hellion

Heh, good, I need thorough. We have no overclocked systems atm, we are in the process of still building them, and currently we are researching memory timings (what they are and really the very basics) and testing for system stability now.

We had an unusual thing happen today as we got the blue screen of death suddenly. We thought it corresponded to a new wireless keyboard as the computer went down upon moving touching the keyboard for cleaning. We got the "RAM Test Failure" message and determined it was the actual stick of RAM that is bad, the slot is still working. This is on our 2nd system, not the one in my signature: Mobo: Asus M3A78 CPU: Athlon 64 x2 5600 8 Gigs RAM is/was 4 sticks of Corsair XMS2 DDR2 800MhZ 2048 MB (4 2 Gig sticks) Western Digital Caviar 640GB, Vista Ultimate 64 bit etc... Installed on CPU is the MaxOrb by Thermaltake cooler The stick that failed today was the one situated very close to the cooler, not touching the pipe but about 3/4" away. The RAM stick had a white residue covering about 1/64th inch along the top edge of the heatsink on the RAMs casing/heatsink where the heatsink pipe is very close. We are assuming there is a connection with heat from the pipe of the cooler???? Just wanted to ask another noob question since I am wondering if maybe it's just a failed stick of RAM or something else before buying a different cooler that will enable us to use all four slots. Thoughts? I mean, how close is too close--we might be better off just getting a larger case... Also, we are replacing the RAM with some new OCZ Gaming Memory 2 G sticks at 1066Mhz, once we can fit them in safely...

Thank you. That clears up a couple of things for me then. :thumbs-up:

Please help me understand what the problem is here. I know my video cards are not the best. After doing some reading in here we probably should have gotten one better card but these were really cheap at CompUsa and we were guided toward them early on in our projects. I just tested my graphics in WoW, with all the settings maxed out, took a flight or two and noticed the graphics hanging which was not happening running just the one graphics card. So I have it on one card now. When I add a card, the NVidia program goes ahead and sets up something which says "SLi enabled", and when I remove the card that goes away. Is there some other place I should be setting up for two cards. Or.... is this an issue with heat? I had the two cards side by side and was thinking of moving the second card down to the further-away slot for room to breathe, so to speak. I wasn't doing anything in WoW but running around in an isolated area and it did seem rather warm inside the case when I opened it. The only other thing I can think is that this is either a HDrive issue, PSU or maybe just WoW lag? I did look around to see if there were any other postings on this, and if so, I apologize in advance for missing it.

Wow. Looks nice, clean and COLD in there.

Here we have a Mitsubishi 60 inch DLP, a rear projector, as the computer screen for one of our systems, and Vizio 32" LCD TV for our other one. We like to be immersed, yeh.

We are playing Wow (but have been taking a break lasting almost four months) So...although we have WotLK, our characters: Hellionefc on Arathor (level 70 mage) and xiild on Arathor (level 70 lock) Also two DeathKnights at 70... All HORDE! That's it. With as much of a time vampire as this game can be for us, there is nothing else.

Wow, thank you all very much for the advice and welcome. The desert here makes for a very dusty and dry environment with a lot of static everywhere so advice will be well taken as we have been careful of it but I did NOT know that plastic bags were not okay on the outside. I think I saw someone on youtube using one for some purpose which did lead me to believe they were okay to use. Thank you for that heads up for sure. Also, we really did not feel like getting a new HD just yet so thanks for the advice on not getting one until later! We are still working on getting the system up and stable. Currently trying to work out issues with the RAM and settings in bios and other glitches like suddenly there is no video. So even basic things like now, we need to reset bios without video are making this a long process. We've been at this for days-straight and probably need some sleep. Was perusing the Mike Meyers book for certification on google today--looks perfect, so thank you.

Hello. We are a couple, gamers, who ended up building rather than buying a gaming computer from a place like Alienware. This started by upgrading an emachine's RAM after learning from SisSandra that the old Emachine could get 8 gigs. The stats on the Emachine say only two. We put four into it and sure enough, the memory helps. Then we put a new AmD Athlon 62 2X into it, and that worked too. Last night we brought home a Phenom Quad Core and the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe (no mempipe), installed that and this morning got Windows Vista Ultimate on it. We are having a blast. We do though, have a LOT to learn--y'all even have your own Language it seems--including understanding and settings in bios, HardDrives (We are using the original Emachine HD for now), and I know much more, things we're not even aware of atm. Trying to find a starting point. If you remember when you knew as little as we do please drop a line of advice on what to read, watch or do. We have a couple of projects going on at once here, making two computers since we have most of the parts now to do that. The one we're focusing on now, at it's current arrangement, goes like this. Asus M3NT-HT Deluxe AMD Phenom X4 64 9950 (Black Edition) Old Emachine 160G HD Emachine CD rom NZXT Guardian 921 case NVidia 9800 GT 2 2G sticks of Corsair Gaming Memory (only able to boot with one stick in atm, for some reason, after talking with tech support @ Asus this morning). Thanks in advance for reading and thanks for these forums.