Recent content by Diablo

Many enthusiasts find that even with their NVME SSDs, their steam drive stretching into the terabytes and unlimited Netflix there is still a need for some network attached storage. Maybe it is to run their music in the living room, hold their photo collection, or stream their video collection...

So I have been meaning to post something for a few months. I recently changed jobs, and now work from home a lot more. I also found my old Staple desk (circa 1997) was not really working as well as it might (having added an extra keyboard drawer, mouse pad runners, replaced the desktop with...

So I thought I would put up a few pictures of some rig I haven’t shown before. They are not the neatest in the world. In particular the miniITX build is a bit of a mess of wires, but there isn’t a lot of space in there, so I think that is probably justified. The first rig is my old server...

About a week ago my beloved X58 Classified bit the dust. No idea what the cause is, but whenever the system tries to pull any significant power through the PCIe slots it loses power to the expansion cards. This occured with the graphics chips, where they would randomly give blank screens...

It must be that time of the year again. I’ve recently got very frustrated with my RAID card, it is ideal for a server environment (i.e. never shut down), but terrible for a heavily overclocked rig, which needs to be shut down every so often for driver reboots (ATI, I’m looking at you). The...

I've had my Z-5500s for about a month now, and the sub seems to be getting a heck of a lot louder recently. I've not done anything with the settings. How long does it usually take to burn in the Sub?

I'm thinking of watercooling a pair of 5970s, would a 480 rad cool them both, if not what size would be best?

I've got a bit of a project to do for a mate. He's looking at building a small server (basic storage, network management etc.) for a small network. He's looking to spend about £400 (inc) although he has an operating system. I reckon this would be quite a good start, but I'm looking for some...

Eyefinity initial thoughts: Whilst I may not be pushing eyefinity to its limits at the moment, with a mere 3 1920*1200 screens, I think I am in a good position to give a first impression of eyefinity. To use eyefinity you need an ATI 5xxx series graphics chip, two DVI monitors and a...

As the title says, I'm going to be offline for a few weeks. I don't know exactly how long, but I'll be going into hospital tomorrow for between 28 days and 3 months. I look forward to returning sometime in the future hopefully much better than I am at the minute. I'll miss OC3D and the...

I recently purchased an Adaptec 5805 RAID controller, two Samsung PB22-J 128GB SDDs and a spinpoint F3 and thought I would do a quick review of them. For a while now I've been using onboard RAID, migrating from JBOD to RAID 5 then to RAID 0. After an incident a year ago where I lost an...

I've decided to jump on the SSD band wagon, and get a couple of Samsung 128GB drives for Xmas, but unfortunately I feel the RAID controller on the Classified is a bit anaemic. So I've invested in an adaptec 5805 dual core SAS/SATA card. Yes its expensive and involves swapping to a new install...

Sorry about this guys, but I thought I ought to check before I did anything to stupid. I've got a brand new EVGA classified with a i7 920 on it. Its under water and running at 1.305V with VTT at +250mV. Firstly are these voltages OK? Secondly, it is clocked at 4.2GHz and under intel burn (10...

I'm thinking of upgrading my rig and giving some odd bits to my Dad to build him a new PC. He does word processing, surfing the net etc. on his current pc. I've specced him up a rig, the bits which I am donating (in exchange for a contribution from him to the upgrade) are starred: 8GB DDR3...

Logitech G19: So you have the fastest quad core money can buy, overclocked to the max. You have the latest graphics chips and watercooling, but you are still using the same budget keyboard that came with your old pc five years ago. It is a situation that many of us enthusiasts find ourselves...