Really need Tech help

[Mortem Desino]

Glad you're getting things sorted out. Newegg generally has been good to me. I got an Antec case + PSU some years ago where the power button was wired improperly. Nearly fried my MoBo and started a small electrical fire.

 

After RMA-ing it, acting as calm and polite as I could, they sent me a new case+PSU by same-day air mail. In the new package were 3 free brand-new 120mm fans to go with the case. Dang cool.

[lost_soul]

The 970a-ud3 is the same board I'm now running... though I will stay away from Bulldozer after what I've read. I equipped it with a X6 1100t on black Friday.

[Baddcog]

New Egg has refunded the mobo and processor for me, got my

 

i52500K and gigabyte Z68AP-D3 mobo in today. So I'll be building tomorrow night and hopefully running solid. More than I wanted and the price was a bit higher but I should be good for awhile.

[ithel]

Remind me not to go in on any hardware with you, Baddcog! You have some seriously bad luck!

[Baddcog]

not until this build

[Bikerdude]

i52500K and gigabyte Z68AP-D3 mobo in today.

Thats a cool little mobo, it even has the m-sata interface onboard. You can use that to plug in an m-sata SSD card to cache your hard drive access. or I think you can even use its as a separate drive.

 

http://www.tweaktown...view/index.html

[ithel]

I use my laptop for both business and gaming. It's a bit over four years old and has served me well (hp pavilion HDX9300..one of the big ones with a 20" screen, weights about 16lbs.). I lug it back and forth to the office every day, no carrying case (can't find one that big). I'm toying with the idea of building a portable machine this year, something with more power but with the same general flexability of a laptop. I'm looking to build as much as I can into this case http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/4436/lian_li_pc_tu200_mini_itx_chassis_review/index8.html We'll see if my budget can keep up with it, heh.

[Baddcog]

A nice Biker,

 

It advertised an SSD HDD cache, but i thought it meant that you just use a regular SSD drive as the cache. Haven't taken the mobo out of the box but the manual does have this slot right below the CPU. They look cheaper than SSD drives too. I'll have to look into it as a future upgrade though. Just need to get this running and it should be much much faster than what i have now so...

 

Got curious and went to new egg to look at specs, read up...

 

And there is a $10 rebate on the mobo, so that helps

 

Looks like those drives are at about $100 now so yeah, future upgrade. Cool to know that I can do that cheap of an upgrae though that should help a lot.

[Baddcog]

ughh

 

Everything seemed just fine putting it together. Put in case knowing it was going to fire up, it didn't so tore it down to a bread board.

 

Now only 1 stick ram, psu, cpu, cpu fan, 4 pin and 24 pin plus the tower power switch are plugged in.

 

When I hit the start button it fires up, cpu fan spins for 2 seconds, it shuts down. restarts (by itself) spins for 2 seconds, shuts down.

 

Getting pretty f'n frustrated here. Why would this setup not work either?

 

It can't be the psu, that thing works fine with my other mobo/cpu and gpu (big gpu).

[Xarg]

Oh man... you're either cursed, or the delivery guy hates your guts. This is prob a silly question, but you are making sure to ground yourself and aren't wearing nylon stocking and jogging on the spot while doing this are you?

[Baddcog]

probably cursed.

 

But i was doing the jitter-bug in my 50's polyester one piece during an electrical storm, you don't think that caused a problem do you?

 

nah, it can't be static. I built my last system, same exact spot, didn't have issues other than no boot menu. Then I rebuilt my old system again after i tore it down, same exact spot and it worked fine...

[Baddcog]

I doubt it's a static thing.

 

I just re-assembled my old system (again) in the same exact spot under the same exact conditions as always. Boots right up no problem.

 

Don't think it's the psu either as this system is fine with it, and this system uses 8 pin cpower cable, the new one has a 4 pin... this one is powering everything, the new system was only the very base build...

 

Guess I'll be taking it to a shop and let him trouble shoot so I don't have to send everything back. This is getting old very fast.

[lost_soul]

Heh, now I have another user's machine here with a hard drive that is going bad. He said Windows started taking forever to boot, and then it would fail to boot entirely, instead launching the repair system. Even when I started it from a Windows CD to repair it, it took forever to load (5-10 minutes). Then I got suspicious and did an HDD test in the BIOS and sure enough...

 

@Badcog: Did you connect the beeper/speaker? It may sound a beep code to tell you what is wrong.

Edited April 2, 2012 by lost_soul

[Baddcog]

Nah, I don't have a case fan, though I'm going to look in a old tower we have here at work I think I may get one from.

 

I took the system to a local shop but he doesn't have any i5 stuff (mobo or cpu) he can crosscheck with.

 

He did test my psu though. It's an Antec 500W neopower (energy efficient model). He said he was only drawing 430 Watts.

 

I'm not sure how that works. Would he only get 430 because that's the base output and it only does 500 if needed to save energy? Or could it be just not putting out full power?

---------

 

I have noticed lately (last couple weeks) that I get shadow artifacts playing TF2. I mainly only play cp_degroot keep these days. Which is melee mode in a small not very well optimized map on 32 person server. So it's a heavy load.

And I randomly get weird shadows flickering across the ground (could be payers overhead), but I've never noticed that in years of playing.

Could it be my card or system just isn't getting the power?

 

--------

He loaned me a 500 watt supply to test with. But arghhh, means another rebuild...

 

From what I understand I can just bread board this and jump the system by using a screw driver on the power pins?

[Baddcog]

Damn, all this over what now appears to have just been a slowly dying PSU.

 

Can't say for sure until I get home and do yet another build but...

 

I just plugged in the PSU he loaned me, breadboarded the mobo/cpu combo and a speaker I found in an ancient tower in the shop basement. Fired it up, the fan stayed on longer but still did the turn off reboot thing along with beep/beep/beep...

 

Stuck one stick of ram in, kicked it with the screw driver again. Beep....whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Fan keeps going, never shuts down.

Restart it two more times, same thing.

 

It continues to run.

 

So for some reason my old psu could keep my old mobo/cpu/gpu/hdd/dvd going. But not even the new mobo/cpu only. (which is supposed to be even more energy efficient.

[Xarg]

That's probably a symptom of capacitor aging. The power supply calculator I use assumes 10% loss of power every year, and you can set it to factor in 50% capacitor aging during the theoretical build test. I imagine your psu is a few years old and just isn't delivering the power anymore, due to said capacitors. That said the i5 and i7 Sandy's should be pretty light on power, have you got an assload of other stuff plugged in too? Maybe the calculator link below can help you.

 

http://www.extreme.o...culatorlite.jsp is what I use when calculating what graphics cards I can upgrade to

 

With a 2600k stock, 4 ram sticks, 1 HD5850 stock,1 HDD, 4 fans, and pretty much nothing else, it says minimum 450w, minimum recommended 500w.

Edited April 3, 2012 by Xarg

[Baddcog]

Yeah I don't really understand it that much but you're probably right. 500 watt, 4 years old, 10% loss... its showing 430 today, probably pretty close.

 

The thing is, and why I really didn't believe it was the psu until now was simply my set-ups.

 

Q6600, 5850, 4 gigs, HDD, DVD and it has been running fine (other than hdd drop out and some off and on shadow glitches in one game on one map)

 

one mobo and cpu (4 gigs of ram or not) and it doesn't even run./ rebuild complete old system - play games.

 

And I never really got any solid advice here or at other forums (tech forums) that really pinpointed it as psu. Just seems to be an odd happening that nobody really expected or thought could happen like it has. Some people did say I should test it but up until now i figured that meant buying a psu, and it just seemed so unlikely.

 

Even the guy at the computer shop today said it might be the psu but it was highly unlikely 'it's probably the mobo or cpu'. But he was also talking to a partner on the phone and said 'it sounds like what our sales comp was doing that one time'.

 

I still the the am3+ systems main issue was the Bios as that's a pretty common known issue atm. But who knows, maybe it was working fine too.

-------------

 

For kicks I calculated the wattage

 

:My old complete system = 357 (give or take for error)

 

The i5 cpu and new mobo, 1 stick ram = 168

 

So you can see it's odd that the complete system will fire up, but the new base build wouldn't.----

----------

 

I've got a SeaSonic 620watt on order though. Might be overkill but i guess i'd rather have that extra buffer/longer life. Plus at $85 on sale it's a good deal, and it's got 5 eggs at newegg with 60 some votes, pretty much all 4 and 5 eggs, no 1's or 2's .

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=17-151-095&SortField=0&SummaryType=0&Pagesize=10&PurchaseMark=&SelectedRating=4&VideoOnlyMark=False&VendorMark=&IsFeedbackTab=true&Keywords=%28keywords%29#scrollFullInfo

 

The main complaints for the 4 eggs are that the main power cables aren't modular. But neither were the 3 on my Antec that I have now. Big deal, one unused cable tucked away at the bottom. Can only take one vid card, but my mobo can only do 4x on crossfire anyway so i wasn't really planning on another card anyway.

[Xarg]

I would imagine that most people wouldn't have assumed it was your power supply, since there seems to be this almost culture, of massively overspeccing psu's for builds. Maybe they plan to sli/xfire later on, but sometimes I cringe when I see someone asking for advice on a build with a 200w graphics card, and a 900w power supply.

 

That aside, I do agree that it makes no sense that your cpu and mobo and ram plugged in wouldn't even boot. You have the curse man. I imagine that even if you replaced absolutely everything, it'd still not work, and damnit if I knew why.

Edited April 3, 2012 by Xarg

[Baddcog]

arghh, I thought I was gettig a refund on my credit card for the FX processor but got store credit at new egg instead. Really could've used that to be taken off the card... oh well...

 

looks like I might be trying out the ol m-sata slot sooner than expected.

 

---edit-------

 

Well, after looking into it...

 

The best price value on the msata is 64g. (lower gigs = higher price). That's about $100 and is a sataII connection.

 

But I can get an internal 64 G SSD with sataIII for the same price.

 

From everything I'm looking at online it seems that even though the msata/Smart Response thing is just coming out on mobo's it's already outdated and a bad concept (or at least not better than just a standard ssd)

I thought it was going to be cool.

Seems it's better just to spend a little more, get a 120 G SSD, throw your operating system on there with programs and forget about the SSD cacheing altogether.

 

But seeing as how I seem to be swimming in HDD's at the moment that probably all work (will be able to test this weekend when the new PSU comes in)... I really don't need another one. This system should be so much faster anyway.

(120 gig main HDD, 320 G game HDD [that I thought died], 40 Gig IDE [will go with back up parts], 500 Gig HDD [i bought from new egg, didn't show, rma'ed and have been setting on it to test but time has now run out], 500 G replacement [ for the last one from WD that they are going to charge me $55 for any day now because I have been troubleshooting so long I missed the ship back date -maybe, maybe tomorrow isn't too late]

 

Unfortunately I ordered the PSU last night, thinking the 'refund' email I got from NewEgg last week meant a CC refund. Today I get the email saying it's store credit.

The guy on the phone had mentioned store credit, but my cell phone died mid convo... then I received the email...

 

So I got $100 to spend and don't need anything now, lol. Speakers? Mouse? Lightbulbs?

---------

edit edit

lol, OMG, I am so confused.

 

Just got an email saying i got a refund to my CC. Did they give me a refund and a gift card?

[Bikerdude]

Unfortunately I ordered the PSU last night, thinking the 'refund' email I got from NewEgg last week meant a CC refund. Today I get the email saying it's store credit.

The guy on the phone had mentioned store credit, but my cell phone died mid convo... then I received the email...

---------

Just got an email saying i got a refund to my CC. Did they give me a refund and a gift card?

 

Double check with your card issuers, as there maybe a marker on thw account for the funds that are going back onto your account. If not send the PSU you back and us the credit note to buy the PSU..

[Baddcog]

Had to post some good news!!!

 

======

I am now installing the drivers and utilites!!!!

 

Had a scare though, seemed like everything was working but could not get my monitor to turn on. The mobo has a HDI slot only for onboard... turns out I just had to jump the CMOS, but Bios only showed up for about 2 seconds so I had to rejump it 4 times before I hit an arrow key before the screen went blank again. (Bios was set to PCI slot, not PCIx16).

[Xarg]

So, bizarre as it sounds, it seems like the new psu has fixed your problems?

[ungoliant]

Damn, all this over what now appears to have just been a slowly dying PSU.

 

I just plugged in the PSU he loaned me, breadboarded the mobo/cpu combo and a speaker I found in an ancient tower in the shop basement. Fired it up, the fan stayed on longer but still did the turn off reboot thing along with beep/beep/beep...

 

Stuck one stick of ram in, kicked it with the screw driver again. Beep....whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

1)I've just got into this thread a while ago, but it seems you've had multiple setups of at least 2 mainboards + other replacements, and still couldn't get past BIOS? that would have to be the PSU.

2) ya no kidding, the 3 long beep code means 'memory not detected' cuz ya had none rams in tha puter. that code seems universal across most mainboards . as long as you keep a working RAM configuration in there, you will not run across that error code again, so it looks like you should be set

Edited April 7, 2012 by ungoliant

[Baddcog]

So, bizarre as it sounds, it seems like the new psu has fixed your problems?

 

yep, still don't understand how one system would run and another wouldn't boot but...

Or how I would come to spend an untold amount of money to fix such a simple problem...

 

But my last few games of TF2 I was getting crackling sounds in the speakers on every played sound, so it seems it degraded slow at first but was getting worse very fast. I guess that's a good PSU for you, it slowly degrades instead of burning up in smoke or just shutting down randomly. (only my second PSU failure, the first was at work. Computer crashed/shut down, big black cloud of smoke)

 

1)I've just got into this thread a while ago, but it seems you've had multiple setups of at least 2 mainboards + other replacements, and still couldn't get past BIOS? that would have to be the PSU.

2) ya no kidding, the 3 long beep code means 'memory not detected' cuz ya had none rams in tha puter. that code seems universal across most mainboards . as long as you keep a working RAM configuration in there, you will not run across that error code again, so it looks like you should be set

1- I wish you would have said that 4 weeks ago

2- ya, that was the first time I had a speaker to plug in. And I figured it would error, but was just trying to get it to stay turned on, which the test psu did. Thing is I wasn't even sure any of the ram was good as it was purchased with the mobo and cpu (1st one) and never got it going... So getting the mobo running without it was just to make sure the ram wasn't part of the issue.

 

-----------

 

This mobo actually came with a suite of programs. A couple anti-viruses and more.

 

One thing is a 'quick OC program'. I OC'ed it to 4.3 (from 3.7) in one second and it ran supper smooth in several rounds of L4D2 already, and TF2. Next I'll use it for a ram OC from 1600 to 1833 (not that I need it).

 

I am running into one annoyance though... Along with Windows I have several programs I have to re-authorize now. I guess the license is tied to the processor during install.

 

But one of my new HD's (the one that's plugged in) is formatted and ready for action.

[ungoliant]

I am running into one annoyance though... Along with Windows I have several programs I have to re-authorize now. I guess the license is tied to the processor during install.

 

I thought that practice was outlawed years ago (in america) when intel tried to pull that shit. maybe i'm wrong, or maybe it was overturned?