Recent content by TheWarden

For what you are doing, I think an additional 256 MB would be perfect. 512 MB (total) seems to be the sweet spot for runining office applications under WIndows XP. Cheers, Warden

On one side we have reputable hardware sites doing multiple benchmarks on multiple setups showing little to no performance gains with RAID 0. On the other side we have people (not just you, Ka0t1x) saying "RAID feels faster." Personally I'm inclined to believe the benchmarks. But Maximum PC...

Read the links I posted and you'll know exactly what we're talking about. Do you have some benchmarks to back this up? Because I have looked at a lot of benchmarks for RAID 0 arrays, and none of them show anything like everything being almost twice as fast. In fact, all of them showed that...

RAID 0 is NOT "much faster" than a single drive: Anandtech - "If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in...

SPDIF output is digital, and your Z640s only accept an analog signal. As far as I know, the only way to use your Z640s in 5.1 mode is to have some kind of receiver between them and the motherboard that would decode the digital signal. -Warden

You aren't by chance overclocking your video card, are you?

I would bet on a dying monitor. However, here is something else you can check. A friend of mine was having a flicker problem, so he bought a new 19" CRT, and it flickered even worse. Turned out to be the transformer for his printer causing interference. The transformer was built into the...

I'm not a guru on electrical code, but as I understand it... First, the difference between hot and neutral. In household wiring, you only have one wire incoming from the power company, which is called the hot. The other half of the circuit is formed by the ground, and the neutral wire is tied...

I think your power supply should work fine for that configuration. Cheers, Warden

You got the same results as StorageReview.com did in their review, so I would say you are on target. Hard drive manufacturers list the seek time, and like mechBgon said, the seek time is lower than the access time which you are measuring (in this case by about 3 ms.) Cheers, Warden

This is not so true anymore, especially with SATA. Hit this link and choose the CPU Utilization benchmark (a direct link won't work; you have to choose the benchmark yourself once you get there.) You will see that the lowest drive on the list is the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 SATA, beating out...

The WD drive is the exact model you listed (WD800JB). It's an 80 GB drive using two 40 GB platters. Things get complicated with the Maxtor drive, though. From the model number you gave, it looks like your Maxtor drive is from the DiamondMax Plus 9 series. Is this correct? If so, then it...

StorageReview.com: WD800JB vs. DiamondMax Plus 9 Here is most everything you should need to know comparing the two drives. Looks like the Maxtor is faster in most desktop situations, though not by a large margin, and it's quieter but warmer. According to the actual reviews (click on the...

The JB designation means it has an 8 MB cache, and thus the 3 year warranty. sterling, what exact model of Maxtor are you looking at? -Warden

Why did you use Google? All your answers are here at Anandtech! ;) http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1312&p=2 http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1174&p=3 Cheers, Warden