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Artisane

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As simple PSU upgrade goes horribley wrong. Dropped in a new PSU (open box) to replace the one I had making not so pretty noises and it fries my cpu/motherboard.

This was my emergency replacement. +$1200 in computer parts this weekend between Val and I.

Her computer is 100% ready to go. (her new soundcard is amazing) and no more Chopper Pol!! (still some buzz I need to work out)

I've got mine together now and Win7 installed. Just reinstaling drivers and games and I'll be good to go.

I'll post specs later when everything is built.
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Pepsi, really?

but, wow - what are those blue tubes? is that some sort of cooling system?

i used to tinker, but now i'm just an "out of the box" guy

good luck and get it fixed and back in game


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I have the same chopper problem, So you basicly clarified that my beloved Audigy 2 is just to old for win7.

P.S. Specs we need the specs!!! Hope your up and running soon.

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Artisane

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OK, basic specs. I haven't messed with clock rates yet so everything is stock. No overclocks; that will come later.
Those tubes you see are part of the watercooling setup. There's a radiator block hanging off the back of the case, and a pump, resevoir and a copper block for the CPU inside. I've only got the CPU in the loop. I had wanted to add the vid card to the loop, but I need a bigger radiator and pump now to do that.

Evga P55 FTW
Intel i7 860 @2.8 (Quad Core with Hyperthreading)
Evga Geforce GTX 470
Antect Truepower Quatto 850watt PSU
4GB Kingston DDR3-1600 8-8-8-20 timings
2x1TB WD Harddrives (my 500 and 250 wont load)
X-fi Fatality Platinum
5.1 THX Logitech speakers
G25 Force Feedback Steering Wheel
Samsung PX2370 LED Monitor (1920x1080)
Samgung 204B Seconday monitor (1600x1200)

and 1 crappy mic I cant seem to replace.

If I'd change one thing, it would be replacing the sound card. Its great for music creation, recording and editting, lousy for games/mics.

And that Pepsi was from breakfast. I had just finished a 19oz Redbull that was sitting behind me. I stayed up till 2am working on this.


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Oh yeah.. and if you look at the beachball in the upper right corner, that's my Pally Bubblehearth beach ball from Blizzcon.


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Here is a screenshot I took last night as I was loading things up late night. I get about 2 MB/sec download here so I figured I'd just set everything to download and head to bed. This is what I see with the 2nd monitor on the right.

Warning, this picture...OMG its HUGE!

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I love this kind of very expensive lego set!

Very nice gear! Can't wait to see it in action!
Artisane

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So yeah, looks like that bad PSU also fried two of my three harddrives. Lost lots of data since one was the main drive and the other was my backup drive.

I'm having to rebuild my gui setup since wow was on one of those drives. I didn't lose important personal data for the past two years since that data was on my 1tb drive, but I did lose emails and other stuff going back +17 years. doh!

I'll have to decide if I want the to pay the cost of data recovery or not. Most likely the are both fried logic boards but the pain of finding an exact replacement may take too much of my time and not pan out in the end anyway.


On to download mods and trying to put everything in the right place. =*(


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I'm sorry to hear about your computer troubles, guys. Was your UI all good to go yesterday or do you have more work yet to rebuild it? I almost wonder sometimes if I'd like to wipe my UI clean and start anew, then I imagine how I'd feel if this happens, and think...actually I wouldn't. Again, sorry, what a pain.
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I was 95% ready to go for the raid last night. I just had to make some minor adjustments. My addons folder had over 100 folders, so there was a lot to get ready.

Had to turn off SpeedStep since it underclocked my CPU while playing wow. Wow doesn't stress the cpu out enough so it just drops to 1.2ghz. On Dreamwalker it was tough to play since it was constantly going up and down causing me weird "lag"

I fixed it for Sindy.

Now, for the performance side of this build. W/o overclocking anything, the CPU was sitting at 14-17% usage over 8 cores during heavy fights, and the vid card was between 40% and 85% usage when things got rough. All while maintaining 60fps.

32xAA 16xAF 8xQ transparancy AA 1029x1080 Ultra Wow Quality.

Overclocking this won't increase my fps at all since I'm locked already.

If I turned on Ambient Occlusion and faced the valley towards Sindragosa, it would drop to 24fps. I'll leave that feature off for now.

Overall I'm happy with the build, just not how it came to be.


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Here is my story I posted on [H}ardocp

Quote:
So quick story, I have an Antec Quatto 850 that I suspected of going bad. It had been making some electrical noise that changed tone when you touched various parts of the case, and if I moved cords around inside the case when it was on, it would just shut down. Strange indeed so I felt it best to just replace the psu, (had bought it used and opened so I had no warranty) Used this thing for 3 years at this point.

SO, I go down to Fry's to pick up my wife a new soundcard (audigy2zs doesn't like win7), and I picked up a GTX470 and a replacement PSU. Topwer 900w Gold recommended by [H]. The rating was what had drawn me to that unit. Figured if Kyle wasn't able to blow the thing up, I would handle my simple gaming rig. Sadly, everything there was open box, but I grabbed the one that looked in the best shape. Inside the box it looked brand new and never used.

I get it home, take out the old PSU and cables, install the new vid card, install the new psu and power it up. No POST, just a blinking power LED on the case and the usual lights on the board telling me all is good. The PSU's own light says its good. I'm thinking that its maybe just a BIOS issue and that it needs the CMOS wiped. No change. My board (an evga 780i tri-sli) has a bios code readout on the board itself. The code was not in the manual, but research pointed to either a board failure or a CPU failure.

Pretty upset that my board might be bad, I put the old psu back in, but it just wont POST. Ok, I'm pretty ticked at Fry's. The next day I head down there to get a replacement system. W/O any way to test individual components, and with time short for the weekend I pick out a new board, cpu, ram, and a new HD to install Win7 on.

Total spent thus far in two days, +$1500. My wife wasn't happy about the cost, but she knows I need a computer. I returned the bad Topower and voiced my compaint that the unit they sold me was bad and shouldn't had been put back on the shelf. They really didn't care since they knew I'd be dropping more money on replacement parts.

I made sure that I got unopened boxes this time. Figures, when I open the box and do an inventory check, I'm missing the I/O backplate, and some sata cables. The contents also were not packed neatly like I know Evga does. I called Fry's to complain about them selling me an opened item. The associate asked me what I wanted him to do about it. I told him that for starters they could credit me the difference the the open box item. I get hung up on.

OK, I figured I'd take a chance on my old PSU since the new one cost me so much extra money, and I didn't want to risk blowing up more stuff. Fry's is an hour away and I didn't feel like making another trip. Installed the new board, installed the old PSU and threaded the cables nicely, put in my now 4 harddrives. Two 1TB drives, a 500gb and a 250gb. The 500/250 are my data and backup drives, one 1TB drive was my Vista drive, and one 1TB drive new from Fry's.

System boots quickly and even into Vista (driver issues with different board of course), but I wanted to setup win7 on the new drive and just copy my data over. At this point I'm only seeing the 1TB drives; can't see my 250 or 500. I'm not nervous, but I did a ton of research w/o any luck.

Tried everything I could think of but was unable to see either drive in the BIOS. At this point its 2am Sat evening and I need rest. I head to BB the next day and pick up one of those Thermaltake external esata/usb docks.Figured I'd be up and running quickly. Pulled the drives from the case and tried to mount them.

Nothing. No power, no spindle rotation. ARRGGG. At this point I'm just about ready to rage and cry at the same time. Both my data drive and my backup drive are fried too. As far as I can tell the logic boards took a hit.

So, death tally from this one Topower PSU; 1 Evga tri-sli 780i, 1 e8400 running at 4.0ghz, and two harddrives with data going back years.

Oh, and the kicker; my "failing" PSU seems just fine with the new system.


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That story describes almost exactly why I don't shop at Fry's. They rebox everything.


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Shaen wrote:
That story describes almost exactly why I don't shop at Fry's. They rebox everything.
Sadly, Fry's is the only place left around here. PcClub was great and they closed down due to poor management after the owner passed away.

Only time Fry's is good is when you have to take something back. They probably put that bad PSU right back on the shelf for the next person.

I remember several years ago I bought an 8gb drive (that was a lot back then) that failed. It had half the drive with bad sectors, but I didn't realize that until I'd installed windows and copied some data to it. I was unable to scrub the drive, but took it back anyway to get a good one. Two days later I saw the exact same drive back on the shelf. I had marked the box so I knew it was the one. I ripped into customer service for trying to pull that off.


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I used to work at fry's, in that cage behind the registers with all the cpu's etc, all ze expensive computer shit, and also did some out on the floor in the computer area...
They defiantly rebox shit.


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Noodlestein wrote:

They defiantly rebox shit.


And without testing it I'm sure.


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