switching motherboard on a dell

Your memory will work, but it'll be slow. RAM's cheap these days, so to get a decent level of performance you should consider upgrading it, but doing so is not essential, just highly recommended.

 

hmm, I never thought about that, I thought 4gigs was 4 gigs but i guess i never thought about the quality... What would you reccomend for 3 gigs, since thats all my os will recognize?

 

I wouldn't - as silly as it seems it's best to have four gigs and then have windows not recognise it than use three gigs, you'll get a higher level of performance. I use these, or more specifically two of them: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145034

 

wats you bugdet m8?

and that PSU was only recomended for your last budget

 

To be fair, spending more than 100 quid on a PSU is always going to raise eyebrows, high budget or not... Unless he's after silence, Enermax are making a pretty penny out of him!

 

stability at very high OCs and stable Rails at load are my first concern, and this PSU cannot be beaten by any other 6-650 WATT PSU

 

Now you're talking crap and you know it - as if this PSU is any different to any other well made unit for overclocking. The stability of the voltage to the CPU is primarily dependent upon the Vregs of the motherboard, not the PSU, as long as the PSU is relatively stable it doesn't matter. The Thermaltake Toughpower, Silverstone Strider, Tagan Dualengine, Corsair VX/HX/TX, Antec Truepower and goodness knows however many other units are all good enough for that.

Seriously your random fanboyism to single products is sometimes unjustified. I never thought I'd be recommending Corsairs on price...

 

Why not use more than one psu? I do all the time.. an old AT unit is perfectly adequate to power 4 drives and the case fans etc leaving the high end unit to just run the mobo and graphics.

What was that crap about installing more ram than your operating system can physically address? There can be NO preformance boost from it.. because as far as the software is concerned IT ISN'T THERE! It can however cause hardware bus problems by sitting there doing nothing while still taking hardware refresh cycles on every memory read/write/refresh cycle. You can't see it, you can't use it, there is no advantage to having it there yet it draws power and ties up some hardware resources by it's existence. You would do better matching up the ram for 3 gigs (stupidly large amount of memory to sit there 70% unused 99% of the time) with 2 1gig sticks and 2 512 sticks all the same speed... load the busses symmetrically. It helps with the timing.

 

A nice idea for quietness, but expensive, and requires the use of a dual-PSU case. Using an old unit you found lying around I would consider a bad idea for hard drives, if it randomly goes pop it might take one of your drives with it, if not worse.

 

Does having a cheaper brand of a PSU really make a big difference? Ive never had a PSU give me any problems so far. Budget is no biggie right now

 

Cheap PSUs catch fire, and it's not that rare either. Suffice to say if they do go up in smoke or flames your hardware is unlikely to survive intact. It happened to me in 2005, I was lucky, all I lost was a stick of RAM, floppy drive, hard drive and the lights on the front of my case, but losing 180GB of data was irritating to say the least.

 

Dual psu case?? WTF.. just stick it behind or on the floor or something.

An AT psu self powered with it's own mains switch costs nothing.. see your local pc scrap man. It's only powering drives.. and fans and maybe some lights. Spray it black and have it on the top even.
It as one extra advantage... you can start it up before booting the rest and because the drives are already spun up everything boots slightly faster.

Hi Sam.. I have a collection of so called good quality and cheap psu's with an assortment of burnouts and holes in them.. One is in about 10 bits held together with the remains of the smoother cappys

That was a top price 650 watt thing as well.

 

Heh, a real professional job that'd look!
Doing that does have those advantages, but for the reasons I posted, I wouldn't do it using any old unit, not by a long way. Besides, even with eight hard drives, a 9800GTX and an overclocked Quad core CPU, a high end PC isn't going to use more than 450W or so, so it's not like you'll struggle to find a PSU that will keep up.

 

hehehe.. I don't care about looks.. It's what it does that matters to me. I will use just about any old AT psu for running drives.. in a drive bay I currently have 16 running spinning 64 drives for the cluster, and powering the rest of the assorted switches, the line printer and network hardware.
When I started computers were an assortment of cabinets with various patch bays and cables joining them together.
They got smaller, but even now my hardware tends to follow those same rules.

 

Each to their own - I have my hard disks in an entirely separate file server PC, so I'm not really one to talk.

 

if recomending quality = fanboy then i an a kign of the fanboys.

please do me a favour and check the reviews. stability shoudl be the first and foremost when looking at PSUs when OCing. youd be mad to look at anything else when OCing. if your PSU cant give the juice where you need it when you up the power requirements by OCing, then you might aswell forget about OCing. why are corsairs recomended? SILENCE???

not foremost. firstly their stability is second to none, that why. now we have a new king, the modu 82+, (even if jsut by a slight minimal 0.00000001% advantage. THATS why im recomending them. check before they came out, i only recomended the corsair. hell even now i recomend it for people working towards a lower budget. but for the best, look towards the enermax modu 82+

 

Corsairs are recommended because I paid 80 quid for an HX 620W. The Modu82+ 625W units are over 100, and not by a very small amount. You're ending up with the same sort of product, just a more expensive and slightly quieter version of it. To say that the difference in stability from an Enermax unit vs a Corsair unit makes a difference in overclocking is laughable. I'm not one to say skimp on a PSU, but using a proven Corsair unit is far from risky, and spending 30 quid just to have a PSU that gives an unnoticeably and almost immeasurably smoother output is ludicrous.

I've seen the reviews and read them at length, and the Enermax units are certainly impressive, but there's nothing in them that makes that extra 30 pounds worth spending. Why replace good with good?

Oh, and also, at full load the 12V rails on the Enermax drop to 11.90V versus 11.93 for the Corsairs. I make the Corsair more stable there. Efficiency? The Enermax works out 0.7% more efficient on average. At a 500W load level that means to offset the £30 cost difference in the PSU at the beginning your PC would have to be at full load for 9 years.

If the Enermaxes were the same price as the Corsairs, or heck even £10 more, I'd probably recommend them for being quieter at idle, but since that's their only advantage and they're so much dearer, no thanks.
The cheaper Enermax units are of course cheaper, but then so are the Corsairs, so the same applies. The VX 450W and Modu82+ 385W are similarly priced, now that's a deal worth picking up on, and indeed the latter has now taken the former's place as my 'PSU to get to quieten my server'. In the high powered arena though, Corsair are still the top player.

 

links?

 

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article806-page5.html
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article692-page4.html


http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-039-EN
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-004-CS
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=446787
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=777990

 

i meant for the psu testing but thanks

now to have agood read of that, and read of the other testers