upok

I learned a ton of stuff at http://ubuntuforums.org/. Very active forums, lots of good guides. Linux, any flavor, takes some getting used to but I have thoroughly enjoyed it.

oh yes, too much! you do not want it oozing out the sides. check out the instructions at the bottom right of this page.

The linux partitions!

Depends, IS IT OVERCLOCKED????

And with the money you save on the 960, you could skip the 5970 and go with 2 5870s in crossfire. Nobody needs that kind of horsepower, but 2 5870s are faster than 1 5970. And I'm not sure about the PSU, I've never used any of the bigger coolermasters(the only cooler master psus that I have used were the cheap ones, great psu for the money). I used to use antec, but now they're kinda sketchy. I've had this corsair for about a year and it has been ROCK solid. And my 920 does 3.8 on 1.15v--high 40s after and hour and a half of far cry 2. I've had it up to 4, but I just changed heatsinks and am still getting used to this one. I was using the cooler master v8, went to the noctua just to see if I could quiet this thing down.

So far as my experience has been, you can never "upgrade" from 32 to 64 bit, regardless of the os involved. Even if it's the same os. When I went from 32 to 64 bit vista I had to do a format and reinstall.

With that monitor, at that resolution, either crossfire rig you propose would be spectacular. Of course, at that resolution, a single 4870 would be spectacular. You will not get your money's worth out of a dual card setup at 1440x900. And as for your comment, "i am fine with the SIZE of screen i have and don't play anything at that resolution anyways (just not possible with my setup)", wouldn't the point of all of this be to play at higher resolutions? I mean, if you have no intention of getting a better monitor, you could probably get away with just dumping the 8600gt and drop a 4890 in the hp slimline and away you go. I understand the allure of a dual video card rig, I have had several. And when they work, they work well(and that is getting to be more often than not). BUT, even at 1920x1200, only the most entry level dual gpu rigs is not going to be bottlenecked. Even dual gtx260 216's just eat up 1920x1200 even in the most demanding games, and those cards are down to $150ish. Dual cards are cool, and if you are dead set on going crossfire, just go with dual 4850's and call it a day. They will crush almost any game at that resolution. Anything above that would just be overkill for the sake of overkill. If a new monitor might make it into your plans, then go bigger.

For those who are saying that their i7 was "cool", what do you mean by "cool"? Got any temp benchmark numbers?

So I have a small computer repair business. Maybe 150 clients, 3-4 evening jobs a week is not too far out of the norm. Anyway, in the last week, I have had 4 seperate clients, living in different parts of town, all suffer psu failures. There has not been any bad storms or sweeping power outages. Actually, the weather has been pretty mild save a couple of rainy days. The computers range from an ancient dell, a 4ish year old gateway to a custom build with an antec TruePower in it. Has anyone else had a surge in psu failures recently? Just struck me as curious.

That bit-tech article makes it sound like the i7 is dead, but then it also says that the 1366 socket will support the new 6 core processors. So, the way I'm reading this is that the quad core market will eventually belong to the i5, and anything beyond that will go to i7. I could be wrong, but that's what I would think Intel would do. And the idea of thinning out the i7 lineup makes sense. No manufacturer goes high-end heavy. Do you think that EVGA built as many gtx295s as they did gtx260s? I doubt it.

Bios update maybe?

Have ya tried pulling one of the 260s out and run just one? I had a crossfire rig with dual 4870s, and wasn't really impressed with the performance. Pulled the cards and tried them one at a time and found out one of the cards had a bad cooler and was running crazy hot. I returned that card and got one that ran at appropriate temps and then set up the crossfire to MUCH better performance. One goofy card can reek havoc on a dual card setup.

I'd try using a ps2 mouse and keyboard. If that works, then it's probably a usb driver problem. Odd that it happened on both os at the same time but who knows. Does the compy work with ps2 peripherals?

How do you intend to have Tri-SLI AND an extra 9800gtx for physics? Last time I was looking at mobos there weren't any that would offer enough pci-e slots for something like that. And like what has already been said, tri-sli is a gimmick-no real extra power.

Pretty common actually. Could have something to do with load dispersion. At idle, or near idle, processor load is left on one core because there is no need to disperse the load. This would lead to one core being always somewhat hotter than the other. When load is applied, dispersion kicks in and core temps get much closer because load levels are closer. Could also be that the IHS is making better contact with one core than the other. The IHS may not be perfectly flat, it may have some consistency irregularities that cause it to conduct heat slightly better on one side than the other, etc. These kinds of things have been out of our control since the days of "Naked" cpus! I wouldn't worry about it. All of the temps are acceptable for a stock cooler. I've had a couple of chips like that. One got closer and closer in temp as time went on. The rest just always did that. My current rig has 2 cores that run within 3 degrees of each other but 5-8 degrees hotter than the other 2 cores(which run within a couple degrees of each other).