well its 3:40am and I think that I may just about be heading towards being able to rebuild my new machine for the 2nd time and hopefully it'll work..
I've got a new DQ6, 6600 C2D (that i hope to overclock quietly up to something fairly meaty), the recommended geil memory at the start of this thread, an EVGA Geforce 8800 GTX, corsair 620 watt PSU (rebadged seasonic), scythe ninja heatsink, all ready to live in the new Antec P180 case (sans internal pc speaker to actually beep at me and tell me something!!!
).
I've spent most of the day carefully building the thing, come about 8-9pm i took it to its living place and tried turning it on.. at first i was getting uber squarking coming out of the 8800 GTX, which i think was down to the pci express outs from the PSU not being in properly... really hard to fit them all down there next to the p180s fan.
This seemed to fix it and then i got onto the meat of the DQ6 related problems... quite simply it would only turn on for about 3-4 seconds and then it'd poweroff, bizarely it would then turn itself on about 3 seconds later, and the whole cycle would repeat.
I looked at this thread and it pretty much informed my shopping cart.. I thought most problems were down to not well matched memory with the board, hence why i brought the geil ram...
Somehow in the hunt for the problem i forgot to really look over this thread again, and even now i've not had chance to read through it all.. I was being told perhaps its the chip thats not being cooled properly, or its the SATA drivers, or its the memory... in the end i undid 3 hours work and pulled it all out of the case again.. my careful attitude was falling away as the frustration increased... I got the motherboard down to itself no CPU... this would spin the fans for as long as you wanted it to do... add a cpu and it would be back to the old behaviour.
Being really focused on the cpu cooling i refitted the sink about 15 times... i even resorted to trying out the stock heatsink as it was much easier to access the push pins. I'm still not sure but i found the cover for the chip perhaps being a bit too high.. i often got the feeling that pressing to click as far down as possible in one corner of the heatsink would raise the opposite corner a little - almost as if it just couldn't be pushed flat enough, if this was the case obviously the cooling would be buggered.
Finally in desperation someone (sorry i've closed my irc app now and can't remember your name) on the overclockers irc channel gave me some suggestions.. perhaps the clear cmos jumper was enabled (it wasn't), and i guess he did a browse/search on this forum and gave me some inspirational reminders of other people having big issues... as he'd typed this to me i'd tried one last time... i flipped out the battery on the MB, just as i'd been doing this the other day with my old MB that died, trying to revive it... at the same time I tried putting a stick of memory in (i'd been running with CPU only for the longest time) ... The following boot attempt worked.. i returned to the irc channel to read the stories of problems cold booting, due to bios potentially and a lot of it clicked...
I also managed to ascertain that the motherboard + CPU - memory would do this booting, powerdown, rebooting cycle i described above... I dont know whether somehow i'd managed to fix the heatsink mating with the CPU by rejigging the socket CPU holder a little, and recleaning the chip again.. or perhaps i cleared the bios a little by pulling the battery..
All i know now is that its fans are powering up for as long as need be... ive just got to rebuild the thing into the case again tomorrow and hope it survives the trip.
Sorry to rant a lot, its just killed me the last 5 hours or so, i figured maybe an account of the madness may help someone else in the future.. I'm not out of the woods yet, but perhaps the chip, motherboard, memory, gfx card aren't faulty somewhere down the line...
If anyone has any tips after reading this, i'd really appreciate it.. if i actually get it running then i guess i can try and install windows (will it need raid drivers to install to its disks?) and also start to look into overclocking potential of the chip, case, cooling ... The setup for this generation of chips are also a bit new to me, so i'll have to reread to be sure i get my memory working 1:1 or whatever its called. On the overclock front i've heard some explanations of trying with is it a low multiplier first, whats the best rule of this?
Need to sleep, hopefully not to have nightmares, or to wake to more of them
Cheers
I've got a new DQ6, 6600 C2D (that i hope to overclock quietly up to something fairly meaty), the recommended geil memory at the start of this thread, an EVGA Geforce 8800 GTX, corsair 620 watt PSU (rebadged seasonic), scythe ninja heatsink, all ready to live in the new Antec P180 case (sans internal pc speaker to actually beep at me and tell me something!!!
).I've spent most of the day carefully building the thing, come about 8-9pm i took it to its living place and tried turning it on.. at first i was getting uber squarking coming out of the 8800 GTX, which i think was down to the pci express outs from the PSU not being in properly... really hard to fit them all down there next to the p180s fan.
This seemed to fix it and then i got onto the meat of the DQ6 related problems... quite simply it would only turn on for about 3-4 seconds and then it'd poweroff, bizarely it would then turn itself on about 3 seconds later, and the whole cycle would repeat.
I looked at this thread and it pretty much informed my shopping cart.. I thought most problems were down to not well matched memory with the board, hence why i brought the geil ram...
Somehow in the hunt for the problem i forgot to really look over this thread again, and even now i've not had chance to read through it all.. I was being told perhaps its the chip thats not being cooled properly, or its the SATA drivers, or its the memory... in the end i undid 3 hours work and pulled it all out of the case again.. my careful attitude was falling away as the frustration increased... I got the motherboard down to itself no CPU... this would spin the fans for as long as you wanted it to do... add a cpu and it would be back to the old behaviour.
Being really focused on the cpu cooling i refitted the sink about 15 times... i even resorted to trying out the stock heatsink as it was much easier to access the push pins. I'm still not sure but i found the cover for the chip perhaps being a bit too high.. i often got the feeling that pressing to click as far down as possible in one corner of the heatsink would raise the opposite corner a little - almost as if it just couldn't be pushed flat enough, if this was the case obviously the cooling would be buggered.
Finally in desperation someone (sorry i've closed my irc app now and can't remember your name) on the overclockers irc channel gave me some suggestions.. perhaps the clear cmos jumper was enabled (it wasn't), and i guess he did a browse/search on this forum and gave me some inspirational reminders of other people having big issues... as he'd typed this to me i'd tried one last time... i flipped out the battery on the MB, just as i'd been doing this the other day with my old MB that died, trying to revive it... at the same time I tried putting a stick of memory in (i'd been running with CPU only for the longest time) ... The following boot attempt worked.. i returned to the irc channel to read the stories of problems cold booting, due to bios potentially and a lot of it clicked...
I also managed to ascertain that the motherboard + CPU - memory would do this booting, powerdown, rebooting cycle i described above... I dont know whether somehow i'd managed to fix the heatsink mating with the CPU by rejigging the socket CPU holder a little, and recleaning the chip again.. or perhaps i cleared the bios a little by pulling the battery..
All i know now is that its fans are powering up for as long as need be... ive just got to rebuild the thing into the case again tomorrow and hope it survives the trip.
Sorry to rant a lot, its just killed me the last 5 hours or so, i figured maybe an account of the madness may help someone else in the future.. I'm not out of the woods yet, but perhaps the chip, motherboard, memory, gfx card aren't faulty somewhere down the line...
If anyone has any tips after reading this, i'd really appreciate it.. if i actually get it running then i guess i can try and install windows (will it need raid drivers to install to its disks?) and also start to look into overclocking potential of the chip, case, cooling ... The setup for this generation of chips are also a bit new to me, so i'll have to reread to be sure i get my memory working 1:1 or whatever its called. On the overclock front i've heard some explanations of trying with is it a low multiplier first, whats the best rule of this?
Need to sleep, hopefully not to have nightmares, or to wake to more of them
Cheers
