GOOD NEWS EVERYBODY, MY MOTHERBOARD DIED

[northan]

My old asus gave up the ghost. It seems that the pci-e connector for the graphics card is dodgy and not letting me boot properly all the time.
You have to hold it in a certain way and if you let go the system hangs.

Had a talk with missus, got go ahead for new build.
New spec is

Ausus m4a88td-v-evo/usb3 (including sataIII)

Amd phenom II x2 555 black edition (going to overclock and open all 4 cores cheap 4 core)

Palit gtx 460 sonic 1025mb gddr5

64gb crucial SSD working on SataIII used for o/s and a few programs

4gb cosair dominator ddr3 memory.

This will be coupled with 5tb of my hard drives.

I will be building a new case in the future, watch this space.
The plans are to be an oil filled htpc, very quite and stable HTPC

[elootos]

(09-27-2010 03:42 PM)northan Wrote:  Had a talk with missus, got go ahead for new build.

The power they have over us eh!

You certainly have the makings of a good spec'd machine.

Amazing what a dodgy pci-e slot can lead to to

[fr56]

(09-27-2010 03:42 PM)northan Wrote:  Ausus m4a88td-v-evo/usb3 (including sataIII)

Amd phenom II x2 555 black edition (going to overclock and open all 4 cores cheap 4 core)

ive been looking at the combo of mobo/cpu as well.

Do you know how easy it si to unlock the hidden cores?

[northan]

Right just finished build.
Typing on system now, proof it works.
How easy is it to unlock all the cores, ermm as easy as pushing a button.
Went into bios, checked the unlock core feature and that was that.
I made sure from research that the mobo had this feature and the cpu was likely to let me do it.
The bios, without any real skill from me, overclocked the cpu to 3.7ghz with nothing much for me to do.
So I got a 4 core cpu at 3.7ghz for under £100. windows rating of 7.3.(the lowest in all my scores)

The SSD is brilliant, got the full wack of 7.9 on windows score and as its running on sata3 I get the full speed of 355mbs read speed. Windows opens in 15-17seconds

Ohh the joys, I have a machine that is good
[/align]

[elootos]

(09-29-2010 12:08 AM)northan Wrote:  Right just finished build.
Typing on system now, proof it works.
How easy is it to unlock all the cores, ermm as easy as pushing a button.
Went into bios, checked the unlock core feature and that was that.
I made sure from research that the mobo had this feature and the cpu was likely to let me do it.
The bios, without any real skill from me, overclocked the cpu to 3.7ghz with nothing much for me to do.
So I got a 4 core cpu at 3.7ghz for under £100. windows rating of 7.3.(the lowest in all my scores)

The SSD is brilliant, got the full wack of 7.9 on windows score and as its running on sata3 I get the full speed of 355mbs read speed. Windows opens in 15-17seconds

Ohh the joys, I have a machine that is good
[/align]

Nice one, that was quick. Thought it was still at the 'add to basket' stage!

Hmm, you're making me want to build another PC now just for the hell of it

Nice to hear unlocking the CPU was easy enough. I looked at doing it for my Sempron to a dual-core but the BIOS didn't seem anywhere near as straightforward as yours. Older Gen I guess.

[northan]

What can I say, this is the first time since my old 333 that I've felt excited about my computer.
It only took 15 minutes to install windows 7 onto SSD, and the performance of this C300 is unbelievable.
What with a directx 11 card too, everything seems to be so fast...instantaneous.

The motherboard is the first motherboard that Ive had that doesnt have any problems or quirks.
So really the whole build, installs, drivers and updates took me just over 2 hours.
I know its not exactly I7 standards, but to be honest I think you get alot for your money with AMD

So I appologise If Im a bit excited My mate too has gotten the build bug after listning to me for hours and I think he is buying a couple of SSD's to put into raid 0

[elootos]

(09-29-2010 01:48 PM)northan Wrote:  So I appologise If Im a bit excited My mate too has gotten the build bug after listning to me for hours and I think he is buying a couple of SSD's to put into raid 0

Yeeeahhhh. An SSD raid. Thought about that for my kitchen PC but a tad overkill for a spot of web browsing for recipes The 32Gb one I have in it now though is always at 30Gb full no matter how much I try and reduce it down. A bit on the thrifty side for size.

The SSDs I have in my lounge and kitchen PCs (although earlier models) have made me realise that SSD is the only way forward for any respectable new build.

[northan]

New update.
Been running the system stable for a week now with no flaws, been playing around with the system and managed to be stable at 4ghz without silly cpu temps.
I thought it would be time to add my other hard drives to the rig with all my films on it.
The big problem is that there is a major conflict between the chipset of my motherboard and samsung f3 spinpoints.
As soon as they were turned on it sounded like the hard drive was ripping it self apart internally.
Samsung are aware of this unique problem and put onto their website some unhelpful instructions and a firmware flash. All I had to do was make a bootable usb and flash the drives in dos. Easy right.
After a long night I only managed to get one of my f3's working, the other one was toast. Cant access on any rig or even using a usb converter.
It was completely full with dvd rips, thankfully I own all the hard copies but it still takes a freaking long time to rip again. I think there was around 200 films on there, a full terabyte. merde
F3 is still within warranty but ebuyer dont try to fix, just replace and destroy. New F3's hopefully come with the firmware update.
So Samsung F3 spinpoints and chipset SB850 don't mix... ohh it's still raw even now

[tonyc]

Argh is appropriate here !

I've seen some new 3TB hDD's but to be honest, it doesn't appeal. It's hearbreaking that as your 1TB drive failed with all the movies, you now have to faff about and copy them all over. I'm the same as you with mine, they are in the loft all boxed up and don't really fancy having to ever do that again, but could happen in the future.

I can't see the point of a 3TB HDD and then having to make a back up of it, espec as you have the DVD's already, but that could be over 1000 films lost.

I remember my Buffalo 1TB external HDD I got a couple of years ago. Ebuyer said it's formatted and good to go. The 650MB HDD I had my MP3's and 'library music' was pretty much full and had a couple of errors on so new it's time was limited. So I moved (not copied) everything over to the new external drive.

When I came to plug it into the server downstairs and set up permissions etc although the drive was there, and could see the available space had dropped, I then unplugged it and put it back on the other pc. Same thing, it was there but couldn't access my data. When checking the status of the drive it was formatted in 'RAW'. Unfortunately I lost everything and had to format in NTFS.

Fortunately, I found a program to restore the old HDD and although threw a few wobblers with file names I managed to get most back, but what a ball ache.

I think in this day and age with large amounts of GB's and TB's available on HDD's it's quick to forget how important backing stuff is. I've certainly learnt the hard way over the years

Hope you get yours sorted out soon Northan as I'm certainly feeling your pain !

[elootos]

(10-06-2010 09:36 PM)northan Wrote:  Samsung are aware of this unique problem and put onto their website some unhelpful instructions and a firmware flash. All I had to do was make a bootable usb and flash the drives in dos. Easy right.

How funny, we're in the same boat at the moment!!

I too spent hours a few nights ago trying to get a DOS bootable mem stick going so I could run a Samsung recovery tool to scan a drive of mine.

Still working away as we speak, 6hrs to scan, 6hrs to low-level format, 6hrs to scan again...

I've also managed to lose a whole disks worth of films, too busy clicking around and whoops, there goes the partition.

I have read a bit on how to attempt recover it but I can't be arsed. Too many hours and days now spent on pratting around with drives...