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New cruncher on the way
Cosmic_Ocean:
So back in October 2006, I put together a machine that I planned to make last five years and still be competitive to new stuff that comes along. I went with a 2P Opteron setup. Until the capacitors got tired of full-bore 24/7 for 4.5 years, it was doing a fantastic job of staying competitive. I replaced the bulged caps and that fixed the problem for a few months, but then it came back. Replaced more caps and it didn't change anything at all. I kind of limped along the past three months with anticipation of building a new rig, but the funds didn't cooperate.
Finally got the funds, and went with a nice new setup:
ASRock 970 EXTREME3
AMD FX-6100 Zambezi 3.3GHz
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) x 2
Seems like a pretty nice setup. I kept a lot of my old setup, with the exception of my OS drive (was a PATA 80gb WD Caviar). Boards these days don't have PATA at all, and I've been wanting to move over to SATA for my OS drive anyway. Dug around in my pile of computers and found an 80gb SATA drive. Ran a lot of tests on it and there are zero bad sectors, so that's all I needed. My plan is to use Acronis or something similar and copy it over to this SSD that I plan on getting sometime in the near future, when funds permit.
Then I'll upgrade my 8800GT to something like an HD 6970. I'll also need to go for a new power supply as this one is 5 years old and has been at 50-75% load 24/7. It seems fine, but the potential for failure is getting pretty high. Not to mention that the mobo reports the 12v rail as 11.3, 5v as 4.35, 3.3 as 3.1. Since they're all low, it may just be the board is reporting low, or it could just be that the PSU is getting weak.
So I got it all put together pretty easily. I was ecstatic to see that when you enter BIOS to change settings.. you can use the mouse, and it is 1024x768. That was pretty cool. Disabled Cool'n'Quiet because I'm going to be crunching and need full-speed. After I got Windows installed and pulled up CPU-Z, I noticed I was only running at 1.4GHz. Pulled up something to load the CPU and it jumped to 3.3. So I guess even when you disable cool'n'quiet.. it's still enabled. Might just have to go to the overclocking section and punch in what it should be.
[rant]
So I was hoping to get BOINC installed and start attempting to build an AP-only cache, but there's just too many problems. For starters, I'm going to RMA the board first-thing Monday. During the Windows installation, I had sound coming out of the speakers. Once I was at the desktop, I started installing drivers for everything. After installing the drivers for the onboard sound, I was getting constant balloon notifications about "you have just plugged an audio device in" and "you have just unplugged an audio device." On like half-second intervals. Constantly. Pulled up the Realtek HD Audio Manager and it shows you the ports either bold or faded for occupied/vacant. Well instead of the green port changing states, all six of them were doing all kinds of random state-changes. Unplugged the speakers, and it stopped. Plugged it back in, crazy crap.
My previous board had a screwy issue with the Realtek sound. The drivers from the board manufacturer didn't work right, so I ended up using the reference set from the Realtek website and that fixed it. Figured I'd give that a try this time. Didn't make any difference at all. Uninstalled the sound card in device manager and let it go back to the default windows drivers and that still didn't fix it. I think the board is just defective or something.
In addition to that, I think one of the USB2.0 stacks on the rear panel are defective. I plugged a cord in for my camera (nothing plugged in at the other end), and there was an electrical arc/pop and two of my HDDs spun down and came back up. So that's a bad socket if I can't handle having something plugged in without arcing and shorting out. Also, I have singing capacitors. They are almost silent if I disable the onboard NIC, but the volume and note they sing changes depending on CPU and general system load. I don't know if it is related to the possibly low voltage output from the PSU, but it just seems there's too many problems and I'm not going to just "make do" with it.
I would just contact ASRock about it and try to RMA through them, buuuut.. they just started a Chinese holiday for the next 10 days, so they're entirely useless until the 30th. I'm hoping that if I can RMA it with Newegg on Monday and ship it to them, I can hopefully get the replacement Friday, but that's probably very wishful thinking.
Then during all of my installations and configurations, the OS drive would go into this read/write cycle where the entire system would become unresponsive (even the mouse) for exactly 300 seconds and then be fine again. I disabled about 10 services that are basically entirely useless and it was still doing it. Finally figured out that it was Homegroup. Left the homegroup and disabled the services for that. Problem went away. Of course it didn't help that while I was trying to set up my email accounts in Outlook, Homegroup was doing whatever-the-hell it was doing, and at some point during updates, Windows decided to change my update setting from "check for updates and notify for download and install" to "automatic download and install, with automatic restart". So I'm trying to import my Outlook archive file which was about 1.3gb, .NET 4 is doing an install in the background, and Homegroup is hosing everything up. Damn that was an annoying hour and a half.
[/rant]
So I'm finishing up with installing everything but BOINC and getting everything configured the way I want it. Since it's going to be the same model mobo and all the same hardware, I won't have to worry about starting all over again when the replacement shows up. Also, since I haven't been able to play games for the past 3 months, I'm going to install them but not play them until I get a working replacement board, otherwise it'll just make that week (or so) just pure agony.
Just felt like sharing my woes.
Mike:
Hi cosmic.
I have the 990 FX Extreme 3 with a FX 8150.
Did you update your Bios ?
Also check your settings in Bios.
I couldnīt run it with default settings.
Have set up everything to manual since nearly no value did match requirements.
Mike
Cosmic_Ocean:
Board came with the newest BIOS version already. Regarding the CPU being throttled even though that feature is disabled is one that I will have to manually overclock it to the stock value. However, BIOS settings won't fix the defective USB port and sound card.
Mike:
Regarding CPU throttling you need to disable CPU Load Line Calibration.
Mike
Cosmic_Ocean:
Finally just went through and got the WEI scores. Not bad, but the HDD brings the whole score down.
Processor: 7.3
RAM: 7.6
Graphics: 6.9
Gaming graphics: 6.9
primary disk: 5.4
Haven't done the suggestion for fixing the throttling yet.
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