The New Hardware Thread

[KO Gilligan]

I asked Santa (my wife) to order me 8GB of DDR3 1600 HyperX for $66 after rebate free shipping

$50 rebate on 4GB kit - up to two kits allowed on rebate
make sure you use the right rebate they have one for Nov and one for Dec
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002UKAR1A

December's Rebate
http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/image...175986371_.pdf

[Jeff]

My dad bought me a laser printer because I said that I only print a few times a year and if you don't use the printer that often, the ink dries up. With laser, the toner is dry, so I don't have to worry about it. It's a Brother color laser.

[Wamplet]

Originally Posted by Jeff

My dad bought me a laser printer because I said that I only print a few times a year and if you don't use the printer that often, the ink dries up. With laser, the toner is dry, so I don't have to worry about it. It's a Brother color laser.

Nice, I got one of those too, a while back. Not sure of the one you got, but I have the 4040 i think. Only drawback was i had to put in a dedicated circuit for it in the fuse box outside and have the wires run all the way up to it.

[Jeff]

It's a Brother MFC-7220.

[8IronBob]

/me thought about a laser printer, but the family wanted a Canon Pixma All-in-One...so I had to make do.

[Jeff]

Got my Sandy Bridge system ordered.

-Cooler Master Storm Scout case (Antec 900 didn't have spots for the external USB 3.0 ports).
-Intel Core i7 2600K 3.40 GHz (3.8 GHz w/TurboBoost)
-Cooler Master Hyper 212 CPU cooler
-Corsair Vengeance 8 GB DDR 3 1600 MHz RAM
-WD Caviar Black 2 TB
-LG 10x BD burner/DVD burner
-Asus 24x DVD burner
-Asus GTX 570 1280 MB superclocked
-Cooler Master Silent Pro modular 850W power supply.
-Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

The only thing holding you back is your hard drive. SSD's are the future. You should have an SSD boot drive, 100-120gb+, in addition to a standard hd for storage.

Otherwise that will be a blistering fast computer.

[Jeff]

I have a 128 GB SSD in my current system. So maybe I'll make a new partition on my WD Caviar drive in this machine, format the SSD, reinstall Windows on the WD Caviar drive.

Following that, I'll install the SSD into my new system, and it should be good to go.

I did this kind of thing before with my Core 2 Duo machine where I accidently installed Windows 7 onto a 5400 RPM drive (no wonder it was slow), so I made a partition onto the front of my 7200 RPM drive and it was much faster.

[NutWrench]

Originally Posted by Jeff

Got my Sandy Bridge system ordered.

-Cooler Master Storm Scout case (Antec 900 didn't have spots for the external USB 3.0 ports).
-Intel Core i7 2600K 3.40 GHz (3.8 GHz w/TurboBoost)
-Cooler Master Hyper 212 CPU cooler
-Corsair Vengeance 8 GB DDR 3 1600 MHz RAM
-WD Caviar Black 2 TB
-LG 10x BD burner/DVD burner
-Asus 24x DVD burner
-Asus GTX 570 1280 MB superclocked
-Cooler Master Silent Pro modular 850W power supply.
-Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Nice!

[Jeff]

It's about as fast as the 980X, except for encoding benchmarks, where the 980X pulls ahead.

[eddym4814]

I got a SteelSeries Xai Laser Mouse today. So far it seems like a decent mouse.

[Phayzon]

Ordered this Rosewill 1000W Modular PSU yesterday with a promo code bringing it down to $105. Should arrive tomorrow.

Hope to bring down noise and heat from my late-2005 Silverstone 650W. Also clean up the cable mess since my current PSU isn't modular.

[Jeff]

Here's a screenshot of my Sandy Bridge performance benchmark:

[NutWrench]

Bought a 4th gen iPod Touch.

[Phayzon]

The new PSU came today, just got it installed. Considerably quieter and a little less mess (never realized I had a lot of crap to plug in, so modularity only helped a little). Heat I'm unsure of, idle is about the same and I don't remember what my burn temps were before to know if they'd be any lower now.

[Jeff]

Bought some SATA cables for my Cooler Master power supply since I couldn't find my box.

$3 plus about $17 in taxes.

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

Originally Posted by Jeff

Here's a screenshot of my Sandy Bridge performance benchmark:

My overclocked i7 920 (at 3.6ghz) got the same score. My memory scored .1 higher. I do plan on upgrading my video card to either a 560ti or a 6950. Though to have a high overall score I will have to upgrade to an ssd.

[Iggy]

My videocard (Asus GeForce 8800GTS 640Mb) died today, I replaced it with a Asus GeForce GT240 (just 105 euro). I'm currently updating the drivers for it while I still got my laptop as back-up device. My new card has no active cooling so this should last a bit longer I hope. There's a big fan right above it that blows air to the videocard so it shouldn't have cooling problems.

I'm also thinking for getting a big upgrade at the end of May, somewhere along the lines of this;

- Motherboard: Asus Crosshair IV Formula (Not too keen on this one as it's been reported that several motherboards of this type have a faulty northbride cooling)
- CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
- CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14 (it's ridiculous large so maybe a smaller will have to.)
- Video: MSI N560GTX-Ti Twin Frozr II/OC (GeForce 560GTX-Ti)
- Memory: Corsair 12 GB DDR3-1600 Tri-Kit
- PSU: Cooler Master Silent Pro M 850W ATX2

I'm not fully sure of my choices so feedback is welcome. I'm not replacing my HD's as their SSD counterparts are extremely expensive. Maybe for the next update.

[8IronBob]

Originally Posted by Inanimate Carbon Rod

My overclocked i7 920 (at 3.6ghz) got the same score. My memory scored .1 higher. I do plan on upgrading my video card to either a 560ti or a 6950. Though to have a high overall score I will have to upgrade to an ssd.

Well, having an X25-M 120GB might help...it certainly helped my laptop out.

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

Originally Posted by Jeff

Here's a screenshot of my Sandy Bridge performance benchmark:

I hope you've heard of the recall. Looks like they will be replacing your motherboard.

[Jeff]

I heard the SATA performance degrades, but I haven't noticed anything yet. My RAM failed on me, so I had to get some new stuff.

Seems those are the SATA 3Gb ports. My hard drives are on the SATA 6Gb ports. My Blu-ray burner and DVD burner would probably get hit, but I'll have to keep an eye on them. There's a notice about it on my local shop's website.

[8IronBob]

True, the 6Gb ports aren't exactly 100% stable yet, the 3Gb ports are solid and mature still, and should actually hold their own for a good long time, as has been the case with my two SSDs, Blu-ray burner and HDD. So I'm probably gonna hold off a little while before jumping the gun on the 6Gb until I can tell whether or not SATA III has indeed been perfected.

[Jeff]

I believe it was the 3Gb ports which were having the issues. I'll have to test my drives one of these days.

[Jeff]

Just ordered a home theater system to add some surround sound to my place.

Pioneer VSX-520 5.1 receiver
Klipsch 5.1 surround sound speakers

And of course some speaker cable and banana plugs.

[8IronBob]

Sounds quite good, Jeff...not sure how that would compare to the Yamaha RX-V663/JBL 7.2 Cinema Series CS480 setup that I've had for the last year and a half, tho.

[Jeff]

Not sure. This is my first home theater system. I mean I do have my Logitech Z-5300s, but those are for a computer not a TV.

My speakers and such should be here on Tuesday. Whoo. The shipment is currently in Vancouver.

[8IronBob]

Keeping an eye on this monitor...having an IPS panel and LED backlighting has me thinking about getting this down the road. Although I'm not sure if this one was full-array LED or Edge-Lit, doesn't really say: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16824005232

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

Just ordered 2 intel 320 SSD's.

300gb for my desktop. 120gb for my laptop.

Ordered from buy.com.

[fast-1]

My value headphones and mic broke .

But I got accident cover.

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

Also recently purchased: Canon M400 camcorder, 32gig class 10 sd card, larger battery, and wide angle adapter.
The camcorder from Newegg, everything else from Amazon.

[8IronBob]

Originally Posted by Inanimate Carbon Rod

Just ordered 2 intel 320 SSD's.

300gb for my desktop. 120gb for my laptop.

Ordered from buy.com.

Yeah, was thinking of getting one once I build a Sandy Bridge PC later on in the year. We'll see how that goes.

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

I received the 120gb Intel SSD 320 yesterday and installed it in my laptop. I'm happy.

My Windows Experience Index for the hard drive is a 7.7.

[X-Vector]

Picked up my new system last monday:

- Cooler Master Storm Sniper miditower
- Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 800W PSU
- Asus P8P67 Deluxe motherboard
- Intel Core i7 2600K CPU
- Zalman CNPS10X Performa CPU cooler
- Mushkin Blackline DDR3 1600Mhz RAM
- Asus EAH6950 DCII 2GB VGA card
- OCZ Vertex 2 120GB SSD
- WD Caviar Blue 500GB HDD
- LG GH22NS50 22X DVD-RW
- Windows 7 HP 64-bit

Haven't tested compatibility with my older games yet (except for Battlefield 2), but it is even more quiet than I hoped it would be and that fan control knob on the case is a really cool feature.
Now I just need to get me a new monitor.

[GambitMR]

Not meant to be offending but any reason you guys went with those humongously oversized PSUs?

[X-Vector]

In my case it was a question of rather having a bit too much than too little.
Apart from that, I wanted a quiet system and that CM PSU fits the bill.

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

Originally Posted by GambitMR

Not meant to be offending but any reason you guys went with those humongously oversized PSUs?

Many mid to high end video cards require at least 500 watts.

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

I installed the 300gig in my desktop. I used intel's data migration utility so I didn't have to reinstall windows + my programs. I couldn't use intel's program on my laptop because the ssd needs to be attached to the system in order to run.

[NutWrench]

I'm seriously looking at a Samsung Galaxy Tab instead of an iPad 2.

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

Originally Posted by NutWrench

I'm seriously looking at a Samsung Galaxy Tab instead of an iPad 2.

bad idea.

The ipad 2 is by far superior.

[NutWrench]

I got the Acer Iconia Tab, instead.

I hear what you're saying, Carbon Rod but I spent about an hour last night trying to transfer some pictures to my iPod Touch and finally gave up. I hate iTunes with a passion and Apple's "all roads to your iPod lead through iTunes" locked-down philosophy. I plugged this tablet into my USB port and everything on the device was available with full drag, drop and delete access.

The Android 3.0 operating system is really nice and I'm surprised how similar it is to IOS. It has real built-in GPS and two quality cameras (the outside one has a flash). It was also about half the cost I would have paid for an iPad 2.