davidjkuhr

My mouse on my gaming rig is really starting to show it's age. It still works but it sometimes likes to act up. It would actually be nice to have a mouse that doesn't ask to install drivers every time I plug it in.

It's amazing how small each new iteration of technology gets.

I like the overall size and looks of the Z2 and the front facing speakers and IPS display are a real plus in my book. I have never heard of dbrand before but the LTT skin looks like it belongs on the phone and looks very professional. I'm still using a feature flip phone from 5 years ago since I could not justify the added cost of changing to a smartphone but at some point I will have to follow the herd.

An extreme video editing rig will utilize a 4p server board with high core count server CPU's to allow rendering with transitions, effects, and all at a high speed. If you are using a gaming machine that you also want to do some video editing on then you will want to go for the fastest single gpu you can afford that is supported by all the software you use. If your software only uses CUDA then get the Nvidia gpu that offers the most CUDA cores for your budget. Also keep in mind that rendering of video that has many transitions or added effects will take longer as some of the rendering will be done on the CPU so your CPU may be your real bottleneck when rendering some projects.

Since the 2 drives are from 2008 they are already 4 years old and I would not trust them to stay reliable in a raid 0 that I would rely on for my OS. If you do video editing they would work great in raid 0 as a scratch disk since it would not be mission critical. Mechanical drives only provide about 100-200 IOPS and in a raid 0 with many on-board controllers the max IOPS available may be lower than that provided by a single drive even though the throughput would be almost double. When dealing with OS drives your 4k IOPS performance is far more important than your max throughput. If you want to see a real performance gain in your system buy a current generation SSD from a good brand to use as your OS drive and then use those 2 older drives in a raid 1 as redundant storage or in a raid 0 as a scratch disk for temporary or shared network storage.

Actually if you bought one of the windows 8 pro upgrade keys for $15 after buying a new windows 7 pc or bought an upgrade key with disk from a retailer it is locked to upgrade only and will not activate after being installed on a low-level formatted or newly blank drive. The reason for this is that during the beginning of the install, the windows 8 installer will look to see if a previous version of windows exists on the drive before upgrading or formatting and will set a flag in memory that is later written to the registry during install. If that flag is not set after windows 8 is installed it will not accept the upgrade key for activation and windows 8 will start in a limited trial mode until it can be activated. The key is what is locked to an upgrade version not the disk. You can find more info about this here: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-windows_install/windows-8-activation-after-clean-install-does-not/01047349-516a-485f-b88d-68c1c9ac0e9c Your choices to install an upgrade key version of windows 8 on a blank drive are: * Re-install your old OS (XP, Vista, or 7) and perform an upgrade * Re-install windows 8 upgrade over the top of the install of 8 you just did * Or edit the registry after install as follows: 1. Run the registry editor (regedit) 2. Find the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\OOBE 3. Change the value for 'MediaBootInstall' from 1 to 0 4. Open an elevated command prompt (run as admin) 5. Run the following command: slmgr -rearm 6. Reboot Activation of an upgrade key should now work.

If you need 95, as others have said install a virtual machine environment like java virtual machine, VMware, etc. Then acquire a windows 95 iso and install as a virtual machine (you should be able to use the license from the old computer if you are junking it without an issue. I assume you have already tried installing/running the old accounting software in compatibility mode on windows 7 and it won't run. I have a few programs from the windows 95/98 era that still run just fine in windows 7.

I seem to remember talk of work on a strictly open GL based core last year. I don't recall when they were planning to have it ready for testing but this could very well be the case since I believe they would like to streamline the projects to all use the same cores as well and eliminate the need to program projects separately based on one GPU or the other.

Yeah with 12.10 drivers I only noticed a slight decrease in utilization so I was not overly concerned because there could be other factors affecting it, but using the 13.1 and 13.2 drivers IMHO are basically like hitting a brick wall as far as folding performance and even performance in some games. It is almost like they placed a cap on the max utilization of each GPU to about 25% for 13.1 and about 40% for 13.2. It doesn't make much sense but it must have something to do with AMD trying to remove stuttering/frame freezing issues on the 7XXX series cards and somehow the 6XXX series cards seem to be affected negatively. Either way I am sure they will figure out the issue given enough time.

"Do you have a specific site or link where said complaints can be made?"On the same page that you download the AMD Catalyst drivers there is a link on the right-hand pane of the page under "Helpful Links" named "AMD issue reporting form" you will also find a link below that for reporting issues with the Beta drivers. http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/radeonaiw_win8-64.aspx

Some things to keep in mind if you do choose install F@H or any other distributed computing program on your PC. * If you are not the owner of the PC ask before installing any software. * If you are not the person responsible for paying the electric bill ask before you start leaving your PC on 24/7 because it can get expensive depending on how much power your PC uses. * It is generally not the best Idea to run F@H on laptops and AIO PCs since they have a much less cooling capacity than most desktop computers. * 24/7 folding machines require periodic maintenance to maintain good airflow that provides proper cooling. (all PC's should be maintained but 24/7 machines generally need it more often)

Some of the older Nvidia cards were having issues in December with not passing the test when they moved to core 15 work units but that was most likely a F@H issue caused by the new testing process being much more picky about possible memory errors on cards. My older folding machine was affected by that issue. My main rig was affected by the new AMD driver issue but I just backdated the drivers to what worked well and folding seems to be back to normal for the time being. I have no doubt that F@H will improve on AMD cards as it has in the past but for the time being Nvidia's CUDA technology is being leveraged far better.

I can also confirm that after upgrading to version 13.1 drivers I have noticed the folding performance of all 4 GPU's in my 2x HD6990's drop to about 20-25% of the performance they were achieving on previous drivers. I noticed max GPU utilization (as measured by AIDA64 Extreme Edition) on 12.6 drivers was always 95-99% on all 4 GPU's but every so often the drivers would crash. When I upgraded to 12.8 not much changed but I started to have some cores spend a lot more time below 95% utilization but it was still mostly in the 90's. When I upgraded to 12.10 I started to notice cores only running at 80-90% average. When I went to 13.1 the max utilization that all 4 cores would see was 20-25% and I can also confirm this since the time to fold each working unit increasing by the inverse of the utilization being measured. So working units that once took about 6 hours were now taking 24-30 hours to complete. I decided to give the 13.2 beta drivers a shot and they have increased the max utilization to about 40% for each GPU and folding time has been reduced a few hours but it is still not very good. One other thing I will mention is that the FPS in some games I have tested according to fraps has decreased substantially with the newer drivers. I have already reported my issues with the new drivers but I would encourage everyone who is having problems with these drivers to let AMD know so that they know its affecting many people and also so that they know that Folding@Home is something that many of us support and we expect them to continue to as well.