Recent content by Steve_in_VA

I'm replacing the fans on my ATI video cards and the Gigabyte MB chipset fans - all sleeve fans that have gotten noisy. I have on order some Spire ball bearing fans. Thanks for all your wisdom.

I want to replace some noisy OEM 40mm x 10mm fans with good ball-bearing fans, but the only ones I can find are 3-pin (presumedly the third pin is a speed signal). Can I use these with 2-pin connectors? I realize I may have to rewire/change the connector, but will the fan function?

A friend has a PII computer whose BIOS won't recognize hard drives greater than 8 GB. He wanted a larger hard drive, so he got a WD 40 GB drive, and we installed it today using the WD Data Lifeguard software, which installs a drive overlay. Everything seemed to go OK; the software first copies...

There's not much of a heat sink, just a flat piece of metal with some small fins around the fan. I took the fan off and squirted some WD-40 (all-purpose miracle stuff!)into the bearing, and it got better, at least for now.

The fan on my ATI 9000 pro card has suddenly developed quite a growl. How necessary is this fan if I'm not overclocking anything?

I stand corrected, ATA133 is right.

Bear in mind that the folks who don't have problems with their mobos usually don't post, so it's hard to generalize based on problem reports. For the record, I recently built a system with the Gigabyte GA-8PE667 Ultra board, a RAID 1 array, 1 GB of RAM, XP loaded, and had zero problems.

I have the Ultra board, so I'm extrapolating to the Ultra 2. You can set up IDE 3/4 as either ATA 100 or RAID. If ATA 100, you can have two IDE devices per channel in the usual master/slave setup. If RAID, only one HD per channel, usually set up as cable select. So you can have 4 IDE devices...

If you go to the support part of the Gateway web site, you'll find a place where you can plug in the serial # of your computer and retrieve full information about its components, drivers. etc.

If I try to change my drive letters now, won't that screw up the software? Don't the various installed programs expect to find their files in folders on F:?

I built a computer with the Gigabyte GA-8PE667 Ultra mobo and set up two hard drives in a RAID 1 array running XP. The array turned out to be drive F: (drive C: is a zip disk on IDE 1). Everything works fine (except for my wife's stupid realtor software that insists on installing to C:), but I...

Compared to the Ultra, the Ultra 2 adds a few goodies: serial ATA and gigabit LAN. I think that's the only difference - not worth the price difference IMHO. Gigabyte may be phasing out the Ultra; I just bought one for less than $100 from Outpost.com. I plan to install it this weekend. To me the...

I know that drives can be mounted either vertically or horizontally, but is it a bad idea to change the position after the drive has been run one way for a while?

I plan to use the Gigabyte GA-8PE667Ultra in an upgrade, and I'm confused by the fan connectors on the board. Am I correct in assuming that the SYS_FAN "sense" pin is for input from a fan that provides rotation information (like the P/S fan), so the BIOS can monitor rotation speed? I want to...