moforila

I need to build a machine for my sister with a $500 budget with out LCD or peripherals. The machine will not be used for any heavy gaming activities. The twist: I have a AMD 939 machine back from 2004 when it was top .. I was thinking of building her a 939 based machine so I hand her down my 3200+ cpu and crappy graphics card. My rig is as shown in the signature. I was thinking of getting her a MSI K8N Diamond which I found for $65, with 512x2 for $70, 300gb for $100 and cheap case + DVDRW($50). That leave me with a bit to get myself a new cpu, maybe a X2 4200+ ($100) or a opteron ($150). Do you think this would be worth the trouble? Would I be better of just building her a core 2 duo system? Can it be done for under $500?

Your right it might be the PSU at fault, as unplugging the cases fans has allowed it to boot with all 3 and now at startup the system acted a bit strange freezing for a few seconds.

Well all 3 drives are SATA and from what I know the jumpers are only for selecting sata 150 or 300, which I did play around a bit with but no success.

This problem goes back when I bought segate 320gb and installed all 3 drives. The bios would only pick up 2 drives at once, when having all 3 drives connect it would sort of timeout and then only pickup the segate and maxtor. It was always the segate and one of the maxtor's, after some reading and researching I found people have problems with some firmware versions of the maxtor drive. I sent the drive back, got the firmware updated and thought this was the need of my problem. Then I plugged them all in and still wasn't able to have them all running at once. I have not had time to find another SATA drive to test this with. Has any one seen problems like this before?

Which bios you using? Try this, do a long bios clear. Power down, unplug power cable, hold power button to discharge. Bios clear switch and the battery, leave it off for 30 mins. Start by using a single stick of ram, in the 2nd orange slot from the top. Somtimes in a set only one of the sticks can be used as a single setup, try both.

I agree that the PSU is sufficient in this case. I have gone about pulling my rip apart and giving it a good clean, then reformatted my OS. I will report back on results. Just a quick questions about driver, Is there a difference in nvida provided vs manufacturers drivers?

Finished a few runs of aquamark, seems solid so far. This is confusing me, everything is tested and ok but the motherboard. The chipset fan is broken and has been for a while, it spin doesnt most of the time, but its still plugged in. The temps are ok, 45-50C

I been working on fixing my system for the past few days. I have just received my new set of ram, memtest 12 hours no errors. Cpu tested 12 hour prime, no errors. Im playing some games and I started getting vertical artifacts across my screen, freezing and a restart. For now I am suspecting the video card but the one inconsistence is when rebooting and going into bios I also got display tripping on me, artifacts and freezing. Im a running some 3dmark testing to see what happens when the cards underload. Any ideas on what else the problem could be? Btw the GPU temps seem fine.

As you can see in my sig, I am using the OCZ PC4000 vx. This is rated at 2-3-3-8 at 250 with 3.2v. It was one of the best set when I first made my rig. My set is causing problem, and will be RMAed unfortunately its a end of life range, they no longer make these chips. So hoping they will give me a choice to what I want as a replacement. What would you guys recommend? I cant seem to find anything thats rated a ddr500 with low timmings like 2-3-3-8. I paid about $430 for my set, back in 2005.

I agree, this DFI board has been the best learning experience ever, far out ways all the frustrations it has caused. I will try get a new PSU for testing and see what happens.

I'm not offended at all, my tone is just bad because of this crappy OCZ set. I know those extra settings are important, and they may get the ram working at its rating. I have done all this before, printed out pages of different settings, tired them all and I remember not being too happy with the results. I don't know about other people with this set but mine can not be pushed past 250. I have read a lot of articles in the past about the meanings off all the settings and how to get the best results. I was really into all this before, now I just don't have time and its all a bunch of numbers, also the fact that a $1000 core 2 duo system can rape my rig doesn't help. I will give it another go, but I still think, that the only settings required "should" be the timmings 2-2-2-8, voltage and frequency. Your right about me not having the patience, I like my dfi board but hate my OCZ set, switching boards would do nothing, except limit me to 2.8v to the dims. I just want to finish off my rant about OCZ. I previously talked to the OCZ support guys trying to figure out why my ram was running crap and why it wasnt able to be pushed pushed to 250 with low timmings. They were saying things like, play around with the settings make sure you have a fan on top of the sticks, try these billion diffrent settings to have it work at stock. These guys seem to be basically picking out the best chips, checking they run at overclocked speeds in optimal conditions and leaving no room for error. I have seen a geil ultra-x set pushed to ddr600 at 2-2-2-5, with less work then I put into getting mine to work stock.

See the thing is ram rated at a certain speed should run at that speed, because thats stock. You buy any other set, stick it in and it works at stock or its an RMA, but something must be magical about this OCZ set, since it needs extra settings to have it run at stock, and no way in hell are you going to push it past stock. Thats called overclocking ram, other brands give you stock then let you play with it to get better performance. OCZ sells you a set rated at a speed that needs to be achieved by tweaking. Honestly, after hours and hours of this crap I just cant be stuffed. About the PSU, I have gone into this before, The minimum wattage is relative, to what the current market is selling. In the orginal printed manuals, which I have, state 400w is minimum, then the forums up it to 450/480 6 months later and then to 520 a year laters. It doesn't matter, work it out by adding all power usages up, 1 hdd, 1 video card, 4 fans, 1 drive does not need 700W. I know it can make a diffrence for that dude running a SLI rig, 12 fans, 8 HDD and heating his room via USB.

Run Prime95, Its the best for CPU testing, give it a good 4+ hour test.

Kingfisher, If the timmings were the cause of the problem wouldn't it show up in memtest. The timmings are set to auto which is picked up by the bios as default 3-3-3-8. About the dirty power, This is a OCZ oversupply that has 5 years warranty and has seem solid since I got it. Any way to test the PSU, I dont think checking the rails are correct will help thought. signmeuptoo, the power going to the PSU is straight from the wall socket. It is not being shared or surged protected. The funny thing is that when power consumption is at its maximum like prime testing I have not seen it freeze, Its only freeze prior to OS load or staright after with in 10mins. Another thing, my OCZ PC4000 vx gold is really give me the crap, It doesnt work at its rating, 250 with default timmings and 3.2 it fails memtest. Like wtf I paid like twice the prices for this set. Bloody OCZ waste of money, and I know its going to be an ordeal to get it RMAed.

My problems began the last time I did a bios flash. The current bios is the latest version from the dfi site. 2006/04/06 I have the bios set to optimized settings, no overclocking, on extra settings. I have windows xp 64 bit installed, thats been on for a while so its getting a bit cluttered. For no apparent reason the system would freeze. This would usually happen before login or soon after. Once windows had log in and got past a few minutes of use it didn't freeze. This only happened sometimes, so i would just restart and try again. This problem however got worse and would happen a lot. The machine would need to be hard powered off, which caused it to not boot (3 leds). To solve this I would unplug power to PSU and leave it off for a 10 minutes, its like the something needed to be discharged. Sometimes an overnight power off was required. Has any one seen this happen before? Back to the freezing, I did 12 hours of prime testing and memtest all good. So i reinstalled windows xp and the problem seem have stop until today. The freezing had start, and I cant get back into windows, I am using linux atm. I will be doing some stablilty testing tonoght on linux. But this is still confusing me, what can be causing these lockups, since the hardware seems fine?