I have an Asus P8-z68v-Pro with a Ci5 2500k and 8gb of 1600 corsair vengeance RAM. The machine has been freezing completely and bluescreening pretty randomly these last months. The bluescreen gave me one of those generic error codes. I have removed and reinstalled mostly every single part, and done all kinds of tests, and I have come to the following conclusions: The auto-overclock (which I took down to 3.7, and it seems to have fixed it) is related to the issue, but I don't think it's the CPU not being able to handle it. I think it might be the PSU being shitty, or some sort of z68 x 2500K issue... I read something about there being reports of Z68 troubles.
Should I get a new PSU? Or just leave it at 3.7GHz and live with it?
Are you doing anything processor intensive when it's crashing or is it completely random? What brand, model, and wattage PSU are you running? @Alecthar has a pretty good idea of what are and aren't good PSUs, so he may have some idea if that's the issue.
Have you run Memtest86 yet? I had some BSOD problem a few month after I built my system that ended up being a bad stick of ram. I would only crash during processor and ram intensive situations such as gaming, but everything seemed fine outside of that.
I initially tried Asus's built in overclocking program on my P67 board and wasn't particularly pleased with the results. I felt that it was upping the voltage too much for the overclock, and my system didn't pass Prime95 for long enough to be considered completely stable. Asus may have made some adjustments to the program for the Z68 boards, but I found I could do a better job overclocking myself.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Run the built in Windows memory test. That's the first thing I do with unexplained blue screens. Memory tends to go bad extremely easily, relative to other components. Especially in an overclocking scenario.
I have Seventeam ST - 620 PAF 620watts. Thing is, here in Brazil good PSUs are harder to find, and particularly expensive. I was thinking of getting a 650 corsair, but I haven't made my mind.
I didn't run memtest, but I ran the win7 memory diagnostic thing for about 8 hours and no issues. The crashes are very random, they can happen during Assassin's Creed III or when the PC is idling and I'm away. They do happen more often when I'm gaming, but I tend to power the PC down when I'm not using it to save my power bill. Oh, temperatures are fine, and I got crashes on Prime95, but "only" an error and no crash after lowering the overclock. I thought about RAM, but I have this impression it could be my not-so-good PSU screwing with a previously rock solid OC (the auto OC thing got me at 4.3GHz).
I can fuck around with OC settings a bit more, anyways.
I have basically the same build as you (P8Z68-v Pro, 2600k@4.5Ghz, 8GBs of Corsair Vengeance 1600mhz) and I havent experienced those issues. If you were able to run at 4.3Ghz for a while and the trouble just started recently Id look to bad ram. If youve been having this trouble since the beginning Id look either at PSU or maybe CPU.
The OS mention got me thinking... I have a couple Win 7 licenses already (one for this computer, one for my wife's), but I'll need one for the new computer. This old system I'm planning on putting in the living room as a streaming box/big picture gaming machine. For a TV since it's farther away, would the Win8 desktop be kind of helpful?
Windows 8 has been wonderful on a HTPC. I can make my most commonly used programs or shortcuts to networked folders tiles on the home screen for easy access. It also boots in about 15 seconds, so by the time my Harmony has turned everything on to the right inputs I'm already at the home screen.
Out of curiosity, does the Home Screen accept any kind of remote control input? Because that would be awesome, if it did. I might be able to get knock together an HTPC my parents can use if that's the case.
I'm going to assume there is someway to, but I use a Levnovo N5902 mini keyboard/mouse to control the PC. I would like something more 'remote like' for controlling XBMC but the N5902 has been fine.
You can fully navigate the start screen with a keyboard, so I'm assuming a media center compatible remote should be able to be mapped to all the basic functions. I haven't upgraded my HTPC to Win8 yet to test, though.
I rather like WMC7 for my htpc though, so the fact that it costs extra on windows 8 kind of sucks.
Are there metro apps that serve the same purpose? I just got windows 8 on a laptop and while I've seen something that says netflix, I'm not sure how nice the app is compared to the plugin for WMC7 (which was built with HTPC's in mind). Similarly I'm not sure about hulu and cable tv watching/recording. Considering WMC7 isn't upgraded in windows 7 I was probably going to stick with windows 7, but if the metro apps are pretty nice I might switch over.
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
They're giving away WMC8MC keys for free for a little longer, so grab one of those to use if/when you upgrade. You just need to give them your email address and fill out a Captcha; no Windows 8 key required to grab one. The deal ends on 1/31, alongside the $40 upgrade pricing.
WMC is still the only game in town if you want to decode CableCard signals on your HTPC. There's basically no difference in software between W7 and W8 media center. The only thing I've noticed is when new media is added to a media library, you don't lose your current selection as it is added.
The only reason I haven't gotten around to upgrading the HTPC is pretty much laziness. My HTPC is discless and only really used as a WMC DVR -- I ditched Netflix a while ago, so I don't watch anything besides TV on it.
I think we already had this discussion, but... you guys funna upgrade to Win8? The timer on that $40 upgrade key is tempting, but I'm pretty sure that's exactly why they put a timer on it. Win7 is working fine for me atm, and I honestly don't see any benefit to upgrading -- aside from gaining access to the other 16GB of my RAM (which is still bullshit, btw).
Same here. I've been very happy with it on my HTPC, and it's just a matter of setting aside a weekend to format and reinstall everything on my desktop.
Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
It really isn't anywhere near as bad as all the online wharglebargle might lead you to believe. My old p.c. was an XP machine, I have access to W7 and use it sometimes on my partners laptop, and yet I still went straight for W8 despite the guys behind the counter at the computer store telling me not to.
The thing is: There is nothing broken or wrong about Win8 like the lack of drivers in early Vista, or the sheer shittyness of ME.
Of course, there isn't really a compelling reason to rush to upgrading from 7 to 8 either, as much as I love the new file and task managers.
The Modern UI is not really useful or necessary on a regular computer (desktop or laptop), but it's completely ignorable. And, after you learn a couple of amazing keyboard shortcuts that already existed in Win 7, you won't even notice the Start Menu is gone. Because the Start menu is a shitty obsolete UI paradigm that has been surpassed by the new stuff, except people love shitty things they're used to and hate great things that are new.
Summing up: Win 8 is great, but Win 7 is more than good enough.
Yeah, that's a pretty fair summation. I've adopted early because I like being on the shiniest new thing (and there's a few specific features that I really wanted). There are a lot of things that Windows 8 does very well compared to how they were in Windows 7, and added all together it makes for a nicer overall experience, but it's not like people who stick with Windows 7 are really doing themselves a disservice. It's a much different situation from when Windows 7 came out, and the two out-in-the-wild operating systems were the even-then-ancient Windows XP and the like-Windows-7-but-much-clunkier Vista.
it's amusing to me how much this thread likes win8 while the rest of my internet can't stop hating it.
But yeah it's great. There's no reason to get seven on new machines at all, even once 8 goes up in price
I suspect because most screenshots of it only show the modern tiles, and people really don't like change so they just assume that it would be terrible without really giving it a chance.
At the same time, I'm on win7 and while I know how nice win8 is from using release candidates for a while on my other machine, it just doesn't offer me enough reason to upgrade atm.
When windows 8 gives me an option to hard set my UI to the standard one, I'll probably switch. At the moment doing stuff is more than not doing stuff. I can wait an extra 3 seconds on bootup.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Vista wasn't even all that bad after a couple service packs. Windows 7 is significantly better in pretty much every way, but once all the drivers (which were an utter clusterfuck) got sorted out it was an okay operating system. Kind of like Windows XP, which was also terrible until SP2, except that XP users were generally upgrading from 98SE instead of the immediately preceding version.
I think we already had this discussion, but... you guys funna upgrade to Win8? The timer on that $40 upgrade key is tempting, but I'm pretty sure that's exactly why they put a timer on it. Win7 is working fine for me atm, and I honestly don't see any benefit to upgrading -- aside from gaining access to the other 16GB of my RAM (which is still bullshit, btw).
If I could get 16GB more RAM for $40, I'd do it instantly.
What's the performance footprint like on Windows 8 compared to Windows 7?
Also isn't the next version of DirectX supposed to be Windows 8 exclusive? Once I felt I was missing out on that I'd upgrade, but many games don't even use DriectX 11 now.
What's the performance footprint like on Windows 8 compared to Windows 7?
Also isn't the next version of DirectX supposed to be Windows 8 exclusive? Once I felt I was missing out on that I'd upgrade, but many games don't even use DriectX 11 now.
win8 is just a little bit faster.
DirectX 11.1 is win8 exclusive, and it might get used more in the future as the new xbox should use it, the reason most games have a dx9 mode now is that the 360 uses it.
But it wouldn't think many games will be dx11.1 only, as that would just cut out too much of the pc market still on win xp or 7.
The thing with Vista and drivers was that they killed the old driver framework from Win 9x (that was still around in XP) and switched over to a new architecture. The new system was a lot better, and drastically reduced the amount of hard crashing and locking, but also had a serious consequences: Every driver had to be reissued, and that meant lots of older software would never be updated, that new drivers were still immature for a while, and that some drivers took sometime before being available. Finally, Vista was kinda hoggish with resources, and many people updgraded to it on old, old systems.
But Win 8 has none of those problems. This laptop is running Win8 pro, and 90% of the time I don't even know it. After booting, it takes a simple click to the Chrome shortcut to get me to the desktop mode, and that's that.
The thing is: There is nothing broken or wrong about Win8 like the lack of drivers in early Vista, or the sheer shittyness of ME.
Of course, there isn't really a compelling reason to rush to upgrading from 7 to 8 either, as much as I love the new file and task managers.
The Modern UI is not really useful or necessary on a regular computer (desktop or laptop), but it's completely ignorable. And, after you learn a couple of amazing keyboard shortcuts that already existed in Win 7, you won't even notice the Start Menu is gone. Because the Start menu is a shitty obsolete UI paradigm that has been surpassed by the new stuff, except people love shitty things they're used to and hate great things that are new.
Summing up: Win 8 is great, but Win 7 is more than good enough.
what new stuff? boxes arranged in grids was a thing in windows 3.1. . . It was shitty then and it's marginally less shitty now.
How is Windows 8 when it comes to games compatibility, is that still a problem anymore?
There were some issues with early GFWL games in the consumer preview release, but I believe those have since been fixed. Otherwise, pretty much anything compatible with Win7 is going to be compatible with Win8.
The thing is: There is nothing broken or wrong about Win8 like the lack of drivers in early Vista, or the sheer shittyness of ME.
Of course, there isn't really a compelling reason to rush to upgrading from 7 to 8 either, as much as I love the new file and task managers.
The Modern UI is not really useful or necessary on a regular computer (desktop or laptop), but it's completely ignorable. And, after you learn a couple of amazing keyboard shortcuts that already existed in Win 7, you won't even notice the Start Menu is gone. Because the Start menu is a shitty obsolete UI paradigm that has been surpassed by the new stuff, except people love shitty things they're used to and hate great things that are new.
Summing up: Win 8 is great, but Win 7 is more than good enough.
what new stuff? boxes arranged in grids was a thing in windows 3.1. . . It was shitty then and it's marginally less shitty now.
Other than that, agreed entirely.
Nope, the new stuff is typing a couple of letters and opening the application. Which works fine on Win7. I haven't opened a start menu in months. Win key+"ste"+enter, and steam is loading. I don't even click on the smart taskbar anymore. I don't use the Modern UI either.
EDIT: But this is the COMPUTER BUILD thread, so I'm gonna go back to topic: I left memtest running overnight, but when I woke up, the machine was on windows, so I guess it rebooted. I was running the "standard" test without any changed settings... I thought it would just repeat the test until I stopped it, so I don't know if my system passed the test and rebooted, or if it crashed on memtest and restarted
Guys, my work just gave me a "new" MacBook Pro. It is a 15" non-Retina display model from mid-2012, purchased for a girl who got hired to be the CEO's new assistant a couple months ago and didn't last a week. :P So it has been sitting unused since then until being handed off to me to relieve the refurbished 2007 model iMac I have been making do with since getting hired here almost a year ago.
I am not too bummed about not having a Retina display, but for a laptop I really think having an SSD would be desireable and advantageous. A co-worker has a friend who can get me a good deal on a 240GB OCZ Deneva 2 C SSD for about $175. The problem is that I can't find anything about this particular drive online in terms of reviews - several places selling them, mostly the larger-capacity ones, and seemingly for significantly higher-than-usual prices even for an SSD.
I know I have read a LOT of failure stories about other OCZ drives like the Vertexes in the past, enough that I would ordinarily rule them out. Also, the Deneva series appears to use a SandForce controller, which is a red flag to me.
Nevertheless, the allure of a deal is strong. Anybody know anything about this OCZ Deneva 2 C, on the off chance it actually isn't a piece of shit?
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
This 256 GB Samsung SSD is $179.99 right now, so I don't know that the OCZ is that great a deal really.
This 256 GB Samsung SSD is $179.99 right now, so I don't know that the OCZ is that great a deal really.
Hell, with that promo code it's $150. I might have to buy one at that price.
Fuck me... :shock:
So is the 840 series considered to have proved itself now? The 830 in my desktop has served me well enough, even if it's never quite hit the performance specs quoted on the box.
For that price I'm tempted to buy two and put one in the desktop, but the girlfriend needs a Valentine's/birthday present, and moving is expensive...
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I have an Asus P8-z68v-Pro with a Ci5 2500k and 8gb of 1600 corsair vengeance RAM. The machine has been freezing completely and bluescreening pretty randomly these last months. The bluescreen gave me one of those generic error codes. I have removed and reinstalled mostly every single part, and done all kinds of tests, and I have come to the following conclusions: The auto-overclock (which I took down to 3.7, and it seems to have fixed it) is related to the issue, but I don't think it's the CPU not being able to handle it. I think it might be the PSU being shitty, or some sort of z68 x 2500K issue... I read something about there being reports of Z68 troubles.
Should I get a new PSU? Or just leave it at 3.7GHz and live with it?
joy2key?
Have you run Memtest86 yet? I had some BSOD problem a few month after I built my system that ended up being a bad stick of ram. I would only crash during processor and ram intensive situations such as gaming, but everything seemed fine outside of that.
I initially tried Asus's built in overclocking program on my P67 board and wasn't particularly pleased with the results. I felt that it was upping the voltage too much for the overclock, and my system didn't pass Prime95 for long enough to be considered completely stable. Asus may have made some adjustments to the program for the Z68 boards, but I found I could do a better job overclocking myself.
Battle.net
I didn't run memtest, but I ran the win7 memory diagnostic thing for about 8 hours and no issues. The crashes are very random, they can happen during Assassin's Creed III or when the PC is idling and I'm away. They do happen more often when I'm gaming, but I tend to power the PC down when I'm not using it to save my power bill. Oh, temperatures are fine, and I got crashes on Prime95, but "only" an error and no crash after lowering the overclock. I thought about RAM, but I have this impression it could be my not-so-good PSU screwing with a previously rock solid OC (the auto OC thing got me at 4.3GHz).
I can fuck around with OC settings a bit more, anyways.
Oh, and my BIOS is up-to-date (3603).
UPDATE:
I ran memtest and the first pass was ok. I'm gonna leave it working overnight, but I'm pretty sure the RAM is ok.
I rather like WMC7 for my htpc though, so the fact that it costs extra on windows 8 kind of sucks.
Are there metro apps that serve the same purpose? I just got windows 8 on a laptop and while I've seen something that says netflix, I'm not sure how nice the app is compared to the plugin for WMC7 (which was built with HTPC's in mind). Similarly I'm not sure about hulu and cable tv watching/recording. Considering WMC7 isn't upgraded in windows 7 I was probably going to stick with windows 7, but if the metro apps are pretty nice I might switch over.
WMC is still the only game in town if you want to decode CableCard signals on your HTPC. There's basically no difference in software between W7 and W8 media center. The only thing I've noticed is when new media is added to a media library, you don't lose your current selection as it is added.
The only reason I haven't gotten around to upgrading the HTPC is pretty much laziness. My HTPC is discless and only really used as a WMC DVR -- I ditched Netflix a while ago, so I don't watch anything besides TV on it.
It's great. It is legitimately really good.
Of course, there isn't really a compelling reason to rush to upgrading from 7 to 8 either, as much as I love the new file and task managers.
The Modern UI is not really useful or necessary on a regular computer (desktop or laptop), but it's completely ignorable. And, after you learn a couple of amazing keyboard shortcuts that already existed in Win 7, you won't even notice the Start Menu is gone. Because the Start menu is a shitty obsolete UI paradigm that has been surpassed by the new stuff, except people love shitty things they're used to and hate great things that are new.
Summing up: Win 8 is great, but Win 7 is more than good enough.
But yeah it's great. There's no reason to get seven on new machines at all, even once 8 goes up in price
That said, Win7 is treating me fine atm, and 16GB of more RAM isn't a compelling enough 'killer app' to get me to drop $40 on upgrading just now.
I suspect because most screenshots of it only show the modern tiles, and people really don't like change so they just assume that it would be terrible without really giving it a chance.
At the same time, I'm on win7 and while I know how nice win8 is from using release candidates for a while on my other machine, it just doesn't offer me enough reason to upgrade atm.
Also isn't the next version of DirectX supposed to be Windows 8 exclusive? Once I felt I was missing out on that I'd upgrade, but many games don't even use DriectX 11 now.
win8 is just a little bit faster.
DirectX 11.1 is win8 exclusive, and it might get used more in the future as the new xbox should use it, the reason most games have a dx9 mode now is that the 360 uses it.
But it wouldn't think many games will be dx11.1 only, as that would just cut out too much of the pc market still on win xp or 7.
But Win 8 has none of those problems. This laptop is running Win8 pro, and 90% of the time I don't even know it. After booting, it takes a simple click to the Chrome shortcut to get me to the desktop mode, and that's that.
That'd make me happy and I'd be more likely to buy the new version. None of this "upgrade" version nonsense.
what new stuff? boxes arranged in grids was a thing in windows 3.1. . . It was shitty then and it's marginally less shitty now.
Other than that, agreed entirely.
There were some issues with early GFWL games in the consumer preview release, but I believe those have since been fixed. Otherwise, pretty much anything compatible with Win7 is going to be compatible with Win8.
Nope, the new stuff is typing a couple of letters and opening the application. Which works fine on Win7. I haven't opened a start menu in months. Win key+"ste"+enter, and steam is loading. I don't even click on the smart taskbar anymore. I don't use the Modern UI either.
EDIT: But this is the COMPUTER BUILD thread, so I'm gonna go back to topic: I left memtest running overnight, but when I woke up, the machine was on windows, so I guess it rebooted. I was running the "standard" test without any changed settings... I thought it would just repeat the test until I stopped it, so I don't know if my system passed the test and rebooted, or if it crashed on memtest and restarted
I am not too bummed about not having a Retina display, but for a laptop I really think having an SSD would be desireable and advantageous. A co-worker has a friend who can get me a good deal on a 240GB OCZ Deneva 2 C SSD for about $175. The problem is that I can't find anything about this particular drive online in terms of reviews - several places selling them, mostly the larger-capacity ones, and seemingly for significantly higher-than-usual prices even for an SSD.
I know I have read a LOT of failure stories about other OCZ drives like the Vertexes in the past, enough that I would ordinarily rule them out. Also, the Deneva series appears to use a SandForce controller, which is a red flag to me.
Nevertheless, the allure of a deal is strong. Anybody know anything about this OCZ Deneva 2 C, on the off chance it actually isn't a piece of shit?
Hell, with that promo code it's $150. I might have to buy one at that price.
Battle.net
Fuck me... :shock:
So is the 840 series considered to have proved itself now? The 830 in my desktop has served me well enough, even if it's never quite hit the performance specs quoted on the box.
For that price I'm tempted to buy two and put one in the desktop, but the girlfriend needs a Valentine's/birthday present, and moving is expensive...