New Computer build woes...

Intro: Not intended as such, but this is getting rather long for an OP. Take it as a blog entry, or a lesson learned in how not to go about updating anything. At any rate, a few non fatal mistakes were made, and all solved so far. And I think my experiences may serve as a notice to all homebuilders out there, especially those of us with an attention and memory-span equal to goldfish; do your research first...

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My nice little current gaming rig was getting a bit long in the tooth so to speak, and with all these new games I want to take a chug at (now that they are out of the post-release beta phase ) it was time for some upgrade.

Decided to build my own again, as my current rig was delivered at the door ready to boot-up. There's just something special about a PC you build yourself, and money beeing a bit tight, Xmas and all, I thought cheaper is better, though not sacrificing performance...

...assuming ofcourse that all your ducks are lined up in a nice row before you start. Having not built my own for a few years some ducklings did get a bit astray.

Parts I intended to "recycle" as it were, is from my old gaming-rig, now used as a media-center (a role my current rig will take over). All the old rubbish had to go naturally. what I was left with was the Lian-Li case, some generic DVD/RW, a spare SATA disk @450GB and a super-duper PSU from Hiper delivering 580W.

And from my current rig, moving the GTX470 to the new, and putting my old 8800GTX into my current rig and future media center.

New stuff I picked up was:

Motherboard
6 core AMD CPU @3.3Ghz
64gig SSD @liek super fast man!
500gig HD for storage and stuff
8gigs RAM @1600Mhz
Win7 64bit HB-OEM

Tools all ready and lined up. Stripped and cleaned my old case. Got the old 8800GTX out of its box, a quick once over showed that it needed a good bit of cleaning. 2 hours later, a good handfull of baked dust went into the trash. Seriously, the fan and heat-sink on that thing was really clogged up.

Onwards, mounted all the new stuff in the Case. Disks first, then MB, CPU and RAM. Started running the cables and all was fine and dandy until... the problems started becoming obvious...

#1: Did you know that ATX motherboards now come with a 2x4 power-connector for the CPU? Really? I didn't. Was 2x2 back last I did this. More important, my PSU only got a 2x2 molex for the CPU power.

Done some reading, and apparantly, the extra power is in case one want to overclock, or run a really power-hungry CPU. The 2x2 (which can be used in the 2x4 slot) delivers about 140W, but some 10-20% is lost when the voltage is adjusted on the MB. Even so, at minimum my 2x2 should deliver at least 110W, and my CPU demand 95W. So I should be good.

#2: Was a bit fast and loose ordering the MB. It do not have any means of connecting an IDE drive. Not a big deal in this day and age you might say, except the DVD/RW I was intending to reuse, is IDE, not SATA. And my copy of Win7 naturally came on a DVD.

Some reading more, and I figured I could just .ISO the Win7 DVD, get it on a USB stick and boot from that. But, naturally, I have no USB stick at hand that is larger than 2gigs, and I need 4gigs minimum.

What I do have though, is an old 300gig external HD that connects through USB. Only, the HD is unreliable. Stopped using it years ago, last time it crashed. But from stripping the old machine, I had a 250gig IDE HD left over. So swapped out the broken 300gig disk with the working very nicely thank you very much 250gig into that little tight external casing. Fiddly work with a lot of really small screws that made no sense in beeing there, apart from making that thing cumbersome to service. But got it done eventually.

And that is where I am at now. Setting up the external disk for booting. Which means a full reformat and some other stuff, not to mention later copying over the Win7 install files.

It is painfully slow. I'm at 75% in the format operation, and a good two hours in.

Perhaps another hour, and I'll have all my ducks lined up. Ready to boot up my new wonder and get the OS on there. From there on in all should be smooth sailing. Assuming my PSU holds up and can feed the CPU with enough juice. If not, come monday, I'm shopping for a new PSU...

I'll update as things go wonderfully right/horrendously wrong. As may apply.

update 1: Woho, great success. Windows is installing. Meaning, all parts work. But in a bout of dementia, I forgot how much my old box made noise when going full tilt with all fans blowing. When configured as a media-box, only the back fan was hooked up. Now the two front fans are hooked up as well, and the noise...

Think I need to invest in a little regulator for the two front fans.

Now just finish installing Win7, then swap the graphics cards between that and this machine, install all kinds of drivers and stuff, and I'm good to go.

update2: Heyhey, Win7 installed. Not hooked it up to the net yet nor swapped gfx cards (getting a bit drunk, enough hardware shit, doing it tomorrow I promise ), but I found that my old 450gig Sata disk is the one with the complete Arrested Development and Seinfeld episodes on it, plus some other stuff. Transferring to external disk now. Also need to change boot-order from USB first to SSD first, but the damned thing boots so fast I hardly have time to hit the del key. Also must format the new 500gig drive, partition it, make sure page-file and recovery files are stored on that. The SSD is not there to perform a whole lot of silly write orders. Reading from it is all I need the OS to do after necessary stuff have been installed and updated.

update3: I almost had a heart attack. Suddenly the new rig got silent. It just went ....omph... and then no sound. As it turns out, when this thing goes into sleep mode, it does it in style. A wiggle of the mouse later, and the noise reached its jet-turbine levels again. And all was fine. Did I mention having to buy a fan-regulator to chill down those two front fans? Apart from that, all still looking good. Soon it will meet the net... And hours upon hours of updates and Steam downloads

update4: and wouldn't you know it, the bootmanager file was not on the SSD, but on the old SATA disk, which previously also held a copy of Windows XP. So, at boot time I got the option to boot from something old or something new. That will not do. Long story short, and some trickery to get it done, the SSD is now the system disk in all regards. Man I loathe those relics of Windows past that lingers way after their due. At any rate, that particular disk is now suffering through a full-format, and all is well. Eventhough I had to install Win7 twice already... Luckily that SSD is mighty fast, and installing from a USB disk is a hell of alot faster than from DVD

Edited by Zylark, 17 December 2011 - 11:46 PM.

update5: 7 months on and the "super duper" PSU from Hiper crapped out on me yesterday. In the middle of a BF3 round where I was doing pretty well

Poof, black screen, dead PC. Though strangly, it still delivered power on the motherboard, as my attached USB devices still got juice and the light in the power-switch of the PSU was still lit. So apparantly one or two 12V rails got somewhat overloaded having to drive my 3 fans (through a regulator that draws power from a 12V 4 pin molex, not the mobo), 3 disks and my GFX card that requires two PCIe 12V 6 pin connectors. Only one from the only PCIe outlet on the PSU, the other was jimmied with a Y cable and two seperate 4 pin 12V molex connectors.

Apparantly, after doing some reading today, the PSU only delivers a measly 360W on the 12V rails. Which is next to nothing considering what it is supposed to give juice to. The remaining 220W powers the CPU and Mobo. And there is no balancing of the load. Now considering that my GTX470 can under max load demand up to 400W plus change, I'm surprised the PSU didn't blow on me earlier.

I am ofcourse learning all this after the fact, so another obvious lesson learned: do check the specs from external sources and technical reviews before putting them into your PC.

Anyhow, have now guttet the 620W PSU from my media machine. This one do have a max of 600W on the 12V rails, and do feature balancing of the load. So should be well within tolerances for my gaming rig, though the PSU is getting on a bit with its 4 years.

Nonetheless, this is just a temporary solution. Need another PSU with even higher tolerances, so I am getting an 850W PSU. Once it arrives, that will go into my gaming PC, and the 620W one I'm using now goes back into my media PC. Then I'll be happy again, and not be nervous running my PC at max in demanding games...

Edited by Zylark, 12 July 2012 - 05:12 PM.
spelling

*bump* This is almost comical.

wow, man. sounds like it's been a bumpy ride getting your rig running. I've always had serious issues playing games with multiple-core cpus. How good does that six-core handle the games?

I built a computer and ran into BSOD after BSOD, turns out, my SSD firmware was causing bad juju. So I am now back to a mechanical drive, no BSODs since, and not much lost in the way...

2 seagate 1tb drives (1 replaced the 60gb SSD)
16gb G.Skill ram
Sapphire HD6850
AMD 1090T with Corsair enclosed water system
dvd burner (thinking about getting the BR burner now)
5 fans and a 4 fan control center
gigabyte MB
PC Power and Cooling 760w PSU
Can't forget the Asus 27" 1080p monitor
and the Presonus Studiolive 16.0.2 and Event TR5n Monitors
M-audio Key rig 49
and an MPC 1000 (learning how to use this beast)

wow, man. sounds like it's been a bumpy ride getting your rig running. I've always had serious issues playing games with multiple-core cpus. How good does that six-core handle the games?

Not been that bad, apart from the PSU thingie. Perhaps not the best item to recycle from an old PC. So I know for next time to get an over-spec'ed PSU with the mobo and all the other new parts.

As for my 6 core CPU, it works really well. It features a lot of throttling, so doing normal windows stuff, it chugs along at low frequencies and not using all cores. Keeping it nice and cool. Fire up something demanding however, and it comes into a league of its own. Though granted, only a few games are optimized for and take good advantage of multiple cores. Luckily, BF3 and ARMA2 based games do. Both run very well.

For other games that only runs on one core, this particular CPU will actually auto-overclock the core with the heaviest load. So it keeps good pace. Other tasks running in the background is offloaded to another core, and the rest is shut down, so as to not blow the 95W max power load.

Ofcourse, for such games (all CoD games come to mind), a really fast dual-core would do better than my six-core.

All said, I have no problems running any apps or games with my six core. All is silky-smooth. The bottle-neck now is my graphics card that could use an upgrade. And I've blown most my money on airguns lately, so got to save up a bit before replacing it.