Recent content by dpaul8

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In April, I am going to be building a Sandy Bridge Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) for a home recording studio. The system must be quiet. I use Cubase and Wavelab software for recording and mix-down. If I purchase a P67 motherboard, then I have to buy a graphics card. However, if I use an...

The i7-980x will be available in March 2010 for a retail price of $999. http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/15/gulftown-processor-dubbed-core-i7-980x-making-its-debut-q1-2010/ The mainstreams i9 six core processors and motherboards will be out in 2011, and these are likely to be more reasonably...

SATA interfaces are backward compatible, which means a 3 GB/s drive will work fine on a SATA 6 GB/s interface. RAID will also work fine.

Best answer selected by dpaul8.

Going from CAS9 to CAS7 on the memory will increase performance about 1 percent: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-870-1156,2482-9.html You would do better by going from 6 GB to 12 GB if you do extensive video and photo editing because Adobe apps will take advantage of this added...

Most P45 motherboards will support 667 MHz RAM, but you need to check with the manufacturers website, not necessarily Newegg to confirm this. For instance, Newegg list the memory supported for the P45-UD3R as DDR2 1366/1066: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128359 But...

Clock (CMOS) batteries have a life of about 5 years regardless of whether or not the motherboard is plugged in. This assumes that when the motherboard is not plugged in, it is packaged correctly to prevent the battery from shorting out. If you have reason to beleive the battery is dead due...

You need to be careful when you upgrade the operating system from Win Vista to Win 7, if you are going to change the motherboard in a few months. If you have an OEM version of Windows, that version is tied to the MB and CPU, and changing out these components will require that you buy a new OEM...

The Seagate 7200.12 is a good hard drive. You are right, you would not see any significant difference with a Samsung F3. If you really want to improve performance, you could add a solid state drive like the Intel X25: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167025 Best regards.

I regret to inform you that you are not a "bonehead." You have very intelligently and systematically diagnosed your situation, and have correctly at this point determined that it is probably the motherboard. You might contact HP to see how much they charge for a replacement MB. Best regards.

Here are some answers to your questions for you to consider: 1. Adobe recommends separate disks for each element of the project - what will be best served by a raid0 - scratch or storage? I'm not so concerned with redundancy. You should consider scrapping Raid 0 because it is not that much...

Here is a comparison of the performance of a Q8200 (close to the Q8300) and the Q9550: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=50&p2=52 You are likely to see about a 25 percent performance increase with the Q9550. The processor is not the determining factor in how fast applications like...

What program are you using to monitor your temperatures? I trust HWMonitor from CPUID.com. You can download it for free from here: http://www.cpuid.com/hwmonitor.php

Here is a comparison chart between the E4500 (close to the E4400) and the E8400: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?p=56&p2=65 The E8400 is about 50 percent better than the E4500 on average. This is a substantial boost in performance. The i3-540 has not been out very long so there is...