StuS

Did the 6800XT fit easily enough? Looking to upgrade my Vega 64 to it which was already a pretty tight fit. 6800XT is shorter but larger in other dimensions. I'm ok with struggling to get it in there as long as it fits.

Monoprice recently added an ATX Mid-Tower case to their product offerings. Minus the sales pitch, the case is optimized for air cooling, and includes 5 120mm fans (3 are LED). A 3-channel fan controller is located up by the front IO. It is constructed of heavy-duty 0.8mm steel and measures 20.1" x 9.1" x 20.7" (510 x 232 x 526 mm) (LWH). It has three 5.25" drive bays and eight 3.5" drive bays with toolless drive mounting options. There is 11.8" (300mm) of VGA clearance or 16.9" (430mm) if you remove a drive bay. The case is painted black, inside and out. The front panel includes two USB 2.0 and two USB 3.0 ports, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a card reader. By Monoprice standards the case is rather expensive, launching at $95.70. This is the first computer component Monoprice has attempted, which hopefully will succeed. If it does Monoprice could bring a full line of high value components that are constantly iterated based on customer feedback. The case is listed under the category Cases | Cooling | Power Supplies, so it would appear more are already in the works. Source: Monoprice

I currently use a 120 GB SSD boot drive with a 2 x 2 TB RAID0 and a 620 GB backup drive. Eventually the 2 TB drives will be reconfigured into a more reliable RAID and moved to a home server when I can afford to build it.

A SSD is a necessity for a computer these days. Too frustrating to use one without.

https://twitter.com/StuS

Hopefully this can replace my brother's recently drowned phone.

I loved Avast and still miss some of the features. I had to switch to MSE after finally figuring out Avast was causing bluescreens and not the hardware I'd been replacing. So if you use Avast and start to notice some BSODs, it could be the culprit.

So these sponsors are turning out to be pretty sweet.

Unless you want all the customization options available for Alienware (Lighting effects, etc) I'd get an Asus or Lenovo laptop. I haven't seen any Intel processors paired with a Radeon card, I think that might be AMD chipsets only. Limiting the graphics card to a 680M really narrows things down. Basically you can choose from these depending on features and price. I'd go for an SSD with a data drive (most/all of these have that). It will be much faster than having a large harddrive. http://ncix.com/products/?sku=79107&vpn=9S7-16F311-404&manufacture=MSI%2FMicroStar&promoid=1393 http://ncix.com/products/?sku=74883&vpn=9S7-176212-281&manufacture=MSI%2FMicroStar http://ncix.com/products/?sku=77719#ProductDetails Otherwise I'd go for the Alienware. I wouldn't trust any of the other ones to be very repairable/upgradable.

The Titan seems pretty easy to take apart aside from a couple odd screws. Should be enough to take the pieces you want off to paint them.

I wouldn't recommend Corsair Vengeance. Absolutely no overclocking headroom. I personally wouldn't buy them again. I'd look at G.Skill or better Corsair memory. Vengeance are pretty much as bad as it gets.

Yeah that is pretty much the conclusion I came to. Its from a Toshiba laptop though, so I'm not holding my breath.

I tried making a 400GB partition on each drive and installed Windows 8 on both (one at a time). Windows fails to boot from either drive after the "Getting Devices Ready" reboot. Windows 7 still runs thankfully. Even deleting and resizing partitions in the Windows installer shows them as 640GB disks.

Recently I added two old laptop harddrives I had lying around to my desktop. I was playing around with a few things and I tried creating a dynamic volume in Windows 7 Drive Management. I later removed it, but the properties for the new drives are now the same. They both claim to be the same manufacturer, size, etc. The only thing different is location. This is also shown in the BIOS so I'm worried a reformat won't do anything. I'm also worried because the 500GB Samsung drive now thinks its a 620GB Toshiba drive. I'd imaging the results of attempting to write to a part of the platter that doesn't exist couldn't be good. I've tried removing the Toshiba drive from the computer, resetting the BIOS, uninstalling the drives, and tried different partition sizes and types. WEI seems to be testing one of these drives as the primary now too, as the score has dropped from 7.8 to 5.9. Any ideas on how to fix this?

I can't find where but I've read that even with over 8 GB of ram you should still have pagefile enabled. I used to run it without before with 8GB in the laptop and I was getting to the point of Windows shutting down programs.