I upgraded my PC in March to a super cool uber rig. Since then, it's been more or less totally crap. I'm sick of it. I am literally close to bundling the whole lot into the bin and buying new.
Lets start this boring tale from the beginning.
Upgraded my previously rock solid (12 week uptimes despite gaming) DFI Lanparty Ultra-D, X850XT PE and Athlon64 3500+ to a nice shiney new Core2Duo system. I replaced EVERYTHING.
My new spec...
Gigabyte DS3 - becuase everyone here said it was 'the dogs'
Core2Duo E4300 - the new bargain overclocker
2Gb of OCZ Platinum - amazing stuff, apparently
8800GTS 320Mb - probably the only part of my system thats actually any good
320Gb WD AAKS 16mb cache SATA HDD.
To start with, it was mostly fine, except it would BSOD every week or so and my favourite game - Armed Assault - ran like a complete dog.
I'd play for 10 minutes, perfectly, with no issues, then suddenly the whole thing would go to pot. 3-4 fps, max, all audio totally distorted, and Teamspeak, distorted. Basically what you'd expect if you tried to run the game on a 486 - a totally overwhelmed PC. The Audio issues were presumably as a result of the machine not really having the remaining capacity to handle the sound properly, hence it even affecting Teamspeak.
Posted on here, lots of suggestions but most people blamed ArmA. I know its a buggy game but it worked fine on the old system. So, I blamed ArmA as well and stopped playing it.
Then the next saga. The BSOD's got worse until they were more or less totally constant.
Posted it all in this thread: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17745141
Eventually I cured this problem by...
Ceasing to use ANY of the PCI Slots in my motherboard. Fantastic. But at least it doesn't BSOD every 30 seconds. Shame I now cannot use a decent soundcard, or have a wireless network. But there we go.
Tried ArmA again last week. new patch. Ran perfectly. Hurrah! Everything maxed out, had hours of fun every night all week. Yay.
Except last night, when completely out of the blue, my crap machine decided I'd had enough fun and bang - the old ArmA problem came back. Play for 5-10 minutes then the whole thing turns into a slideshow.
I give up. I really do. I mean what prompted THAT problem to come back? I've done NOTHING to the machine, ive installed nothing, ive played with nothing, ive fiddled with NOTHING. Yet its back. Infact actually it did reboot itself for no reason whatsoever prior to the ArmA problems returning so its probably related.
I've renistalled Windows so many times I now have to call Microsoft to activate every time I install it. I've tried more driver versions than any other person on this forum.
I am left with no real alternative other than there is some sort of hardware fault thats been present ever since I bought all this kit. And here lies the problem.
I have NO idea what hardware is faulty. Furthermore, even if I did, I've no real way of proving its faulty. It wont show up in testing at the supplier as its intermittant, so there is pretty much nothing I can do with it.
I genuinelly have considered simply taking the motherboard, CPU and memory, popping them in the recycle bin, and buying something completely different.
What else can I do? Personally I think the motherboard is faulty and has been faulty ever since I got it - why else would the PCI Bus be rubbish - but how can I prove this and get a replacement? Infact even if I could prove its of no help to me at all becuase turning my PC off for 3 weeks whilst I send a mobo back for testing and replacement is hardly a realistic solution.
It's certainly not related to any overclocks becuase I've barely had enough time to even try something as fun as overclocking whilst I've been wrestling with the constant problems at stock speed.
Lets start this boring tale from the beginning.
Upgraded my previously rock solid (12 week uptimes despite gaming) DFI Lanparty Ultra-D, X850XT PE and Athlon64 3500+ to a nice shiney new Core2Duo system. I replaced EVERYTHING.
My new spec...
Gigabyte DS3 - becuase everyone here said it was 'the dogs'
Core2Duo E4300 - the new bargain overclocker
2Gb of OCZ Platinum - amazing stuff, apparently
8800GTS 320Mb - probably the only part of my system thats actually any good
320Gb WD AAKS 16mb cache SATA HDD.
To start with, it was mostly fine, except it would BSOD every week or so and my favourite game - Armed Assault - ran like a complete dog.
I'd play for 10 minutes, perfectly, with no issues, then suddenly the whole thing would go to pot. 3-4 fps, max, all audio totally distorted, and Teamspeak, distorted. Basically what you'd expect if you tried to run the game on a 486 - a totally overwhelmed PC. The Audio issues were presumably as a result of the machine not really having the remaining capacity to handle the sound properly, hence it even affecting Teamspeak.
Posted on here, lots of suggestions but most people blamed ArmA. I know its a buggy game but it worked fine on the old system. So, I blamed ArmA as well and stopped playing it.
Then the next saga. The BSOD's got worse until they were more or less totally constant.
Posted it all in this thread: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17745141
Eventually I cured this problem by...
Ceasing to use ANY of the PCI Slots in my motherboard. Fantastic. But at least it doesn't BSOD every 30 seconds. Shame I now cannot use a decent soundcard, or have a wireless network. But there we go.
Tried ArmA again last week. new patch. Ran perfectly. Hurrah! Everything maxed out, had hours of fun every night all week. Yay.
Except last night, when completely out of the blue, my crap machine decided I'd had enough fun and bang - the old ArmA problem came back. Play for 5-10 minutes then the whole thing turns into a slideshow.
I give up. I really do. I mean what prompted THAT problem to come back? I've done NOTHING to the machine, ive installed nothing, ive played with nothing, ive fiddled with NOTHING. Yet its back. Infact actually it did reboot itself for no reason whatsoever prior to the ArmA problems returning so its probably related.
I've renistalled Windows so many times I now have to call Microsoft to activate every time I install it. I've tried more driver versions than any other person on this forum.
I am left with no real alternative other than there is some sort of hardware fault thats been present ever since I bought all this kit. And here lies the problem.
I have NO idea what hardware is faulty. Furthermore, even if I did, I've no real way of proving its faulty. It wont show up in testing at the supplier as its intermittant, so there is pretty much nothing I can do with it.
I genuinelly have considered simply taking the motherboard, CPU and memory, popping them in the recycle bin, and buying something completely different.
What else can I do? Personally I think the motherboard is faulty and has been faulty ever since I got it - why else would the PCI Bus be rubbish - but how can I prove this and get a replacement? Infact even if I could prove its of no help to me at all becuase turning my PC off for 3 weeks whilst I send a mobo back for testing and replacement is hardly a realistic solution.
It's certainly not related to any overclocks becuase I've barely had enough time to even try something as fun as overclocking whilst I've been wrestling with the constant problems at stock speed.