Computer Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread II

GoodGame said:
Is that assuming overclocking the i5 about 4 ghz?
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Nope, at stock the 2500K is straight up nearly double the speed of the Q6600: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/53?vs=288

Depending on specific thermals in your PC, the 2500K will ramp single core speeds to 3.7 GHz on its own.

A lot of people don't realize just how much faster processors have gotten in the past few years - in that timeframe, there's been a fairly significant shift to laptops with lower TDPs, and most games have been GPU-bottlenecked anyway.


Personally, on my main PC, I'm still running a dual-core 2.0 GHz Athlon 64 from 2005 clocked at 3.0 GHz. It's lasted amazingly well over that timeframe, but I'm reaching the point where I can't really justify not upgrading anymore. (Particularly since my job will pay for a PC for myself) I'm torn between picking up a 13" laptop with Intel's 35W Ivy Bridge quad-core, or just building a desktop with whatever high-end desktop chip Intel releases in a couple months.
 
I normally do not run anything else in the background other than some automatic windows processes.

I don't have a problem with turn times in anything other than on the settings I described. I'm not sure if the game is throttling because of its programing or because of my CPU.

I have 2 1gig sticks and 2 2 gig sticks.

Damn I guess the way I want to play Civ is not really possible then :p.

Thanks for the advice!
 
Zelig said:
I'm torn between picking up a 13" laptop with Intel's 35W Ivy Bridge quad-core, or just building a desktop with whatever high-end desktop chip Intel releases in a couple months.
Click to expand...

I've been wondering what the new Ivy Bridge laptops will be capable of. I'd seen people guessing that CPU will reach 5 GHZ overclocked.
 
My laptop is starting to make buzzing noises. There's hardly any air flowing out of the cooling fan, but that might be dust, since I see it spinning. The buzzing went away when i turned it off, but came back when I turned it on again.

The laptop is an HP HDX 16-1375DX, with NVIDIA GeForce GT 130M graphics card (1 gig shared memory), 4 gigs of ram, and win 7 64 bit, upgraded from Vista. Intel Centrino 2-core processor. It was bought in summer of 2009.

Is the buzzing related to the computer's age, or something else?
 
One of the fans (possibly the video card's) is causing vibration which would make the buzzing sound. Try a can of compressed air and see if it helps. Then try adjusting the fan, it may be ajar.
 
GoodGame said:
I've been wondering what the new Ivy Bridge laptops will be capable of. I'd seen people guessing that CPU will reach 5 GHZ overclocked.
Click to expand...

I doubt any laptop is going to do that with reasonable thermals.

Laptops are generally pretty close to their limits thermal-wise - you only get 55W TDP chips in 17" laptops basically, and the 55W Ivy Bridge part runs at 2.9 GHz, up 200 MHz from Sandy Bridge.
 
shadowplay said:
One of the fans (possibly the video card's) is causing vibration which would make the buzzing sound. Try a can of compressed air and see if it helps. Then try adjusting the fan, it may be ajar.
Click to expand...
I cleaned it out, but it didn't work.

And I noticed that it only does that when I"m running a graphics intensive program. I listened closely, and it's definitely from the area of the laptop cooling fan/graphics card.

And I don't have either the tools or the know-how to take it apart and fix it. :undecide:
 
Best to take it to the shop. I wouldn't ignore it since a bad fan may reduce cooling efficiency, which could reduce the life a computer.
It might be as simple as a wire worked itself lose and is impinging on the fan's blades, or maybe one of the blades is warped, etc etc.
 
GoodGame said:
I've been wondering what the new Ivy Bridge laptops will be capable of. I'd seen people guessing that CPU will reach 5 GHZ overclocked.
Click to expand...

From what I've heard 5ghz+ on air cooling is expected from Ivy bridge on desktops vs about 4.5ghz on sandy bridge. Overclocking laptops more than a few hundred mhz(or at all) is usually never a good idea even with top of the line mobile processors.

...

Here's a probably very dumb question. A couple of times now my browser window seems to get "attached" in front of anything else I open so I have to minimize the window or move it to see it. For example if I open a youtube video in fullscreen the browser window will stay on top blocking the video, same with anything else like folders or programs.

Is this some windows 7 or firefox feature I never encountered before but have started accidentally triggering now?
 
I hav quesiton. Why it it that some websites are able to complete a broken web-link (as long as there is enough to tell what it is), while oithers dump a 404?
 
Okay uh... how do I tell whether something is USB, USB 2, USB 3? Can I look up its speed?
 
Any given piece of hardware, if you know its name and version, you should be able to look up its specs and it should tell you that.
 
LucyDuke said:
Okay uh... how do I tell whether something is USB, USB 2, USB 3? Can I look up its speed?
Click to expand...

In addition to Cutlas's comment, a USB 2.0 device appears as an "enhanced" device in the Device Manager in Windows.

AFAIK you can't use USB 3.0 on any current Windows OS without installing a driver for a USB 3.0 device, so then you won't have to guess. If you do get GB/sec speed on data transfer with a USB device than it definitely is USB 3.0.
 
Does anyone have further info on van Eck phreaking than Wikipedia? Nearly everything I find is years old and applies to CRTs... Wouldn't the sheer amount of displays today (smartphones) make it impossible to detect/separate a usable signal?
 
You can try to follow what Goodgame said. What do you know about the hardware you are trying to figure out?
 
Is it very common for internet to run faster than it is advertised?
 
Ok, someone recommended me a generator of sorts on the Celestia forum. However, it is in the format of a Perl .pl file. How do I run it?
 
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