Hardware compatibility when upgrading several components

carrierPigeon

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 22, 2017
Messages
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I am not up to speed on the current PC building environment. However, I was reading an article that was talking about how your components need to be compatible/ stable when combined in a build. In other words, if your computer consists of 7 parts, even if all of the parts work fine, the 7 of them combined might basically have hardware problems. Perhaps that's an elementary lesson to some of you. But, at best, that was something that was buried deep in my mind from several years ago.

Here is the article:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/is-your-computer-stable/

I have upgraded my graphics card, ram, and hard drive. I have also put in and taken out a new power supply a few times (defective, and then I was concerned it was causing some problems that I was experiencing).

How far down in your list of upgrades do you have to go before you need to start thinking of the machine as a new build, instead of a "no thought" upgrade?

In the process of doing upgrades, I ran into a lot of problems. Mysteriously, the problems disappeared after really no changes, just trying it again and again (taking hardware out and putting it back in a month later).
 
seems a little over kill. when you build a new system, build it outside the case first, test it with prime95, memtest and some games. you can run a quick check on the drive with the oems software if you want but if the os installs fine the drive is usually fine. once you replace all the parts its a new system but not a new build. last bit sounds like something wasn't seated properly.
 
Those days are mostly gone as there's a lot of standards that everyone adheres to these days. The chances that you run into that odd quirk where things don't work together happen more when you've got components from vastly different generations. And even then, most of the time it will just simply work. (y)

Now, the 'removing and reinstalling' issue that you described is something I've seen more of as some of the quality of stuff has gotten a bit too cheap. Nevertheless, as you noticed, just 'trying again' pretty much solves it.
 
My take is that if you replace the motherboard with a different model, it's best to reinstall your operating system from scratch. I have a separate partition for the OS and my data is on another partition so I can do this easily.

I don't think it's necessary to go to any rigorous testing. If you want to overclock then test programs become useful but otherwise I would just use the computer normally and if it crashes you can start looking for the cause.
 
Good point about the motherboard. Generally, you'll be lucky if it boots when changing major things like this unless drivers are found upon boot. I'm sure you could install the drivers first and then swap boards, but that may not always work.

I've had good luck though with swapping components from disparate systems, even as far as taking out a boot drive of another system and putting it straight into a newly built system. After some bios tweaks, I got it to boot successfully.
 
Those days are mostly gone as there's a lot of standards that everyone adheres to these days.

That's what I thought too, but AMD has brought those days back with Ryzen and memory compatibility.
 
The last motherboard combo I bought that had issues working together was a KT7A-RAID mobo and a V7700 Video card.

That's been awhile, lol.

I ended up having to overclock it slightly to work (135MHz bus, iirc); that was Exactly the last thing I tried, before I was going to give up, and buy a new video card.

Everything worked, separately. System booted fine with a 4mb S3 card, lol.

All the mobos I buy now are ASUS, never had any more issues getting one to even boot.

They may not overclock the way I want, necessarily; my P6TD Deluxe won't set a multiplier over 22 on my Xeon 5670. :)
Otherwise, it's running 4.4GHz at 55 degrees C full load, where a i7-920 was running 80C.
 
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