inahandbasket | (no subject)

new computer up and running, no magic smoke was released in the construction of it either.
All in all, a good thing.

Currently running a modest 114% overclock, I hope to get it up to a full 150% before I'm done.
Athlon64 overclocking is a much more complicated process than AlthonXP overclocking was. This is due to the fact that the memory controller is now resident in the CPU die itself. The bus doesn't work like a normal FSB, instead it has a HyperTransport thingy with a multiplier in addition to the CPU multiplier. Then you can adjust the speed of the HTT much like you would the FSB on older CPUs, but you run the RAM on a divider (akd 3:2) so that it doesn't have to run as fast as the CPU.

The upshot of all this is that it gives you the capability of really pushing the CPU clock without needing insane RAM speeds.
The downside is that it's a good 3-4 times more complicated than it was last time I was overclocking a CPU.
It's like learning how to tie my shoes again.

It's running pretty quiet already, but the videocard is 4x as noisy as the rest of the machine put together, so I just dropped $35 on an aftermarket heatsink for it. Once I get that installed, my entire system should be nice and quiet, like my old one was when I first built it.
*happy sigh*

System Specs:
Motherboard - Abit AN8 Ultra (passively cooled with a heatpipe system, no noise at all)
CPU - Athlon64 3000+ Venice core @2050mhz
Heatsink/fan - Scythe Ninja with Nexus quiet 120mm fan ( <10db )
Hard drives - 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.8's (among the quietest HDs available)
RAM - Kingston HyperX DDR400 (scavenged from old system)
Case - Antec SonataII w/430w quiet PSU and quiet 120mm exhaust fan
Videocard - EVGA nVidia 6800GS @105% overclock

quiet as a stealthy ninja... with a noisy video card strapped to his back.
Ah, but soon my pretty...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The last two systems I built were AMD based... and they were a nightmare. I built them right when the AMD MP 1900+'s hit the market... don't remember the brand of mobo that I used. Everything was top notch but it worked for shit. I'm not sure I would go with AMD again. My lappy that I just sold was also AMD... not sure if the stability issues I had with it were related to the cpu.

I'm using a compy with a Pentium D processor now. So far it's worked pretty good. Much faster than what I was used to which is nice... and I have more memory... still not fast enough though. Maybe in 3 to 5 years computers will finally be "fast enough" for my needs. Really the only time this computer has seemed slow is when I'm editing video... and even then it's faster than Photoshop was on my old machine.

I've been running AMDs in my last three machines: a 1ghz thunderbird, a 2500+ Barton (running at 3200+ speeds), and this one; a 3000+ venice64 running at 2.2ghz as of this morning. (Stock speed is 1.8ghz.)

I've never had stability problems with any of these machines, I think you must have gotten a flakey mobo or RAM or something. AMD is pretty renowned these days for rock-solid processors.

This upgrade was prompted by a lot of things. Mostly it was that I needed a new video card for gaming and my old mobo was AGP based. Everything's PCI-e these days, so I needed to upgrade my mobo if I was going to do video card, and at that point it's basically a new system anyway, so wtf. go whole hog.

This was January of 2002 and it might have been a mobo issue. My old boss built an identical machine except his mobo had onboard raid and he had a slightly faster processor because he did his two months after I did mine. He had the same problems that I had and said that he'd never buy AMD again. He's built a lot more machines than I have and had never had this many problems.

I'm guessing it must have been mobo related sicne we both had the same problems and his just had raid added on. Not sure if I mentioned this before but I tried different brands of memory and two brands made the mobo beep when it tried to post.

Have you heard anything about certain games not working with AMD setups? I have a friend who claimed that was why he didn't use AMD and after I gave him my two AMD machines he said that some of the games wouldn't work and in the game forums other AMD users were having the same issues. I didn't bother to check it out myself and he's the only one I've ever heard of having problems with games and AMD stuff.

Yeah, I've heard of problems like that about 10 years ago. There hasn't been anything in recent memory though. AMD/Intel are completely interchangable.

He was having problems recently like six months to a year ago. Not sure what games wouldn't work... all of the games I played on them worked fine... except when they were crashing but that wasn't game related.

You seem to know your shit when it comes to computers so I have a question for you... I have a new HP with a Pentium D 3.0 Ghz processor running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2002 with SP2. Every couple of days my system will just lock up and I have to restart it via the power switch. How would I go about figuring out what is causing it to crash? I thought WindowBlinds might be the culprit but I've had it crash since disabling that.

Is there a program that I can install that will monitor the system and log something so when I reboot after a crash I can figure out what caused it?

I'm sure there is, but I couldn't tell you what it is.
I assume that you're running the default HP software that came with it?

My first course of action in these kind of situations is to just reinstall the operating system.
- If it still happens, it's a hardware problem.
- If it's gone, it was a software issue; reload software slowly and see if the problem comes back.

Naturally that isn't the easiest route. You might find that Norton Utilities/Systemworks would help you out, but I can make no promises. Also, Media Center has a bunch of stuff added into it that I haven't played with yet. Are you using any of the features?

I thought you might say that. Damn... I hate reinstalling the os. Especially since there is so much to reinstall after that. Maybe I'll try Norton first... I used to use it but haven't tried it in a couple years. Have you had good luck with it?

I'm not using any of the "special" features and I've uninstalled a bunch of stuff. It came loaded with a lot of garbage so a fresh install wouldn't hurt things... would just take a lot of time. The computer didn't come with any cd's... instead it has a recovery partition and you can burn cd's from that. I'll have to check to see if they included a regular os image or if it's just restore images. Would be nice to install a vanilla copy of Windows XP on here... but even the MCE version would be fine... without the extra HP crap... other than drivers.

yeah, that's why I avoid pre-installed machines whenever possible. ;-)

Norton's pretty useful for some things, utterly pointless for others. It might manage to stabilize your system, but it's just as likely that it'd crash along with everything else. I'd say you have a %50 shot of having it work.