The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

I've had a sound card prevent a PC from posting. Or was it a blue stop screen... any how, faulty cards can cause some nasty problems. It's pretty much the board protecting itself. That's how I look at it anyway.

 

A sound card shorting out the bus could cause posting problems but with a video card there are many more problems since the system is totally based on your graphics card. No sound card no problem, no video card big problem, basically put.

 

Exactly. It does make troubleshooting easy. Pull the sound card, and it will be fine then LOL! If one has onboard video though... *cringes* LOL!

 

Rich,

Replace the IDE cable. They all do that when they go belly up! It only worked because you made a connection when you plugged it back in again. They are well known for high resistance connection problems, caused mostly by vibration. The crimp connectors slowly cut through the wires, due to that. I always use 80 pin cables, if possible.

Best Regards,
Russ

PS Here's a couple of songs from Jackie's new album, "Songs From the Silver Screen".

Music of the Night on The View

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d65VQZ2iKuQ

Reflection on Fox and Friends

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=qpTBhGLV2r0&NR=1

Such an amazing voice!

Enjoy,
Russ

 

Not sure If I've ever had an IDE related issue. Though I've heard of them. I've only ever had a few IDE drives. I've owned probably 600%+ more Sata drives Never had a Sata cable related issue. Though I've heard of those too. Cables are definitely the first thing to eliminate, as a cause!

 

IDE cables don't normally go bad unless they have been abused by pulling them off wrong where the IDC pulls apart or is stressed. There certainly isn't enough vibration in a PC to cause wire cutoffs, again it would be miss-use.

 

Even plugging an IDE drive into the board without plugging its power in will often stop a PC from posting - fortunately this does not seem true of SATA in my experience.

I'll also agree with Stevo here that SATA cables go wrong an order of magnitude more often than IDE cables.

 

Unplugging an IDE drive without powering down, can be catastrophic to the IDE channel! Never done it myself, but my brother did. He won't make that mistake again I believe my troubles with cables have been zero, because I treat them very well. Not suggesting that those with troubles are brutal... but perhaps they received a very fragile cable, and they weren't gentle LOL!

 

I have also found SATA cables to be fairly fragile. Is common to see broken insulation at ends if bent and have had several seemingly fine cables simply refuse to work. IDE cables on the other hand, I could pull one out of a junkyard and use it forever.

 

I could say the same thing about sata

Not that I ever would

 

Actually prefer the orange/blue SATA cables that Gigabyte supplies. Have had good luck with them.

IDE cables basically any brand, any age, though I do try to use 80 pin cables for various reasons. AFAIK unless compatibility problems arise, 80 pin cables are better in every way.

 

I just got the RMA from Gigabyte for my 990XA-UD3. They will replace it! I'm glad he finally saw things my way! LOL!!

I bit the bullet, and bought an FX-8320 Viscera 3.5GHz (4.0 Turbo) 8 core to play with.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113285

I also bought a pair of Western Digital WD Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive. Bare Drive only for $79.99 each w/free shipping. A 5 year warranty, 1TB, Enterprise drive for $80! Are you kidding me? I just bought 2 500GB FAEX drives a couple of weeks ago for $73 each.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533

They're my first 1TB drives!

I can't wait to see how well it runs my 3D rotational programs. The current software can use up to 12 cores.

Russ

 

I thought Sam jinkz'd my SSD in my main computer as I got a unrecoverable BSOD 0x74 error. I rebuilt the whole system and shortly after I was all done I started to get a 0xF4 error that I could recover from temporarily but it would keep coming back. So I pulled out the SSD and threw in a 250G 2.5in drive and low and behold right after installing Office 2010 the system started acting goofy again, so know I've wiped out Office's folder completely and I'm starting all over again from scratch.

On the flip side I just bought a new laptop for my daughter. I got an A6 3420 1.5GHz Quad Core Acer which has two SATA bays just like my i5 2430 2.4GHz Acer. I wish I would have bought the same processor or higher AMD as this new notebook, since this one doesn't lag like my Intel and runs just as fast for the most part as the Intel, ADOBE seemed to install a bit slower but then they are streamlined for Intel so I would expect that. I will try to generate some numbers before I give it to her for her birthday as it would be interesting to see how it compares with some stuff. So far I like it much better but I do need to put it through some tests.

 

Rather than lose time waiting for the new MB, I'm going to finish the new PIIx6 965BE as my FX-8320. Newegg screwed up my order, and sent 2 FX-8320, and an extra 1TB WD black. I normally wouldn't mind, but then they had to spoil it by charging me for them1 LOL!! I've already installed the latest BIOS flash in the motherboard, so the 8320 is a drop in.

I almost bought an 8150 Zambiezi, but talked to my doctor friends first. They said to buy the FX-8320 instead, it's worth the extra $20, as it's much faster than the 8150! I'll find out in a few days! The case is just as I thought it would be, and cools super well!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

And I thought I'd be the first to jump on the FX bandwagon

 

Oman7,

No big plan really, it just happened that way! LOL!! I usually wait a while, but I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and had just the right amount of attitude to go with it! I figured that since the 1090t was no longer the best that AMD had to offer, and I was wanting to build something that was new and improved,so PileDriver it is then! It's that time, I have to go call Newegg!

Russ
EditileDriver is here! I'll probably install it tonight when I'll have a little help coming over.

Russ

 

Quite impressed so far by the i5 3470 in the LAN PC I built for the weekend - running it on a video encode alongside my older 750 overclocked to 4.11Ghz, while the 3470 remains stock - they're encoding at almost exactly the same speed - in fact the 3470 is 0.11% faster, haha. Both are running 93% faster than the stock Q9550, which is itself still a fairly powerful CPU. Not bad for a 77W chip that has its own IGP. The per-core per-clock performance on this thing is amazing.

I'm also pleased with the MSI HD7770 I fitted to it, which has proved very quiet in all except for the most strenuous operations, and even then, it isn't that noisy. So far so good with the Corsair CXV2 500W PSU as well, that has also proven very quiet. For a stock 'out of the box' build, it's a quiet machine with no modifications needed. Very pleasing to see maufacturers are shipping quieter components 'as-is' nowadays. The only noisy thing in the system is the 6 year old 750GB Seagate I had to dig out to install games on it!
Aiming to replace with a 1TB Caviar Blue or Black, price depending by the end of the year.

 

Sam,

That's exactly how I feel about this FX-8320 build. There's so much that turned out better than I expected. It's been over 6 1/2 years since I've had a steady income. I can finally afford to take a closer look at better quality, but somewhat higher priced components, and be able to buy and build anything I want. I did a lot of research, in looking for the right case, and the Corsair 400R is it for me. This thing runs silly cool. It's 74F (23.3C) in here, and the damn thing is idling at 21C. It's so quiet too!

Tomorrow, I'll put my drives in it and be back on Win 7. Here's some quick benchmarks at stock 3.5GHz speed.

Memory bandwidth 1600 MHz Cas 7



Processor Arithmetic 1600 memory



Processor Multi Media



Side view of the computer with the cover removed, from Corsair's gallery.



Overall, I'm pleased with the results!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Isn't one of the main issues with Caviar Black how loud they are, or has that been rectified with the current models?

 

They're not silent by any means but compared to a 6 year old Seagate 7200.10 even a cement mixer is quiet!