The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

You can laugh, but browsing YouTube rendered my 30GB completely useless, since they are unable to be both read from and written to at the same time, so until a youtube video finished streaming, you couldn't read from the drive - reading from the HDD is critical to windows even running, even if you have no problems open. A working hard disk is even required to move the mouse!

 

I can be such a goof sometimes I swear! This has been a bomb of a morning! It's NOT a pentium 4 Prescott. Its a celeron. Which totally negates the possibility of 64 bit operating! Not sure Why I thought that LOL! His board is so screwed its not even funny. His onboard audio is acting up, one of his IDE channels is blown, his HDD is clicking away like its gnawing on wood(Seagate), and his HDD is about as fragmented as it gets LOL! Not to mention he has twice as much ram as I thought. In fact he has 2Gb! Suffice to say, i'm not going near it anymore today LOL! It's just about made my head pop.

 

May I inquire as to the make and model of this board, and its age?

 

Dell Dimension 3000. Celeron 2.4Ghz. I'm afraid I didn't acknowledge the brand of the board. I won't be working on it again til tomorrow... I almost wonder if its an intel though...

No, I think its an actual dell board.

 

Dell, make most of their own boards. What I did find interesting is that my friend's Dell XPS 420 is shipped with a single nvidia graphics card, yet has an Intel X38 chipset. Why not a P35, for a system like a Dell? odd...

 

I'm afraid I can't answer that question

By the way, I believe its a 2004 Model.

 

sammorris,

Sam,
I don't think it's a case of panning anything. People don't usually complain about drive failures, unless they actually happen. I'm not saying that all green drives have a high failure rate, but there are problems with certain ones. The 750 and the 2TB WD ones seem to have the highest failure rate. There's problems when trying to use them in raid configurations, or in formatting the drive to full capacity. The 2TB is not exactly as green as you might think either, but that will happen when you take an efficient design and add another 500GB platter to it. I suspect that has something to do with all the reported failures. People have even coined the phrase, "The click of Death" in regards to them. I can't fault the shipping as the cause of all the failures, as a powered down drive can stand an awful lot of shock without any damage. I know every drive I've bought from Newegg has been well packed, and never had a DOA or a drive fail from them. I personally would avoid either the 750 or the 2TB ones until their failure rate is markedly reduced! There's reports of far too many drive failures on the net, to be ignored or to be considered sour grapes by some WD hater.

I'm not considering the 750, green or black and I'm going to get the WD5001AALS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s. The WD7500AADS 750GB is a green drive, but it also has a higher failure rate (11% on newegg) than the 500GB. The black 750, has about a 10% failure rate. The 750 is also the same price as the 500GB for 50% more drive space, and I still don't want one! I'm sure that in time the reliability will improve, but I'll stick with the AALS 500GB for now.

Best Regards,
Russ

 

For those wondering how an IDE port could fail:

I told my brother over a year ago, to go ahead and buy a new dvd rom drive to replace his obviously bad drive. He thought rather than trouble me with the task of installing it, that he would try and do it himself. What he did wrong was not power off the system, and started detaching the IDE cables and power cables. He didn't realize that it could reek havoc on a PC. Well, suffice to say that particular IDE channel no longer works.

At least he has a spare channel. However it would appear that his HDD does not like to play nice with a slave drive connected with it. So that will be my task tomorrow. His drive says nothing about, "Master W/ slave." So im not certain what to do with it. Perhaps i'll simply go BOTH cable select. But it seems like i've heard that some boards don't like the Cable select option.

 

The RAID issues annoy me, as they only come up if you have a faulty drive, and if you've got a faulty drive then you've got other problems to worry about. Even though it uses more power than the other drives in the series, the WD20EADS still uses only 60% of the power of a modern drive, less than 50% of what some of the big Seagates use. That's still energy-saving as far as I'm concerned.
The funny thing is, seemingly just to spite me, an hour after I made my last post, a friend messaged me and said his WD15EADS had failed. As far as HDDs taking shock in the post it happens, three HDDs another friend I know bought (320GB Seagate 7200.10s) arrived in a rather beaten-up box and one was DOA, the other two failed shortly after. Shipping damage is still a real concern for HDDs.
The 500GB AALS drives are brand new, if they do suffer the same problems, you wouldn't know yet. Quite frankly, with so many bad drives from Samsung and Seagate out there, I consider whatever the failure rate of the WDs to be, a lesser of several evils.
I am however intrigued by Hitachi's latest offerings. All the Hitachi-bashing seems based on past experience, and the 2TB Hitachis are a good 20% lower priced than any of their rivals...

 

Oman7,
I had one of those 3000 Dells with a 3.0GHz Prescot in it. Wasn't a bad machine, just no overclocking, and the last of the socket 478s.

You can upgrade the CPU for fairly cheap though.
http://www.geeks.com/products.asp?cat=cpu
A 3GHz, 800 fsb 1MB L2 cache, for $22.

Russ

 

ALL ide channels are Dual channel right? Cause I noted that his board has a white and a black ide port. The black one currently occupies the HDD. The white one is 100% dead LOL! And it would appear that Dell really wants the HDD on that particular port. They color coded the cables to match the port.

I toyed with the notion of upgrading it once upon a time russ. It just doesn't seem worthy of it anymore. It's on its last leg...

 

Sam,
The WD5001AALS 500GB/32M has been around for over a year now. That's why Newegg has so meny reviews on it (867). The raid issues with the 2TB WD20EADS are caused by something in the drive not being turned on, and there's a fix for it on the net!

I have seen damaged drives before, and some places do have issues with shipping, but I've never gotten a damaged one from Newegg or UPS. Only the FedEx one that was airmailed across my front yard was DOA, and it appeared to land right on the corner of the box and the box split open. TigerDirect does not pack near as well as Newegg, either.

I have no complaint with the 250GB DeskStar I had. It was noisy as a boot drive, but for storage, it was reasonably quiet. It ran a little slower than my Seagate, 72MB/s vs 93MB/s, but for storage it was OK.

Russ

 

Russ, have you ever heard of a single channel IDE port? I never have. I assumed that all IDE ports were dual channel.

You know...it's gotta be that darn HDD's jumper setting.

 

Oman7,
For what it is, it's a good machine, but it's Achilles heel is the cooling. They have to be kept clean or they will overheat. The CPU cooler takes a hell of a beating since all the case airflow goes through it! If the IDE controller was good (try a new IDE cable), it would be worth the $22 for the 3.0/800/1MB Prescott. Make sure that the IDE cable for the HDD is an 80 wire cable as Dell sets the HDD at CS from the factory. Otherwise you will have to set it as a master with the jumper if it's 40 wire!

Russ

 

Man...im really out of it today. I forgot about the different revisions of 40/80 wire. Meh. The processor choice is his. He has another PC thats similar to my Secondary. ROCK solid!

 

Oman7,
Be sure that the IDE controllers are both turned on in the setup. This is particularly important with that specific model because when you install XP, it will not boot until you go in the setup and turn the HDD controller back on. Why installing XP turns the controller off is a mystery to me I freaked the first time it happened to me! LOL!! My Precision 420 is the same way, the only way you can install the OS on the boot drive with it is with the controller turned off! It goes through the entire install and then won't boot up! LOL!! Turn it back on and it works fine!

Russ

 

ok got a few questions. a friend of mine here at work just built him a new system

Q9550
ga-ep45-ud3p
his 5770
2x2gb gskil mem
cm 800w silent pro
750gb wd hdd
CM scout case.
he has tried at home to get into the bios and cant. so he brought it into work for me to look at. im at a loss other than the board being bad??(imgine that)lol once started the gigabyte logo comes up like it should you goto hit the delete button to get into bios, and nothing happens. same with f12,tab,end ect.... we have tried 3 different keyboards. all with the same outcome. you cant get into anything cause the keyboard isnt working. any ideas on this?

 

Have you tried a PS/2 Keyboard?