The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Pretty sure Advanced Clock Calibration is exclusive to AMD.

Russ, you've definitely got something wonking out on you. That sounds pretty wonky LOL!

 

Rob,
It's an AMD thing, but it's far more sophisticated in that seems to take control of the individual cores in the CPU. For instance, it can keep a weaker core from bringing the whole computer down. You can adjust each core individually. It's sort of a trim control for all cores, or each individual core. It allows you to get a better performing overclock, and essentially allows you to clock the board higher. Just trying to figure out which which is which, is a deep dark secret! LOL!! AMD has applied for a patent for it, which takes a fair amount of time and they are afraid that Intel will steal it and use it on their boards until Ati gets granted the patent! LOL!! that's the story, anyway!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Well, I found the problem! Something in the sound, probably a bad sound chip affecting the SB buss. I did notice that if I add any voltage at all to the SB, it will boot into windows, but the sound hangs up and you have to press the reset to stop it. Turn off the Start Windows sound, and it boots up just fine until you try to play anything audio. When I play a CD the sound stutters, or if I'm talking to someone in a Voice call. Then it just hangs again! Without any extra SB voltage, it sometimes sounds Stacoto, like a skipping CD. Sometimes it sounds tinny, like an old spring type reverb. I was talking to Rick in a voice call on Yahoo Messenger, and the sound went all wonky, and finally Blue Screened! It does it overclocked, stock and underclocked. All I have turned on for voltage adjustments is the CPU voltage, which is set to 1.325v, and the DDR2 voltage is set to 2.1v everything else is set to normal. I can get a rock stable 3.6GHz overclock at 1.325v, and run IBT 15 times, and it's good, but play a DVD , CD or Voice IM, and it crashes! If I turn the Audio off in the setup, it will pass IBT at 3.8GHz using 1.350v. Turn the sound on and it freezes up at the windows opening sounds (I use the LooneyTunes theme).

I knew something wasn't right last night, because as soon as I went to 3.7GHz, I had to move the voltage up from 1.325v to 1.375v. It shouldn't take that much of an increase, when there's no indication of excessive heat or other problems, and it wouldn't pass IBT if there was a problem with the CPU. I just got off the phone with AMD, and they say that if it passes IBT at any setting, that it's not likely a problem with the CPU. I just got the RMA in an email, but it pisses me off that GigaByte will not pay shipping! Then again, most motherboard manufacturers won't! Asus, Biostar, Asrock, ECS and Foxconn don't either! When this one does go down, it's always a BSOD, never just a reset. Even IBT has never given me a BSOD when it fails. It just resets the computer!

Russ

EDIT, I've been patiently going over my computer, and I've come to the conclusion that the problem is yet another bad Southbridge! If i play a Youtube video, some times it will crash, but if I download the video and then play it, it will stutter from time to time, but doesn't crash. I'm running at a stock 3.2GHz, with the CPU voltage set to 1.325v, and the DDR2 voltage set to 2.1v. Everything else is set to normal. If I up the SB voltage the smallest amount it will crash when windows opens. That makes me believe that there's a problem with the bandwidth. Stay tuned!
JRS

 

Damn russ. That's some serious bad luck. I hope mine's not going too. Sometimes when I'm streaming from netflix, I get strange sounds. So far, it's isolated to only netflix streaming though. Youtube doesn't have that problem. So I believe it to be due to their software. It doesn't do it all the time though thankfully. I was wondering for a while if it was a bad overclock. But since netflix is the only bug, I'm not thinking so.

How many Gigabyte boards have you gone through? Friggin crazy man!

 

A lot of hard disk noise comes from vibrations through the case. Some cases are worse than others for that noise. External hard disk enclosures are usually pretty good for it.

Those Startech docks look really handy, I want to get a USB3 one when I start my drive transfer process.

 

Oman7,
This has been the unluckiest personal build I've ever had. The first motherboard, a different model, was RMA'd. I was told that the model was discontinued, so I bought the 790X-UD4P, and promptly had SB problems with the Sata, and it was replaced by Newegg. After about 6 weeks, it developed similar problems with the Sata as well, so I had to send it in to gigabyte. The one they replaced it with developed the same problem, and I went back to Newegg and backed them into a corner, because had they not told me that my original motherboard had been discontinued when it wasn't, I probably wouldn't have had all these problems. The UD4P they gave me lasted until about 4 weeks ago and we had that power problem, and it wouldn't do anything but shut down after about 5-6 seconds. I installed the new one this past Monday and it was working fine, until suddenly this problem came along. First I thought that maybe it was the video drivers, so I removed them, and ran Registry Crawler to get all of the driver info out, and reinstalled them. It seemed to be OK for a few hours, and then it started spitting and sputtering again. ARRRRGGGH! I swear I will never say that this is my last personal build ever again. This has been going on for over a year now, and it's getting old! LOL!!

I've talked to AMD and they do acknowledge that they have had some bad 710 and 750 SB Chips, so I can't really blame Gigabyte for the problem. I mean the last one worked great for months. I mean, all the parts are high quality. There's no junk or poor quality anything in my computer. CPU, Memory, PSU, GPU, ODDs, HDDs, CPU cooler, fans, you name it, it's all good stuff. I had better luck when I was building with lesser quality components!

I just did some research into all AMD motherboards, and the best one that has a high amount of sales, is the Gigabyte MA785GM-US2H, by a wide margin. Unfortunately I'm not interested in an HDMI board. Still it's the most popular AMD motherboard of any brand out there with 843 confirmed owners out of 911 reviews on Newegg, and only 8% with a 1 egg rating, it wins the top spot by a landslide. You have to look at the Uber priced AM3 motherboards to do better, and they don't sell in large enough numbers, because of their high price tag, to form much of an opinion. One thing I did notice was the fairly high failure rate of just about every motherboard out there, regardless of brand. There are many with far less sales that don't qualify because the numbers are just not high enough to be able to base any opinion. All of this seems to translate out to the effects of a bad economy, with a very high level of dissatisfaction, and a high failure rate. I know the one egg category on newegg seems to be anywhere from 12 to 17 percent range for many motherboards. Contrast that with the 8% one egg rating of the MA785GM-US2H, and it's easy to see why it outsells any other AMD motherboard. Mind you that's 8% out of 843 confirmed owners. Given it's high sales numbers, it's probably the best and most reliable AMD motherboard you can buy today!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

This is the one I bought my mother almost a year ago(GIGABYTE GA-MA785GPMT-UD2H). Its performed quite well. She still uses her old computer the most though. It's rather silly. She seems intimidated by the new one. Windows 7...

That docking station looks interesting Creaky. I may have to keep that technology in mind. I can think of situations where that would be extremely handy. Sam is right though. USB 3.0 would help greatly in transfer speeds

 

Amazingly enough I have a DVD burner tale to share with afterdawn for once.
Installed my GH20NS15 last night after its 6 month period of being unplugged due to being unused (and having nicked the cable for something else)
Went to burn DVD - failed burning at 2% in. Interesting I thought, perhaps it's Windows burning software being crap.
Ran ImgBurn - crashed 3% in. Not only that but after Ctrl+Alt+Del'ing the program, the drive was still spinning the disc at 20x. No joy from the eject button. Trying to right click the drive in My Computer crashed Explorer.
I decided to hard reboot the PC with the reset switch, and the drive was still spinning at 20x with no eject, even after passing POST having detected the drive. Very odd.
Powered the PC off. When I powered it back on, I decided to reflash the drive's firmware with a tool I found simply by googling the drive name.
After having done that and rebooted, all is fine and dandy.
Interesting how DVD firmware can just fail like that. I find myself wondering if somehow I let it be Starforced... :S

 

This is off topic, but I feel important. I am leaving Yahoo permanently, and going back to Hotmail. One of the reasons is this, taken from the fine print at the bottom of the Yahoo Mail page: "NOTICE: We collect personal information on this site" instead of the usual "while we don't intentionally collect personal information" that everyone else uses. The other reason is that they not only force you to have to do a Capachta code, just to send an email, but I got censored and blocked by them yesterday, and an email to omegaman7 erased! Why, I'm not sure, as I can assure you that there was no bad language or anything like that in the email, and we weren't plotting to overthrow the Government or rob a bank. Just the fact that some key word kicked my email off the internet, and they can read anything I wrote, is unacceptable to me. I consider these actions by Yahoo Mail to be an invasion of my privacy, and will be going back to my old Hotmail account.

Russ

 

Hotmail do the same. Gmail do the same. It happens. Get over it, to be honest.
It's not right, but I'm not exactly going to lead a protest about it.

 

Hotmail works for me. I'll stick with it for the time being. Pretty weird about your optical drive firmware. Never had that happen. I have had a drive get stuck burning though. Usually a power down, and reboot is the end of it.

 

I'll blame StarForce tbh. Easy and fairly likely scapegoat!

 

Sam,
OK! I'll bite, what makes StarForce the likely Scapegoat?

Russ

 

LOL, I was just gonna ask who in the hell or what is Starforce.

 

more "conspirocy theories" but this time relating to games haha.

though on most points about what creaky said i probably agree to some extent.

still teetering on the illuminati, but im not to sure. 2pac does sway it as real for me.

 

Shaff, what ya think if someone would have rma'd all those gigabyte they would be talkin bad about them like they were made by ASUS????lol just funnin all

 

took the words right out of my mouth haha

 

Hmm, let me think. I didn't have to wait 20 minutes or more on the phone on my dime, be disconnected a couple of times, and then finally get someone that couldn't find their a$$ with both hands and a flashlight! No one lied to me or tried to cheat me. I had the RMA and the shipping ticket in about 15 minutes, via email. It couldn't have been easier! Add to that, the fact that it's not a Gigabyte problem, but a Perifial component that is bad, made by Ati. The motherboard worked fine for a couple of days, so it wasn't DOA, like the P5N-E, that Asus supposedly tested with a CPU and memory, before they shipped it to me. So tell me again why I should be mad at GigaByte, or talk bad about them?

Russ

 

Starforce is a copy protection system included with some games. It rewrites the firmware on discs to bend the laser's trajectory, so it can be used to verify if the disc is made of normal CD material, or CD/CD-R etc. material. This isn't what DVDs are designed to do, and not only does the firmware fail, it also mechanically destroys the drives.
Shaff: Lol nobody's going to listen to your opinions on culture, you think City university is better than living in York

Shaff/Rob: Because it's Gigabyte's fault AMD make bad southbridges amirite?
It's well documented that Asus boards are bad whether they're AMD, Intel, nvidia chipsets or whatever. So far, I see very little evidence Gigabyte are responsible for these boards, since it's always the southbridge that fails. Just means AMD can't make southbridges.