Throwing in the Towel

M

Markyip1

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Feb 12, 2007
Messages
1,257
Hey guys,

Happy to be back once again, but a bit of troubling news this time and I'm in need of some advice.

After seven+ months of trouble free use with my P7N Diamond 780i motherboard, I woke up today to see that my system has blue screened. The issue appears to be RAID related -- several days ago I started noticing "Critical Access Failure" messages in my system tray, which I more or less disregarded because it would occur my on 680i boards from time to time but would never prove to be a problem.

There certainly seems to be something going on this time. Ever since recovering from the blue-screen, Vista has been unstable. The Critical Access Failure message appears more frequently and the system will freeze after a few minutes of use. I'm in the process of doing an emergency back up, but I have yet to find the cause of the issue. I certainly hope a driver and BIOS update will fix it. I haven't tweaked my system in a few months and I'm definitely behind on BIOS updates. At the worst, it's hardware related -- likely a failing MCP (the drives themselves don't appear to be the issue) -- and I'm wondering whether or not I've succumbed to the dreaded 780i Data Corruption Issue.

I'm finally ready to join the bandwagon and call it quits with nVidia, and a part of me wants to sell my GTXes and buy a 4870 right now. If I were to do this, all I'd want is to maintain my video performance with a single card -- which means putting in a 4870 X2 or a GTX 280 I believe. For the motherboard, if I go P45 or X48, I'd need it to support 8 gigs of RAM without issue and tons of hard drives, but the most important feature is OC support... The core of my system is built around a golden low vid Q6600 G0 and I would be looking for a board that can make the most of that with the least amount of trouble.

Of course, a large part of me says to wait, since the plan has always been to upgrade to X58 next spring, in part because it would finally get me away from nForce, and while I've certainly had less issues with my board than others, I too have the same lack of trust given what we know about their build quality. The question is whether or not it's worth it to spend a few hundred and buy an interim board now.

What are your thoughts on this? Oh and since it's been a few months, any advice as to which P45 or X48 motherboards OC best would be much appreciated. Lastly, just to throw it out there, my computer uses have shifted a bit since my last build. Gaming is a much lower priority for me -- I'm kind of convinced PC gaming is heading into the sunset (although that's a conversation for another time) -- but on the other hand image editing with Lightroom and Photoshop is on the rise. Hardware is still a big hobby of mine, as is OCing, but where before I'd see how high I can run my proc and leave it there, today I'll be more likely to back off after the fact to a more conservative setting.

Many thanks!
 
Jeez, took ya long enough! :)

Anyway, if you check over at the XTreme Systems forums, this mobo has been shown to be an awesome overclocker:
Biostar TPower I45 Intel P45 Motherboard - $150

So I recommend that motherboard since overclocking is a major factor for you.

Now onto your main question: I say stay with your current motherboard and try to troubleshoot it. Going to a new Intel motherboard and the time it takes to tweak and overclock that might end up taking just as long as troubleshooting the MSI motherboard but you're spending an additional $150 to do so. Not worth the costs IMO.

However, if you just want to get away from Nvidia once and for all, I'd say $150 is a good price to pay to be rid of Nvidia. Since gaming is a lower priority, a single 8800GTX might be enough for you. Though if you're the kind of person that during the little times he does play games, he wants the absolute best, sell the GTX cards and buy a HD4870X2.
 
Wow... Mark wrote a lot... lol. I'll be back later to read it all. :eek:
 
I'd grab an Intel chipset based board and a 4870 X2 if I were in your situation.
 
Thanks for the advice so far...

After another night of troubleshooting, I'm unfortunately not that much closer to figuring out what's going on, or what I should do next. The two drives in the RAID array show up in the BIOS and are recognized as healthy by the RAID controller, but Vista now fails to boot. If I boot into my XP drive, the RAID is recognized, but XP will insist on running CHKDSK /F, which invariably fails during the Index stage. When XP loads, the RAID drive is unavailable. The only way to get the RAID drive to appear in XP is to skip the CHKDSK /F. The RAID drive will appear and will work for a while (5 to 10 minutes usually,) but then will dissapear with an error that one of the drives has been disconnected from the array. The one useful bit of info I've been able to discern though is that it's always the same drive that's disconnected, and I believe the issue with CHKDSK is that's its being disconnected during the diagnostic.

After switching the SATA cable and switching the ports used by the RAID drives, the issue still occurs and always with the same drive. This leads me to believe that it's a drive issue, but I'm still not certain. When working, the drive sounds fine, and both the RAID controller and the SMART system report the drive as healthy. However, I haven't run drive diagnostics yet. Honestly, I'm pretty pessimistic that the diagnostic will be useful as it'll likely fail due to the drive copping out. Has anyone heard of or seen this problem before? Any guesses?

I hope it's a drive issue, since a new one will be pretty cheap. I'd like to get away from nVidia, but unfortunately it won't be cheap to maintain my system's video performance... btw. how much are used GTXes going for these days? The Biostar looks good, but I'm not so sure I want to prioritize OC ability over other features. The higher end P5Qs have my eye, especially the Premium with it's litany of ports -- but I'm also intrigued by the Maximus II Formula... never had an ASUS gaming board before and it may be fun to play with one. Still, it's a lot of money to spend, especially with Tylersburgh a few months away. If I do go with a new motherboard, I may look to the ASUS GTX 280 TOP, which was recently reviewed here as an alternative to the 4870 X2... still, would either of these be any significantly faster than the two GTXs I have now? the research I've seen so far says -- not much.
 
Hey Enginurd... this is very interesting, I'll have to take a look when I get home. Thanks! What's odd though is that this issue only crept after so long.
 
Yah, my guess for it taking a while to show up is that the drive developed some problematic sectors along the way, and now its taking longer to correct R/W operations since there are more problematic areas than before... I'm just guessing here. :p
 
Hmm... after reading the Wikipedia article, I'm a bit confused. I have the SE-16s, which suggest that TLER is disabled by default... which I assume is the case on my machine, although I haven't yet checked. Assuming it's turned off, do I want to turn it on -- as the wikipedia article suggests? Have to say that beyond size, speed, and cache level, I don't pay too much attention to my hard disks features... Before they've always worked, or they've always quite clearly (and quite literally) clunker'd out -- signaling the need for a new one.
 
lol, yes, sorry, you want it enabled for RAID (it comes disabled on the KS drives). the KS-equivalent drives for RAID arrays are YS.
 
Hi all, sorry for the delayed update. Last weekend I was away for labor day (and I didn't have access to the PC) and over the last week I was at a conference in Vegas, again away from my computer.

I tried Enginurd's suggestion of enabling the WDTLER feature, which I was able to do. Unfortunately it didn't fix the problem. After a few more hours of troubleshooting, I'm about 80% confident that the issue is nothing more than a dead drive, for which I am both relieved and disappointed. Relieved because a dead drive is a dead drive and nothing more ominous -- disappointed because there goes any chance of recovering my array... it's no huge matter since the important stuff is backed up, but its a bummer that I'll have to spend a day re-installing everything.

After WDTLER didn't fix the issue, I disabled RAID on the motherboard to do a low level bad sector check on each of the drives individually. Well, the (supposedly) working drive passed the check w/o issue, while the faulty drive in the setup did exactly the same thing it was doing before.... the system would try to read it, fail, hang for a minute, and then recover with the drive being disconnected from the OS. Putting the drive to my ear, I now notice a strange looping noise -- it will make a few clicks (always the same few) and stop, and then I hear a faint power whine, like a moter spinning up -- then it repeats.

The other thing I tried to do was to delete and re-create the array... Doing this in the BIOS simply leads back to the original problem of bad sectors galore and the first drive dropping out (the drive is so bad it doesn't even get to chkdsk anymore -- it just can't be read.) In Windows, I'm able to create an array, but the errors come back as soon as it begins to migrate data. Always the same drive (regardless of sata port or position in the array,) always the same issue.

For 100% confirmation, I'm going to bring the drive to work on Monday and try running low level diagnostics from my computer over there.... Assuming the same thing happens, it'll be tossed in the garbage and I'll be in the market for a new drive setup. I'm thinking two 1TB arrays in RAID-1 this time -- I'm finished with 0. I saw the Seagate on sale a few days ago -- hopefully it'll be on sale again.

Lastly, I don't think it really makes sense to migrate to an Intel board at this time. It's a hassle considering the water cooling setup, and I'll be spending nearly $1000 for the new drives, a new board, and a single card that can at least keep up with my two 8800 GTXs... Instead I'll wait for Nehelem to make it's debut, then when the timing is right, cross over to the wonderful world of Intel with X58.

Thanks for everyone's help!
 
Sorry to hear about the bad drive. Don't forget to RMA it if its still under warranty.
 
The hd is being RMA'd... so the question is what to do when it gets back. If I add 2 TB drives for RAID 1, I'll have six internal drives in my system (two cages with three drives each.) This may not be a desirable setup as each drive is sure to run above 50-55C when crammed with two others. I can scale back to a 1 TB drive and just run JBOD for a total of 5 drives, but then storage gets a bit messy -- as it'll be 5 internal drives plus three externals. I suppose down the road I can setup a home media server with some extra drives, but I'm not too interested in doing that right now... The last two options are to sell the returned drive or to just continue on with the current setup with 2 500 gigs in RAID 0. Unfortunately as my largest single internal drive is 500 gig, running my current setup JBOD isn't going to work well (given my storage, performance, and backup needs...) decisions, decisions!

Lastly, for the fun of it, I priced a new rig at newegg -- I know I said I wasn't going to upgrade, but the thought of having to do a reinstall of my software environment has me tempted to do something with the hardware as well. This upgrade would take care of longer term needs too -- namely a new case better suited for water cooling and a new PSU better suited for newer graphic cards (it has 8 pin connectors) and cable management (its modular)

Here's the list:

Case: Cooler Master Cosmos S, replacing Silverstone TJ-09 -- $219 ($249 - $30 inst)
PSU: Corsair HW1000, replacing Silverstone Zeus 850 Watt + combo with
Mobo: ASUS P5Q Deluxe, replacing an MSI P7N Diamond (780i) -- $409 ($420 - $30 inst - $30 combo - $20 mail-in) -- it's a good price on the PSU and it brings the deluxe within range of some of the cheaper P5Qs.
Vid Card: MSI 4870 X2, replacing two 8800 GTXes in SLI -- $549, same price as all others but this one is over clocked

total comes to $1,179. Assuming I can sell the parts these are replacing plus a NiB EVGA 780i and a used, alternate Q6600 I never got around to sell, I figure I can reduce my upgrade cost to about, at worst, $500.

Getting this is betting on the fact that Nehelem will be very much overpriced for at least a year, as some people are suggesting -- Also, I figure this would do a good job in supporting my Q6600, which perhaps deserves another run around the OC block.

What do you all think?
 
Looks good. I'm not sure the performance improvement is worth the $500, though.

How much do you want for the TJ09?
 
Well $500 would be the worst case scenario. If I was able to sell everything I had to a higher end e-bay average -- i'd bring down the cost to $79 :)

To be honest though, this new hardware upgrade isn't so much about performance than it is about better fitting my lifestyle. With my girlfriend moving into my apartment, I'm looking to reclaim some of the space my computer occupies in my bedroom. The Cosmos S will allow me to put my radiator in the case, without dremel work (which in reality I can't accomplish easily in my own apt in NYC.) This will allow me to save significant space around my desk. The shift to Intel is a shift primarily to stability (and, hopefully, to give my proc better OC support.) I game less, but work on media apps (photo apps such as Photoshop and Lightroom) far more often -- thus bleeding edge SLI becomes less important than having a core logic I can trust.

The PSU is the only component I wish I didn't have to upgrade, since I imagined an 850 watt psu would carry me well into the future. With the new graphic cards requiring 8 pin connectors, it looks like that isn't the case. The better benefit to me, at least, is the modular cabling, which will help me with better wiring.
 
Well sir, the towel has been thrown in. It was an fun (and interesting) two years in the world of SLI video cards and nForce motherboards, and while my saner side might agree about not bothering with an upgrade, the hardware nut won out for better or worse.

I've ordered the above spec, and I'll be posting some of my current stuff up for sale. If anyone is interested in one of the few proven copies of the P7N Diamond, let me know. Mine was able to take my Q6600 to 4ghz for a few vigorous rounds of benchmarking, before I backed off to a more reasonable everyday speed of 3.6ghz.
 
When you say Blue Screen you mean BSOD, or an actual Blue Screen.
 
Well man, good luck on selling your hardware. Hopefully this switch will bring about the stability you need.

Oh and one thing: Post a pic of your new setup!
 
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