So… Install Windows 7, hook up the Samsung ML-1210 printer, and…
…well not much happens. If you’ve gone to Samsung’s site, you may have found 2 possible files to download (technically more, but only 2 that have any hope of working), and you’ll find that neither seems to work well.
The Universal Print Driver will install, and you’ll probably get it to even find your ML-1210 eventually. If you get farther than that, congratulations! You’ll have gone farther than I was able to with that package.
The GDI driver on the other hand will refuse to install. Windows will pop up and ask if you want to try compatibility mode. Unfortunately, it’ll still refuse.
If you’re using the MSI X58 PRO-E motherboard and have checked out the temperatures in your BIOS, you might be alarmed to find that the IOH temperature (northbridge) is quite high. Indeed, a little searching around will show that you’re not alone – plenty of these motherboard owners have expressed similar concerns.
The good news is that Intel designed the X58 northbridge to safely handle temperatures of up to 100 degrees celcius, so if you’re not quite there, technically, you should be safe.
The bad news is that if you’re flirting with high 80’s or 90’s already, a bit of overclocking or a hot day may very well put you over the top.
If you’re concerned about temperatures, you have a few options:
Contact MSI and inquire about an RMA. Note that unless your temps are actually passing 100 degrees, they may simply tell you that it’s operating within design limits… which is true.
Keep the environment cool, be careful with overclocking, and hope for the best. Worst case scenerio is the motherboard dies outside of the warranty period. Chances are you’ll be fine.
Add some internal cooling. Internal fans help, or you can glue a little fan to the heatsink.
Upgrade to an aftermarket cooler. Pricey, and it would probably cost less to simply buy a motherboard with better default cooling instead, but it’s an option.
Remove the thermal interface pad from the Northbridge/Southbridge and apply some high-quality thermal paste instead.
Option #5 is the one we’ll be looking at here.
Feel free to watch the video below for a walk-though (skip to the 3.5 minute mark if you just want to see how it’s done). Alternately, you can scroll down for the write-up.
Reducing the Northbridge temperatures on the MSI X58 PRO-E Motherboard.
Today we’re taking a quick look at the Antec Sonata III Mid Tower Quiet Case.
The Sonata III was bought as a replacement for the Sonata Piano Finish case. It’s actually very similar, although it doesn’t have quite the same piano-finish look to it. There have been improvements in other areas though, and they’ll be mentioned below (you can check out the video or scroll down to read the written review).
Antec Sonata III video review. Click to watch, or scroll down to read the written review.
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Front view of the Antec Sonata III
Starting at the front, you’ll notice the ports are flush with the case. The older version had the ports hidden away under a silver “door”. While I suppose the old version probably blended in better if you actually had it sitting beside your grand piano, it’s wasn’t the best in terms of functionality. Even when open, the door made it impossible to see the ports from above resulting in a lot of fumbling around if you were trying to plug something in. When the door was open, that section also became an “intake” resulting in a lot of dust getting sucked in as well. Having a flush mount with the Sonata 3 should definitely help to alleviate both these issues. Another change that should serve to help is that the lower intake’s on the left and right are a little larger. Offering less constriction there should help ensure that most of the intake air is pulled from the bottom and passes the filter.
The front panel remains similar, although the Sonata 3 has been double-hinged, making it Read more…
After years of not having to worry about wireless, I was forced to buy a new router to replace a fried one (lightning) and was now looking at wireless-N. Where I was stuck was trying to figure out was if I should be going for one of these “Dual-Band” Wireless-N thingies or not. They supported both 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz but that’s all the box in the store told me (aside from the extremely helpful worthless marketing).
If you’re a bit new to this as well, keep reading. If you just want to see what I have to say about the D-Link DWA-160 Dual Band Wireless N USB adapter, skip down a bit. Read more…
I recently bought an Intel Quad Core Q6600. I’ve been doing a lot of Video Encoding for the Apple TV, and while a fine chip, the E2140 just wasn’t cutting it time-wise for quality encodes.
I grabbed some pics of the process with my new Sony Cyber-shot DSC-W35 (if the blurry pics from my previous posts made your eyes bleed, these should help alleviate the pain). I also got idle/load temperatures both before & after.
Part 1: Lapping
1A: The Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro (lapped using sandpaper against an already-lapped waterblock small enough to fit between the mounting pegs)
Here are a few pics of what this thing looks like when you pull it out of the box (click the thumbnail to open a larger image):
You can see they include thermal interface material on the heatsink, which I’ve read is MX-1 – apparantly it’s pretty decent stuff. Naturally, i took it off (rubbing alcohol worked well enough). Pay close attention to the 4th picture. You can see the heatsink surface is pretty rough – it’s much rougher than the Intel Stock Cooler. You can notice it in the 3rd as well. Not that it’s necessarily a *huge* deal. Smooth would be preferable, but the more important question is “is the heatsink FLAT?”. We’ll find out soon enough, time to start lapping the heatsink…. Read more…
It’s been well known for some time now that heatsinks aren’t always perfectly smooth and flat. Sometimes the machining process used when making a heatsink leaves much to be desired. A poor surface means poor contact with the CPU, which translates to less effective cooling, and thus, higher temperatures. “Lapping” the heatsink is a technique that has become common practice with modders and overclockers. It’s generally accepted that a properly lapped heatsink performs better than one that isn’t, except in the case where the heatsink was already quite smooth and flat.
But what about the IHS (integrated heat spreader) on a CPU? Read more…
While writing up an article and scrounging for information on all the BIOS settings, I came across a couple Anandtech articles for other ASUS motherboards that have *very* similar settings to the P5K-E. If you’re looking to find out what most of the memory/cpu/fsb/frequency/voltage/timing options do, check out the articles here and here.
In a prior article, I was playing around with OS X installs on regular PC hardware. I’ve kept a couple of the installations going for the time being, and have been using one of them to recode some videos that we have in DivX and XviD format into H.264 for the Apple TV I recently bought.
Recoding is a time consuming process, and with this particular system, using 2-pass encoding resulted in around an hour per 1-hour episode that’s been recoded. Looking for a way to speed up the system a bit (the E2140 is known to be a pretty decent overclocker), I looked to the BIOS. Read more…
I bought the 20″ SyncMaster 206BW to replace an old weak 17″ CRT that was showing signs of age. I also wanted something that would show a little more screen real-estate.
Monitors are one of the few things where I’m very hesitant to buy online. Picture quality can vary drastically between monitors, and in no way is one $250 model guaranteed to be anything close to another. Preference comes into play a lot here too. Something as simple as glossy vs matte can make a world of difference. I head into the nearest Future Shop, and spent a pretty long time looking at their displays.
There were 2 major things I was looking for: Read more…
Setting up an HTPC to run Media Center, I was looking to get an optical output so that I could hook it up directly to our receiver. Current sound cards with an optical out unfortunately run around $100 at the low end. I had a couple motherboards that actually have optical outputs, but for the life of me, I couldn’t get the one in the NF7-S to work in Vista, and while the Gigabyte 7VAXP-A’s worked with drivers from Realtek’s site, that motherboard didn’t like the mobile Athlon XP-M very much (it would only work if i set the onboard switches to a 100Mhz FSB which didn’t tickle me in a pleasant way). The 7VAXP-A wasn’t totally useless though… it provided me with one of those little cables that plugs into the motherboard and provides an output via a rear slot.
Problem of course was that the little accessory had 3 pins and plugged into the motherboard. The Audigy 2 I had kicking around (and wanted to use) had a digital out, but it was unfortunately a 3.5mm jack. I needed the TOSLINK style. It did have an SPDIF_IO section on the card, but it had a whopping 8 pins to contend with, as opposed to the 3 pins I had to work with. Pin-wise they didn’t look at all plug and play, but fortunately there’s a way to make it work. Read more…
