Gondor

Quick word on power converters... If you know much about electronics, first off... Most converters cannot handle the amount of power the speakers require, so that is a limiting factor. Second... Most converters are very poor quality, made to run things like hair dryers, you would have massive static and distortion on your speakers. I guess there is a chance that there are some out there that wont do this, so I could be wrong, but this is what seems to be with most of them

Lemme see here... Al Yur Bass 'R' Be on to uhs?

Ok, I'd say trade em up for the 4.1s for a few reasons.. First off, though they may lack the -WOW- effect that a full home theater system has when you look at it, they have quite the amount of power for their size. Also, if you are having space issues, then the pros are the way to go, due to their smaller size. Personally, however, I wouldnt mind having a full HTS but then again, I have a stand-alone DVD player and wouldnt need to rely on a laptop's stereo out for the DVD sound. Soooo... I say stick with them, they will play music movies well enough and loud enough for you, maybe get rid of some of your other speakers if not all of them, and if the Pros arent enough for when you listen to music, use your remaining speakers, maybe in collaberation with the pros, to make a pretty damn sweet system for music

In essence the pros are off, they go into a standby mode when not in use, and I have had my set for more than a year now and never unplugged them except to move them from home to college, and they still work beautifully. So, IMHO it doesnt hurt to leave them plugged in, or they would have put an on-off switch. You may have noticed that the CP-1 that you can order has an on-off switch, but the switch doesnt actually turn the pros off, just places them in standby

You may also try turning the sub's hole toward the wall (leave it a few inches off because I am not sure what making it flush to it would do, but probably nothing good)... I noticed quite the difference, especially since it is facing a corner and the 2 6.5s have the walls to bounce their sound off of... Just a suggestion

the Platinum, MP3+ and X-Gamer are all the identical cards, the differences lie basically in the software packages, and the fact that the Plat has the Live! Drive... The X-Gamer comes with, what else, games... whereas the MP3+ comes with MP3 encoding software and some "jukebox" like software and 1 or 2 other things. The Platinum in addition to the Live! Drive it comes with the software packages of the X-Gamer and the MP3+.... If you get the X or MP3+ you can buy the Live! Drive at a later date directly from creative if you find you really want that extra connectivity. Just the facts here. I bought an X-Gamer (a while before the 5.1s even became available) because I wanted the games and I didnt need the Live! Drive

Ok, I see everyone laughing about that quote "All your base are belong to us" and I saw it on the website where you all did... But whats it mean... I mean, whats so funny about it...? Again, pardon my ignorance.

Thats the System Swerv, you have been crushed by the competition. My apologies

I dont know how many of you play the CounterStrike mod on Half-Life. But any of you that have, and have visited the West Lafayette Purdue University Campus, a friend of mine and I are lookin to make a map of Cary Quadrangle and maybe some other locations on campus, like the engineering fountain area. Tell me what you think, and let me know if you have made maps for half-life or counterstrike before, any help would be appreciated.

Oh, and BTW, Sam_D you cannot run VMWare on Win9x/ME machines that I am aware of, it was programmed for NT architecture

Alright, a couple things for you guys havin probs in WIN2K... First off, if you are runnin some of the quicker AMD chips, goto their website and download the registry patch for large page files, seems to clean things up a bit with skipping and jumping in applications in general. http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/athlon-duron/amd_win2k_patch.html Also, like someone else mentioned, it could just be the version of winamp, if you can get your hands on others, try them out. And ya know, I was gonna say something else, but I have plum forgotten what I was gonna say, so if I think of it, I'll post again Sorry guys

BSDPN LoAdEd, where do you play counterstrike, I play quite a bit as well, on the Purdue counterstrike servers, but also on netheads occasionally. Lookin for good servers out there. The purdue ones are fast, but if you dont have a quick connection to the internet you will get fried cause all of us that play on it have sub 20-30 pings

Yep, you can, if you only want to listen in stereo then you need only hook up the front cable, however, if you want to listen to it in pseudo 4.1 surround then you need to visit your local Radio Shack or Wal-Mart and buy yourself a sub $3 Y-Adapter that basically turns your one headphone jack into 2 identical ones, then you hook both cables into it and enjoy

I have one thing to say about that price you got on your speakers. Lucky @$$ &@$^@*!.

I'm with you paragon, I got my Hercules Prophet II (GF2 64meg GTS) when it came out and I dont expect to upgrade any time soon. I didnt have to pay for my GF2 because it was a birthday present, but I will probably have to pay for my next upgrade. So I am cautious. And besides, other than memory upgraded and a slightly faster chip, the GF2 Ultra is BASICALLY the same thing, just a little faster. (dont nitpick with me, I know the differences) So, IMHO I'm stickin here and savin some cash, and still gettin sweet Framerates in all the games I play. (course some of that has to do with my 1.2 GHz TBIRD, though I realize the vid card is probably the bottleneck)

woah, where did he get that one

I have an answer for you Low_key If you run win2k you can run some of your stuff, then download VMWare or buy it and run linux in a virtual machine its decent enough

I heard that the orbs really arent that good as HSFs. Also, any idea for a fan blowing across your Vid card and onto your system chips... I saw a friend of mine had taken an old card slot cover that you place in when you dont have a card in a PCI or ISA slot, bent the top so that it still screws in, but the cover part sticks out above all the cards but parallel to the board, he ran 2 screws into it, and stuck an 80mm fan on there, that thing is pretty damn sweet, i think I will jurry rig 2 or 3 of them for myself, just an idea for you all

it runs about 49 degrees on average (but I have Seti@Home always runnin in the background)... when I am playin games and stuff it gets around 52, havent seen higher yet... Are you serious that the TBird can handle temps that high? maybe its time for me to overclock

Hey all, any of you running an Athlon ThunderBird 1.2GHz... If so, I'd like to know what temp yours is running at... I know they are supposed to run hot, but mine is running at a constant 48-52 degrees Celsius... does that seem too warm? Let me know what you all think... I have an AMD certified Taisol HSF and a 92mm intake on the front of the case and 1 60mm 2 40mm and a 20mm exhaust fan on the back.

Well, I have never had any problems with them, in fact my secondary PC is running a 20 gig one (that has lasted long enough to go from my primary pc to my secondary one) its probably nearly a year and a half old. I hope they havent gotten worst, or that I snagged some good ones I do see how you dont like them though.

As paragon said, if you dont overclock atleast a decent amount, then there is almost no point, I said I could get my Athlon to 850 and not 1mhz over, but I still run it at 800, because I dont see the point in creating the extra wear on the processor, even though it is well cooled, unless I can do something noticeable, I'd say 75-150 mhz is noticeable (and 75 not very much so), as for graphics cards, you can overclock those 5-10 mhz and not see all that much diff, or you could see a lot of difference, it depends on whether your system or your card is the bottleneck, and whether or not the memory on the card is a bottleneck. Overclocking a graphics card is much more risky in my opinion because there are less cooling options for them, and all of them run very warm to begin with if you already have an orb on your athlon, just throw a $8 fan 82-90mm fan in the front of your case to pull in air, and a couple of $5 40mm or larger fans in the back for exhaust and you should be able to get a fair amount out of it, unless its like mine where it wont go more than 50mhz faster you probably know most of what I have said so far, sorry was on a soap box, not meaning to step on any toes

something you can do to monitor the temp in the case of the one you dont have a temp monitor in, is goto radio shack and buy one of the indoor/outdoor thermometers and hang the outside probe inside the case, it will give you a pretty good idea whats going on in the case in general, I have also heard of people mounting the probe near the CPU to get a good read of the CPU temp... I dont know what tape you would use that wouldnt melt though... maybe thermal tape also make sure you have plenty of air flow in the case, as in, fans in front pulling in cool air and fans in back pumpin out hot air.. what I have seen a lot of people do is "roll" the IDE and floppy cables, basically splitting them apart and binding them to be really thin.. remember, even with all this cooling your processor may not overclock more than 50MHz or even 20, similar to my Athlon that wont post over 850MHz and its an 800 and I have an Arctic Circle on it (one of the agilent technologies circle coolers) I would recomment one of those for your TBird and the P3, they make both versions.. They have some nice ones for socket processors that have like 2 fans in them both running at high RPM though quiet... (NOTE: if you have a KT7 or KT7-RAID you have to dremel off part of some of the circle coolers to make them fit) (NOTE: some P3s are CLOCK LOCKED... you must physically modify the processor to get them to OC occasionally) also check out: http://www.thecardcooler.com they have some pretty nice fan solutions for HDs and case fans, as well as fans that blow straight down onto your board, CPU and graphics card another good site with stuff is http://www.3dcool.com they have some nice things if you feel like cutting holes in your case for better air flow.. Other than that I could scan in the article from the Maximum PC magazine that has a watercooled setup http://www.maximumpc.com or you could go peltier, or you could even purchase a Kryotech (refrigerated) case http://www.kryotech.com Remember, not all processors will overclock the same, with everything I have mentioned you could end up only getting 50MHz or you could end up getting 350MHz, I have seen both, and more... If you need any other tips E-mail me, or send me a private message on this board

Actually the thing about Western Digital HDs and last year was they recalled a whole load of them cause they were going bad in their tests. They said that its fine now I worked at OfficeMax and we got a post about it and had to send back all our stock and stuff

I read on the Highpoint (the ATA100 Raid controller) website that there were some problems with some of the Maxtor drives in running RAID 0 cause of timing issues, maxtor even verified... I know its on just some of their drives, but they had no problems with any of the WD drives they tested, and I have never had any problems with WD drives either... What I heard the problems were is that there are too many non functioning units that get to stores, but that ones that do work, work well I also got these on sale with free DVDs and stuff, so if there is a problems, I'll take them back or something.