mesh

LGA775 Intel Xeon E3110 2x3GHz (server / low power version of E8400) with stock OEM cooling Evga 750i LGA775 motherboard 2GBx4 OCZ DDR2 Vapor-X Radeon 5850 2GB 80GB WD Raptor boot + 1TBx2 WD Black Raid0 Lian Li PCS-80 Corsair 620HX power supply Benq FP231W 23" 1920x1200 LCD Audio Technica ATH-A700 headphones Country Canada note: while I'd love any upgrade gift, the most pressing are my headphones, the ear covers are almost transparent and I've yet to find somewhere to get a replacement part. I have 3 other pairs of headphones but don't use em since they aren't even close in sound quality. In any case, thanks for the opportunity.

Thank you for a chance at the prizes, and thank you for not making us jump through lots of hoops just to participate.

Not sure if it helps or if its the cause in your case but I once read that disabling the nvidia driver/helper service could help that, and if you're using an ati card, perhaps disabling their driver service applies as well.

I've had that happen with the 180.48 drivers on a westinghouse lvm-42w2. I've found it's related to the poor monitor ID implemented in the drivers and the lack of standard in the monitor itself for reporting it's specs. In 1080p@60Hz the image is squished in, any other Hz is scaled fine. I plugged the same pc/settings in a benq FP231W and it fixed it. Plugging it back to the lvm-42w2 fixed the scaling till the next resolution change, probably because it queried the monitor's id to do it. For now I've settled on creating a custom res of any other Hz that didn't exist (oddly allowing me to define a 120hz res. on a 60hz panel) and it's fixed it. It'd be nice if I found a way to clear out the windows/drivers cache of monitors ID. I found "Monitor Asset Manager" by EnTech that shows like 6 in the registry, but doesn't help me remove em.

There's always daisy chained 1394 or usb

I'd lean towards anything but asus. Their support is seriously lacking.

Big list, though most of those don't use the really bad part of securom, it's not new as can be seen by the version they're up to. The online parts are the real problem with securom or any other drm scheme. Big companies like valve might seem like they'll be around forever but there's no hard value to make that so. Maybe if they put in writing that should they ever go under, all games anyone's bought could be used without the steam client/online authentification. Or better yet, if the first few weeks of sale are the big reason why drm is used at all, make any games on steam stop requiring any sort of authentification past the game release date + 1 or 2 weeks. That way, pirates can't blow sales and users get peace of mind.

xxclone looks neat, does it work with vista?

I don't think mine is the v3.0 revision but the side buttons haven't changed that much and they've always been a bit easy to click. I miss mine, it broke down after like 10 cable repairs

My 2x8800ultras were on a HX620 not long ago, with plenty of room to spare too. Yours will be fine and the modular cables work and look great.

2gb is fine for vista, I even ran it on 1gb for a while. If funds permit 3+ is good too. Just make sure you disable the biggest space hogs like superfetch and similar services.

I had a similar system on a corsair HX620, the TX750 should be more than enough for yours.

I second the motion to experiment. Although in my test for fanless systems all I found was: - typically expensive to accomplish - one low speed fan gives great temp and won't let you hear the noisy hdd as much. - fans are generally quite similar, noise by speed tends to be best under 1000rpm for 120mm variants. I've given up on making a low speed / hot system, and turned instead to isolating it at a distance .

I don't favor either, price/performance ratio is more useful to me. Though of all my systems my intel have been a bit more stable than amd, except for my recent atom desktop but that's because of lousy x64 drivers.

I thought the fun of polls was to read lots of comments ? well, maybe that's just me