help and suggestions

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16 Nov 2005
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111
Hi, was hoping some of you might be able to shed some light on my current situation, apologies if its less than technical in explanation or overly long but bear with me as I'm no expert when it comes to computers. :D

Around 2 years ago, in an effort to get some more life out of my p4 2.4 dell computer i decided to take what i could from it and overclock it (which unsurprisingly turned out to be just the cpu and harddisks). The end result, after some helpful advise from some members on this board, was a system made up of the following

antec case
antec smart power 450w supply
asus p4p800e deluxe mobo
2 x 1gb corsair xms4000
winfast a7600 gt
sb x-fi
plus some big ass heatsink and a 120mm fan

somehow i managed to assemble all this and get it to clock at a stable 3.1ghz and everything was dandy until 2 days ago

i don't know if this is worth adding but for completeness sake I'll mention it - for the past 6months or so whenever the computer was running or switched off (with power still connected) it would make a high pitched whine, i always put this down to being related the psu but as it always behaved itself i thought nothing of it

recently while playing games on it, the computer would lock solid with the only way of restarting it
being to hit the reset, i did this maybe 6 or 7 times over the last month. So 2 days ago i did this, the computer power light comes on the hard disk comes on and the fans start, but it wont switch the monitor on or post.

After much head scratching i figured I'd try my old graphics card which didn't cure it, then i set about swapping the corsair sticks for 2 old 256mb generic sticks it booted to windows (after messing with the bios)

so i then tried to see if i had toasted both sticks by trying to alternatively boot with the corsair sticks and as you probably guessed, it would only boot with 1

so my questions are as follows:-

firstly what actually killed the stick
is it actually killed or is there a way to repair it

and finnaly as the everything is knocking on a bit and given that the only serious use is for gaming do
a) attempt to build a new computer using new components assuming that all the components i have are going to be pretty redundant – if so what sort of ballpark figure should i budget for for a reasonable rig to last me the next few years

or

b) keep this for messing around with internet etc. and buy a next gen console (dont hate me ;))

cheers in advance
 
tl;dr :p

The noise was likely coming from a fan, my bet was the PSU fan until I read that it booted after massaging it. I would probably blame the PSU, motherboard, or the RAM itself.

That's a fairly old rig so you could do pretty well to upgrade it. You can get a monster spec'd system, quad core processor, 8800 GTX graphics card, fancy case, for about 800, assuming you reuse HDD, the sound card, and perhaps a few fans or any combination of those. For around 500 you could get a very good system with an 8800 GTS or an HD 2900 Pro and a fast dual core processor. You could probably sell the old components for a fair amount of money if you can test and assure that each works.
 
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