The hard drives are pretty moot when it comes to discussing power requirements, especially if one or more are SSDs that consume a trivial amount of wattage (<1W idle, <5W under load). An optical drive uses maybe 5W idle but never is going to break 20W even in use. A modern system with 4 HDD, 2 Optical Drives, and SLI would have power usage requirements something like this: CPU+MB - ~150W Graphics card 1 - ~150W Graphics card 2 - ~150W 4 HDD - ~50W 2 Optical Drives - ~25W Other (RAM etc.) - ~20W However it's not realistic you'd have everything under max load simultaneously. I'd jump for a 650-750W PSU for something like that. But note it's not the HDD or optical drives or what-not that have much bearing on this. It's really a matter of how many graphics cards you're looking to run. Cut one of the graphics cards out and you'd be fine with a ~500W PSU.
I get the exact same shit with my ATI HD6950. Absolutely drives me up the wall in games like Dark Souls, Minecraft, and Guild Wars 2 where it's most prevalent.
I'm not sure what that Minecraft picture is supposed to show but Civilization 5 used to produce really blatant color streaks on my HD6970, even though the card didn't overheat and worked fine elsewhere. But the latest patch added an option to disable GPU texture decoding, and it turns out that was the culprit. So I suppose it's yet another broken AMD driver.
The sand blocks in the foreground should look similar to the sand blocks in the background. That black and red weirdness shouldn't be there, it should be a nice smooth fade to black. It kind of looks like the game is using an 8-bit colour pallet(it's not I checked that). Even worse the colours in windows were off as well and no amount of fiddling with settings would get rid of it. Occasional flickering is one thing, but having messed up colours is unacceptable, especially if you need to do any image editing.
So now my computer's doing this awesome thing that I can't google to figure out why it happens nor to fix it (I don't think). I booted it up tonight after works, and it'll randomly say that the display driver has failed. It does it basically right away, then not for a while, and then again anytime I bring the computer out of the low power standby mode. EVGA 660ti, and the Nvidia program itself is very unhelpful (And sometimes says that a runtime library has failed?). Any clue, anyone of greater knowledge?
I'd try updating video drivers, but you mention power modes, I think motherboard drivers. (Occasionally, the latest drivers from Nvidia and AMD have not been great for everyone, requiring back-versioning).
Are you getting the "Display Driver has stopped responding and has recovered..." error or something different? I'd try fully uninstalling the video drivers and doing a clean reinstall of them. If that doesn't work there's the chance it's faulty hardware. Any warranty period left on it?
It's just weird that the drivers would decide, randomly, to stop working yesterday where as they've worked for a month or two before hand. But I'm going to do that now and see if it helps. I've started using Chrome since Firefox continually hangs and freezes on me, but I don't think that would have anything to do with it, would it?
If it was working and suddenly stopped working it's likely one of 4 things: 1) A physical defect in the video card that's finally starting malfunctioning 2) A problem with your hard drive controller (is it an SSD?) that is not reading data correctly 3) A problem with your RAM that is randomly corrupting data stored in memory 4) A physical defect in the motherboard that is affecting data transferring to/from the video card There's definitely something going on if a commonly used program like Firefox simply freezes for you. Have you tried fully uninstalling and reinstalling to see if that helps?
Firefox was working for months fine, in fact it was the only browser I used. Then like, idk, a week ago it just started freezing 5-10 seconds after opening. Now I'm using Chrome, no problems, but this graphics driver problem keeps popping up. I've uninstalled and reinstalled firefox at least 2 times, and it hasn't fixed the problem. I just did a system restore to a point about a week ago before these problems existed and it didn't fix them. I'm going through the motions of reinstalling the drivers.
You forgot 5) A broken plugin which is the standard reason when things go wrong with Firefox specifically. However, if graphics driver problems keep popping up outside of Firefox there may be a graphics card defect.
This is what happened to me. For unknown reasons the drivers started crashing. I've uninstalled, reinstalled, and rolled back. Then they started randomly working again. Reseating the card seems to help this, which is why I thought it was my motherboard. BTW, I still haven't installed the new motherboard. I still get random flakiness with my SATA ports (as in, the hard drives disappear) but I know how to deal with it nowadays (turn off the computer, wait a minute, when windows starts again tell it to reboot normally. If it wants to repair my install, turn off the computer again because the SATA controller hasn't come back yet.) So maybe the Nvidia drivers are still wonky? I haven't seen a new driver version since 10/2. I'm at 9.18.13.697.
It could be from going to standby mode. I haven't had a computer yet that isn't flakey when coming out of sleep. Is your computer overclocked? Mine is and locks up as soon as it tries to enter standby.
Thanks for all the help guys! Today I spent most of my morning troubleshooting, and finally just got so fed up with walking away and then five minutes later it going into the same display driver crashing and recovering that I completely uninstalled everything Nvidia related. At the same time as I was doing this, I found a great thread (link) that took me step by step, and now everything is, so far, working fine. I think something with one of the 3D drivers or HD audio drivers was wonking me up and I don't know why. But it's all good now, everything's cruising, and my graphics card is even running a little cooler than it was before. I'm crossing my fingers and praying to an eldritch god that it doesn't continue. Dean ; Yeah the Nvidia drivers always seem to have at least one problem with them, though the one I'm currently using (v306.97) seems to work now, though it wasn't before. The helpful people at Nvidia told me to go get the beta drivers and I just laughed. I'm not trading my sometimes working for something not even guaranteed to work. DocLazy ; No overclock, but I do put it to sleep a lot. Is this not a good thing? With my laptop it was a requirement otherwise the battery would drain so I'm sort of used to doing it. edit: hahaha just kidding it didn't help.
In my experience putting desktops to sleep eventually causes problems. If you have a SSD shutting it down really isn't an issue time wise. Before my computer was overclocked putting it to sleep would ocasionally cause weird problems. Like hard drives and or network disappearing. If you are getting crashes after coming out of sleep, then that is probably the cause.
DGS what's your mobo/chipset? I'm in agreement with DocLazy, my computer doesn't like to get out of Standby properly. I haven't tried it yet since having Win7 installed but my past experiences with desktop standby haven't ever been consistent. I'm not so sure it's actually going to cause problems for your video card experience but it's worth a shot. Time to RMA your card if possible.
Shut. Up. I don't think I can mentally handle TWO broken PSU's! :P And Pogo , I've got a gigabyte mobo with an Intel 3570k. As an update, it's now day 2 and I haven't had a single problem. Whatever the beta drivers did they seem to have worked. I haven't put it to sleep, but I've shut it down a few times and nothing bad has happened.
Okay! I never did get around to throwing the new motherboard in. I had come to terms with how to quickly get back up from a SATA failure. Basically Win7 would stop working, do a crash dump (blue screen), then come back on saying the Windows installation was bad. That's a lie. Just turn off the machine, wait a second, turn it back on. It now tells me we're recovering from a crash. I tell it to start Windows normally, and it does. Life goes on. So I was getting a fair amount of these crashes while doing video rendering, which would sometimes make me lose hours of rendering time. Last night I was rendering something and woke up to one of these crashes. And it wouldn't come back. No Windows install. I go into BIOS and it can see my HD, just not my SSD. The SATA port is working (because the HD is plugged into the other 6GB/s port, and if they go then they both go). So the problem, lo these many months, has been an SSD that has been intermittently failing. According to everything I've read, that doesn't happen. They just go bad. Luckily I bought a Samsung back when Amazon had them on sale. I've installed it, and am reinstalling everything (again). I hope this takes care of all my problems. Now I have to go look at the warranty on the SSD I bought.
SSD controllers totally intermittantly fail. I've probably had 1 in 4 SSDs I've dealt with run into some sort of trouble. Usually when people tell me they're getting intermittent BSODs the first question I ask is if they're using an SSD.
And I would have found that the new motherboard didn't fix the problem, thus losing the time it took to install the motherboard AND all the rendering time. I'm so excited to have a working computer again and hopefully to have finally taken care of the problem.
Ouch. Not really what I was hoping to hear just before my first ever SSD (120GB OCZ Vertex 3) arrives tomorrow... :(
It's nice to know I haven't lost my PC tinkering skills, even though it's been years. In fact, I solved two problems simultaneously this afternoon! I found a missing screw AND figured out why I was getting a BIOS fan error. I'm just that good.
Has anyone tried one of these things? It fairly shrieks "gimmicky bullshit" to me, but I'm a little out of the loop. I'm trying to reconcile my desire for a fast HD with the price tag on a pure SSD drive and the perception that they tend to fail a lot.
It's not bullshit. It's not that different from buying a cheap small SSD "boot" drive to put your OS on and a separate larger HDD for your media, except with this you're getting both at once and paying a bit of a premium. (normally for a HDD you are paying <$1 per 10 GB and with SSDs <$1 per 1 GB, so by comparison this $120 hybrid drive is only like $80 worth of storage) Basically this like buying an 8GB SSD joined at the hip with a 742GB HDD, except you're letting their software decide which of your files will get stored on which side rather than manually controlling it by installing stuff directly yourself. If you have no interest in running multiple hard drives or managing things yourself this may be a good alternative to get some of the SSD speed benefits without putting in any effort.
Thanks for the info, Reldan. I think I'm going to bite the bullet and buy one of these for my OS along with some manner of conventional drive for games and music. It's a little more than I wanted to spend on storage (also replacing a monitor, mobo, CPU, RAM) but I'm sure I'll be glad I did the first time I launch Skyrim from the drive.
I'm interested to hear how it works out. I understand the concept behind what these drives do but haven't used one in practice. I'm curious as to which files it will decide to store on the SSD portion and how many different programs you'll be able to notice a substantial speed difference with. I'd assume it would begin with a preference for putting system files on the SSD so you'd get the obvious benefit of superior boot times, but I'm wondering how much space it would have left to speed up anything else. The obvious usage for such a thing would be in a smaller laptop that only has one hard drive bay, because this gives you a functionality that'd otherwise be impossible without spending a ton on a really big SSD.
I'm an oddball. I tended to put my OS on SATA and my games on SSD. Boot times are low enough as is, and mostly what I'm concerned about are games loading assets due to my usage. That said my old machine eats SSDs and I blew six of them (thankfully all warrant replacements) in a month before deciding that my controller apparently cannot deal with SSD.
That seems fairly sensible to me, Kildorn. If I regularly played any games that really warranted it other than maybe Skyrim and the two Fallout's, I might opt to do that, too. As I'm finalizing this build, is it safe to assume that the i5 3570k is the most cost effective Intel processor that also provides great gaming performance? For a brief time I considered AMD processors just because I like to support the little guy but good lord their power draw is insane and (for gaming) they get shellacked by the low end Intel cpus.
It's been too long since some component in Dean's PC caught fire/became possessed, etc. I'm starting to worry.
It's a bit of a shame with AMD's current processors. Bulldozer or whatever it is called is just an all round shitty architecture. I've built a few budget PCs for friends and family using the last generation of AMD APUs as they didn't use too much power and had decent performance, you could even run a modern game at a reasonable resolution. Something that's still somewhat of a problem for Intels integrated graphics.
Since replacing the SSD I have had no problems at all. Oh! This happened: I installed the new drivers from Nvidia the other day and everything got overly bright/washed out. I turned down the gamma and everything is fine again. It didn't seem to warrant a post.
In the spirit of the thread title: I've been building and tinkering with my PCs since 2004 and only yesterday do I find out how to configure dual channel memory. How did this escape me for so long? I guess I'm why they color code the RAM sockets. What a depressing thought.
Okay, system builders, consider that I think my motherboard is bad (random component failures and a bulging capacitor), but the rest of the system is presumably good. I would like to have a functional system, but it doesn't have to be top-of-the-line by any means. With that in mind, do I: A. Buy a replacement motherboard and stick with my existing hardware (Athlon 64 X2 5000+ w/4GB DDR2 and a GeForce GTS 250); B. Buy a replacement motherboard that supports the quad-core AMD Phenom CPU I have sitting on a shelf, which will require me to buy new RAM; C. Buy a barebones system with a better CPU and more memory, and keep the video card; or D. Take off and nuke the site from orbit (a.k.a. wait until I get my tax refund and buy a whole new system). Option C is sounding better by the minute, quite frankly. That build has run Fallout 3 perfectly, and Skyrim and Saints Row the Third tolerably, so I'm okay sticking with that level of performance for the moment.
Yeah, to keep that RAM and CPU you should probably just replace the motherboard with the same one. I did that once with a system I built, and the motherboard replacement was $20 (that much time had passed, I think about 2 years), which I thought was great because I could have a working computer while I saved for a better one. Generally you're going to do motherboard + CPU + RAM, or upgrade the videocard, or upgrade storage when you're doing an upgrade. Only once have I replaced a CPU without replacing the rest, and that was because two months after I built a system there was a great sale on a much better CPU than the one I bought.
I'm thinking about picking up the ASRock N68C-GS FX, since it's cheap, available on Amazon (where I have some credit), would allow me to use that Phenom CPU, and has room for upgrading. The only problems are just two DDR2 slots (my 4 GB is in a 4x1 configuration), an 8 GB memory limit, and just one IDE channel. Admittedly, I should just dump my legacy drives already, but it's hard to say goodbye to all those files I never look at anymore...
Check out the prices for DDR2 RAM, compare to the prices of DDR3, and then decide if you really want to deal with upgrading RAM on your particular system.
