Ok I got everything put together but am concerned I made a couple of errors. I already mentioned having to route the cpu fan wires around the fan but that seems to be ok.
I put the standoffs in the case, put the motherboard on the standoffs...and then used a wrong screw! Now it is stuck in there, turning it either way doesnt do anything. For now I am not worried, the mobo is plenty secured, but Ill have to deal with it when I take it out.
The video card had two connections for power, I assume both hve to be connected? The instructions were like "if your card needs two use two."
I plugged in the 24 pin power connector, I also need to plug in the atx 12v power, right? My board has an 8 pin connection but you can also use 4 pins. The power supply has 2 4 pin connectors, I assumed that is an 8 pin connector that is 2x4? I guess I did something right because it started up. All the fans were spinning and I got into the bios. The hw monitor was telling me the cpu was idling at 65 celsius. That seems very hot. These things never go well for me :-(
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minor incidentexpert in a dying fieldnjRegistered Userregular
Your assumptions are all correct.
And don't sweat the stick screw for now. You can deal with it when the time comes by removing the whole standoff from the case. Not a big deal if there's only one stuck one.
65 is awfully warm to idle at. Usually a moderately high (but not blazing) idle temp means that one or two corners of the heatsink just aren't fully snapped down making full contact. Double check that your heatsink is securely fastened. If it's the stock one, make sure it's snapped in on all four pegs, and that none of the release screws on the pegs are turned.
Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust
Llano APU's are also a really good option for basic HTPC use. They're more powerful, graphics-wise, though less so CPU-wise.
So would this A4-3300 be sufficient to drive a Win7 set top computer, for streaming 1080P, and web browsing? I really know fuck all about these new AMD CPUs.
Nevermind my question about the Crucial SSD vs any of the SandForce drives. I'm just going to stick with the M4 because I'd rather have reliability over a bit more speed.
Are the factory overclocked video cards worth the extra money when I'm probably going to overclock the card myself anyways (and the card has a lifetime guarantee, granted overclocked isn't really covered under that)? It seems like that would be a good place to save $10-20 if that's the case.
That's...actually pretty awesome. Before I start getting frustrated, does anyone happen to know if you can set up programs like Vent to use the bluetooth as its audio device? Because that would be swell.
That's...actually pretty awesome. Before I start getting frustrated, does anyone happen to know if you can set up programs like Vent to use the bluetooth as its audio device? Because that would be swell.
If you're able to set the Bluetooth mic/headset as the default sound input or if it shows up in the drop down menu in Vent for input devices it might work. I'm curious to see if it works myself, but I don't have a Bluetooth headset.
Ok ran home during lunch and pushed on the four posts some more. I dont think they are going in any more and everything is rotated with the slot perpendicular to the heat sink (can only rotate them counter clockwise which I think unlocks them). Is it possible I have something wired wrong that could cause this? Other than that I guess Ill have to pull it off and reapply thermal paste? Can I do all that with the mobo in the case?
Ok ran home during lunch and pushed on the four posts some more. I dont think they are going in any more and everything is rotated with the slot perpendicular to the heat sink (can only rotate them counter clockwise which I think unlocks them). Is it possible I have something wired wrong that could cause this? Other than that I guess Ill have to pull it off and reapply thermal paste? Can I do all that with the mobo in the case?
You can do it with the mobo still in the case, just be careful when cleaning off the existing thermal paste/compound (q-tips with rubbing alcohol work well) to not get any on the motherboard.
are you using the stock cooler or an aftermarket heatsink?
Ok ran home during lunch and pushed on the four posts some more. I dont think they are going in any more and everything is rotated with the slot perpendicular to the heat sink (can only rotate them counter clockwise which I think unlocks them). Is it possible I have something wired wrong that could cause this? Other than that I guess Ill have to pull it off and reapply thermal paste? Can I do all that with the mobo in the case?
Yeah its easy to reapply thermal paste to the CPU without removing the motherboard.
Just pop off the fan/heatsink and the CPU, remove what is on there (use rubbing alcohol, works well with q-tips or cottonballs), then reapply to the heatsink and put it all back together.
For the fan, assuming its one of the intel default ones, just make sure all 4 pins are "locked". Don't rely on the positioning of the "screws" as they're goofy as all hell. just tug lightly at each corner and you should feel no give. If they feel at all loose then they're not pinned correctly. Just dork with the "screws" until all 4 corners lock. You should alternate corners diagonally when doing it, if you go round robin they'll just pull eachother out when you put pressure on them. You can actually pop out the screws if you are gentle enough with them. It allows you to get the white tab into the mobo holes and then you can place the screws back into the slot and readjust them to make sure they're facing properly if you care.
Yes, you can do it with the motherboard in the case, but you may have to have you hands at some funny angles to get full access to the retention pins on the heatsink. It's been a long time since I cleaned a cpu and heatsink that already had thermal paste on it, but if you have some isopropyl alcohol, coffee filters (they're anti-static), and q-tips they'll be all you'll need.
That's...actually pretty awesome. Before I start getting frustrated, does anyone happen to know if you can set up programs like Vent to use the bluetooth as its audio device? Because that would be swell.
Wait, what? How do I enable this? I still have my USB bluetooth dongle plugged in.
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ChaosHatHop, hop, hop, HA!Trick of the lightRegistered Userregular
edited October 2011
Gentlemen, I'm thinking about upgrading my current computer to have an SSD for a boot drive and some other applications (Starcraft, League of Legends, and as many steam games as I can cram on there). But, I do have some school stuff that would be a real pain in the ass to backup and reinstall. Can I just install Windows 7 on the SSD and boot from that, and then just access all the information on the old hard drive? How much dragging and dropping of stuff can I do, i.e. can I just drag the Starcraft 2 folder over to the new drive and then fix any shortcuts that relied on the old location?
I guess what I'm asking is, how much of a pain in the ass is this going to be? Also, what's a good amount of space for the usage I'm looking to have?
That's...actually pretty awesome. Before I start getting frustrated, does anyone happen to know if you can set up programs like Vent to use the bluetooth as its audio device? Because that would be swell.
Wait, what? How do I enable this? I still have my USB bluetooth dongle plugged in.
I just installed the drivers off of asus's site. I have the 3.1 revision of the board, I don't know if the 3.0 didn't have it or not. But yeah, it's just on. I haven't tested it yet, but it was one of the things on the box so I thought I'd check it out.
Totally unrelated, I should get my new video cards today.
For an SLI setup, assuming I already have the drivers installed for a single card, is there anything other than plugging it in and using the bridge that I need to do? Will it just *work*? Do I need to do anything manually in drivers or games to enable it?
Totally unrelated, I should get my new video cards today.
For an SLI setup, assuming I already have the drivers installed for a single card, is there anything other than plugging it in and using the bridge that I need to do? Will it just *work*? Do I need to do anything manually in drivers or games to enable it?
I've never used two Nvidia cards, only AMD, but it should just be a matter of plugging them in, connecting the SLI bridge AMD (if it's anything like AMD) checking an "enable SLI" box in the Nvidia software.
Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust
If you're replacing an existing single-card solution, you might want to uninstall/clean/reinstall your drivers, but once you have the hardware installed and bridged, as far as the software goes you should just go into nVidia control panel and make sure that SLI is enabled. It should turn on automatically and enable the SLI profiles on games that have them on driver install, though.
Yeah I can't figure it out. Both cards work, both cards are powered. I'm going to flash the mobo bios here shortly, but aside from that I can't think of anything I am missing. It's simply not showing the second card at all, in the device manager or anything. And there are no real PCI settings in the bios at all, so that's no use.
I could reinstall the drivers but I did a clean install last night for the exact same card, I shouldn't need to. And since it's not showing in the device manager I'm pretty sure it wouldn't do anything anyway.
Yeaaaah...this will be the last time I order anything from newegg I think.
I mean, all the parts they sent yesterday, the mobo/cpu/ram worked fine. But like I said, this is the second DOA card I've gotten from them in the past couple years and I had forgotten till I submitted this RMA that you have to pay for your own shipping and packaging back to them and they won't send you a replacement until they've received it. Meaning I probably won't get the replacement till late next week, at the very earliest.
That's not friendly. Particularly after how good EVGA has been with my other dead card.
At the very least I will just order future cards directly from EVGA since their pricing seemed pretty good anyway and for whatever reason that's what I have issues with newegg with. I regret now not just asking for a refund for the newegg RMA and then just ordering one straight away from EVGA.
minor incidentexpert in a dying fieldnjRegistered Userregular
That's exactly why I do most of my shopping locally at Microcenter. I don't think DOAs are Newegg's fault by any means, but it's so much less stressful to make a return in a brick and mortar store as opposed to having to ship it back and wait.
Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust
There's no local PC shop here in Utah, that I know of anyway, that isn't some hole in the wall with years out of date stuff for 3x the going price.
Otherwise, yeah, I would do that. Best Buy is the only store that I can think of that reliably has video cards, but they don't exactly have a wide range of them, and they're often overpriced.
Gentlemen, I'm thinking about upgrading my current computer to have an SSD for a boot drive and some other applications (Starcraft, League of Legends, and as many steam games as I can cram on there). But, I do have some school stuff that would be a real pain in the ass to backup and reinstall. Can I just install Windows 7 on the SSD and boot from that, and then just access all the information on the old hard drive? How much dragging and dropping of stuff can I do, i.e. can I just drag the Starcraft 2 folder over to the new drive and then fix any shortcuts that relied on the old location?
I guess what I'm asking is, how much of a pain in the ass is this going to be? Also, what's a good amount of space for the usage I'm looking to have?
first you need to prepare your old drive, delete or move to a backup anything you don't want anymore, run a defrag, disable hibernation (go to cmd prompt and enter: powercfg -h off, and than move the pagefile off your drive: http://mintywhite.com/vista/vmaintenance/performance-boost-move-page-file-to-another-physical-drive/. the goal is to get your windows/data size under the size of the ssd your going to buy than do a clone of the drive onto the ssd.
easiest way is to first reduce the size of your old main partition to the size of your ssd minus a gig or so, free version of partion wizard works good enough for that: http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html
than you can copy that over to your ssd using todo backup home: http://www.todo-backup.com/, check the box for ssd optimization.
just change the boot order of your drives so it boots from the ssd, and feel free to format that old hdd and use it to store more porn.
after that you'll want to do a few tweaks to windows:
enable TRIM and AHCI, heres a good guide on that: http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=86403
disable automatic defrag on the ssd
disable indexing of the ssd.
as for what size you will want, 120gb will probably cover windows+games, just keep your media files and such on a large normal hdd.
There's no local PC shop here in Utah, that I know of anyway, that isn't some hole in the wall with years out of date stuff for 3x the going price.
Otherwise, yeah, I would do that. Best Buy is the only store that I can think of that reliably has video cards, but they don't exactly have a wide range of them, and they're often overpriced.
Best Buy can work in a pinch. They have a decent video card selection online, and those can be shipped to/returned to stores. Plus, BB coupons are all over the place. I picked up one there that ended up being about $10 cheaper than Newegg after some coupon codes.
Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust
Alright no dice. Grabbed some thermal fusion 400, cleaned off the cpu and heat sink with some isopropyl alcohol and q tips, applied some of the paste, put everything back together, and cranked. Same result. It actually levels off around 65c but if I sit long enough it actually still keeps creeping up sloooooowly.
Anything else it could be? Pretty sure the fan was in right, I was extra careful this time. Hell, the paste looked like it got applied ok the first time too. Could something be wired wrong and screwing up the fans? I have the cpu "full enabled." I have the chassis fans plugged into the power, is that right? Bios says cpu fan spinning around 1900 rpm.
Maybe the stock cooler just isn't very good or the temp sensor is giving false readings because you don't seem to be doing anything wrong. Could be worth your time and piece of mind to spend $25 on a Cooler Master 212+. Keep in mind, the temperatures are probably going to go down once the motherboard and cpu are installed in the case if you're doing your current testing with everything out of the case.
How much thermal paste did you apply? Unless things have changed dramatically in the last few years, all you need is a pea sicked dollop of paste and allow the pressure of the heatsink to spread it out over the CPU.
The only other thing I can think of it to check that you can see if all 4 black pins of the retaining pins of the heatsink are protruding all the way through the back of the motherboard.
Everything is in the case, one side open, lying on the side that doesnt have a vent. A better cooler is something I am considering but I want to make sure something isnt wrong with something I have done first.
Does that fan speed seem right? All three fans are very quiet, even when the cpu starts creeping up to 70...
70 wouldn't make it go nuts, you'd have to be hitting upper 80's or 90's before it got crazy.
but if your cpu is going up like that just while idling it could very well just be a bad part. And most likely it is the CPU, the mobo or fan/heatsink wouldn't make it get that warm doing nothing.
Nope, i havent even installed the os yet! I am kind of paranoid about the temp. sensors could be wrong but it is giving me 25 c for the mobo, though it also starts creeping up
Ok, my plan after work is Ill go ahead and install windows and check the temps. If it is still too hot I will go get a new better cooler. It isnt a bad thing to have anyways, and it could expose my stock cooler as defective. Hopefully the bios temp sensor is just wonky.
Posts
I put the standoffs in the case, put the motherboard on the standoffs...and then used a wrong screw! Now it is stuck in there, turning it either way doesnt do anything. For now I am not worried, the mobo is plenty secured, but Ill have to deal with it when I take it out.
The video card had two connections for power, I assume both hve to be connected? The instructions were like "if your card needs two use two."
I plugged in the 24 pin power connector, I also need to plug in the atx 12v power, right? My board has an 8 pin connection but you can also use 4 pins. The power supply has 2 4 pin connectors, I assumed that is an 8 pin connector that is 2x4? I guess I did something right because it started up. All the fans were spinning and I got into the bios. The hw monitor was telling me the cpu was idling at 65 celsius. That seems very hot. These things never go well for me :-(
And don't sweat the stick screw for now. You can deal with it when the time comes by removing the whole standoff from the case. Not a big deal if there's only one stuck one.
65 is awfully warm to idle at. Usually a moderately high (but not blazing) idle temp means that one or two corners of the heatsink just aren't fully snapped down making full contact. Double check that your heatsink is securely fastened. If it's the stock one, make sure it's snapped in on all four pegs, and that none of the release screws on the pegs are turned.
HWMonitor was giving me a reading of 80C for CPUTIN for like 45min then it dropped to 1C which is colder than the air temp in the room it was in.
But my cores were at 30C and didn't change when the CPUTIN value changed.
So would this A4-3300 be sufficient to drive a Win7 set top computer, for streaming 1080P, and web browsing? I really know fuck all about these new AMD CPUs.
Other hardware would be -
Mobo: ASRock A55M-HVS FM1 AMD A55 (Hudson D2) HDMI Micro ATX
RAM: Crucial Ballistix sport 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
Case: Habey EMC-600B Black Aluminum Server Chassis with 12V DC power supply 120W - I'm assuming 120W is enough juice for this system, am I pushing it?
SSD: Patriot Pyro PP60GS25SSDR 2.5" 60GB SATA III MLC
And I already have this for keyboard/mouse.
Are the factory overclocked video cards worth the extra money when I'm probably going to overclock the card myself anyways (and the card has a lifetime guarantee, granted overclocked isn't really covered under that)? It seems like that would be a good place to save $10-20 if that's the case.
That's...actually pretty awesome. Before I start getting frustrated, does anyone happen to know if you can set up programs like Vent to use the bluetooth as its audio device? Because that would be swell.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
If you're able to set the Bluetooth mic/headset as the default sound input or if it shows up in the drop down menu in Vent for input devices it might work. I'm curious to see if it works myself, but I don't have a Bluetooth headset.
You can do it with the mobo still in the case, just be careful when cleaning off the existing thermal paste/compound (q-tips with rubbing alcohol work well) to not get any on the motherboard.
are you using the stock cooler or an aftermarket heatsink?
Path of Exile: snowcrash7
MTG Arena: Snow_Crash#34179
Battle.net: Snowcrash#1873
Yeah its easy to reapply thermal paste to the CPU without removing the motherboard.
Just pop off the fan/heatsink and the CPU, remove what is on there (use rubbing alcohol, works well with q-tips or cottonballs), then reapply to the heatsink and put it all back together.
For the fan, assuming its one of the intel default ones, just make sure all 4 pins are "locked". Don't rely on the positioning of the "screws" as they're goofy as all hell. just tug lightly at each corner and you should feel no give. If they feel at all loose then they're not pinned correctly. Just dork with the "screws" until all 4 corners lock. You should alternate corners diagonally when doing it, if you go round robin they'll just pull eachother out when you put pressure on them. You can actually pop out the screws if you are gentle enough with them. It allows you to get the white tab into the mobo holes and then you can place the screws back into the slot and readjust them to make sure they're facing properly if you care.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Wait, what? How do I enable this? I still have my USB bluetooth dongle plugged in.
I guess what I'm asking is, how much of a pain in the ass is this going to be? Also, what's a good amount of space for the usage I'm looking to have?
I just installed the drivers off of asus's site. I have the 3.1 revision of the board, I don't know if the 3.0 didn't have it or not. But yeah, it's just on. I haven't tested it yet, but it was one of the things on the box so I thought I'd check it out.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
For an SLI setup, assuming I already have the drivers installed for a single card, is there anything other than plugging it in and using the bridge that I need to do? Will it just *work*? Do I need to do anything manually in drivers or games to enable it?
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
I've never used two Nvidia cards, only AMD, but it should just be a matter of plugging them in, connecting the SLI bridge AMD (if it's anything like AMD) checking an "enable SLI" box in the Nvidia software.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
E: Nevermind, just saw your previous post that answered the really basic question I had.
I could reinstall the drivers but I did a clean install last night for the exact same card, I shouldn't need to. And since it's not showing in the device manager I'm pretty sure it wouldn't do anything anyway.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Shouldn't the second card show up in windows either way?
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Time to contact Newegg. Bleh. This is the second time I've gotten a DoA card from them as new.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
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Oh man, that's never fun. Hope you get it sorted soon.
I mean, all the parts they sent yesterday, the mobo/cpu/ram worked fine. But like I said, this is the second DOA card I've gotten from them in the past couple years and I had forgotten till I submitted this RMA that you have to pay for your own shipping and packaging back to them and they won't send you a replacement until they've received it. Meaning I probably won't get the replacement till late next week, at the very earliest.
That's not friendly. Particularly after how good EVGA has been with my other dead card.
At the very least I will just order future cards directly from EVGA since their pricing seemed pretty good anyway and for whatever reason that's what I have issues with newegg with. I regret now not just asking for a refund for the newegg RMA and then just ordering one straight away from EVGA.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Otherwise, yeah, I would do that. Best Buy is the only store that I can think of that reliably has video cards, but they don't exactly have a wide range of them, and they're often overpriced.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
first you need to prepare your old drive, delete or move to a backup anything you don't want anymore, run a defrag, disable hibernation (go to cmd prompt and enter: powercfg -h off, and than move the pagefile off your drive:
http://mintywhite.com/vista/vmaintenance/performance-boost-move-page-file-to-another-physical-drive/. the goal is to get your windows/data size under the size of the ssd your going to buy than do a clone of the drive onto the ssd.
easiest way is to first reduce the size of your old main partition to the size of your ssd minus a gig or so, free version of partion wizard works good enough for that: http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html
than you can copy that over to your ssd using todo backup home: http://www.todo-backup.com/, check the box for ssd optimization.
just change the boot order of your drives so it boots from the ssd, and feel free to format that old hdd and use it to store more porn.
after that you'll want to do a few tweaks to windows:
enable TRIM and AHCI, heres a good guide on that: http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=86403
disable automatic defrag on the ssd
disable indexing of the ssd.
as for what size you will want, 120gb will probably cover windows+games, just keep your media files and such on a large normal hdd.
Best Buy can work in a pinch. They have a decent video card selection online, and those can be shipped to/returned to stores. Plus, BB coupons are all over the place. I picked up one there that ended up being about $10 cheaper than Newegg after some coupon codes.
Anything else it could be? Pretty sure the fan was in right, I was extra careful this time. Hell, the paste looked like it got applied ok the first time too. Could something be wired wrong and screwing up the fans? I have the cpu "full enabled." I have the chassis fans plugged into the power, is that right? Bios says cpu fan spinning around 1900 rpm.
How much thermal paste did you apply? Unless things have changed dramatically in the last few years, all you need is a pea sicked dollop of paste and allow the pressure of the heatsink to spread it out over the CPU.
The only other thing I can think of it to check that you can see if all 4 black pins of the retaining pins of the heatsink are protruding all the way through the back of the motherboard.
Does that fan speed seem right? All three fans are very quiet, even when the cpu starts creeping up to 70...
but if your cpu is going up like that just while idling it could very well just be a bad part. And most likely it is the CPU, the mobo or fan/heatsink wouldn't make it get that warm doing nothing.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Core Temp or Real Temp?
Nope, i havent even installed the os yet! I am kind of paranoid about the temp. sensors could be wrong but it is giving me 25 c for the mobo, though it also starts creeping up
Just install whatever OS you're using and then watch the temps.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Video Card: HIS IceQ X Turbo H695QNT2G2M Radeon HD 6950 2GB - 270.00
CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz 220.00
Motherboard: ASUS P8P67 PRO (REV 3.0) LGA 1155 Intel P67 - 175.00
Case: ZALMAN Z9 Plus Black Steel / Plastic ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - 70.00
Power Supply: CORSAIR Professional Series HX650 (CMPSU-650HX) 650W - 132.00
Memory: G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 - 55.00
Hard Drive: SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s - 60.00
That's what I'm looking at for my build...costs ~$1000.
However, I won my company's Biggest Loser competition and now have an extra $250 to spend. How should I proceed?