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Quote: Usually, once newer cards release (or, most any NEW componentry really), the older card's/component's prices hit rock-bottom generally & definitely drop down in price below the latest-greatest/state-of-the-art unit! True, but that's for cards that are manufactured using the cheaper parts. Existing boards will have been built with more expensive parts. There's only so much profit margin the suppliers can knock off. Quote: Now, the ONLY thing I am confused about now is that Tom's Hardware Pages review of it today (03/07/2003) stated the 5600 Ultra performs less than a GeForce Ti4600... what's going on? OR, did I read that wrong in the conclusion sections there?? It is a bit confusing in places isn't it If I were nVidia, I'd be worried that my brand new 5600 Ultra card is beaten by ATis older 9500 card. It does seem as if changing the driver optimisations from Balanced to Performance have a huge impact on frame rate. From being slower than a Ti4200 to faster than a Ti4800. In order for the card to jump up in that much performance, there must be sections of the scene that are either not rendered, or rendered at lower resolution. For most gaming applications, this won't be an option that players will use. I'll admit that I don't know what changes actually occur between Balanced and Performance modes, but if they are adjusting the final rendered output to get higher frame rates I'm pretty sure that the gaming crowd are not going to warm to nVidias new technology. Blimey, I've been going on a bit of an anti-nVidia rant lately haven't I? It's not intentional, it's just at the moment, I don't see any decent products coming out of their doors. No doubt in 6 omnths time I'll be saying the same things about ATi, as nVidia regain the performance and features crown

Ah, but that will be pricing just for the GPU. By the time you add on the costs of the memory, PCB and other spangly bits, the price will be well up on that. I find it hard to believe that this brand new uber-card will come in cheaper than the existing ones. Suppliers would be left with a stock pile of expensive, old generation cards. Even if you weren't in the market for the fastest card around, you certainly wouldn't spend more money on a slower one. But maybe you would if these new cards have the same cooling system as the 5800 card

You can order the 9700 Pro AIW from Komplett. It's not cheap, but it is available.

Quote: I have read some reviews on the card - and to me - it just seems like a GAP / time filler until their release their R400 cards... nothing overly impressive, but still a nice looking card. Supposedly the 256mb version will be called the 9900. Nope, that was the rumour going around though. The 256MB will be a 9800 model. I'm guessing the 9900 model numbers will be kept for their next big thing. As mentioned, the 9800 doesn't bring a huge increase over the 9700 (I think it ranges between 5% and 10%), so I doubt many will be rushing to buy it if they have these cards already. The one good thing about it is that it should push down the price of the 9700 cards a bit. Good news for me, as that's what I'm looking to buy next

Do you think this is actually going to happen though? Given the farce over the FX card, if nVidia really have something that quick, why not just release the damn thing and start clawing back some of their dented reputation (and sales income)? ATi have already announced their next series of cards. Haven't really looked at the specs on them yet, so I don't know if it's anything that new, or just the 9700 with a faster clock/RAM speed. Personally I'm going to move over to ATi now. Their driver issues seem to be a thing of the past (or if not, they are hugely better than they used to be), and they can get the products that I want to market on time. Maybe it won't always be the case, and if ATi screw up in a couple of years when I'm looking to buy again, then I'll go back to nVidia (providing they have a better product). Heh, ya never know, there may even be a new player in town by then.

Maybe the format is similar to an ISO file? In order to check it out, you may need to burn it to a CD first.

Water cooling isn't huge, and it isn't hard work. Just takes a little time and patience. All you need is a pump, water block for the CPU, a radiator, and plenty of tubing Hook it all up and bobs your uncle. There are other bits you can add such as a reservoir (makes filling and bleeding much easier, but you could just use a T piece at the highest point as an air trap/filling point) and water blocks for your motherboard and graphics card chipsets. It is fairly quiet, but you will still need to have a couple of fans running. Your radiator will heat up, so you will need a fan to help disperse the heat from that. If you have a res, then that too can get quite warm once the system has been running for a while. The pump will only make a slight hum as it operates, so that won't be a problem. There are plenty of water blocks and kits on the market, but I used Dangerden blocks and rads for my setup, and it worked pretty well. I think the rad I picked was a wee bit small to be honest, so try and get something reasonabley hefty. Also remember that bigger rads generally have more twists and turns in them. This lowers the flow rate of the water, so you'll need a bigger pump to keep everything whooshing round.

Quote: I would warn you that disabling the Background Intelligent Transfer Service is not wise as more programs than you realize use it. Also, RPC Locator is important. Well it's just as well no one has mentioned those services then ;( Quote: setting them to manual will not allow them to load, but also allows those services to be called upon and started when needed. Just as well I said that exact same thing several posts ago.

Right click My Computer, choose Manage from the menu. Expand Services and Applications. Click on Services. Set the Indexing service to Manual (that way it's still available if it's needed. Expand Indexing Service. Expand System. Click on Directories. If any are set to Yes, double click them, set them to No, and click OK.

If it had bad sectors on it when you got it, you should have sent it straight back and got a replacement. As for reliable drives, I got a pait of Matrox ATA66 drives still going strong after several years. I'm going to be buying a Maxtor 80GB drive with 8MB cache for my next machine I gather Western Digital also make decent drives, but I don't have any personal with any of their recent drives though.

Just stick the heatsink on top of the core Over on [H] a little while ago they had a video of some guy using a milling machine to remove the spreader from a P4.

Can you format it with the camera? I read an article somewhere that said you generally get the best performance out of the memory cards when they are formatted in the device they are going to be used in, rather than formatting them in a card reader. How old is the card? They are only rated for so many read/write operations, so if you've had it a few years, and used it loads, then maybe it's reached its MTBF time. I know that doesn't help you very much, but it might be something to consider.

Well, I won't pretend to know exactly what goes on when you format these things. I guess it divides the memory in little sectors, and possibly marks bad any duff ones. But you can format them, and it does delete all the data on the card when you do it. As to their lifetime, I think they average around 100,000 read/write operations. It sounds like a lot, but I guess you can easily rack that up over a 3 year period, particuarly if you take your camera most places you go and snap at lots of things.

I have the MS Explorer v3. Very nice and comfy, but wired. I too have read all sorts of bad things about wireless mice, but the Logitech MX700 seems to have been getting rave reviews all over the place. It seems to be far superior to the MS wireless offerings. The other MS option is their BlueTooth setup. It looks the dogs danglies, but a few people have had connection problems with it

Are you running QoS or any uneeded protocols on the affected workstation? Does the affected workstation have the same version of the ODBC drivers as the speedy workstation (if you're using them)? Any other patch/version differences to Windows and the database software between the quick and slow machines? How are they connected to the server? Are both machines plugged into the same switch, or different switches? Can you get them both onto the same switch to see if it's network hardware at fault?

We recently had a drive die on us, and sent it to Ontrack for recovery. They did the job in a couple of days, and recovered everything on it. Only problem was the £2000 bill Still, the powers that be thought it worthwhile.

As mentioned, it really depends what you need the card for. If you have a firewire camera, then you can just transfer the video that way. The graphics card you have will make very little difference. If you need a card with video inputs to capture from the camera, then either a dedicated capture card, or an AIW is your best bet. But once the video is on your system, the graphics card won't be doing very much. Video editing is CPU, RAM and HDD intensive. These are the systems that will be stressted the most, so try and buy decent ones

Right, here goes When you send an item to someone, it sits in your Outbox. When the recipient opens it, it moves to your Sent Items, and obviously appears in their Inbox. Whilst the message is in your Outbox, you can recall it and/or edit it. Easy peasy

IIRC the extra wires on the 80 wire cables are to prevent crosstalk and interference when running at the higher speeds. It's entirely possible that you won't have these problems with such a short length of cable, and that's why there's only a 40 wire cable in the cradle. If you have a spare 80 wire cable that you can cut up, then go for it, but I think you'll find it tricky to buy an IDE cable of that length.

Yeah, I know, I noticed that too. But the real world differences between the two seem to be so low that it really doesn't matter. It might hamper your ability to overclock the card, but then if that's what you were planning, you probably wouldn't go for the AIW anyway. I'd imagine the extra components on the card would crap out on you before the RAM or GPU does.

The AIW 9700 Pro the 9700 Pro have the exact same clock and RAM speeds. In a review I've read that is focussed on the AIW card, they compare its performance to the 9700 Pro, and the scroes are so close between the two, that any differences can be put down to the testing software. It really is a couple a points either way. Linkage: http://www.explosivelabs.com/reviews/aiw9700/

Heh, good choice BladeRunner I'm speccing up a new system for a project I've got goine, and initially I thought I'd just bung a GF4 Ti 4600 in it. But seeing as price isn't that important on this one, I've decided to go for the 9700 Pro as well. Just haven't decided which one, and if I should maybe get the AIW version. I do love the ability to watch TV on the PC, but then this new machine isn't going to be replacing my current one, so I'll still have the WinTV card in that one. Decisions decisions. Out of interest, which manufacturer did you go with?

Could you also have not made the shots any smaller? Did we really need to see 1280x1024 shots?

I've read of a few people who have various other verisons of these glasses, and they say they work really well. Only real downside is they don't work with TFT screens It's possible that this X3D stuff might, but all the earlier models explicitly stated that you had to use a CRT screen.

I was reading a week or two back about a new DVD format on the horizon (Blue something or other), and the article there said that these new players need to have 3 lasers in them. One for CD, one for current DVD, and a third for the new Blue-wotsit DVDs. So there ya go