Recent content by Pain

As long as you have an ide controller you can use them, sure. The new motherboard may only have one ide controller so you would be limited in how many optical drives you use if you also used an ide HD. Advantages of sata aren't really anything of concern, other than it's the new technology so...

Generally speaking, burners are disposable. Get a new one. You could try putting it in a different machine just to be sure it's broken, but I doubt there is anything you could do, or anything it would be worth doing.

It's very much game/engine dependant too. But, you said that too. In this first article, we wanted to see if an Athlon XP 2500+ would bottleneck today's newest AGP cards. It would seem that the answer is a resounding "sometimes". Depending on the game, some will bottleneck early, and others...

That's what I said. IRT topic, you could also find a 2500+ on ebay and maybe boost your system a bit more, if the board will support it. But, there is a point of diminishing returns on this current machine, so you have to decide if $200-250 is worth it to upgrade it, or to put it towards a new...

Just to clarify that, his current XP may not get much boost from a higher card, but I have many 3200+ machines that run great with 6800gt and 7900gt cards, though the 7900's are definately reaching the end of those cpu's resources.

All respect, I think they are wrong and I've used cards at 4x and gotten good results. Here are the AGP charts from 2005 that show cards you should look at. Find a game you like to play and check out the results. Then, you can look at the latest chart comparing the 7300gt and the 6600gt, using...

To sell new hardware. It's true, there isn't all that much difference. IRT to the original poster, you would get a huge improvement over that MX card with even something like the 6600 or as said a 9xxx series card. You could even get a 7600gs for $125 though I don't really think that would...

It is possible that you are getting that error if you have a CD drive hooked up, but unless you are using that 40pin cable on your HD then I doubt it is causing it to crash. I have systems where I've got the cd drive connected with that 40 pin cable, and it doesn't cause me problems though it...

You should always reformat when you build a new machine, unless the board is the same. With that said, you should have backups of your critical data anyway, so no harm done, right? :wink: You can get a 40-80G hard disk for $50, so get a new disk for the OS and keep this current disk in...

My take on it is this. If the motherboard dies or you have an OS meltdown, etc, then you're going to lose the array along with all your data. Anyone even marginally serious about running a raid5 array should be using a real controller. That's my opinion. I understand that one might be on a...

If only....along with the last person to start this same thread, and the one before that, and the one before that...... :wink:

You mean a software array? Link to the article you used to set it up.

You connect it the same way you connected the other disk. Boot the machine and see if the OS will recognize the non-bootable disk and read from it.

I think that kind of tests using a multimeter would be meaningless, especially if the machine is shutting off that quickly. The chances are good of getting variation on a good PS and it would be difficult to interpret the readings. Snag another PS and put it in. You could try, as suggested...

It would be very hard to test a PS under load with the meter. I don't recommend you try it.