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"I need a new PC!" 2010 Edition

thanks! :)

edit : one last question before I go to bed. the stupid is getting to me :I

my motherboard has this :

http://img.inpai.com.cn/article/2009/10/18/be0092cc-17e0-463c-942e-e654f4490d9e.jpg[/IMG - picture of sata 2 and sata 3 ports

And if I'm not mistaken the vertex 2 is sata 2 ( II ? ), which means, it goes into one of the blue slots in the picture? Holy shit I feel stupid right now but I promise it's like 3am and I can't separate my ass from my face
 
Corky said:
Oh wow, I had no idea I didn't have to format my old windows partition. But what about things like drivers, gpu, mobo etc, surely I'll have to reinstall those on my SSD?

Yeah you're still starting from scratch. Not formatting your old HDD is just a nice piece of insurance in case you forget anything important on the drive. Also, as an above poster said, if something ever goes wrong with your SSD or Windows installation, this gives you a backup.
 
TheExodu5 said:
Yeah you're still starting from scratch. Not formatting your old HDD is just a nice piece of insurance in case you forget anything important on the drive. Also, as an above poster said, if something ever goes wrong with your SSD or Windows installation, this gives you a backup.

so not formating my old HDD wont in any way impede my performance?
 
Corky said:
so not formating my old HDD wont in any way impede my performance?

Nope. It's just going to be a big chunk of data. The only thing that you might want to do is defrag is after you finish installing Windows on your new SSD, so that new data going on that hard drive won't be fragmented.
 
TheExodu5 said:
Nope. It's just going to be a big chunk of data. The only thing that you might want to do is defrag is after you finish installing Windows on your new SSD, so that new data going on that hard drive won't be fragmented.

thanks again buddy <3
 
IMACOMPUTA said:
Hey guys.
I have an XFX 5850 and was wondering if its possible to crossfire cards made by different companies.
Saw this deal MSI Twin Frozr II 5850 ($154.99) (after rebate)

Make doesn't matter. As long as its the in same family, IE: 5800 series, then it can be crossfire'd. Though getting CF to work correctly is a huge PITA... getting tired of it now. Getting tired of these shitty console ports and them not taking advantage of multiple GPU's.
 
Added information to the guides:

Lots of the stuff there you don't have to worry about (like all the RAM timings). Mainly, you just want to control the voltages, keep RAM within spec, and up the QSB or whatever the overclocking frequency is for the i5.

The main thing to make sure is that all the voltages are kept within spec. Once the overclock boots into Windows, then just run Prime95 and monitor your CPU temps with speedfan. You generally want to stay below 72C with the i5, I believe. If your PC doesn't boot, don't worry. You either need to lower speeds or up the voltages for the overclock to be stable.
 
Also with reinstalling windows you should try and use ninite to install some of the apps you may use. It will save you a fuckton of time.

http://ninite.com/

Oh and never defrag an SSD. Windows 7 should automatically turn it off for that specific drive, but double check that it has.
 
zaidr said:
So I have a unique dilemma here:

Should I get a Q8400 or QX6850. Price = Same. :D

If the price was the same, which processor would you get? Any one have a definitive answer?


Alright, I'm getting paranoid now...
Am I on some kind of an ignore list or something? I never get any replies on this thread except from Hazaro and feist. wtf? Someone just reply, with ANYTHING, so I know its not me, its just my stupid questions...
 
zaidr said:
Alright, I'm getting paranoid now...
Am I on some kind of an ignore list or something? I never get any replies on this thread except from Hazaro and feist. wtf? Someone just reply, with ANYTHING, so I know its not me, its just my stupid questions...
I dunno man! I checked around a bit, nothing too conclusive. I saw you posted on reddit :p
Clock speed is clock speed even if its 65nm vs 45nm.

Honestly I would not sped $200 on a 775 CPU, whats the context of this upgrade, what's your system, etc.
 
zaidr said:
Alright, I'm getting paranoid now...
Am I on some kind of an ignore list or something? I never get any replies on this thread except from Hazaro and feist. wtf? Someone just reply, with ANYTHING, so I know its not me, its just my stupid questions...
ANYTHING
 
zaidr said:
Alright, I'm getting paranoid now...
Am I on some kind of an ignore list or something? I never get any replies on this thread except from Hazaro and feist. wtf? Someone just reply, with ANYTHING, so I know its not me, its just my stupid questions...

I love you.
 
zaidr said:
Alright, I'm getting paranoid now...
Am I on some kind of an ignore list or something? I never get any replies on this thread except from Hazaro and feist. wtf? Someone just reply, with ANYTHING, so I know its not me, its just my stupid questions...
This reminds me of this kid on a CSS server way back when

*rustling*
"Can anyone hear me?!"
"No..."
"Nope"
"Naw"

"Fuck... Can't get this mic working"
:lol
 
My PC is currently near-unusable due to my Gigabyte GTX460. If Nvidia doesn't get their act together I'm never buying another card from them again.

My PC will frequently not boot and suffers from freezing at the "Welcome" screen when logging into Win7 and if it manages to make it into the OS there's no guarantee it won't freeze in its tracks 30 seconds, 5 minutes, or 10 hours later. It's completely unreliable to either work or game on.

This seems to be an issue across various 400-series GPUs, and it's not like as if it's not being talked about verbatim on Nvidia's own forums:

GTX480: PC hangs after login

GTX 460 freezing crashing

At this point I haven't heard anything back from my tech support request with Gigabyte. If they give me a hard time about an RMA, or even if they don't, I'm likely to not have a working graphics card - or possibly no graphics card at all if I'm in the middle of an RMA transaction - when I go on vacation for a week in December, when I was hoping to get some work and gaming done at home on this machine.

Black Friday and deals are coming up, I'm tempted to go out and buy a graphics card and make it an ATI card at this point (6870?) because I'm so fed up with how my machine is acting because of this BS. Fuck Nvidia and their unresponsiveness on their own damn forums to an obvious problem.
 
Heard of a few people with that same problem. It always seems to be the Gigabyte card, but I don't know if that's because it's the most popular gtx460 or not.
 
teiresias - This sounds like the exact same issue an ausgaf member was and probably still is having with his gtx460. He sent it back to the place he purchased it from, they sent it back to gigabyte (i think it was a gigabyte) they tested it and sent it back claiming it was fine. Puts it back in and the thing is still causing freezes.

We tested just about every other piece of hardware and everything seemed fine. I believe he has pretty much sent the entire set of parts back that he purchased for them to test, not sure if he has heard back yet.

I wish we figured out what was wrong with his as it may have been able to help you, But it left us all stumped as too what the hell was going on. The thing worked fine with an older GPU as well :lol

Disappointing that Nvidia aren't even responding to the issues. What's your parts? I wonder if the both of you have an identical setup.
 
So I am just going to throw out a general hardware question here. I replaced the stock cooler on my i5 750 and decided to overclock it. After I managed to find a more or less stable clock speed the temps are still around 63 Celsius under load. Here is my question, is there any point in trying to OC it further with voltage tweaks or is it too risky and I should just leave it as it is?
 
Lostconfused said:
So I am just going to throw out a general hardware question here. I replaced the stock cooler on my i5 750 and decided to overclock it. After I managed to find a more or less stable clock speed the temps are still around 63 Celsius under load. Here is my question, is there any point in trying to OC it further with voltage tweaks or is it too risky and I should just leave it as it is?

What kind of speeds are you getting?

teiresias said:
My PC is currently near-unusable due to my Gigabyte GTX460. If Nvidia doesn't get their act together I'm never buying another card from them again.

My PC will frequently not boot and suffers from freezing at the "Welcome" screen when logging into Win7 and if it manages to make it into the OS there's no guarantee it won't freeze in its tracks 30 seconds, 5 minutes, or 10 hours later. It's completely unreliable to either work or game on.

This seems to be an issue across various 400-series GPUs, and it's not like as if it's not being talked about verbatim on Nvidia's own forums:

GTX480: PC hangs after login

GTX 460 freezing crashing

At this point I haven't heard anything back from my tech support request with Gigabyte. If they give me a hard time about an RMA, or even if they don't, I'm likely to not have a working graphics card - or possibly no graphics card at all if I'm in the middle of an RMA transaction - when I go on vacation for a week in December, when I was hoping to get some work and gaming done at home on this machine.

Black Friday and deals are coming up, I'm tempted to go out and buy a graphics card and make it an ATI card at this point (6870?) because I'm so fed up with how my machine is acting because of this BS. Fuck Nvidia and their unresponsiveness on their own damn forums to an obvious problem.

AMD is no better. :lol
 
Hazaro said:
I dunno man! I checked around a bit, nothing too conclusive. I saw you posted on reddit :p
Clock speed is clock speed even if its 65nm vs 45nm.

Honestly I would not sped $200 on a 775 CPU, whats the context of this upgrade, what's your system, etc.

Yeah, i'm getting more replies there than here...had to try.

System is currently e2160 @ 3.0ghz, 4gb pc800 ram, 8800gt.

PSU not a problem.

And what you say here, THATS WHAT I WAS THINKING...clock speed is clock speed, right? Its not that you have a shorter, more optimized compute path or new architecture between the two, right? Its C2Q vs older C2Q.

What do you suggest? Its kind of a harder question if I start to consider moving to a new platform / cpu architecture. Lets say I added another $100 to the mix. Would the extra investment really be worth it? I can always ride this platform out on the 5870 + one of these 775 processors, and do the bigger upgrade maybe 2 years down the road. What do you think?

Just to give some context, I wanna make it so I am not bottlenecking the 5870, and wouldn't mind playing GTAIV so it looks like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7yOOd1GA5s

I know some people don't like the look, but I think it looks almost REAL.
 
Fredescu said:
Heard of a few people with that same problem. It always seems to be the Gigabyte card, but I don't know if that's because it's the most popular gtx460 or not.

Many people experience it with ASUS cards too.

evlcookie said:
Disappointing that Nvidia aren't even responding to the issues. What's your parts? I wonder if the both of you have an identical setup.

Corsair AX850 PSU
Intel i7-870
Gigabyte GTX460 1GB OC
Gigabyte P55A-UD4P mobo
8GB (2 x 4GB) G. Skill Ripjaws Series (CL9-9-9-24)
Asus Xonar DX
OCZ Vertex 2 120GB SSD (OS, games, apps)
WD Caviar Green 1TB (music, photos, document files, etc.)

RAM all passes Memtest with flying colors. It's definitely the graphics card. I'm mainly just pissed off that it's looking like I'm not going to have a working PC when I get to take my vacation, and I LOATHE dealing with RMAs direct to the manufacturer, but I'm stuck in this case since, like many people experiencing this problem, the card worked perfectly fine for a month before deciding to go insane.

For example, the computer has been running fine for the past half hour. Earlier today I had to reboot about ten or twelve times, go into Safe Mode a few times, and watch the PC frequently freeze even at the BIOS. It's obviously a low-level hardware fault to be happening before I even get into Windows.
 
zaidr said:
Yeah, i'm getting more replies there than here...had to try.

System is currently e2160 @ 3.0ghz, 4gb pc800 ram, 8800gt.

PSU not a problem.

And what you say here, THATS WHAT I WAS THINKING...clock speed is clock speed, right? Its not that you have a shorter, more optimized compute path or new architecture between the two, right? Its C2Q vs older C2Q.

What do you suggest? Its kind of a harder question if I start to consider moving to a new platform / cpu architecture. Lets say I added another 100 to the mix. Would the extra investment really be worth it? I can always ride this platform out on the 5870 + one of these 775 processors, and do the bigger upgrade maybe 2 years down the road. What do you think?

The only main differences in between difference C2D and C2Q are the caches. Otherwise, the architecture is the same and yes, it's clock vs. clock.

As for upgrades, I'd only consider a cheap used Q6600 or something like that. Don't be spending more than $100-150 on your 775 board. I bought a Q8300 to replace me E6600 for a little over $100 last year. It's been tiding me over.
 
Lostconfused said:
3.4GHz with turboboost. Windows crashed during boot when I attempted to push it to 3.6GHz

Well your temps are still low enough. Thermal spec on the i5 is 72C, so feel free to push things until you reach that point.

You got a little unlucky if you can only hit 3.4GHz with stock voltages, but c'est la vie. My old E6600 couldn't even break 3.0GHz, even though tons of people were getting 4.0GHz out of it.

I think anywhere up to 1.3V or so is a pretty conservative amount of voltage, so I'd try that.
 
TheExodu5 said:
The only main differences in between difference C2D and C2Q are the caches. Otherwise, the architecture is the same and yes, it's clock vs. clock.

As for upgrades, I'd only consider a cheap used Q6600 or something like that. Don't be spending more than $100-150 on your 775 board. I bought a Q8300 to replace me E6600 for a little over $100 last year. It's been tiding me over.

Well, what I meant was, I'm spending about $190 for either the q8400 or qx6870. I don't know where you guys are getting such good prices on the q8300? I wish I was near a Microcentre, but most places I see here aren't anywhere less than 160 + HST (13%). So, if I were to spend $100 more to go for a new i5 cpu + mobo, would it really be worth it?
 
A few users recommended me to this thread so here it goes. I need help finding parts to build my first computer powerful enough to play Starcraft 2. I am completely new to this so I will need recommendation ranging from the type of screws to use to the most essential things. My budget is $550.
 
IrishNinja said:
finally pulled the trigger on this baby today, black friday promos offered 10% off and a free upgrade from an ATI 6850 to a 6870, couldn't turn that down. much love to brain_stew, Hazaro, Fredescu, Milpool, and ·feist· for your help in learning/sorting exactly what i wanted from this system, here's what i got:



after all the research, that was about 1k (little more shipped) and perfect for my needs: PC gaming, dolphin/PCSX2 emulation, portability (work/LANs etc), and from what it looks like to me, future-proof for a little while to come..i like playing on high settings, but im not looking at crysis 2, for example. :D most i can see is maybe a SSD one day down the road when they're at a price i like better.

either way: take note GAF, your advice on this is much of the reason i got this rig, which with my recent steam/GOG purchases (and the forthcoming lull in the console cycle) is is looking to be my transition to your snobby glorious master race, so again, thanks for all your help here.
Congrats on the new PC. Glad to have been of help. Take some pics when it arrives. It'd be nice to see what kind of cabling job they do on the build.
 
zaidr said:
Well, what I meant was, I'm spending about $190 for either the q8400 or qx6870. I don't know where you guys are getting such good prices on the q8300? I wish I was near a Microcentre, but most places I see here aren't anywhere less than 160 + HST (13%). So, if I were to spend $100 more to go for a new i5 cpu + mobo, would it really be worth it?
Do not spend $190 on a 775 CPU. When I mentioned the $90 Microcenter Q8300 deal earlier, it was only as a possible option, if you were looking to upgrade to a used C2Q for ~$100. New versus used CPU.

Between the two chips you mentioned, the QX6850 beats out Q8400. However, at the present, neither one makes much sense if that's the asking price. Intel's Sandy Bridge is slated to debut at or around CES time. AMD's Bulldozer 1 should show up within 6 months or so from that point. Hopefully we'll know what real world performance of the new x4/x6/x8 BDs will be like soon enough.

If Bulldozer is too far off for you, I'd recommend waiting for Sandy bridge prices before you decide on an upgrade. Unless you can find a reasonably priced, used C2Q, you're just going to have to be patient. In the event that Bulldozer is too far away for your liking, and you're not interested in going the Sandy Bridge route, prices on used C2Qs should go down with the arrival of new tech (and more used chips up for sale).

Another option would be to go with a powerful, but moderately priced i5 or Phenom II build that would hold you over until 22nm CPUs and features like LightPeak and the new PCI are widespread.
 
I'm looking for some help piecing a new gaming machine together. Budget would be between 1000-1500 and I don't need a monitor. It's going to be used for mainly gaming, but I would like the ability to record fraps. I'm currently running on an E6750 machine that I built about 3 years ago and I'd like to get something to last me as long as that machine did. Any help is much appreciated.
 
WEGGLES said:
Looking at this guide...

"For example, if you choose a BCLK frequency of 200MHz the DDR3 frequencies that will be available are 1200MHz, 1600MHz, and 2000MHz."

Mine is 1333MHz, so what would I use?

1200MHz, unless your RAM can actually take 1600MHz (some RAM will run at higher than they are spec'ed).
 
TheExodu5 said:
I wouldn't be surprised if they were. A-Data makes good memory.

Worst case scenario: your PC doesn't boot or you start blue screening. Just lower back down to 1200MHz at that point.
Oh, ok.

It's not going to like, destroy it. :lol
 
caliblue15 said:
Alright just ordered my PC. Heard the hardest part is seating the CPU on the board.

Alright I just canceled my order! lol

I found an I7-970 for $215.

What do you guys think of the Intel® Desktop Board DX58SO Extreme-series over my MB ASUS P7P55D-E LX LGA1156 R I had originally...

Edit: Nermind the i7-970 uses a different socket, so i have to change motherboards no matter what now.
 
TheExodu5 said:
Not without overvolting, I'd think. I've never had an issue pushing RAM. It would just fail to boot if it was pushed too hard.
Hm. Alright. I'll give it a shot tomorrow afternoon. Don't want to start something this late.
 
caliblue15 said:
Alright I just canceled my order! lol

I found an I7-970 for $215.

What do you guys think of the Intel® Desktop Board DX58SO Extreme-series over my MB ASUS P7P55D-E LX LGA1156 R I had originally...

WTF. That's a $900 CPU.
 
Question for you guys. I built a system for a buddy of mine. When it boots up, it restarts during the boot, then fully starts after that. Any ideas? It works fine other than that.
 
TheExodu5 said:
WTF. That's a $900 CPU.

Intel is doing a thing on December 1st for retail edge peeps. Insane deal, but makes my whole computer more, prolly worth it though. It might just be overkill though, idk.

Edit: Hmm I can get a motherboard for $199.

ASUS Sabertooth X58 LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131665

only $70 more than my other motherboard, but i jump from an i5-760 to an i7-970... hmm
 
This is a good place for a general PC troubleshooting right?

So this is my system...

EVGA p55 LE
EVGA 640 GTX SC 1GB
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD502HJ x2 in RAID1
Intel Core i5-760
Creative xtremegamer SB
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB DDR3 1600
Windows 7 Ultimate

This happens pretty frequently, almost every other day. After my PC has been off for an extended period of time (usually happens when In the morning, but it has happened after coming home from work) when booting up I will get a "windows failed to start" message and it will boot up in the repair menu on the second attempt, usually finding nothing. It has on occasion told me the error was caused by some media device that I plugged it but I don't have such a device. Only thing plugged in is my keyboard, mouse, monitor and speakers.

This only happens the first time I boot the PC up after it's been off for around eight or so hours. I can just sit there and keep shutting off my pc and it won't happen again until it's been off for a while. Sometimes on that first boot it will make it to windows and I will get a BSOD. Once I reboot it's super stable and it has no stability issues at all.

Have no idea what is causing it though... rebooting takes a few seconds so it's not really annoying. But I would like to know what is causing it.
 
teiresias said:
My PC is currently near-unusable due to my Gigabyte GTX460. If Nvidia doesn't get their act together I'm never buying another card from them again.

My PC will frequently not boot and suffers from freezing at the "Welcome" screen when logging into Win7 and if it manages to make it into the OS there's no guarantee it won't freeze in its tracks 30 seconds, 5 minutes, or 10 hours later. It's completely unreliable to either work or game on.

This seems to be an issue across various 400-series GPUs, and it's not like as if it's not being talked about verbatim on Nvidia's own forums:

GTX480: PC hangs after login

GTX 460 freezing crashing

At this point I haven't heard anything back from my tech support request with Gigabyte. If they give me a hard time about an RMA, or even if they don't, I'm likely to not have a working graphics card - or possibly no graphics card at all if I'm in the middle of an RMA transaction - when I go on vacation for a week in December, when I was hoping to get some work and gaming done at home on this machine.

Black Friday and deals are coming up, I'm tempted to go out and buy a graphics card and make it an ATI card at this point (6870?) because I'm so fed up with how my machine is acting because of this BS. Fuck Nvidia and their unresponsiveness on their own damn forums to an obvious problem.

Try upgrading the bios. It's helped my issues with that card... so far... Been running great for a month and a half.

http://download.gigabyte.us/FileList/Utility/vga_utility_atbios.exe
http://ggts.gigabyte.com.tw/FileList/986237/n460ocgi.f4_a
 
caliblue15 said:
Intel is doing a thing on December 1st for retail edge peeps. Insane deal, but makes my whole computer more, prolly worth it though. It might just be overkill though, idk.

Edit: Hmm I can get a motherboard for $199.

ASUS Sabertooth X58 LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131665

only $70 more than my other motherboard, but i jump from an i5-760 to an i7-970... hmm
Go for it. You'll need triple channel DDR3 3x2GB (6GB) as well.
 
caliblue15 said:
Intel is doing a thing on December 1st for retail edge peeps. Insane deal, but makes my whole computer more, prolly worth it though. It might just be overkill though, idk.

Edit: Hmm I can get a motherboard for $199.

ASUS Sabertooth X58 LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131665

only $70 more than my other motherboard, but i jump from an i5-760 to an i7-970... hmm

Yeah, pay more for the mobo, do what you can to take advantage of that deal, that is re-god-damn-diculous.
 
Hazaro said:
Go for it. You'll need triple channel DDR3 3x2GB (6GB) as well.

Why do I have to go to 6GB, over the 4GB I have setup? Is it because it's a triple channel motherboard?

Grr, this just keeps adding up.. extra $100 at least.
 
caliblue15 said:
Intel is doing a thing on December 1st for retail edge peeps. Insane deal, but makes my whole computer more, prolly worth it though. It might just be overkill though, idk.

Edit: Hmm I can get a motherboard for $199.

ASUS Sabertooth X58 LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131665

only $70 more than my other motherboard, but i jump from an i5-760 to an i7-970... hmm

It is absolutely overkill, but I wouldn't pass that deal up. :lol
 
TheExodu5 said:
It is absolutely overkill, but I wouldn't pass that deal up. :lol

They also have a 160gb SSD for $215, I don't think I need that big of a SSD though, as I only want to use it as an OS drive.

I can just use the heatsink that comes with the CPU, I don't need to buy one do i?

and will 650W still power the i7-970 and GTX 460 just fine?
 
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