[H] Building a desktop PC grindstation 9000 - Page 3

On September 02 2009 07:41 Ket wrote: The mobo seems solid and supposedly has tons of good overclocking options, a sicko with 30k posts on a uk building forum recommended it to me as a step up from a more basic model I was looking at. Also the PSU efficiency is quoted at 85% for both PSUs and 450W might be cutting it a little fine esp if i decide to add stuff.. my calculated 'estimated' wattage atm is at 412W I believe.

trust me these estimations are bs. i ran my $3k machine with that power supply when i had only one video card.

On September 02 2009 08:34 PplusAD wrote: Hm interesting choice of grafic card. might do well for you in case u only need it for poker + sc2 However a XFX 4890 is an average of 40% faster in video games + only costs 65£ more It can probably play every upcomming game of the next 2 years in good/medium quality I just mention this cause i am really surprised u talk about overclocking options of the motherboard

i dont think im ever gonna get into gaming though, too much of a time waste. gfx card i just want something that runs sc2, plays movies and handles lots of monitor space so i cant really justify anything better than what i have, even what i have may be too much and 512gb may have been ok for my needs perhaps

Okay taken delivery of all the bits, tyvm for all the help in here, much appreciated. Will build later today and hopefully be posting on lp from it by the end of the day

hf hf I hope it rules, messing around on a fast new computer feels so good hahaha /sick nerding

hehe ty... sickest nerding idd

haha
gl hf

OT: i ve got vista for 9 month and i basically only installed pokersoft + msn + 3 games and some codecs and its starting up slower and slower, i obv run defragmentation, comodo system cleaner and clear startup registry every but its not helping

i recommend the intel i7, esp if ur using vista or windows 7
with at least 6gb ram, so you can run it in triple channel
a solid state HD, or 2x velociraptors (10k rpm) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136322

if you already got the parts, gl

Thanks a lot for the help all, I just got the stuff delivered today and damn near took the best part of the day building it. Everything went fairly smoothly except now im having a big problem getting it working with all 4 DIMMs in place. It works fine with just one dimm in there but when I try to put two or four there are problems and vista won't start, will just give some brief blue screen error while loading up and reboot. is there something obvious im missing that im supposed to be doing here when i add more memory so that vista wont bugger up? thanks in advance for any help on this, v frustrating when im so so close to getting it all put together but just cant quite seem to complete it and use all my ram.

fwiw i got this mobo
ASUS P5Q PRO Turbo iP45 Socket 775 8 -Channel Audio ATX Motherboard
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/165395/show_product_overview

and two of this RAM (4 DIMMs total)
Crucial 4GB (2X2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 Ballistix Memory CL4 2.0V
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/143844

it cant be that 4 dimms total is somehow 'too much' for my mobo because it doesnt even work when I use two dimms in slot 1 and 3 (matching colour like its supposed to be done)

wtf help how do you install more ram and not have epic fail ensue. is there some tinkering youre supposed to in the bios or something, the bios does recognise its installed not sure what else i can do, then when i try to boot windows, errors

After a quick google around, try disabling the 'Legacy USB Support' in the BIOS. If that fails to work, twiddle around with bios settings a little bit.

source:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/F.../17320679-1a2e-4e76-87c0-e830aeb024bc

the other thing you could try is booting vista with each individual stick of ram and see if it boots, if one crashes/fails or something perhaps theres a problem with that stick.

Several things. First of all, wait a few weeks because the next generation of video cards is about to launch from ATI, which will introduce great new options, or at the very least drive the price of current crop of video cards down. Additionally, since you have a 30" screen, I would guess you need a beefier video card to run SC2 with all perks turned on. So I would go with at least HD4890 or GTX275 or GTX285 from NVIDIA. They are not too expensive, and you are probably going to be glad you have that with the screen that size. I know since I use a 30" too.

I would also opt to build a Core i7 system over the last generation Core 2 Quad. It should come out to almost same price with the parts you got picked out. The new processor is a lot better.

Also Windows 7 is about to launch in October, so I would strongly consider waiting for that. It's supposed to be far superior to Vista.

Check out some recent guides from www.anandtech.com for a better idea of what parts you should be looking at. As is, I really don't think you have a very good build.

Ket,

You may have to go into your BIOS settings and verify that your timings/voltage are set correctly. Not to mention you may have to manually set the sticks to run in dual-channel mode if they aren't by default.

I would simply visit the official forums for your mobo/ram and post your setup and explain your case. Hopefully someone more familiar with your hardware can post any recommended settings that can help you get up and running. Fairly often there is a hardware guru waiting to walk you through it for the sake of being helpful.

I've just 99% worked out it's a motherboard problem. Here's what I found: 1 stick of ram in the first slot runs fine no matter which of my 4 sticks I use (ok i was too lazy to try them all but was going to before I found this problem). using two sticks in dimm slots 1 and 3 fails no matter which two i use even though both the sticks work individually when I boot with just that one stick in slot 1. then I tried loading up with just one stick in slot 3 and it failed with the same bsods making me think theres something wrong with slot 3 on the mobo?. I tried with just one stick in slot 2 to make sure it doesnt just dislike having a single stick in a diff slot to slot 1 (motherboard manual says I should be able to install just 1 stick in any slot i like anyway) and that works fine. I tried out booting up with two sticks in slots 2 and 4 incase it was just slot 3 that was working but that failed. One stick in slot 4 failed. So it seems to be that the only thing that works is one stick in slot 1 or 2 implying perhaps slots 3 and 4 on the mobo are somehow faulty? Based on my findings here I was thinking of getting a replacement mobo from ebuyer seeing if i fare any better with a fresh one. Thoughts on this?

get a power supply much larger than 500W!

I had a 500W one that seemed to work fine until I started to play fallout 3 (which actually demanded full use of my graphics cards). Normally, my graphics card uses like 30W or so when idle, but it bumped up to 150W and my power supply blew out!

I think i have a 800W one now and all works fine. I'd say settle on all the parts you want, then find out how much power everything demands and get a power supply that's 100W or so more than that. yeehaw