Ashtefere

Just got myself an m14x last night, as I only play LoL nowadays. To be honest, I am extremely impressed with it. It is an incredible little machine, and the GPU OC's like a beast. I will be doing a review of it when I get the time, in a week or two. -Ash

Dont know if you are still wanting an answer, but I no longer have the m18x, so I can't check. There are only 3 ports anyway, however. -Ash

FYI - only blizzard accounts with a purchased game will get beta access from opt-in. Those 35 accounts will need sc2, d2, wow, etc bought for them to be eligible. -Ash

Kidnap their children. It's amazing how quickly that will speed things up. Works every time. -Ash

Yeah, people will understand that this isnt any stock intel or dell heatsink, it would be akin to the higher end air coolers that people buy for their gaming PC's. Same thing, but more complex to build. I am sure you will be able to sell more than 30 of these at $100USD, especially on ebay. -Ash

I would pay $100USD plus postage. Happily. -Ash

I knew that single heatpipe heatsink was gonna be a piece of shit. Anyone know the part number for it and if we can get it sent separately? -Ash

Nuff said really. -Ash

Yeah, sounds like the AU config isnt too bad after all. Base config on AU website + aftermarket CPU and aftermarket RAM upgrades will be the go for me I think. -Ash

Au, Uk, and I think Canada all have it so far. -Ash

I would love to see the throttlestop results with this CPU. If it works well, I will have to pick up an m18x - especially now that in Aus we get the 6990m xfire. While I like the idea of the 580m sli... it just isnt worth the extra cash. Also, for everyone worried about random reads/writes with your crappy h67 chipset - I have a solution of sorts. FancyCache Overview Install and run. Give it 2-4gb (or more if you got it) of RAM (but make sure your PC is STABLE first!) and you will get some pretty ridiculous speeds, as while the CPU is slowly ramping up to get the HDD reads up to scratch the ram cache is already there and waiting, and it largely mitigates the performance problems of the H67 chipset. For a base config with the 6990m, it will cost me 3.2k AUD - still a lot more than the US price but I am unsure of what the 6990m crossfire will cost yet, as it hasnt hit the US site. -Ash

It is virtually impossible for a VRAM module to overheat, even when bare naked. A VRM module though, can but this is very rare. Two very different circumstances separated by just 1 letter. Toms hardware guide get this mixed up way too fucking much. So do a lot of online hardware stores. -Ash

Looks like the 580m is gonna drop tomorrow. Shown running crysis2 at 1080p, max settings and max tesselation at 60fps+. Nothing special I know, but interesting nonetheless. -Ash

Im going to steer away from all of this generation's sandforce drives TBH. They have a linear auto-throttle that is constantly kicking in depending on the amount of writes left on the flash. One of the key features about sandforce drives is that they can use "cheaper nand" for the same performance - and believe me they all do. This cheaper nand has less write cycles, so before 5 years is up the drive will actually be throttled as low as 20% of its "new" speed. Not a typo. 20%. This isnt including the trim bug that still exists on the new sandforce drives. If your drive ever gets totally covered in dirty blocks trim STOPS WORKING, and you need to secure erase the drive to restore it. Which reduces writes. Which kicks in more throttling. All the tests I can see show the king of the hill to be the Crucial M4 and Crucial C300... Hilariously, they are about the same performance - c300 being better for randoms, M4 being better for sequentials. In iometer benchmarks a pair of 120gb m4's is actually faster than a pair of V3's in raid 0 by a good 20%. All the benchmarkers for sandforces new drives had to ask for a "Special" firmware version that switches off the throttling, but also disables the warranty on the drive. The IO for 4k reads on a retail drive is no ~80k like the marketing department says. Its actually closer to 5k. Thats just woeful performance. CDM uses purely compressible data so the sandforce drives run at max theoretical performance with CDM. Real world data loads dont get even close to this. -Ash