Quick component check

maloflora

maloflora

maloflora

Associate
Joined
19 Aug 2007
Posts
68
Hi all,


I’ve just upgraded to a GTX 1080ti and I might now be looking to upgrade the rest of the PC around it. This is partly because there are some instability issues on bootup which I think are because of the power supply or motherboard, but also because I want to do justice to the graphics card. I mainly do VR gaming on the Vive.


Current:

Gigabyte Z97x Gaming 7 mobo

Intel i7 4790k

Enthoo Primo case

H110i cooler


Plus the 1080ti

And a five year old 650W PSU



Proposed:

O/C bundle with Gigabyte Ultra Gaming Z370, i7-8700k, 16Gb Ram:
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/defc...4.70ghz-gaming-bundle-bu-0a7-og.html#t=a1b1c5


Corsair 850W Gold PSU – not sure what the different variants do?
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/cors...lar-power-supply-cp-9020180-uk-ca-23v-cs.html


Is the Asetek AIO cooler in the bundle good enough, or should I go for a 240mm AIO cooler like this one?
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/cool...ressable-rgb-cpu-cooler-240mnm-hs-07v-cm.html


All advice very gratefully received! Overall budget, excluding graphics card, ideally below £800-£900.
 
To bundles , first being better value then one you've posted above

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £2,911.67 (includes shipping: £11.70)


Your 280 Corsair CLC should be okay, but worth looking at Eisbaer 360 LT if you do wish to upgrade .

PSU, Focus 650w should do the trick with 10 year warranty

Though again, your current i7 should handle most things bar latest games like BFV /COD/AC:O that do like high thread counts

What's your i7 overclocked to ?.​
 
Thanks for the reply. I'm not overclocking anything at the moment as I'm having trouble booting up quite often and have to reset the bios every time. Hence the upgrade. But if it's not going to make much of a performance difference I might just try and replace the power supply only. That's about 7 years old and might be the problem.
 
maloflora said:
Thanks for the reply. I'm not overclocking anything at the moment as I'm having trouble booting up quite often and have to reset the bios every time. Hence the upgrade. But if it's not going to make much of a performance difference I might just try and replace the power supply only. That's about 7 years old and might be the problem.
Click to expand...

CMOS / mobo battery might be worth swapping out
 
It was a decent psu but it's getting on now, that model launched in 2009. Do you have a spare psu or one you could borrow from somebody? Bit of a long shot but have you looked to see if there is a newer bios version for your board? The latest is F8 which you can download here. If you do need to update it download the bios and put it on a USB stick. Reboot the pc, enter the bios and go to the tools section where you will find the Q-Flash utility. Click on it and follow the instructions, point it to the usb stick and let it do it's thing. It will reset the bios so if you have any settings that need to be changed write them down before flashing.
 
I'm afraid I have no spare psu and have tried the bios update as well! F8 is what's currently running.

Is the advice there wouldn't be much of an upgrade from moving from my current cpu? If so I'll do my best to repair rather than upgrade.
 
I have a 4790k and am not looking at changing it anytime soon. Intels prices are disgraceful and for what it would cost me to upgrade it just isn't worth it for such a relatively small performance increase. As for AMD, for my uses (mainly single threaded gaming) even a overclocked Ryzen 2700x would be a downgrade. It's a decent upgrade if the games that you play make use of the cores because Ryzens multicore performance is much better than Haswell. If you were coming from a Sandybridge set up then I imagine Ryzen would be a nice upgrade but from Haswell neither Intel or AMD platforms are a massive upgrade and for what it would cost that is what they need to be, a massive upgrade. I am personally waiting to see what Ryzen 2 does next year and hope that AMD don't follow the current trend of massively increasing prices.

I would be trying to fix what you have but having no spare parts to swap out could be a problem. Do you have access to a multimeter to test the rails on the psu? It's no good advising that the psu is on the way out only for the new psu to arrive and not fix anything. With the start up instability and having to reset cmos I am leaning more towards the motherboard having a fault. The problem with that is that you are restricted to whatever you can pick up second hand now and decent boards are tending to sell for much more than they cost when new. This is where I contradict myself with what I said earlier because there comes a point where it makes more sense to jump to a new platform rather than spend some serious money on a older one no matter how good it still is. If it is the board and you can get a decent replacement for it for around £100 then I would go for it. Get to £150 and that's getting into silly money for which you could buy a very good AMD AM4 B450 motherboard and have a large chunk of cash left over to put towards DDR4 or a cpu.
 
Silly question maybe, but are you powering up from cold every time? In other words do you leave the system on at the wall, or the I/O switch on the PSU, or are they all turned off, so no +5VSB going to the system board. :)
 
I'd probably remove the discrete GPU, and just use the onboard graphics to see if the system startup issues persists. If it does, then you can be almost sure it is your board (almost, but not entirely) then try re-introducing the discrete GPU to see if the issue comes back.
 
Define `Instability`
Does it hang,crash,just take ages to boot?
Might be worth trying just the OS on another drive
I have had trouble with a faulty hdd hanging at boot,swapped hdd/ssd for different/new problems disappeared :)
 
About 1 time in 2, it POSTs, shows MoBo screen, then shows Windows logo and immediately powers off. I can always get into BIOS with Del, but it's unpredictable whether it goes from BIOS to Windows (10) without powering off. Once it does, there are no problems at all.
 
Hi all,

I've decided to bite the bullet and give myself a nice future-proofed Christmas present by upgrading. I'm going to keep the Enthoo Primo and obviously the 1080 TI and my pre-existing drives. Can I just do a check on these components and make sure they'll play nicely together?

Thanks!

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £1,091.05 (includes shipping: £11.10)
​
 
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