New gaming rig, couple of questions

J

Jared701

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
May 9, 2002
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1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc

Gaming

2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?

500

3) Where do you live?

Kansas City, MO

4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc. The word "Everything" is not a valid answer. Please list out all the parts you'll need.

cpu, motherboard, cpu cooler and dvd burner

5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.

antec 1200 case, bfg es800w power supply, planning on getting 2500k cpu, bought gskill ripjaw 2x4gig ram that was on sale today, radeon 6970 video card

6) Will you be overclocking?

yes

7) What size monitor do you have and/or plan to have?

3 23" 1080p monitors

8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC?

Within the month

9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? USB 3.0? SATA 6Gb/s? eSATA? Onboard video? etc.

SATA 6gb/s would be nice but not 100% necessary, crossfire ability with 2 spots between cards (1 that would be empty to help reduce noise if I crossfire in the future). USB 3.0, raid, firewire, esata are all not necessary.

10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If yes, what OS? Is it 32bit or 64bit?

windows 7 64 bit pro


I already purchased the ripjaw memory and have read that the sandy bridge motherboards are very finicky about what memory is used with them. I'm wondering what my best options are for the motherboard. I've read positive things about the H60 cooler? I believe that's what it was called. I live near a microcenter and they seem to have almost weekly deals of buying a motherboard/cpu combo and getting 40$ off the purchase price. That with the price on the i5 of 180 makes it an almost unbeatable deal. I've read the power supply forum a decent amount and it appears that my power supply should be good enough to handle crossfire of 2 6970s for in the future but can anyone confirm or deny that? Thanks in advance for any help offered.
 
Motherboard wise, take a look at the MSI P67A-G43, P67A-GD55, or P67A-GD65 depending on availability. HSF wise, yes the Corsair H60 is a good cooler. Your PSU will be good for HD 6970 Crossfire. A tad close but should be fine.
 
How old is the PSU? That would be a contributing factor. Those 6970's are power hogs. I had the same exact PSU, and it ran a 5870 and 2x5830s fine, but adding a 5770 would power it down. This was with an 80w cpu.

You'll have 65a on the 12v rail. If you figure the theoretical max limit on a 6970 of 300w, that is 600, plus the 95w (plus overclocking, 125ish) cpu, gives you 725w- 725/12= 60.4a which, as Danny said would be cutting it close if the PSU were brand new. With capacitor aging, you will be even closer.


That being said, what games are you playing? Even with the high texture packs and dx11 pack installed on crysis 2, everything set to Ultra and 1920x1200, I was playing at 45+ fps with my single 6970/2600k. I guess the triple monitor setup will eat up gpus, but honestly I would pick up a PSU before a second 6970. No, no more fps, but a lot more stability. Also, if that BFG is older (since they are no longer in business, I would guess it is), you may want to check fluctuations on the rails. You'll likely see a lot more variation than you would in a new Corsair or similar. This will lead to lesser overclocks.

As far as DVD burners go, I'd go ahead and buy this one-
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827136238

At $19 with free shipping, you can't beat it.

The H60 is a great cooler. If your bestbuy has any H50's left on clearance, I would probably do that to save some money, but you won't go wrong with either of them.
 
Mr34727 said:
How old is the PSU? That would be a contributing factor. Those 6970's are power hogs. I had the same exact PSU, and it ran a 5870 and 2x5830s fine, but adding a 5770 would power it down. This was with an 80w cpu.

You'll have 65a on the 12v rail. If you figure the theoretical max limit on a 6970 of 300w, that is 600, plus the 95w (plus overclocking, 125ish) cpu, gives you 725w- 725/12= 60.4a which, as Danny said would be cutting it close if the PSU were brand new. With capacitor aging, you will be even closer.


That being said, what games are you playing? Even with the high texture packs and dx11 pack installed on crysis 2, everything set to Ultra and 1920x1200, I was playing at 45+ fps with my single 6970/2600k. I guess the triple monitor setup will eat up gpus, but honestly I would pick up a PSU before a second 6970. No, no more fps, but a lot more stability. Also, if that BFG is older (since they are no longer in business, I would guess it is), you may want to check fluctuations on the rails. You'll likely see a lot more variation than you would in a new Corsair or similar. This will lead to lesser overclocks.

As far as DVD burners go, I'd go ahead and buy this one-
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827136238

At $19 with free shipping, you can't beat it.

The H60 is a great cooler. If your bestbuy has any H50's left on clearance, I would probably do that to save some money, but you won't go wrong with either of them.
Click to expand...

The power supply is 3-4 years old. What is the best software to use to check the rails? I know I can do that in the bios but not sure if I can do that in windows. What symptoms would my system show if the power supply is unable to draw enough power? Instability? Just shutting down? It will likely be a few months before I would get a second 6970. Running 5760x1080 seems to push gaming WAY harder than 1 monitor does. I've read that crossfire almost doubles performance in most games so seems well worth it when I can afford it. I'd like to at least try it with this power supply before buying another one if this isn't enough.
 
Danny Bui said:
Motherboard wise, take a look at the MSI P67A-G43, P67A-GD55, or P67A-GD65 depending on availability. HSF wise, yes the Corsair H60 is a good cooler. Your PSU will be good for HD 6970 Crossfire. A tad close but should be fine.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the recommendations. So far I've only checked out the GD65 but it appears to be a good board and is available at microcenter. Now I just need them to have the sale again. I still need to do more research on the H60 vs air coolers. Does it seem to perform as well as or better than most of the best air coolers on the market? Until today I actually had never looked at it and didn't know that the H60 was a water cooling system. I read up on it some today though and found that it's supposed to be self sustaining so I shouldn't need to change the liquid. Does anyone know how long it is supposed to last for like that? I would'nt want to kill my cpu by thinking there was still liquid in the cooler and it had burned up or something like that.
 
Jared701 said:
The power supply is 3-4 years old. What is the best software to use to check the rails? I know I can do that in the bios but not sure if I can do that in windows
Click to expand...
No software in the world, no matter how much it costs or how accurate everyone says it is does not provide correct PSU voltage readings. Not even the BIOs. You need to use a Digital Multimeter, an actual device, in order to check PSU voltage properly. Software PSU voltage reading is just as accurate as asking your family what the voltages are.
Jared701 said:
What symptoms would my system show if the power supply is unable to draw enough power? Instability? Just shutting down?.
Click to expand...
Instability, shutting down, hardware becoming and staying defective, and sometimes just a dead PC altogether.

Jared701 said:
I've read that crossfire almost doubles performance in most games so seems well worth it when I can afford it. I'd like to at least try it with this power supply before buying another one if this isn't enough.
Click to expand...
Not 50% often but more along the lines of 30% to 40% on average.

Jared701 said:
Does it seem to perform as well as or better than most of the best air coolers on the market?
Click to expand...
It can hold its own against some of the best air coolers on the market. But there are a few air coolers that would beat the H60 in cooling IIRC.
Jared701 said:
Does anyone know how long it is supposed to last for like that? I would'nt want to kill my cpu by thinking there was still liquid in the cooler and it had burned up or something like that.
Click to expand...
Not sure.
 
Danny Bui said:
Instability, shutting down, hardware becoming and staying defective, and sometimes just a dead PC altogether.
Click to expand...


I suck at quoting but I wanted to ask about this part. This power supply is 3-4 years old right now. I had my Q9550 overclocked to 3.65 for all this time until about 3 months ago with absolutely no issues. I then started getting random crashes and found out that my chip was severely overheating. I had thoroughly tested this setup when I first configured it and the system had been stable and not overheating since I started it (that I know of, and if it was overheating not enough to cause crashes). I set everything back to factory defaults and my cpu is still not nearly stable. It's not overheating anymore but 2 of the cores error in prime95 within 10 minutes saying fatal hardware error. My computer now keeps randomly BSODing and simply shutting down without a BSOD message. Are these likely signs that my power supply could be dying? I wouldn't want to keep the same power supply with new parts and fry them if that could be a likely result.

Edit: All of these problems seem to have started shortly after installing the 6970 video card into my system. I'm guessing that means my power supply is probably SoL :(
 
Have you tried downgrading the video card? I.e swapping in your old card?
 
So if I tried that and my cpu no longer errored on prime95 than it would prove that it was the power supply. If it still errors though then it would simply be inconclusive right? You said that a bad power supply could cause permanent damage to the card.

Edit: I have not tried that yet.
 
Jared701 said:
So if I tried that and my cpu no longer errored on prime95 than it would prove that it was the power supply. If it still errors though then it would simply be inconclusive right? You said that a bad power supply could cause permanent damage to the card.
Click to expand...

If it still errors, yes it would be inconclusive at that point until additional testing is done (i.e swapping out the PSU or CPU or even the motherboard)
 
I ended up going ahead and buying an i2500k, P67 GD65 and H60 cooler. I installed and everything booted up fine, updated windows fine. I ran prime95 blend test for 2 hours and warmest any of the cores ever got was 53. So far so good.

I then set it up to do a blend torture test overnight and went to bed. Today I go to check on it and the computer is turned off. I had not set coretemp to keep a log of tempurature yet so have nothing to go on for why this happened. When I booted into windows I got the message that an error occured, typical message indicating a failure and not windows installing updates I had missed.

While checking things the lights flickered some in that room and my directv box restarted during the flickering. I checked another directv box in another room and it had not restarted. I believe whatever power issue was isolated to that area of the house. No clocks were blinking when I got up so I do not know if the power issue I saw today had been happening during the night also and this could have shut down the computer (computer did not go off when directv box reset itself).

I believe I can safely narrow problem down to my power supply or a fluctuation in power that caused this shut down. I'm simply not sure what to do to test this and do not want to do damage this my new components if it is the power supply. I do not have my machine on a UPS but do have it on a surge protector and grounded. I do not normally have power issues and fluctuations so not sure that was going on and if that could have been happening overnight also. Should I simply try to do another prime95 run for several hours to see what happens? Everything on the system is stock settings so far.

Edit: I have the system shut down right now to prevent problems in case the power supply is slowly killing parts.
 
If you have a spare PC, use that BFG PSU with that spare PC, run the tests over night and see what happens
 
Danny Bui said:
If you have a spare PC, use that BFG PSU with that spare PC, run the tests over night and see what happens
Click to expand...

Did this with an i3 2100, micro H61 motherboard, single hdd attached, geforce 260 and no case fans and the system ran for 12 hours with no errors. I'm wondering if I should swap the 6970 into this computer to tax the power supply more and run the test again? Or should I go ahead and hook the power supply back up in my computer and try the test again?
 
Danny Bui said:
Swap the HD 6970 in.
Click to expand...

Did that and ran prime95 for 12 hours. Everything was still fine. At this point I'm starting to wonder if it was just a power fluctuation fluke in my home and that's what turned off the computer. I have both computer hooked back up like normal now and running prime95 again with my new components.
 
Danny Bui said:
Wouldn't be out of the ordinary.
Click to expand...

Danny Bui, thank you for all of your help on this. I thought about not posting what had happened but should admit when I did something dumb so so you know how this turned out. I had reinstalled windows 7 and the default setting for power saving is to have the computer sleep after an hour. I'm not sure how exactly I pushed the power to make it start up again in the bios instead of simply waking up the computer from sleep but I'm almost certain that's all that had happened. I just ran prime95 for 12 hours with the cpu overclocked to 4gig on stock voltage and it passed so everything seems to be running great. I think I'll just leave it at 4gig and not overvolt it because I'm assuming I simply overvolted my last processor too much and did permanent damage to it over the 3+ years it was overvolted.
 
Haha.

Don't worry man, a lot of computer issues tends to boils down to small acts of stupidity. Any computer builder will have similar stories to you :)

Anyway, glad to see to that your issue has been resolved.
 
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