linked directly to the hardware CD player, so most likely isn't even exposed to software.

Our local PC shop has had these in stock for a while. Pretty cool for a entertainment box, though probably not worth the cost.

M.S.I. already announced this Product during the CeBit in March...

See their Press Release

It really is too bad they can't use Athlons.

They were IBM xSeries boxes - they don't (that I'm aware of) offer a x86 version with AMD. Had this been sponsered by someone who did do AMD servers, you would have seen Athlons in there. This was an IBM gig - and they had xeon's in inventory. Not a bad bit of kit, btw...

You are correct about the floating point, however. For chipsets, look for the AMD-8131 in boards like this. Most of the new workstation class boards from AMD will be based on the Opteron...

"OTOH a mobo supporting even 4GB of RAM could cost over $2000, and it's likely a proprietary design." My $200 MSI K7D Master L supports 4 Gigabytes of RAM link

For a home-entertainment system, this MSI system looks a LOT nicer.

It has a lot of audio stuff built in, and you can even power it on separately from the PC. And it has a remote.

I think this is going to give the shuttle systems a run for the money.

I had a MSI K7T Turbo (MS-6330 v3 w/ ide-raid).

Never had any problems with it, but when I was selling it I (and the buyer) noticed the brownish leaks, just like in the photo linked in the article. Board still worked fine though, and from what I hear still does... now I wonder for how long though.

Right now, for my own home, which isn't too big, I think something like the MSI transcieving module would be more like it. But I'd rather get something good from Axis which has excellent Linux support, than from MSI who doesn't support Linux explicitly at all.

I've dumped their sales department an e-mail about this now and then, but never got a response.

Ok, Well after reading the first hundred or so posts I've realized that most of you are strokeing your ego's and not awnsering the man's question!

Now, Simply put here are some sites that contain a lot of information to digest.
Tom's Hardware
AnandTech

Now here is a list of components to pick, and please do your self a favour and do some resarch before hand, get some do's and dont's and faq's stuck in your skull before spending any hard earned dough.

BTW I build systems on the side for the not so techniclly apt (as I'm sure many /. readers do for friends and family!).

Heres your shopping list
1. CASE w/PS (at least 350W ATX and a size you could "Grow" into)
2. Mother Board (Think long and hard about this one as it is a more important choice than even your CPU or RAM). Personal recomendations include ECS, MSI, Asus, and if you like spending money Tyan. Not to mention Gigabyte, Abit and shuttle, however if you visit the both tom's and anands they will have all the links for you with recent information and benchmarks. 3. CPU (what ever you want to spend on this will directly determine the capabilities of your system hence money=power!)
4. Ram (your options are limited by the capablilties of your motherboard.).
5. Video (again do you play video games or do you simply fart around in office all day and surf the net?). And if you play video games how much power do you need (can you afford to spend upwards of $400 on a card?).
6. Sound (Are you a musicaian, do you want home-theatre quality or is the AC'97 on the motherboard good enough for you?).
7. Optical devices (DVD, CD-ROM, CDRW, DVDRW?) again functionality direclty determined by price. DVDRW drives cost roughly $300 - $500 and the media is $4 to $8 per (and when you screw up they make expensive coasters). On the other hand I pay about 12 cents us per blank CD-R. (I purchase bulk!).
8. Storage (again price determins functionality). all drives now start at around 40GB and cost about $70 to $150.

9. Printing/Scaning (do you need a multifunction device to deal with the "real" paper world?).

10. Lastly but definitly most important! Connectivity! Will you get DSL? Do you already have a DOCSIS compliant cable provider in your area? or are you stuck with a measly little 56K modem? (I'm sorry I'm biased by my Canauk 3.5MB/s DSL.) The choice is simple if you get a modem stick with USRobitics or GVC. (both have lifetime warrenties). If you get a NIC (Network Interface Card), then you may consider weather or not you'll use the added features of a $50 3Com or weather or not a $10 Realtek will do?

Now you have a lot of foot work to do, quotes are a bitch! I only say that haveing worked in a computer store sales environment. They take time effort and forethought. You will get out of it what you put into it. If you simply think "Ok I'll get one of those dell's or compaq's and add what I need as I go!" well then you will be stuck with whatever decisions you make. Keep in mind computer parts depreceate faster than Ford Pinto's! So if you maintain a steady investment then you will have great preformance at price point that would make any scrouge druel. Stay away from used hardware unles it has a warrenty! Refurbished monitors are a huge saveings and have a one year warrenty. Realisticly you should simply say "This is my budget and this is what I need!" If you know what your doing (after all that reading!) then you'll get a killer deal. If you like you can even email me and I'll send you a quote .

A note to the rest of you /.'ers my first computoy was a crappy zenith vic clone that turned up the daisy's to a cup of tea across the keyboard. Peek and Poke are KEWL! The second system I used was a MICOM (Text ONLY! muahahah in beautiful PUKE ORANGE!), and the first color system I ever touched was a comodore 128 (with a whopping 128K). The first system I purchased (I will never buy a name brand again!) was a crappy AST (no they don't exist anymore!) and the first system I built was a 386SX, followed by a K6 266 and then an Abit BP-6 (man $70/processor and there are 2). Now I run a dual Athalon setup (Yes I render stuff and cant work without multitasking). My older computing geek friends tell me of the 'days of yore' when your 'codeing tools' consisted of a hole punch and bristol board cut to the right size, analog computers, and the first IBM/Amdhal S360's that in thier old age required physical battery to operate properly.

I am a diehard IE user (and Proxomitron user, and ad.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 hosts file editor) simply because all too often, sites don't work with OTHER BROWSERS.

For instance, if you try to do a search on the MSI forums page it doesn't work with Mozilla 0.9.9. Many other sites experience similar problems. Like my online banking page doesn't like Mozilla.

You can whine all you want about Webmasters not abiding by WWW standards and using custom extensions, but you know what? At the end of the day you still need to use IE to view their site. And I am not in a position to shun all poorly crafted web sites because of some ideological motivation, be it hatred of MS or proprietary webmasters.

All you haters out there, why don't quit yer bitchin and build a browser with the same functionality as IE? I would love to get off the MS train but none of the other browsers work.

(IE 6 is kind of a piece of crap too, but IE 5.x works well for me.)

--The Supreme Court recommends that all US companies hire illegal immigrants, they're cheaper and have no protection from unfair labor practices.

Actually, I wouldn't bet on the PCI Radeon having DVI output. I bought another mini computer (much better looking than the shuttle box, I think -- an MSI 6215) and am using a PCI Radeon AIW. They dumbed it down a bit from the AGP version. For one it's just got SDR ram instead of DDR. And they also took out the DVI.

I just did this last week. I used a msi book pc and then added an ATI All-in-wonder Radeon. The motherboard that came with the book pc has a built in NIC, audio (although not great) and video (which I disabled). Some versions have an s-video out on the motherboard, but I wanted the features of the ATI card. It can record up to DVD quality MPEG2, it has an on screen programming guide that lets you schedule what programs you want to record, and the MPEG2 decoder on board is pretty decent. I am running Win2K, which I am happy with for this application. I would take a look at doing something similar.

They're wrong, all those benchmarks. I get a higher 3Dmark on WinXP than I do on Win98, and a higher Q3A timedemo 1 score as well. I score 8000+ in XPbench, for crying out loud. And I'm only on a GeForce 2.

What I did was: install XP, install nVIDIA driver v22.50 (available from MSI, so it's as official as you can get for a leak) and sit back.

These people must be testing with the supplied drivers with WinXP for NV (and indeed any) cards which don't have OpenGL support: they go straight to the software layer, a lot like mesa on Linux, that Microsoft put in for less fortunate cards. This is, of course, very slow indeed.

However, the VIA 4-in-1s (I have a T-bird) are not required on XP, because the version that's in there is actually good. Otherwise, that's why you use other drivers instead. And it's *very* stable.

Take a look at the Slim PCs from motherboard maker Microstar. Uses an Intel 815e chipset, decent NIC, and the case doesn't look like ass.

Many manufacturers now (and have for quite some time) make motherboards with half these devices on-board.
You can quite easily find boards with built-in Ultra160 SCSI, 10/100Base-T Ethernet, USB, FireWire and Sound, leaving the slots free for more esoteric devices.
My MSI motherboard has onboard FireWire, ATA100 RAID and Audio.
They also make them with SCSI and a NIC.
I went for ATA100 RAID as it's just about as fast, and soooo much cheaper than SCSI and put the money i saved into getting a second CPU.
-- kai

Verbing Weirds Language.