Back in Febuary, I felt like I had a bunch of money burning a hole in my pocket, so I dropped it on a computer for heavy duty gaming business. Bleh.
Heres what I built:
Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DS5 AM2 MB
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ 3.2GHz (Windsor) CPU
4x 1GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 1066
4x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB HDD
Highpoint RocketRAID 3510 (added later)
PC P&C 750W PS
ATi Radeon HD 3870
Creative X-Fi
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit
Pretty good at first, loved the speed. Then a couple weeks later I started having crashes until finally it would not boot, ran some tests, bad stick of ram. Pulled the offending stick and kept chugging.
Within about a week of that all 4 sticks were bad. Im thinking, okay, I got a bad lot. Mind you I played with the timings some, but never touched the voltage beyond setting it to Crucial's recommended, 2.1V. I purchased 2GB of Corsair ram until I could get the Crucial stuff replaced under warranty. While I was trying to sort out the RAM business, I discovered what appeared to be two bad hdds. I initally had the 4 seagates in 0+1 on the onboard RAID. I took them off the onboard RAID and tested them, they were good. Appearantly, the cheap onboard controller likes to loose sync with the HDDs. I bought the highpoint controller at this point and set them up as a RAID 5. Works good now, pretty much trouble free except occasionally the BIOS does not find it and complains about no boot disk. Usually a reboot fixes this.
I finally got the ram back from crucial and install it.
About a month later that stuff was toast as well.
I threw in 2GB on OCZ DDR2 800 that was incompatible with another machine to get it running again.
In the mean time, I built another machine using a free 3.2GHz HT pentium 4 and a old copy of windows XP home. The rest of the essentials ran me $360. I used the Corsair DDR2 from the other machine after I got the Crucial stuff back.
The kicker, I swear the P4 machine is faster at everything except at something that requires a lot of raw graphics power, and I suspect only because I spent about $80 on the card for the P4 machine.
Now my latest problem is it refuses to see the Highpoint, will not boot. I shut it off and have not touched it for 3 weeks. I have not done any diagnostics to find the source of the problem. I swear if it burned another 2GB of ram I will take the thing sans HDD setup and PS and put a series of 9mm holes in it...
Sorry, had to rant.
Heres what I built:
Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-DS5 AM2 MB
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ 3.2GHz (Windsor) CPU
4x 1GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 1066
4x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB HDD
Highpoint RocketRAID 3510 (added later)
PC P&C 750W PS
ATi Radeon HD 3870
Creative X-Fi
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit
Pretty good at first, loved the speed. Then a couple weeks later I started having crashes until finally it would not boot, ran some tests, bad stick of ram. Pulled the offending stick and kept chugging.
Within about a week of that all 4 sticks were bad. Im thinking, okay, I got a bad lot. Mind you I played with the timings some, but never touched the voltage beyond setting it to Crucial's recommended, 2.1V. I purchased 2GB of Corsair ram until I could get the Crucial stuff replaced under warranty. While I was trying to sort out the RAM business, I discovered what appeared to be two bad hdds. I initally had the 4 seagates in 0+1 on the onboard RAID. I took them off the onboard RAID and tested them, they were good. Appearantly, the cheap onboard controller likes to loose sync with the HDDs. I bought the highpoint controller at this point and set them up as a RAID 5. Works good now, pretty much trouble free except occasionally the BIOS does not find it and complains about no boot disk. Usually a reboot fixes this.
I finally got the ram back from crucial and install it.
About a month later that stuff was toast as well.
I threw in 2GB on OCZ DDR2 800 that was incompatible with another machine to get it running again.
In the mean time, I built another machine using a free 3.2GHz HT pentium 4 and a old copy of windows XP home. The rest of the essentials ran me $360. I used the Corsair DDR2 from the other machine after I got the Crucial stuff back.
The kicker, I swear the P4 machine is faster at everything except at something that requires a lot of raw graphics power, and I suspect only because I spent about $80 on the card for the P4 machine.
Now my latest problem is it refuses to see the Highpoint, will not boot. I shut it off and have not touched it for 3 weeks. I have not done any diagnostics to find the source of the problem. I swear if it burned another 2GB of ram I will take the thing sans HDD setup and PS and put a series of 9mm holes in it...
Sorry, had to rant.
