Hardware Discussion Thread

Very dead on this thread...

Here's something to help. Hope this will help some budget-minded builders:

This cooler sucks.

No, not being pottymouthed for SnG, I really mean it! I know it isn't a Arctic Freezer 7 Pro, which is very hard to get around these parts and thus leaves a bit of a void in the old "sub-120mm/budget tower cooler" range I thought it would be at least slightly superior to an ancient Zalman 7500Cu while also being fairly cheap. Well it isn't. In fact it happens to be much worse

OCZ, if you actually want to make a budget cooler worth buying, try to do at least one (and preferably all) of three simple things which needn't break the bank:
1) Use the correct size fan. Not that a 92mm fan has to suck (though yours does), but if you do use one make sure the heatpipes are the correct spacing to catch some of the friggin' air! If the fan isn't wide enough to cover the heatpipes within the primary airflow corridor it won't cool worth ****. Don't use mutant 105mm coolers unless you have suitably esoteric 105mm fans to match them. Zalman managed it! N.B. stagger the heatpipes you 'tards! (not just OCZ at fault there...)
2) Use the correct fixings, not cack stock ones to save 2 cent. No, the Vanq isn't that much heavier than the Intel stock HSF, but that's not the point! You seemed to have cottoned on to the fact that reviewers all use flat testbeds. Sadly 80% of the units in your target audience will have vertically-inclined cases, where the Vanq's high centre-of-gravity results in a truly craptastic "Leaning Tower of Pisa" effect which kills the contact between the cooler baseplate and the CPUs IHS. And this is a cooler that clips in so tight you risk snapping your mobo to get it in! FAIL.
3) If there was any contact to begin with. I love the old con-trick where you seem to give added value by giving a free giant hunk of stock cooling gunk. Because this just happens to conceal the fact that you don't seem to have even passed a coarse file over the base, which seems to have been hacksaw'd off a big copper pole. An average cooler manages a base finish of ~32 microinches, even with exposed heatpipes. A decent one can attain <8 microinches, even using copper rather than electroplated nickel and mad lapping jobs. I'm guessing your base's finish is around 150+. On a coincidental note I really wish I had some fine sandpaper right now. I shudder to imagine the air-voids but I want some sanding stuff before I try to reseat my cooler

On a depressing note, I notice that out of the last five OCZ items I purchased four have turned out to be out-of-spec piles of dung, three of which still need the "return to sender" treatment. Such miserable QC warms my heart - simply because it means someone has defied the odds and even made Gigabyte look good. And given the problems I had with them and a certain OEM a few years back that's saying something! :rolleyes:

Sorry, but never again, OCZ. And I've shunned other companies for far less.

I was just warning peeps off one cooler in particular

If you have a decent case just ignore bling and get a Tuniq CCF (s775) or Akasa Nero (s1366). Former is the second-best tower cooler out there, and its far from expensive (at least on OCUK). Just a bit big And I haven't seen the Themolab BARAM (best tower cooler out there) out this side of the pond yet anyway (plus you'd need an even better 12cm fan than the CCF to actually beat it)

Akasa Nero is pretty decent, and at OCUK prices its one of the few decent Core-i7 coolers out there that focuses on cooling over bling.

Frankieboy: I think these posts will be cutpasted to the Retailer Discussion thread soon. So if they seem to disappear don't panic

Anyway, don't Komplett have an English site? Dabs, Pixmania and Overclockers all have UK domains for shipping to Britain, and may actually have better RMA reliability over there as well so some issues we've had with them over here may or may not apply to you :cool:

As for your second question try hanging around here and swatting up on some recent XBit/Guru3D/AnandTech articles. Tom's Hardware used to be the best but are going a bit sideways again; as had occured previously there's signs that they're taking money from people to tilt reviews in their favour again. Either that or they are the most unprofessional hardware site on the web JohnnyGuru is a good source for understanding PSUs, and XBit good for finding out real component power usage.

looks terrible

Hmm... looks like they will appear after all: PCIex1 9500GTs are coming to town. Or at least HWVS. Maybe.

Interesting piece of kit for older machines with free PCIex1 slots. A short while ago it would also have been a neat way to add a truly retarded number of monitors to a PC... but then AMD went and ruined it with EyeFinity

And to continue that train of thought... some more new Phenoms to play with. C3 stepping is bringing some silly fun - not only has the old X4-810 been replaced by the faster, higher-cache X4-925 at the mid-budget end of things, but we also have a rather silly addition. Fancy a gaming HTPC? How about a proper 3GHz quad with 6MB L3 cache and a 65W TDP?

I'd love to know how in hell these work. PC3-12800 CL7 @1.35V?! :eek:

Deano12345 wrote: »

If your gaming,go with the 4890,if not the 4350 is a better choice

FYP! :P

And its a hard choice... 5770 is quiet and subtle, 4890 brute-force powerful. If you just want to game well get the 5770, but if you want to "push the envelope" regarding quality and AA/AF think about the 4890... and a bigger PSU :P

TheDoc wrote: »

I'm assuming the 5770 will give me a nice boost especially in wow ( not an intensive game on graphics) but will make it urn smoother, while running on my psu.

Dunno... WoW is a jaw-droppingly badly optimised game, far worse than Crysis could ever aspire to! :eek: If it decides to "take agin" a rig you can have a real nightmare of a time trying to get it to play ball. And yet the same game will play on decent-ish integrated graphics on lower settings with only a bit more juddering. FFS...

As you have an ageing nVidia card odds are they're not bothering to optimise it with new drivers, so a switch to a newer, better ATi card would be a sound move indeed. With a decent CPU it should hopefully force WoW and L4D to stop acting the maggot. And it'll probably need less juice than even the old 8800GTS

And 120€ for a vaporx 1Gb is pretty nice price

Think i might go with that one

Thought it was the HD5750 VaporX for €120-ish? The HD5770 VaporX is €134, still dirt-cheap compared to most HD5770s though! :P

The problem is that a full shroud tends to bottleneck airflow and unneccessarily shield the heatsink, preventing any additional passive convection from the sides. Its even worse nowadays as the extra DVI port tends to obscure most of the rear vents anyway. On a more recent card like the one pictured a full shroud could hinder more than help.

Please tell me you've seen models other than the 980X?

Because I've got a sinking feeling... this enterprise-grade Gulftown has a (slightly) crippled memory bus and was re-designated as an i7. So... what if the not-€1000+ i9-labeled enthusiast models only appear on X68? :eek:

Methinks Intel may be preparing to pull a fast one on us again!