The Gamer's Quarter

dhex

first note: i now have an 7800gt and a 3700+ amd single core processor i would like to get rid of. let me know if you're interested.

so i installed my dual core opteron (180) and 8800gts ssc (640mb) today. and i took some photos:

this is what everything looked like beforehand. was getting shitty temps on my old 7800gt. airflow suffered. too many wires and bullshit.

even without the vga blower it looks like a bunch of crap.

thankfully lian li cases are like a blowjob from the tooth fairy - painless to take apart and rework. yeah yeah they're too expensive but whatevs.

so after taking all the power connections out i slid the mb tray out of the main case.

and then i removed the fan and heatsink from the processor.

not that you can really see from this picture but the paste had spread pretty badly. i'm lucky i didn't fuck anything up. (this had run many, many hours since i built it about 2 years ago)

took the old processor out and hey look pins:

and thusly the socket is empty.

moving on, you think that was a heatsink? now this is a heatsink:

holy shit it weighs like 50lb or something.

so the opteron sinks are much easier to install. plus you can't really fuck up plugging in a 939 socket processor unless you're an idiot. it takes no force and can only be plugged in from one direction. i missed a bunch of photos here but that's why i'm not a rockstar internet journalist.

that's the bottom of the heatsink - the heatspreader comes with a thermal pad you have to scrape off if you're going to use another grease or paste. i used ac5 cause that's what i had on hand and honestly it's never done me wrong. a wee dab and we're off to the races.

so i was successful in getting this part done. i cannot stress how much less force this required than the old single core 939 heatsink combo. still frightening with the amount of force you need to put the side latch down (which locks it into the mounting frame) but i got over that rather quick

then came the fun stuff (part 1)

i was honestly frightened by the size of this thing. it's a two slot card, with the second slot is taken up by the exhaust on the mounted heatsink/fan combo.

first snag of the day:

god fuck you video card, fuck you. but i managed to get one thumbscrew into the top mount and it feels super solid, so i'm not worried about the second. but i lost a good 20 minutes trying to strategize my way around this. bah.

joke #2

the card is the length of the motherboard, nearly. on the back of the video card there's a six pin pci-e power connector. of course it's 3mm away from the back of my hdd cage, and sliding everything in and out was a horrible pain in the ass.

but i persevered.

it also made getting this nonsense plugged in a total pain as well.

those are the connections for the power switch, reset and hdd light...that sort of stuff. lian li, being the pimp cadillac of cases, is helpful in bundling everything together in a reasonable manner. god bless their tiny yellow hearts.

so i managed this time to get the cables around in a much better manner. airflow is important, and i know a lot more about it than i did.

toss in the giant blower:

and we're done!

so far my gts temps after a crysis demo speedtests are pretty good - not yet above 70, which is pretty remarkable for air cooling and a card like that. more importantly, i got 55fps average with everything set to medium in crysis. i'm going to test out things like fear and whatnot later on. i also have to check compatibility with a lot of the steam games and a dual core processor. (there are workarounds in both win2k and xp, though i get the feeling i'm going to have to migrate over to just xp eventually.)

all told i'm very happy with this build and it went as smoothly as can be expected. took about two hours total, including the software installation for the new drivers and all that.

and as usual rivatuner is god.
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kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

Thank you for reminding me why I'm a console gamer and treat my PCs like my laptops: no user serviceable parts inside, 'cept maybe a hard drive.
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dhex · Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2007 2:08 pm Post subject:

why? this stuff is awesome!
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kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

It's just the "interestingness" to "pain in the ass" ratio seems way out of whack.

Interestingness, not as a judgement of your phoojournal, which is pretty ok, but I find software has a lot more potential for being interesting than hardware, which just seems to get in the way.

I'm just bitter from getting my ass handed to me in my newly networked dorm, Duke Nukem 3D, my trusty 486-16 against all the freshman punks shiny new pentiums.
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dhex · Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2007 3:11 pm Post subject:

eh, it's just stuff. software is far more annoying, at least in terms of the amount of hours i've spent trying to fix stuff. hardware follows mostly simple rules. do a bit of reading and i guarantee nearly anyone could do it. (unless they had no arms or something)

of course i can understand not wanting to, in the same way i never really learned that much about cars despite my dad being a pretty good mechanic. just never got very interested in driving and whatnot.
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kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

DaleNixon · . Joined: 08 Jul 2005 Posts: 179

I had more fun with computer hardware back when I had my PowerMac G3 in 1998. I got the 266MHz processor up to 400 MHz with no additional cooling! (and it didn't even have a fan on it). I overclocked the 66MHz bus to 83MHz and put PC100 in! I bought a 3dfx Voodoo 3 and flashed it with beta firmware for use in a Macintosh (little endian vs. big endian). I bought a 17" CRT that went up to 1600x1200!

Things just aren't exciting to me anymore in the realm of computers Sad

. I've currently got an Athlon X-2 5600+ and a 7800 GT and all that but where's the soul?

I'm not trying to shit up your thread dhex. And I really appreciate your enthusiasm. I wish I could get more excited about computers these days... maybe a fault of me making a career out of sitting at a computer.
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kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

I like the parallels of modders and ricers.
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dhex · Posted: Thu Dec 13, 2007 11:49 am Post subject:

some of the water cooling systems lack only wheels and the singularity would be complete. blacklight tubing, acrylic cases, etc.

ryan · . Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 999

I always enjoy the surge in research whenever I'm getting ready to upgrade. I generally ignore everything for a few years, then for a month or two I'll have 8 tabs up, all day, on different tech sites trying to figure out the new terminology and products. The system I'm on now is the first one I built myself, and I really enjoyed the trial and error process. The only thing I'm curious about now is my RAM, due to a blue screen IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL crash and that Vista has my 2 gigs at 54% when my system is idle.

I ran a CheckItDiagnostics test on the RAM but it showed everything as being fine. It's only in cases like this, where I feel pretty lost, that I get irked. Still, it was a fun process and I like knowing exactly what's what in there.
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dhex · Posted: Thu Dec 13, 2007 12:05 pm Post subject:

man vista seems 3 flavors of shit.
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ryan · . Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 999

Yeah, I actually don't use it. I bought Vista Ultimate when I was upgrading, but partitioned my drive into two parts of 150 gigs each, with XP Professional SP2 and Vista Ultimate. The only thing I've ever done in Vista was log in to see what it looked like, fiddle with the weather thing and add a photo to the side slideshow deal.
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kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

Getting a B+W HP Laserjet to work with Vista just wasn't happening.

I guess technically it's a "software" problem, but I think device drivers are in that evil no man's land.
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ryan · . Joined: 20 Feb 2005 Posts: 999

Oh yeah, Vista screws that up hard. I think it's HP? maybe Canon? where none of their printers work with Vista. I guess that has been fixed, though. I went to look up which company is was, but a search for printers not working with Vista brings up every manufacturer there is, even little Lexmark.
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dhex · Posted: Thu Dec 13, 2007 3:24 pm Post subject:

source engine issues fixed with 162.62 drivers. even with AA enabled. no idea why.
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parkbench · . Joined: 02 Jul 2007 Posts: 145

dhex · Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2007 10:33 am Post subject:

it definitely helped me understand from an early age how x fit into y and whatnot. i used to get hand me down pcs from 4 or 5 years behind the curve from my aunt, many of which would act weird for no good reason. i had no idea of course that a dual 5.25 disk drive tandy wasn't the coolest thing ever. plus when you take something apart you learn to put it back together right quick.
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kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

I guess it's cool that PCs aren't as blackbox as other electronics in our lives...
but still, I do buy these desktops that are about as compactly assembled as a laptop so I have fewer options.

That said, I *really* need to figure out what's causing this power short that causes my computer to auto-power-down... if it's something in the wall, the plugs, or the PC itself...
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dhex · Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2007 11:56 am Post subject:

well that's what we're here for:

when does the power shut off?
is it random? does it happen when you're doing something fancy pants?
do you get a BSOD or any kind of error message or is it more like "i'm gonna go reboot now so fuck y'all" type stuff?
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Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Your Source engine problems were crazier than mine! They look more awesome though. I was just getting flickering.

dhex · Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2007 12:15 pm Post subject:

Shapermc · Hot Sake! Joined: 14 Oct 2004 Posts: 6279

Hm, interesting.

My card normally runs at about 46 degrees when it's not doing anything. It gets going and hits 60 no problem with anything that's new or with the settings on everything cranked up. The thing is that I played through the Crysis demo twice before I realized that my vid card was heating up and only staying at 30% fan speeds. I should have melted this card and didn't. That's pretty impressive to me.
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kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

parkbench · . Joined: 02 Jul 2007 Posts: 145

So it's only when you start a program? Sounds like an HD issue to me...though what do I know? It's just that I used to have a similar problem with my desktop--leaving it on was fine but the moment I launched any programs that were accessing off the main drive things would freeze up or crash. It was because my HD was stups. So it might be that.

Try running anything off an ext or a thumb drive and see if it still happens.

kirkjerk · . Joined: 12 Apr 2006 Posts: 1227

dhex · Posted: Fri Dec 14, 2007 3:34 pm Post subject:

power supply or hd would be my first guess. can you defrag it or copy large batches of files without it flipping out, or does it seem random?

if it's random it's probably the power supply.
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