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If you have an Audigy2 or X-Fi, go buy a DVD-Audio disc of something you like.

Or you could buy a $10 VCR at Walmart and use its tuner with an antenna.

The BB coupon says markdowns taken from regular prices, so you probably got lucky if you got the 10/12% off the sale price. Regular price is $2k and current sale price is $1800, so 10% off the regular price wouldn't save you anything anyway.

Yep, same issue here, and the tray has holes in it so it'll fubar an optical mouse if you don't use some sort of pad. DOH!

As others have said, in spite of the looks the desk is quite sturdy. The metal parts are mostly tubular (or rectangular) steel and the top is thick tempered glass. You CAN put the keyboard tray on either side, that was something I was concerned about as well.

Mine came with that too, it's actually fairly small (like maybe 10"x10"x14"), designed for holding those um...hanging file folders I guess you'd call them. It's just sitting in my closet, but I guess it's not bad if you have some folders or paperwork you want to store and no filing cabinet.

Allegedly one of my local Best Buys has the 42" in stock. I'll be tempted to buy it if they go on good sale again, they've been $1800+ for a while now. I could still use an HDTV and the Westy is potentially a great deal at 42" (and I don't have room for anything much bigger).

Not bad even at $99, I have one I paid the $150ish for and it's pretty nice. No drawers or storage, but plenty of surface area and it's fairly sturdy - I have my old 17" CRT on the corner piece.

I bought mine last year for $80 - 40 MIR. Never got the rebate, but it's still a nice case (if a little short from front to back, PSU is awfully close to my optical drive). Good case, careful with the CompUSA rebate though...

Probably a decent deal, a no brainer if you want 1080p unless you're willing to wait for it to be cheaper. There's a lot of competition in 42" displays but it's all about price/performance, what you'll use it for, and what display you like the picture of best. The 1080p may be nice for future...

Well shit. I think my motherboard has fried, whole computer just shut down in the middle of a game Thursday night and I couldn't power the system up again. Tried all kinds of things, and I don't have enough spare hardware to narrow it down 100%, but it's looking like either the mobo or the BIOS...

RAM nirvana BIOS would be good. I just got my 2 gigs of G.Skill PC4000 (the stuff with the black heatspreader). It's running fine right now @ 260 and advertised timings, but unfortunately in single channel only. I can't get the board to POST if either stick is in either of the two slots closest...

With temps like that, you could always physically touch the heatsink (ground yourself to the case first) and see whether it feels warm/hot to the touch, it should be fairly warm. If it's not, it's probably safe to assume that either you don't have proper contact between the heatsink and CPU or...

Looks like jab-tech has quit selling the standard Ninja and only has the plus, which is the same thing with a fan. Used to be $36 for a Ninja and $4 for a 120mm Yate Loon. The Plus is $43+shipping at jab-tech. For mine, shipping ran around $6-7 because it's somewhat heavy. Plus...

Bought a SuperLanboy case from CompUSA last fall, it was sale-price $80 with a $40 MIR. Paid the $80, sent in all the rebate stuff, never got the rebate. It's the only one in recent memory I haven't gotten, and there have been a lot. Didn't follow up on it because I had sent in a couple...

I wasn't really too worried about crushing the core(s) since the heat spreader seems pretty sturdy. I was worried about getting the heatsink lined up right though, because the fresh AS3 between the Ninja and CPU made things a little slick, and it was hard to only push down on the clips without...

I just put mine on a couple days ago and wasn't a fan of the mounting crap. The backplate is metal (ok, so it has a thin layer of foam). You could potentially short something out with it, although it's unlikely. The adhesive didn't help it stick to the board. It was slightly curved, so it didn't...

The mechanisms for mounting the Ninja and mounting a fan on the Ninja suck. But it does cool really well once you've got it all put together.

Yep, I used Q-tips and water. It took a little more effort than isopropyl, but in the end it worked 95% as well and hell, do you really need to get every last bit of residue off if you're just going to smack more thermal paste on there in a minute?

I believe the Opty has a better cooler (with heatpipes), so take that into consideration if you prefer stock cooling. The X2 has a higher multi and stock speed but less cash and tends to be slightly cheaper. They should both overclock about the same, with a range of 2.4-2.8 being pretty typical...

It should work, it'll just be ugly :) Your system probably won't be cold enough for condensation to be an issue, and if it's 40 degrees outside the air will probably be pretty dry. If you're pumping really moist air into your computer, you may start to have issues with things rusting or...

With my Epox nForce2 board, there was a saying that FF either meant Fully Functional or Fully F***ed. While FF is normal "running" status, if your board immediately goes to FF as soon as you power on, something is probably wrong. I can't really say what, but when my Epox did that, it was a...

Think I'm gonna let others try this out a while before I go ahead and flash it in :)

Not exactly a benchmark, but the Barton 2500+ has been semi-retired now that my 3800+ X2 is in service. Still working on a max stable overclock but either way, I've now got TWO cores folding with each one faster than the Barton was ;) The Barton will go back into service (probably running...

AMD used to make knockoffs of Intel chips back in the Pentium and earlier days. But eventually they started in on their own designs and had modest success with the K6 and K6-2 chips. It seems to me they got on top when they realized that, as the underdog, they could take some bigger risks. Intel...

I'm using GeIL PC3200 Ultra. Rated at CL2 6-3-3 1T @ 200MHz and it runs at that though some of the sticks have problems with 1T in the board (I'm using 1x512 + 2x256 - ran in dual channel that way on my nForce2 but won't on the EVGA). Not sure you can even buy this RAM anymore, but it's what I'm...

4 leaf clover. 4 core Clovertown. Coincidence? Maybe. :D

Probably the 165 at those prices. 3800+ has less cache but a higher multi. 170 has the same cahce and a higher multi. The higher multiplier should really only help you if your board is not likely to manage a high HTT frequency.

So far to me, it feels like the huge difference in gaming was going from a 9700np to a 7800GT more than going from a Barton 2500+ to a 3800+ X2 (though it's hard to separate because I switched out both at the same time). But the nice thing about the dual core is that I can leave crap running in...

Yeah the 100% CPU thing sounds like DMA is not on. If you don't use DMA, all drive reads and writes have to be processed by the CPU to get in and out of memory, yay!

Er...don't cut the connector. God knows why, but there seems to be two power LED connection points. One is the two-pin you already found in the block with HDD LED, power, reset. Just above that is another pin block for the PC speaker (crappy old speaker that beeps at POST, not onboard audio) and...

Not much really. I guess it's kind of hard to get good monitoring, Jetway's MyGuard program or SpeedFan both seem to do reasonably good jobs of giving you temps, fan speeds, etc. Not sure if there's a better solution, it's kind of annoying that MBM stopped development.

Should be able to, my 3800+ X2 detected correctly right out of the box, and I believe had the proper default clock settings.

Nah, but at the same time, if you're going to publish an article, spellcheck is E-Z :D

I actually got all my RAM to work, it was either a clocks or timings issue. I need to play around with it some more to see if I can figure out why exactly it does/didn't work (it's nice that it works but it'd also be nice to know why). I guess I'm gonna ponder a nice heatsink now since I...

No it's not really "top" now, since you technically COULD build a better box. There will be better stuff in 6 months. And then in 6 more months. That's how it works. But depending on what you use the box for and how demanding you are, that rig would probably serve you well for a year or two...

I tend to get them in the mail once a month or so. No idea why I get them, but I do use them on occasion. Most of the ones I've gotten have a disclaimer at the bottom saying they can't be used for Dyson, Tempurpedic, Nautica, and a few other expensive name brands.

Yeah, because of the dividers, your choices for memory clock can be sort of limited. Right now I've got an "FSB" of 270. I'd like my memory to be right at 200MHz. But because of the dividers, I can't make that happen, so I have to choose between something like 185 and 225. My memory won't do...

My 3800+ X2 @ 2.7 is giving me: Arithmetic 24.3 MIPS 11.1 MFLOPS Mutlimedia Int 51.5 it/s FP 55.5 it/s I assume my multimedia results were somewhat lower than mlinz's because my memory bandwidth sucks right now. Had some RAM issues so I'm only running one stick of 512 (which means...

GAH! I wish it had :( The one I got is all aluminum with no copper plug in the base, no heat pipes. It's close to the size of my old copper Thermalright SK-7 I used forever on my Barton and a similar fin design. But I think the stock fan is a 70mm and I'm not sure you could mount a bigger one...