Just a simple upgrade
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My GPU's liquid-cooled too. Both it and the CPU have 120mm fans that barely ever budge. (The CPU radiator actually has two of them for some reason, I've never heard them spool-up much past half even when my computer was full-out.)
EDIT: correction, the GPU's fans are 80mm (it looks like). Still, they don't throttle up much.
Honestly, I think it's goofy at this point to build a computer without liquid cooling. It's just so much better.
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Honestly, I think it's goofy at this point to build a computer without liquid cooling. It's just so much better.
The case I got for my semi-recent computer came with two 120mm fans that are pretty close to inaudible, so I went with the low-cost, low-effort solution of just keeping that. I did have to move the ugly blue LED fan to the back instead of the front, but that's neither here nor there.
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@Intercourse said:
Well now you've learned that video cards are, by far, the most likely component in your computer to be dead-on-arrival.
@Intercourse said:
Oddly enough, this is the first time it has occurred to me. I have had a lot of RAM that was DOA, more than a few power supplies that were flaky out of the box, seems like there have been a motherboard or processor in there also. But this is the first video card.
Blakey is right about it being a common problem. Very common, in fact. However, I also have never had a DOA component. Whether this is the brands I stick with, the review-shopping I do, or just completely blind luck, I still have no idea. Given that I've done large count bulk builds, it is very surprising to me. I am tempted to lay blame for DOAs on the cheaper brands, but I haven't really got any solid evidence of this apart from that my purchasing the brands I do (almost always Asus for GPUs) tends to be from reading reviews (customer, not industry), and they get better reviews.
I've also never had problems with graphics drivers in Windows. And rarely in Linux. Feel free to hate me.
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I miss the days where it was cheaper to build your own computer. Now, you spend so much time researching this junk that if you count your time invested, you're better off to just buy a pre-built one.
I had mine built from hand-picked components, but had it built by the store - I decided that I'd rather pay $10 than screw up a $1500 rig.
They did it pretty well, oddly enough. Though I should have gotten a better case - it gets dusty as hell, and the fans are noisy and weak.
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It's not the building it part so much as selecting the components, and guaranteeing compatability, which was the issue for the OP.
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Honestly, I think it's goofy at this point to build a computer without liquid cooling. It's just so much better.
If you're not pushing it you don't need it, that's why. The fan on my POS work machine is slightly unbalanced, but even with that it's not much over ambient noise.
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Bullshit. Back when I used Windows 2000 and XP, I switched out video cards nearly every 6 months, switching from AMD, NVidia, AMD, both brands installed simultaneously, etc. I never had a single problem caused by a NVidia driver being present on a system with AMD hardware, or vice-versa.
Then you are blessed my friend.
I have done maybe over a hundred instances of swapping out hardware from various systems over the years in my professional career. I always image the station beforehand because it's a crap shoot whether everything comes back up fine or not. I'd say maybe 50/50 overall whether it works or not. Custom systems tended to fail more often, out-of-box systems less so.
Caveats:
- Any time someone wants to upgrade, say, RAM or a video card on an 8-year-old system, I question the wisdom of wasting their time on something so obsolete. Failure rate on those was much higher & skews the overall results. I couldn't say how many to calculate the offset.
- There is always the possibility that something else was wrong with the system going into the operation, and the hardware swap was the final straw. Again, impossible to calculate.
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@Intercourse said:
Plus, I like to root for the underdog and I have liked AMD since I overclocked my first Athlon XP from 1.8ghz to 2.6ghz.
+1 ... me too :)
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Any time someone wants to upgrade, say, RAM or a video card on an 8-year-old system, I question the wisdom of wasting their time on something so obsolete. Failure rate on those was much higher & skews the overall results. I couldn't say how many to calculate the offset.
Yeah, I am not entirely certain as to the age of this build. The CPU in it first came out in Q2 2009. Had I realized that, I would probably have not even attempted a refresh and just went with the whole hog to begin with. Had I done that, a driver issue would not have even crossed my mind and this whole fucking debacle, including the dressing down from @blakeyrat, because apparently I was Doing It Wrong (hmmmmm, who does that sound like? Self-righteous, condescending, thinks he fucking knows everything, acts like the god of his field....)
I seriously had a client ask me a while back if there was any way to refresh some P4 machines to get some more life out of them. They had already been in a storage closet for a few years. I have no idea what he was thinking...
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@Intercourse said:
I have no idea what he was thinking...
"I can save a few hundred bucks for each one I don't have to replace, and I don't care how I abuse my workers."
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+1 ... me too
They were beasts. I went to PC Club (remember when those were a thing?) and bought a mobile XP2500+ (they were unlocked from the factory in order to cut power usage) and with just a slight bump in voltage I got a 50% overclock. I think I still have that board and processor around here somewhere. Gigabyte motherboard with a whole 1GB of RAM and SATA portsand an ATI 9800GT card (IIRC). I was king of the nerdlings until the Sledgehammer chips started coming out.
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@Intercourse said:
I like to root for the underdog and I have liked AMD
As someone who used to work for AMD's competition, I've tended to be biased in the other direction. :)
I'll admit, though, that it is a prejudice. I don't have any real facts to base a decision one way or the other. Except that Jerry Sanders was an idiot; I'm amazed AMD survived his leadership. Yes, I know he's been gone for over a decade; they've done much better since then.
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that Jerry Sanders was an idiot; I'm amazed AMD survived his leadership. Yes, I know he's been gone for over a decade; they've done much better since then.
Oh yes, he did a lot of really stupid shit back in the day. I used to follow overclockers.com and they always had articles about AMD, their leadership and how the business was going. IIRC, he is the same guy I used to always wonder how he kept his job...
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@Intercourse said:
9800GT
That one is the Nvidia card that spanned 3 generations (8800GT - 9800GT - 240GT).
You probably mean the Radeon 9800XT.
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@Intercourse said:
v3.0 card in a v2.0 slot when AMD itself has said that their 3.0 cards may not work in anything less than v2.1 slots
I find this questionable (although, there are the words "may not work"). I'm still running an ASUS P6T Deluxe (PCI-E v2.0) board with an AMD Radeon 7970 (PCI-E v3.0), and it runs quite well. Unless this is a requirement specific to the GCN-architecture cards (Hawaii/Taihiti et al)?
Though it's not popular, HIS isn't no-name, nor necessarily shit (though, maybe they have become worse lately?). Myself and some friends ran HIS Radeon X1600 cards back when they were new, with XP, Vista and 7 all.
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I'd like to hear even a theory of how that can possibly happen.
It's not quite so bad nowadays, but I benchmarks and a few games might try and detect AMD/ATI/NVidia specific features based on what drivers could be loaded; for example, since the x2000 series, AMD/ATI has had a tessellation engine (carried over in a way from the Xbox 360 GPU) that were specific to those cards (the engine on the cards then changed with the DX11 cards because DX11 required a different form what AMD had).
I guess the main reason the drivers are usually uninstalled prior to switching cards comes from benchmarkers (when doing a clean install wasn't an option, for whatever reason, like not having the time) to remove as many possible detrimental influences on performance as they could. Someone like Bindi (Richard) from bit-tech.net would probably be able to give a better answer.
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Honestly, I think it's goofy at this point to build a computer without liquid cooling. It's just so much better.
My core hardware is 5 years old, and has just survived with harddrive and GPU updates. When I build my next and upgrade to an R9 290X, I plan on watercooler (even just with an all-in-one loop) just to get past the thermal throttling that happens with that card.
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Good memory.
I do believe you are correct.
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I had both of them at some point, actually
The 9800GT broke pretty quickly, though and got replaced with a GTS250 (which also uses the G92b).
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I think the 9800XT I had failed, now that I think about it? Earlier I said I had never had one fail, but I believe that one did. I had the version with the TV tuner built in. That was a silly idea on my part. Trying to make a pseudo-HTPC out of an overclocked, aircooled PC.
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Even the top names aren't immune to GPU infant mortality.
Back when I built my PC, my top flight GTX280 - a BFG, arrived DOA.
Further investigation (in other words, looking at the thing) revealed that the heatsink had been removed by some klutz, presumably to watercool. There were tool marks all over the place and a metal air deflector was shorting several components because it was installed wrong. Apparently, it had been returned "unopened" and restocked.
Newegg was not pleased and actually cross shipped the replacement.
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not sure that's the fault of BFG but of newegg for not inspecting their returns as close as they should of. it's really hard to hide the signs of opening the boxes of modern GPUs.
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Is BFG considered a top name now?
I think ASUS, MSI, etc.
Edit: That said, I've had a DOA MSI GPU before. Had to RMA it, was a huge pain. Somehow I avoided having to buy a new motherboard just to figure out if it was dead or not.
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They were at the time, in the high end, high buck gaming community. No idea if it stuck. Probably not. The rise and fall of hardware companies has always been fascinating. My particular favorites are how gigabyte went from being utter vendor trash to the gold standard and supermicro went from making shifty looking server boards to being an enormous player in the commodity server market.
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it's really hard to hide the signs of opening the boxes of modern GPUs.
There was a time when retail packaging had a window so you could see the board, including a sticker with model and serial numbers, and a matching sticker on the shrinkwrap. I think they're moving away from that, and if you have access to shrinkwrap you could probably fake it. My current video card's a Galaxy 650 Ti Boost I bought at a TigerDirect, and I don't think it had any particular fraud-deterrent features in the packaging.
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harumph. i suppose you are right...
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I was running a core 2 duo until recently, what made me upgrade ... gifs and VS2013 + Sitecore because sitecore.
I have been pretty disappointed with every PC since my AMD 2500+ machine with a 9800pro ... I've always seemed to get stability problems mainly even when building with decent components.
This i7 machine is stable unless I play games and then pretty much anything can happen.
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then pretty much anything can happen
Oooh, it might build a Space Elevator for you? That would be neat.
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More like crash when you are really getting into blowing bits off nazis in Castle Wolfenstein.
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I can't recall any time I've gotten a GPU in anything more sophisticated than a cardboard box.
And I'm one of those loons that.keeps the boxes stacked up.on.a.shelf.
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I was running a core 2 duo until recently
I still have a C2D laptop that works just fine when I need a small, light, laptop to take somewhere. (Dell D630) It does not do any heavy lifting though. Mostly just surf the web and run some RDP sessions, SSH, etc. C2Q machines are still really capable machines for your average office worker also. They may not be the fastest thing around, but for office workers, even if the OS ties up a core and some application ties up another one, they still have 2 cores left to keep the machine responsive.
They just take quite a bit of juice to run. My current Linux box is a C2Q running at 2.66ghz. No complaints, even when running a full stack web framework. I have thought about upgrading it, but really see no need.
Edit: Come to think of it, I do believe that 2 of our HTPCs here in the house are C2D machines. They probably should be replaced just to save power, but oh well. They work fine and I got them for free. My cousin runs a C2D Mac as a web developer and also sees no need to upgrade yet. Multi-core is one of the best things to come down the pipeline for desktop user experience for quite a while.
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I can't recall any time I've gotten a GPU in anything more sophisticated than a cardboard box.
I've actually seen what I described in retail stores, perhaps around the time the Pentium came out? If you remember there was a concern about "counterfeited" ones, where someone would etch the top layer off the package and re-etch a higher speed code, thus pretending it was a faster chip than it actually was.
People were buying, IIRC, two video cards, one cheap, one expensive, putting the cheap one in the expensive box, and then returning it. (Obviously they do that to this day with regular things.)
The countermeasures I described above, I've personally seen: plastic box with a window showing a sticker with the model and serial numbers, and a printed part of the box, or maybe a sticker, showing the same information, so you could visually inspect the package to make sure it was what it said it was.
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I had a Dell D430 which was an ultra portable and did fine most of the time. I sold it eventually to a co-worker that used if for basically porn (he made no secret of it, both him and his wife).
But VS2010 and SQL Server take their toll even on the fastest of systems and it was done past VS 2008 / SQL SERVER 2005.
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People were buying, IIRC, two video cards, one cheap, one expensive, putting the cheap one in the expensive box, and then returning it. (Obviously they do that to this day with regular things.)
Been a victim of this once, many years ago at a store formerly known as Circuit City. Bought a sealed, shrink-wrapped cutting-edge Wireless-N router (or so I thought) - opened the box, in it was an old early Wireless-G crappy router. Went to return it, no dice. Didn't buy from them again after that. Several years later, they went out of business.
Rewind to 1996. I had a short stint working at Computer City (remember them from Tandy Corp?) One of the jobs they had me doing was opening returned equipment so I can recondition them to factory spec for the next customer that would buy and potentially KEEP the thing. Opened an Apple computer box (don't remember the model) in front of two other techs and my manager as I was keeping busy during a short meeting. Good thing, because inside the box was not a $2500 computer. What I found was...a rock. Just a rock. My manager just shook his head. Oh, I left for my first engineering job just a few weeks later. Computer City went out of business not long after that incident, IIRC.
I wonder if there's a pattern...
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Went to return it, no dice. Didn't buy from them again after that.
Yeah, I wouldn't either. I have had that happen twice at (different) Toys'R'Us stores when my kids were little: bought a Fisher Price playset or whatever, get it home, it's full of stuffed animals. TRU took it back both times.
People who do that deserve beatings, and, of course, that's why places like Fry's will generally open the damn box.
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that's why places like Fry's will generally open the damn box.
That's why I like to shop there too, besides the cool toys. :)
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That's why I like to shop there too, besides the cool toys
Last place I worked, we were about a mile from a Fry's: every Friday was Fry's Friday, where we'd go there, browse for a half an hour, and then find some place cheap to get lunch before heading back in. :)
Also, I have heard people gripe about the people doing returns but I have never had a problem: but then again I always have all the pieces, the receipt, and a plausible reason for the return.
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They did it pretty well, oddly enough. Though I should have gotten a better case - it gets dusty as hell, and the fans are noisy and weak.
Sometimes I think choosing a good case is the hardest part. So far the best one I've ever used is the Thor v2. My home machine is in a Smilodon, and while they are awesome for building (especially with the mobo side swinging out, they are not very good dustwise. It doesn't help that my house is way undercleaned. I need a job that pays well enough for me to hire a cleaning service.
1) Any time someone wants to upgrade, say, RAM or a video card on an 8-year-old system, I question the wisdom of wasting their time on something so obsolete. Failure rate on those was much higher & skews the overall results. I couldn't say how many to calculate the offset.
I usually tell my non-technical friends that trying to upgrade something older than five years with any current components is usually either a waste or going to be more trouble than it's worth. Except RAM... RAM is usually a good upgrade regardless, provided you don't wind up falling into the DDR 2->3 price gouging zone. (Or was it 1->2? I can never remember.)
My core hardware is 5 years old, and has just survived with harddrive and GPU updates. When I build my next and upgrade to an R9 290X, I plan on watercooler (even just with an all-in-one loop) just to get past the thermal throttling that happens with that card.
Given the amount of dust I wind up cleaning out of my massive and ridiculous CPU heatsink, and the relative cheapness of liquid cooling, I think it no longer makes sense to cool the CPU with fans. I think my next build will include GPU liquid cooling too.
Edit: That said, I've had a DOA MSI GPU before. Had to RMA it, was a huge pain. Somehow I avoided having to buy a new motherboard just to figure out if it was dead or not.
You jest, but one of my previous coworkers once got three DOA GPUs in a row only to then find out that his MoBo had died in the upgrade process. Whether it was one of the graphics cards frying it or not, he never determined, though none of the three harmed my machine.
For the last decade I have rarely upgraded. I've just built new machines, usually selling the old parts to partially fund the build. The last two times I got a little over half the cost of the build out of the old machine, in part because both times the buyers wanted the parts to replace the same kind and the new parts cost almost as much as when I had bought them a few years earlier.
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provided you don't wind up falling into the DDR 2->3 price gouging zone. (Or was it 1->2? I can never remember
It is all price-gouging zone lately when it comes to RAM. I looked back in my NewEgg history and I bought two kits of Mushkin RAM that were DDR3 2x4GB (16GB total, in 2011 for $44/per. Today those same kits sell for twice as much. I thought shit was supposed to get cheaper? The 32GB of RAM I just bought was ~$300.
I think it no longer makes sense to cool the CPU with fans.
You still have fans, they are just blowing through a radiator.
For the last decade I have rarely upgraded. I've just built new machines, usually selling the old parts to partially fund the build.
I am likely to do the same in the future, except I will deprecate my old machine to be my Linux box.
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Last place I worked, we were about a mile from a Fry's
One job I had, I actually worked in the same building as Fry's. Sadly, the only one around here is an hour (1/2 hour, if there were no traffic) away.
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@Intercourse said:
two kits of Mushkin RAM that were DDR3 2x4GB (16GB total, in 2011 for $44/per. Today those same kits sell for twice as much. I thought shit was supposed to get cheaper?
Supply & demand, maybe? That could very well override the "technology constantly getting cheaper" trend.
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Supply & demand, maybe? That could very well override the "technology constantly getting cheaper" trend.
In an industry where a major player was class action'd for price fixing? NAH. It's been long enough that they're back at it for sure. Only time RAM was cheap was right after the suit. Way too convenient.
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@Intercourse said:
two kits of Mushkin RAM that were DDR3 2x4GB (16GB total, in 2011 for $44/per. Today those same kits sell for twice as much. I thought shit was supposed to get cheaper?
Seems to have happened with hard drives too. I still can't find a 1TB as cheap as the one I bought in 2010 for my current build. I guess all the research is going into SSD now
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Yeah, in about a month or so I am going to have to buy ~50 4TB drives. Not looking forward to writing that check. The prices on hard drives never recovered after the floods in Thailand. It put a hurt on a lot of people in tech when that happened. I hope they learned their lesson in regards to geographic diversity...
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Yeah, RAM manufacturers almost have to be price gouging these days. I was reviewing my NewEgg order history to find what I'd built for a friend in 2012 so I could troubleshoot his system. We'd bought an 8 GB stick of DDR3 RAM for $33. The same thing today costs closer to $80.
Either price gouging, or inflation is worse than anyone will admit...
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I'm thinking of building a new PC, specifically for gaming really. My current box has a Supermicro motherboard (was a total hassle trying to order one), an Intel Core i7 960, 6 GB of memory, a GTX580 (forgot the brand) and a 256 GB Samsung SSD. Nice little Dell 22" eIPS screen, too. I see no point in upgrading it, because it still plays current games pretty well. Perhaps not everything at ultra settings, but I don't care. And for everything else it's fast enough.
But if/when I'm going to build a gaming PC, in a small form factor to it fits neatly under the TV, it'll have a good motherboard (perhaps Supermicro again; Intel chip; Nvidia graphics card. I've been building PCs for too long to look at the price/performance ratio too closely, and in my experience it usually spells trouble if you economise on components. That's not to say that this would be one of those ultra-expensive gaming PCs with red motherboards, neon and that kind of nonsense, but good quality components that will last a long time.
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Seems to have happened with hard drives too. I still can't find a 1TB as cheap as the one I bought in 2010 for my current build. I guess all the research is going into SSD now
Just ordered 13 of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1930310
Ouch. Filling up storage servers is not cheap.
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.... that's even with the discount a 30% markup over what i paid for those items separately not three months ago....
WTF is happening to the hard drive market?
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It fluctuates wildly, but these are also NAS drives. Did you guy a commodity drive?
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WTF is happening to the hard drive market?
Prices went up and never went down...
2011 Thailand floods - Wikipedia
