Do you run special software to monitor your GPU fans at all times? I don't, nor do I want to. I just expect that if the fans fail other components will shut down before they suffer thermal damage (not always the case though, especially in GPUs /coughnvidiacough). Not to mention that if the fans are not hot-swappable, redundancy is pretty pointless because you still have to shutdown and get out a screwdriver. In this case, it looks like you may need more than a screwdrive to replace any of those GPU fans (assumign they are replacable at all, MANY GPU fans are not).

I usually don't know if any of the fans in my system are working when I'm in an OS unless I put my head under the desk and listen for them. I could run some snazztastic radeon montiring tool I suppose, but I'd rather avoid the way too often update notifications, resource utilization, software conflicts, and general PITA that comes with instaling that junk.

From a reliability standpoint, the less moving parts in a PC the better.

Out of the dozens of video card failures I've seen at work, only one wasn't caused by a cooling/fan problem (capacitor blew out, but this could possibly be traced to insufficient cooling as well). I'd say that 95% of the time (if not 99%) moving parts are the root cause of modern PC failures, i.e. fans and disks.

I know its just a reference design but putting three fans, even two fans, on a video card is stupid. In all likelyhood, that more than doubles the failure rate vs a single fan cooling setup...

Much better explanation than I had! :)

I used to work for an HPC vendor, about 1/3 of our sales were to oil/gas. From what I understood it was pretty easy for our customers to parrallelize their workload to run across thousand of off the shelf servers with gigabit ethernet vs having to buy a much more expensive setup with high speed interconnects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=jwg4mbGL4JE#t=36s

I posted my experience with Hero3 cameras below. It is a deeply flawed product that never should have been shipped. I feel for your friends as I ahd a similar terrible experience that messed up a trip to Mexico. GoPro should be ashamed of themselves...

I surf, and ride motorcycles, so my girl decided a gopro would make a cool xmas gift this year. We went to New Zealand in December so she gave it to me early...

Strike 1:
So before we left on our trip, she ordered a Hero3 silver from gopro's website, which advertised "ships by Nov 30th" when she placed the order. After hearing nothing for 4 business days, not even an order confirmation, but having her CC charged $300+tax, she checked the website again and it said the Hero 3 cameras were on 14 day backorder. She then attmpetd to call GoPro. Big mistake. It took 54 minutes to get a live person on the phone. They stated that they could not guarantee when the camera would ship, and could not cancel the order. She gave up, called her Credit card company and disputed the charge, then she went to Best Buy and bought the camera off the shelf there for the same price. The camera from the gopro website never showed up and she got a cryptic email two weeks later from a manager saying the order was cancelled.

Strike 2:
Fast forward two weeks. We used the camera in New Zealand while enjoying our trip, and I was learning to use the camera etc... It seemed ot work OK but had really bad battery life but not a huge deal as I ordered the extended battery pack along with several other accessories, totall around $120. Then we went on a road trip to Baja for New Years. While driving south the GoPro locked up. At that point it wouldn't record at all, evena fter removing the battery and memory card and reinsterting. When we got back I found out it had corrupted the memory card so badly that I couldn't get any videos from that trip off of it. I then followed gopro instructions to reset the camera, and the website said there was a known issue and directed me to update the firmware, but I already had the most recent. Long story slightly shorter, I spent several hours messing with the camera, was hung up on after waiting on hold for 45 min by gopro support, and bought another SD card ($20), before returning it to Best Buy and getting a replacemnet camera.

Strike 3:
Now I have my new camera #2 all updated with the same FW (12/15/2012) and new memory card (which I have two of now) and it seems to work. Yay! So I start recording my commute to work on my motorcycle. After a couple weeks, this camera starts doing the EXACT same thing as my last one. Locks up, corrupts memory cards, factory reset/FW flash/Card reformat doesn't help for more than a few videos. This took about 30-40 videos to start happening, just like the first camera. This time I email gopro support hoping fro better luck. I didn't hear back for 9 days, when I got an email telling me to do all the things I had already tried (and I ahd told them I tried in my first email) and suggesting that I had bought a substandard memory card, which is the same thing their website says (I bought two class 10 san diesk cards along with teh class 10 best buy gave me with the camera). So, I took this camera back to Best Buy as well and complained heavily to their staff about GoPro and the camera. They urged me to try one mroe camera so I did.

Strike 4 (yes there are more than 3):
GoPro Hero3 camera #3 seems to work, jsut like #1 and #2. I start recording videos on my motorcycle and in my truck and what do you know... After about 2 weeks and 25 videos, it locks up, same symptoms as the first two. I waste another 2 horus messing with camera #3, then give up and take it back to Best Buy. They refuse to give me a full refund and I end up with store credit instead. I really can't blame then since it took me 2 1/2 months to ask for my money back after replacing two of them already.

Strike 5 (poosibly another gopro strike):
I write a review of the camera on Amazon and state my experience. Within 2 weeks my review is removed, no word from Amazon about it. I also noticed that sevveral other negative reviews had been taken down (all with the same problems I had) and the camera's rating had actually increased from 2 stars to three. It seems that gopro was actively complaining about negative reviews to Amazon and likely using the "spiteful" clause in Amazon's review process to get them taken down.

As far as I'm concerned the Hero3 is a broken product and most people simply haven't used them enough to find out. It has an issue with the memory card controller that corrupts them over time, and I think it may be related to power loss events occurring while it is recording but I'm not sure. GoPro is handling things very very poorly, posting silly messages on their support site about users belonging to a tribe etc, but they aren't even answering the phones. I really believe this company is headed down the toilet, and fast. I'm still out about $120 for the accessories I got for that POS, and I honesltly wish the worst for that company. It was a horrible experience.

I'm pretty sure BMW is going to offer a diesel engine in the 3 series this year. Also, isn't the CC/Passat also available with a diesel and manual transmission?

I live in CA, which seems to frown on diesel engines/fuel for some reason. My buddy just got a Mercedes SUV with a 450ft/lb diesel in it. It's a GREAT vehicle if you have $50k to drop on a mid-sized SUV. It has something like a 600 miles range too. He just bitches baout dieel costing more per gallon but his truck more than makes up for it in MPGs. For my buck (and short commutes) I stick with buying/maintaning older VWs and American V-8s off the used market. There's nothing like the growl of a HEMI with a free flowing exhaust, especially when you can pick one up for less than $10k with plenty of miles left on the ODO. Having a little Golf GTi or something makes a nice counter balance and they get pretty good MPG too... :)

I get pretty darn close to the EPA estimates on all 3 of my vehicles. Definitely not 25-50% less than the window stickers said...

Messing with old hardware to try and make it rack mountable? Pfft. Save the effort. Buy a few mid-range servers and you'll get similar compute performance compared to that energy hog of a cluster. If you really want to use that hardware, don't remount it. Just stack the servers in a corner, plug them in, and install ROCKS. It's still gonna be an energy hog and have crappy performance though.

Hold on. Lets break this down because your post wasn't obvious at all. That is why I replied with my snarky comment. For starters, original message said:

Double negative and no period on that abortion of a sentence.

This could me a decent, understandable sentence if it was completely re-written. But to your point, I can decipher two very broad unsubstantiated claims here.

And then there is this sentence. I honestly have no idea what you are trying to communicate in the parentheses here. Ignoring the terrible grammar, the rest of it appears to make another broad claim with no explanation or references.

Now, for your reply...

Dealing with your dyslexia isn't anyone's problem other than yourself dude. And I have no idea wtf you are talking about in the rest of this breathtakingly stupid comment.

I'm more comfortable with Stupid Engineering Opposition

Try describing your SEO experience in complete sentences and use grammar. You could lose out on a metric fuck ton of money when employers don't hire you because you can't communicate.

I grew up a few miles from there in the 80s. It was awesome hearing/feeling the rocket engine tests. I don't think there has been any correlation between higher cancer rates and the communities around that facility, so I'm not sure what that has to do with the story. Progress requires some sacrifice. If we aren't wiling to sacrifice anything we will never progress. The trick is finding the right balance and personally I feel we have swayed too far into the unwilling to sacrifice territory of the last few decades.

I'm no expert on coal power plants but I'm pretty sure we already do that with scrubbers.

Maybe not on the horizon but there is certainly something that has been around for 50+ years that could replace coal overnight. It's called nuclear power.

Is he? I feel like its more about politics than actually solving anything. Instead of pumping money into "green" start-up companies that inevitably spread the wealth among their executives and then disappear in a puff of smoke, the federal government could subsidize the building of a smelter capable for manufacturing a reactor vessel. Last I read, the only country with the facilities to manufacture those is Japan and they currently have years of back orders. I also haven't heard anything about solving the nuclear waste storage problem out of this administration. Getting the waste problem sorted out, subsidizing the construction of a facility with the ability to make containment vessels, squashing all the red tape involved with new plant construction, and decommissioning some of the older nuclear power plants is the most sensible approach to getting us away from oil and coal in my eyes.