Make Fun of Me While I Try to Build a PC

So a week after my video card problems were solved by a new driver, they came back, only this time it wasn't just older games like Bioshock and DDO, it was every game that used 3D graphics. I tried Deus Ex, Bioshock, Civ V, DDO, and Crysis. All would crash within 5 minutes of starting.

So fuck this, I'm going to get a new motherboard, but first I'm going to take this thing apart, look at the motherboard, and make sure everything is seated correctly and there are no pins out or bent, or something.

I took the whole thing apart, reseated the CPU, put the cooling thing back on, and reconnected everything.

Some of the pins were bent in the connector for the USB 3.0 slots in the front panel. I pushed them back in place and reconnected that thing (which hadn't been connected since my original build).

I replaced the SATA 6GB/s cable on my SSD. Now there are 6 GB/s cables and 3 GB/s cables included with my motherboard. This article did some tests and found there was no difference.

Also when I plugged in everything, I didn't bother using the new power cable that came with my new PSU, I just used the one from my old computer. It's got considerably less thickness (shielding?) than the new cable. I can't see where it would make a difference, but I switched to the new cable. I'm into voodoo here.

And this is the big one, though I could be wrong. When I went to pull the main connector from the PSU to the motherboard, I didn't bother to find the little clip that holds it in place and the connector just came right out. This leads me to believe that I may never have pushed that power connector all the way in and that the power to the motherboard may have been intermittent or faulty from the get-go. Or, I might have loosened it some previous time that I was dicking around in the innards and never pushed it back in correctly. I made sure it was all the way in and wouldn't come out just by pulling on it.

Last night I played a half hour of DE: HR, a half hour of DDO, and 5 hours of Civ V. The system was rock solid the whole time.

But I live in a world of distrust now. It took three weeks the first time for the system to go crazy. If it goes down again I'm buying a new motherboard.

Check and see in your motherboard manual. Nowadays they have both 6 GB/s and 3 GB/s SATA connectors. Your SSD should be in a 6GB/s connector. From what I've read, current hard drives aren't fast enough to use the 6GB/s throughput, so they can be connected to a 3GB/s connector, as well as your optical drive.

I wasn't totally clear. Those are the 6GB/s ports I listed. It also has some of the 3 GB/s ones, which I connected my optical drive to. Sounds like I should connect the HDD there too. Thanks!

Everything is assembled, and it works like a charm. Well, one case fan is on but not registered by the BIOS so I've got to open it up and check things out, but other than that it's great! Only thing left is to install a pile of software...

Thanks Reldan! It was definitely helpful to have someone knowledgeable ease my fears about getting the wrong kit.

Can I say that I kind of hate all of you putting together your PCs and having them work flawlessly?

I am the cautionary tale of this thread.

We appreciate your misery, if that makes any sense; and even better, its sort of working now!

Why is it not your video card?

And "intermittent power" isn't really a possible thing on motherboards. It will turn off or restart.

Well, the video card was fine from June until September. The system has been through a host of other problems, from memory going bad to Windows installs being corrupted over time. Then the video card just goes bad too?

Everyone I've told the sad story to says it's either the motherboard or the PSU and then tells me there's no way to test to find out which it is. So I was going with motherboard. It's always taken about 3 weeks for a Windows install to get corrupted enough that it stops working, so I'm now in wait and see mode.

Although my current Win install is from August, but the reason I think it's lasted this long is I switched the SSD from the 6GB/s SATA port to the 3GB/s port. I've now put it back on the faster port to see if I've fixed the problem (and because it should be in the faster port, dammit).

BTW, played DDO last night with my regular group and everything worked flawlessly.

SSDs controllers are extremely fussy. I recently had my SSD that'd been working fine for months start giving me intermittent blue screens - as in 2-3 times a day and no chance it could stay running overnight. Again, it had been working fine as set up for months. I thought it was starting to fail, but tried plugging it instead into the other SATA controller on my motherboard. Rock solid again for weeks now.

If your problem is related to files getting corrupted that's almost certainly an SSD thing, so the problerm is either the drive or the controller on the MB. You ought to be able to rule the PSU out entirely if that's your error. Good chance it was the latter and using a different port has taken care of the problem.

I started on a 6GB/s port using the ASMedia drivers and got problems, then switched to the port that used Intel drivers and still got the problems. Switching to the 3GB/s stopped the problems, but was actually a noticeable speed difference. So now I'm trying a new cable and hoping it stays stable.

Every test I've done on read/write on the disk comes back saying it's working fine, then windows will lock up and need all sorts of repair. I've noticed on a reboot or two that my drives will just be gone, but then after another reboot they'll be back.

Nothing on my hard drive has ever had a problem, just Windows corruption on the SSD. As far as I can tell, there is no way to test whether an SSD is working properly, it either works, or it doesn't, so the problem seems to me to be in the pipeline to the SSD, not the SSD itself, because apparently one they fail, they're dead.

I thought my new video card had gone bad this morning, when I booted into windows only to be greeted by display corruption. It had lots of blue lines everywhere and would occasionally flicker to black. First thought it was something to do with having an aggressive overclock. Put everything back to normal and rebooted, still corrupted in windows. Next thing I tried was wiggling the monitor cable, again no change. It was only when I unplugged the monitor cable then put it back in did it start to work. I've had similar problems with memory sticks as well. Taking them out and re-seating them was all that was needed to get them working.

So it wouldn't surprise me if your problems with corruption were caused by a weird/bad connector or cable. But, with all the other problems you have had, motherboard or PSU failing seems more likely.

Damn it, spoke too soon. looks like it's a bad graphics card after all. It started to show banding with darker colours and has quite a washed out look now. Changing cables did nothing, but changing monitors helped a little. The banding was still there, just not as obvious.

Man, I can't believe the run of rotten luck you guys are having. Not trying to be flippant or anything - it's just so contrary to my experience with hardware (both my own and that of friends).

So it's been a little over a week now since the strip down and rebuild. DDO started crashing with green speckles all over the screen last Thursday, and since yesterday whenever I wake the computer up from sleep mode it shows the desktop, then I click on something and it bluescreens with a core dump, then the "Resuming Windows" screen comes up and everything works.

God fucking dammit.

I ordered a new motherboard last Thursday. It's the plain vanilla Asus Z77 and it cost about half of what my Sabertooth Z77 cost. I'll install it tomorrow (no time today) then start the RMA on my Sabertooth with Asus. I had hoped that because it's the same line and manufacturer I could switch it out without doing a full Win7 reinstall. Joe, my hardware friend, said, "I'd be very surprised if Windows was happy after you did that."

So between that and the OS instability, it looks like my 5th OS reinstall. Glargh.

Win 7 is much, much better with mobo swaps than XP used to be. I *think* I managed w/o a reinstall when I switched from Athlon64 & nVidia6150 to AthlonII & AMD785G (it's been 3 years, so I might be misremembering this), but I know for sure I had zero issues last month going from the latter to Sandy Bridge/H61, a completely different platform. Should it somehow misfire, I suggest seeing a witchdoctor because you're fucking cursed.

Thank you Dean for taking one for the team, and being an all around stand up gremlin lightning rod. ;-)

I'm considering building a new serious monster for gaming and video editing, but then I read this thread and I'm glad I haven't had these problems.

I'm slowly starting to come around to the notion that I need an upgrade (my laptop is starting to feel it's age), and reckoned if I'm going to do this I'm going to do it right and build my own.

However I'm in Ireland and have absolutely no idea where to start looking for cheap parts. Most of the places I looked would be costing me €13-1400 to get a similar build to what you guys are pricing at $1000 on Newegg :(

Damn it, second card has same problems.

Then it's probably not the graphics card. Probably the slot on the motherboard.

Welcome to motherboard hell. I'm right over here next to you.

I swapped to an entirely new brand and manufacturer without having issues in win7. I didn't actually have issues beforehand though.

So I'm tasked with fixing my friend's desktop. He was going to donate it to Goodwill for recycling (along with a core i7 laptop that I'm using and easily fixed just by soldering the power input lead, since it snapped, since the plug is a cheap Chinese piece of shit).

Anyways, it's a 780i 3-way SLI E8400 that he built a couple years ago with two 8800gt cards in it, a beast of a machine back then, and it's always "had gremlins," mainly lockups.

After a couple hours of troubleshooting yesterday, I eventually came to a discovery. This fucking thing works when it's:
1) upside down
2) on its side

Imagine fiddling with motherboard cables and swapping video cards and RAM, alternating between picking the computer up and keeping it laid down, and not realizing what was actually going on.

Anyways, so it's powered on and now I'm trying to figure it out and I push a little bit on the massive Zalman aftermarket HSF and... the computer locks up. I then remember how the securing bracket for the HSF was bent way too much by the manufacturer and I had to use my hands to bend it to not crush the CPU. My guess is that back when he installed the CPU/HSF, there was so much pressure on the motherboard, combined with gravity on the heavy HSF, that something tiny eventually just gave out and now only works when there is no pressure on the HSF toward the bottom of the computer.

Otherwise it boots up, but I also can't get Windows to recognize either the Front Panel USB or the rear panel USB. Has anyone EVER had luck getting USB to work without a reinstall? I've seen this on a computer before where USB would completely fail to work, even after removing in device manager, until an OS reinstall.

Are the USB ports enabled in the BIOS? As for the HSF, is it possible that there's something shorting when there's pressure on it?

It's possible, though I haven't taken it off yet to look closely. I don't imagine it's going to be a problem I can fix.

Yeah I played with USB BIOS settings. No change. I've triple-checked motherboard connections for the front panel USB. I really suspect that Windows just wants nothing to do with it.

Ultimately this is going to be parted out or sold on eBay, sans motherboard. I'll probably take the 2x2gb of performance RAM sticks and maybe donate the HSF and 8800GT video cards. I don't need the case. Maybe I'll save the 550W Antec PSU as a backup for my own PC, maybe I'll swap out the e8400 with my e6850.

I don't know what Lum's rules are on selling shit on here but I'd probably get rid of these 8800GTs for cheap, along with the HSF for anyone that wants to overclock a socket 775 CPU.

At least I know the cards work since I did get to play his copy of Witcher 2 in offline mode for a good half hour. They won't run a game like that in 1900x1200 with no hiccups but they do power it nicely at 1680x1050 with decent detail settings. I don't know how that compares with my PC's 460GTX but I imagine it's somewhat equivalent.

Sympathy like because I feel your pain, way more stress than anyone deserves.

I wasted a huge amount of time trying everything, different monitors, cables, computers and different settings. It was one of those really annoying intermittent problems where failure would only pop up at random, and using different hardware changed the nature of the problem. My old video card an Hd3870 has worked perfectly with this computer and monitor for the last five or so years. Which should rule out a problem with my system.

Not to worry, I paid a bit extra and got the store I bought it from to swap it for an Asus GTX 660. Guess what, it works perfectly out of the box. No more screen flickering or funny lines and no more weirdness with darker colours banding.

Just a warning to anyone thinking about getting an AMD 7xxx series card. There is a lot of chatter on the internet about this series of cards having a lot of problems with artifacts and flickering. Way too much to just be the usual expected for hardware failure. The more I read about it, and my own experience with a 7850. The more I get the feeling something fishy is going on at AMD. Even if it does just turn out to be a problem with drivers and not a hardware problem like I suspect. It's probably best to avoid the 7xxx series cards as they all seem to have similar problems and much higher failure rates than normal.

This is a pic of some of the weirdness I was getting with darker colours. It shows up in everything, but is much more subtle compared to Minecraft:

i'm sure not many people care, but here is my recent 'new build' i put together to replace my aging Core2Quad system a few months ago:

Antec Case (Three Hundred Two)
Gigabyte Motherboard (GA-Z77X-UP5-TH)
Intel Core i7-3770 CPU (BX80637I73770)
Mushkin 4x 8GB DDR3-1600 Dual-Channel Memory Kit (994069)
Pioneer Blu Ray Drive (BDR-2207B5PK)
OCZ 512GB Vertex 4 (VTX4-25SAT3-512G.M)
2x Seagate Barracuda 3TB (ST3000DM001)
MSI GTX 660 Ti Power Edition (N660TI PE 2GD5/OC)
Seasonic 460W PSU (X-460/SS-460FL)
3x ASUS 24" 1920x1200 IPS (PA248Q)

..it runs Win7 & Win8 (primarily) like a dream. i'm pretty happy with it.

I've got most of my stuff through Dabs.ie. komplett.ie can be ok as well, but they have a smaller selection and you have to check their prices (some good, some bad.)



I'm trying to get a small spare computer going that was in a cupboard for the past six months. The processor was 50 quid or so about a year ago, I think I spent €250 on the thing in total (while RAM was expensive.) At this point it won't even post/beeb as I start it up, no fans, nothing. I'm immediately thinking of the PSU, but it's one of those small form cases that comes with a non-standard PSU so I have nothing I can really do with it. The RAM has gone into my PC (an extra two gigs for me! \o/ )

BTW, I just played DDO for three hours and it was solid as a rock. It also stopped blue-screening when it wakes up from sleeping. I haven't gotten a chance to install the new motherboard.

It's like the old one saw the new motherboard box and said, "Oh shit, he's going to replace me, I guess I'll stop fucking with him."

Holy shit that looks very nice! *Jealous*

Why the 460W PSU though? I was under the impression that 550W was the minimum standard these days, just to keep yourself safe. To be honest PSU wattage always confused me (like why are tons of people buying 700W, surely that's far too much and just dangerous more then anything else?), so I'm curious more then anything else.

Thanks for the sites Millie, I'll be checking them out later.

thanks! it is pretty awesome!

anyway, from my experience with this sort of thing, you just don't *need* that much wattage, especially with today's lower power profile cpu's & video cards. if i were going to do an SLI configuration, i think i'd consider bumping it up a bit, depending on what video cards i was using, but as it is this thing sucks under 320w in full-on cpu & gpu usage situations. average usage is between 90w-100w when i'm just browsing/ chatting on irc/ doing some things in office/ stealin' with utorrent/ jamming out on foobar. so it seems to be pretty good! plus, Seasonic is probably one of the best PSU manufacturers on the planet. trust their stuff!

People like a bit of extra headroom with their power supplies and you never know what extra hardware you will add or even if you will overclock. They choose 700-750w because that is about the limit for a single 12V rail, so they are still reasonably efficient even with a low power draw. They are a nice balance between efficiency and wattage.

The power rating of a PSU isn't a measure of how much power it constantly puts out, but a measure of the maximum power it can supply. They aren't dangerous as they only provide the amount power the computer needs. My computer for example has a 750w supply that only draws 160w at the wall when the computer is idle. Increasing to 320w when running a graphic intensive game or working the cpu hard.

If a 460W power supply is 80% efficient, it will beat more powerful supplies that are made shittily.

Quality actually matters in power supplies (of any sort in any industry). A transformer is a simple electrical concept but its effectiveness is very much based in quality of manufacturing and design.

McKnight you have 220 volts at your house WHY ISN'T IT BURNING DOWN :)

80% effeciency is pretty crappy, but yeah quality matters especially as something as important as a power supply. Personally if I was going to build a new pc with an ivy bridge I'd get a Seasonic 660w supply. They are practically silent but have about 90% efficiency when outputting 320w it drops down to about 87% at 170w which is still decent.

I would imagine quality matters, there's a reason I'm asking questions about it after all (thank you for all the *helpful answers* btw).

Btw, Pogo we did have a house almost burn down the other day. Albeit that's because the main fuse for the whole place was literally a nail, but still your comment does hold a fair bit of irony in my eyes :)

For a transformer in electronics use 80% is pretty damn good. The 80 Plus certification is a minimum, so you'll get that even at 100% power draw, and it's possible to get more assuming the material quality is high.

Most of the cheap shit one buys is less than 60%, probably due to crappy cores.

with mine, i'm fairly certain that i won't be adding an additional graphics card. there is a possibility for additional hard disks or ssd's, but there is still quite a bit of headroom for those with this power supply. i would definitely recommend a larger power supply if you really don't know what the power draw is going to be on a system.

that said, you can take a look at what hardware i've listed along with the power draw i've given and get a pretty good estimate as to whether you might need something beefier. higher end gpu? go with a beefier power supply! 8 hard disks? yeah, it might be better to run something bigger. it's just that in my case, i knew what i was going to get and had a really good idea from other experiences as to what the power draw was going to be and i've felt really comfortable with it and how it has turned out.

To me it seems like you need a fully loaded tower to draw a lot of power... like 4xHDD, 2xOptical, and SLI I could see needing 750W or more.

I ran a card that needed "600W PSU" on a Shuttle 250W PSU. The crappy efficiency discussion that just went on? Yeah, manufacturers of video cards still seem to think we live in a world of terrible PSUs.

definitely. not sure why that is really still the case with video cards these days. guess no-one wants to under-estimate the other crap someone may have in their machine is about all i can figure.

Interesting, now I know I've probably been overbuying my power supplies. But, I usually go cheap, so who knows how much power I was actually getting.

Heh, 8 hard disks wouldn't be a problem on that power supply. It will quite happily put out 460w all day long.

Switchmode power supplies run at a very high frequency meaning they can have much smaller and more efficient transformers. Where they lose efficiency is semiconductors and the design of the power supply itself.

On another note 60% is just horrifying. A 60% power supply would suck 470w to run my computer under load, that's if it didn't burn up first. It wouldn't take very long for a more expensive but more efficient power supply to pay for itself.