Tempesta

I have a Tt 480W psu that I bought about a year ago.... I didn't do my homework and while it has SATA connectors, there are no PCI-E connectors. No biggie as my vid card came with an adapter. It seems that 480W is no longer enough, but this one faithfully powered two HDDs, one 7800GTX, two optical drives, and all my fans/lights with no problem.

I backup my network to my server once a week on Sunday nights, religiously. I backup my wife's My Documents, her Quicken, my My Docs (pics, music, etc.), my hard-to-find downloads, and both of our .pst files for Outlook. I am paranoid about losing my digital pics. If I do a big offload from my digital camera in the middle of the week, I'll run the backup then as well. Those are the most important to me. I saw a friend lose a 30GB drive chock full of every digital pic he's ever taken. He was nauseous and just about in tears when he realized - yep, you guessed it... no backups. Every digital pic - gone forever. I have a customer that has RAID-1 in his server, plus a tape backup every day, plus 2 USB HDDs that he backs up the entire server plus his three PCs once a month and rotates the drives and keeps once in a safety deposit box, plus a digital Iron Mountain backup that runs every night over his DSL connection. It's a differential backup so it only grabs what changes. He is the perfect example - you can never be too paranoid about your backups!

I've got a pretty nice system but I've got money burning a hole in my pocket and I'm dying to upgrade. I've been a hands-down Intel person but I'm getting tired of watching guys with lower-clocked AMD CPUs run circles around my P4 3.4. So, I plan to get an AMD CPU in the new few weeks and switch everything I have over to it. I won an AMD mobo at QuakeCon '05, so the only thing I need is the CPU and the graphics card. The RAM, drives, case, etc., will all carry over. So since I'm not at all familiar with AMD, I have a couple of questions. 1. I understand that the San Diego core is the way to go. Is that still supposed to be the core of choice? 2. I can get the 3700+ for around $100 less than the 4000+. Is the 4000+ worth the extra $100? I have a friend that has the 3700+ and he said his has been o/c to 4000+ since we were at QuakeCon and has had zero problems. Should I save the money and buy the 3700+ or go with the 4000+? The system will have a 7800GT (can't afford the GTX) and 2GB Corsair XMS PC3200 2-3-2-6 with an Abit AX8 mobo once I am done.

Yeah, that's what I meant to say.... I know the RAM will step down the slowest in the system. We used to mix PC-100 and PC-133 at work all the time and never had problems. The RAM voltage is 2.75v (manually set) and CPU voltage is 1.584v-1.600v. That's according to CPU-Z which shows it fluctuating. That's the default/auto voltage set in the BIOS. I'm using the Zalman CNPS7000a-Cu cooler. My idle temps right now as I type this is 30C and my load temps under a full gaming load never exceed 46C so there is plenty of room to grow.

Tried playing around with my system to get a decent overclock and I can't seem to get very far. I was only able to get a 3.53 o/c that would even boot into Windows. My system is as follows - P4 3.4GHz Northwood Asus P4C800-Deluxe mobo (1.019 BIOS) 1GB Corsair XMS PC3200 2-3-2-6 1GB Corsair XMS PC3200 2-2-2-5 (I run all the RAM at 2-3-2-6 and the other doesn't seem to mind) I tried loosening the timings to 2.5-3-2-6, 2.5-3-3-6, and 3-4-4-8. I can't get past 208/832 for a CPU clock of 3.53. I'm at 30C idle right now so no worries there but dang, I would think I could get this thing a little faster. Is there a problem mixing the RAM and trying to o/c? Normal stuff like gaming doesn't give me any problems with the mixed latencies.

I think I'm just gonna go with the 4000+ but it's not going to happen as soon as I'd like. It will have to wait until Christmas, unfortunately. Thanks for the advice!

I am most likely going to build a new PC within the next couple of weeks. It will be my first AMD system, mostly because I won an Abit AX8 mob at QuakeCon 2005. I saw that there's a little less than a $100 difference between the San Diego 3700+ and the 4000+. I don't mind spending the extra money for the 4000+ but my question is, is it worth the extra money? Will I really see a gaming difference between the two chips? Keep in mind I've build and used Intel all my life so I know next to nothing about AMD CPUs. Thanks for the help!

Well, it wasn't for my car but for a friend of mine. I personally wouldn't go through the trouble as if someone wants the gas that bad, they can have it.

Heh, when I read the topic I thought you meant locking fuel doors as you couldn't find one. I'm in NC and when the dang prices went to $3.40/gal after Katrina hit, the local auto parts stores ran out of locking gas caps.

I'm still learning the game so I played Assault mostly last night. Played around with the helicopter and did better than I thought; still have to figure out the whole plane/reverse throttle thing. But yeah, I played Assault and a little Special Ops while trying to learn the game.

Lols that's great! I like the part about daisy-chaining 5 PSUs together...

Sweet! A fellow flyer! I fly glow and electric. At last count, including my combat plane and an indoor electric chopper, I have 14. They range from 80" wingspan Big Boy to my 60.5" Ultimate Bipe to my Funny Park foamie. I have a Freedom 3D with a Mega brushless motor (my only one, as the others are all brushed) and that's my 'biggest' electric at 48" span. I think the ESC can tell the BL motors to run backwards, but I'm not sure, as the BL motors are essentially modified AC motors. All the brushed motors in my small foamies are neutrally timed, so they run just as well backwards as they do forwards. But anyways, yes, I have two expensive hobbies... computers and R/C planes. I'm looking at the fan now and that's a whole lot of small wires to be re-soldering. Don't know if it's going to be worth all that trouble.

Yeah, I know that the fan blades are curved and oriented to provide maximum airflow, unlike the paddles of a ceiling fan, for example. I'm not too worried about the airflow since I don't think the existing fan does much of anything anyway. I've helped plane newbies with a poorly-flying plane to find out the prop is mounted backwards. Thanks for the info about the LEDs; I have no electrical experience with them so I didn't know if they were polarity-specific or not. I figured they were since they are DC but I wanted to double-check. That's a whole lot of soldering.... it's probably just easier to mount that fan as an exhaust rather than an intake. I'll check my temps and see if it makes a difference or not. That front fan was blowing across my Raptor but I guess it doesn't really get that hot after all. Thanks for the help as always!

I did a search and found a few older topics about reversing polarity to case fans. Here's my situation and why I want to do this. I have a Tt Tsunami Dream case. I have a Sunon 92mm side intake fan, a 120mm blue LED Tt smart fan that's setup as rear exhaust, and a 120mm Aspire red LED front intake fan. I made some case and fan cage mods to maximize airflow, and I achieve 32C idle temps and ~42C load. The way the front of this case is designed, the front fan doesn't really do too much but provide red light for the case. It's quite noisy, mostly due to the restrictions in trying to pull in air. So I came across a new Cooler Master red LED 120mm fan. Super-bright LEDs, low fan RPM, and low noise. Bought one and plugged it up outside the case. Looks great (and the LEDs really are bright), but I noticed a problem. The LEDs are 'facing' one way.... you really have to mount the fan in one direction to get the maximum amount of light. Mounting the fan like that would mean that it turns this fan into an exhaust fan, not an intake. So I thought about reversing the positive and negative to the fan motor so it will reverse the fan rotation. I fly model airplanes and we run DC motors backwards all the time when they are attached to a gearbox. The fans are obviously DC but I saw several people state that they have a diode and will not run backwards with reverse polarity. My other concern is, will the LEDs light up if the polarity is reversed? Or are LEDs not polarity-specific? Or will they burn up? Should I just mount the fan as an exhaust and be done with it, since it's not doing much anyway? Thanks, as always, for the help!

Yep, I ordered a few of them for a friend of mine for battey cooling with model airplanes. Loud as hell, but cools like crazy!