Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

Well, its somehow the end of September, as you can see I’ve been experimenting with PCs like crazy. Here once again is the PC buyers guide based on the AnandTech guides that I find so helpful. The main modifications have to do with learnings from “SilentPCReview”:http://silentpcreview.com to make the machine…

Right now the chip to get is the “mobile Athlon”:http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=29&threadid=1321894 as this great thread describes. There are four flavors so it is very confusing. There are: * 1.2V Mobile Athlon 2800+ and 2700+ running at 1.8 and 1.6GHz Newcastle respectively. These both have 512KB cache and should overclock OK to…

Athlon 64 for Quiet Power :: SilentPCReview.com. A good review of the power consumption differences. Has a great slide on actual power consumption of CPUs: !http://www.silentpcreview.com/files/images/column/seti.png!:http://www.silentpcreview.com/article169-page3.html Basically shows that the new Intel Prescotts and Northwoods really burn up lots of power. Quite a reverse from the Athlon XP which was…

Now that I’ve figured out how to get the Chaintech to overclock, the next question is how to get the thing to run more quietly. The stock fan that comes with the Athlon 64 is incredibly loud. Runs at 3500 rpm and sounds like a vacuum cleaner. The Chaintech unfortunately…

Now that I’ve got the Chaintech and the Athlon 64 about in the right range. That is maximum memory overclock to DDR500 and maximum CPU overclock to about 2.45GHz, the next question is how fast can the Radeon 9800 Pro go. First some data on the Internet: * “Extremeoverclocking.com”:http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/reviews/video/Sapphire_9800Pro_4.html. My…

Got my first call from someone that has SP2 causing them problems. Actually I’ve heard of two other folks with issues. Some folks think 1 in 10 will have problems with an upgrade, so beware. At my house, I have one SP2 machine that I installed as a greenfield installation,…