Posted 11/24/09 at 02:30:15 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

I built a home theater PC from scratch a while back. It has an Intel D945GCZLR motherboard with a Pentium D 925, a passively cooled GeForce 6600, and an Avermedia PCI-e Combo TV Tuner, all inside an Evercase ECE1341 case. I went with the best BTX CPU cooler I could find: the Thermaltake CL-P0191. This thing sounds like a lawn mower.

Even with plenty of airflow into the case and plenty of room in every direction on my entertainment system, the cooler is far louder than the 14-28dBA its marketing materials claim. I have already replaced the cooler’s fan once, but the new one was just as loud.

What can I do to quiet this thing down? Would upgrading to a cooler Core 2 Duo or Quad make a difference? What about upgrading to an actively cooled GPU? Even stock ATX coolers are cooler than this thing—can I just use one of those?

Read our advice for Frank after the jump.

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Posted 11/24/09 at 12:15:15 PM by Thomas McDonald

Facebook is the answer to a question no one asked: “How can I waste more of my time?” Compared to social network gaming, however, Facebook itself is as useful an invention as the cell phone.

Actually, I do like Facebook. I’ve used it to reconnect with dozens of people I used to know. Two of them are even people I like. A year after I first joined Facebook for the sole purpose of sharing pictures of a new puppy, I find myself updating my status, making comments, and listing things like the “Five TV Characters I Wish Were Real So We Could Hang.” (Dr. McCoy, Emma Peel, Hurley Reyes, Simon Templar, and Gomez Addams: another answer to a question no one ever asked sober or outside of a college dorm.)

I used Facebook for a year before I caved in and tried any social gaming. It held no appeal at all. I ignored the messages from friends asking me to join their Mafia, become part of their vampire clan, move in next door to their rutabaga farm, or contribute to efforts to elect Ron Paul president. (Oh, you mean they were serious about the Ron Paul thing?)

Continue reading after the jump.

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Posted 11/23/09 at 02:45:16 PM by Bill Calkins

I bought two laptops for my two granddaughters about a year and a half ago. Now both have missing keys. Is there a way to purchase replacement keys, or do I need to buy a whole new keyboard? These two laptops are both Compaqs sold by HP. If I give HP the model number can I get a kit with all the key caps and a procedure for installation?

Read our answer for Michael after the jump.

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Posted 11/23/09 at 12:30:12 PM by Tom Halfhill

After decades of fitful progress, parallel processing is suddenly hot and will soon be commonplace on ordinary PCs. For applications rich in data-level parallelism, performance is soaring by leaps and bounds.

Multicore CPUs from Intel and AMD are all good, but the game-changers are the next-gen GPUs from Nvidia and AMD/ATI. These chips are evolving from highly specialized 3D-graphics processors for games into broader computing engines for nongame software. Nvidia is leading the charge with a new GPU architecture that, for the first time, supports general-purpose computing as strongly as it supports graphics.

Nvidia’s new Fermi GPUs will support error-correction codes (ECC), one terabyte of memory, concurrent kernels, and faster double-precision floating-point math. These features are largely unnecessary for 3D graphics but vital for high-performance general-purpose computing. (In fact, ECC slows down graphics processing, which is why it can be disabled in Fermi chips sold for the consumer market.)

Continue reading after the jump. 

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Posted 11/20/09 at 03:30:29 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

I’m looking to get a new SSD for my laptop when Windows 7 comes out, and I just read a review on Newegg warning about a drive not supporting Win7’s TRIM feature. A Google search gave me the basics on TRIM, but how important is it, really? I’m having trouble finding which drives support it and am wondering if I should wait before pulling the trigger.

I use my laptop for home and work, so I’d really like to do a clean install on a new drive (for restoration purposes when I really screw something up) and it seems like a perfect time to make the switch. I’m also moving from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Windows 7, so—as I understand it—I need to wipe regardless.

Read our answer for Steve after the jump.

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Posted 11/20/09 at 11:30:24 AM by Nathan Edwards

They just keep getting bigger and bigger. Now that CPU air-cooling manufacturers have seemingly settled on the skyscraper school of heatsink design, there seems to be a competition over who can cram the most cooling fins into the largest area. Scythe’s Mugen 2 air cooler, the follow-up to its popular Mugen series, is one of the largest coolers of this type that we’ve ever tested. But can it match the cooling power of its slightly smaller cousins, such as Thermalright’s U-120 eXtreme?

The Mugen 2 is a hefty hunk of a cooler, at 5.1 inches wide, 5 inches deep (with the included 12cm fan), and 6.2 inches high; it weighs nearly two pounds. It’s not the heaviest cooler we’ve ever tested, nor the most unwieldy, but its girth could certainly prevent you from installing it in all orientations on all motherboards. We had trouble fitting it in some orientations on our EVGA 680i SLI board—our usual preference being to install the cooler fan parallel with the rear exhaust fan. On our board, though, there wasn’t room; we resorted to attaching the cooler fan perpendicular to the rear exhaust fan. Thankfully, this didn’t seem to impact performance, as the Mugen 2 performed slightly better in our tests than the Thermalright U120-eXtreme—about 2.25 C cooler at both idle and full CPU burn.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

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Posted 11/19/09 at 05:30:12 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

I recently reformatted my computer after a failure with an old Seagate 7200.11 1TB. Lately, though, I have been noticing problems with my USB ports. Whenever I connect my iPhone 3G, it is very hard for iTunes to recognize it and the popup tells me that the iPhone isn’t plugged in to a high-speed port, even though all my USB ports should be 2.0. This has raised even bigger concerns about my other devices connected via USB.

My motherboard is an Asus P5Q-E. The CPU is an Intel Q6600. My initial thought is that an upgrade to my mobo’s BIOS or other utilities might fix the problem, but I’m wary of undertaking such a feat without knowing for sure what the problem is, because I’ve heard updating the BIOS can be dangerous. If a BIOS update is necessary, what sorts of precautions should I take?

—Taylor Sabbag

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Posted 11/19/09 at 12:30:18 PM by Will Smith

If I asked you in 1993, “What’s a PC?”, you’d probably have pointed to the beige box sitting under your desk at work. In 1999, if I asked you the same question, the odds are good that you’d have shown me a grey box in your den. In 2005, you would probably have shown me a shiny new notebook. But, as I sit here in 2009, I’m finding it difficult to answer this seemingly simple question.

Sitting on my desk, I have four extremely powerful computing devices, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Let’s decide which of these are personal computers together.

Machine A features four CPU cores, and a host of GPUs and coprocessors. Machine B is more modest, with three CPU cores and a decent GPU. Machine C is even more modest, with a dual-core CPU, but a woefully inadequate GPU. Machine D pushes a lot of its workload onto dedicated processors, but still sports a dedicated GPU.

So, what’s all this powerful hardware? A home-built gaming PC, an Xbox 360, a Lenovo X200s notebook, and an iPhone 3GS.

Continue reading after the jump.

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