Frankencomputer

Earlier this year, I started gathering components in order to assemble myself a new computer, but I got stalled on that due to insufficient income. I plan on restarting that project as soon as I can, but as a result, I have this spare hardware lying around.

In the meantime, I've decided that I am going to make a new machine out of the new components, and use what I can from my old machine.

The new bits of hardware I was able to acquire are:

* An MSI NF980-G65 motherboard
* A Rosewill Lightning 800 watt PSU
* An APC BE650G 650 VA 390 Watts UPS

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I also got a few components that I had considered "temporary"; stand-ins until I could get parts more powerful or larger. This includes 4 gigs of DDR3 1333 memory, and an AMD Sempron 140 Sargas 2.7GHz Socket AM3 45W Single-Core Processor.

My old system has an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ CPU, with 2 gigs of DDR1 memory (sorry, I forget the speed). Its video card is an old GeForce 7800 GS AGP. The new motherboard's onboard video is capable of much higher framerates and is able to use some of CoH's Ultra Mode options (ambient occlusion seems to cause a huge decrease in the framerate, so I have to turn that off).

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The parts from the old system that I can still use are:

* Its hard drives (the 200 gig and the 500 gig drives; the 80 gig boot drive I would not want to use, but I will want to copy its data)

* The sound card (Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium PCI)

* The TV card (A Pinnacle PCTV model that I can't remember right now).

* The case (ATX; Mid tower size)

* The PSU (A Rosewill RP550-2)

* The operating system (Windows XP Home; I actually have two legit reg codes for this)

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The thing is though, the hard drives and the optical drives are all PATA, so I will need to get a PCIe PATA interface at the Fry's tomorrow, if I wish to do this. I also plan on getting a SATA hard drive for use as the boot drive. The optical drives can use the single PATA port on the motherboard.

That's what I plan to shop for tomorrow. But I was wondering off-hand if anyone here could give me any suggestions? Remember, I don't really have a lot of money right now. Getting another hard drive and an interface card will be kind of pushing it already. But I'd really like to play CoH at a decent framerate for now!

That processor was unlocked by AMD and should be a dual core.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Sem...hlon,8447.html

I'm pretty sure your 7800GS would make a better gaming card than the onboard 8300GS. Try both and see for yourself. You should backup and wipe a hard drive and start building already. Have fun!

Jer

Oh, yeah, I should have realized you'd already been working on it. The old 7800 is AGP, so it's not going anywhere anyway. I'd like to nudge you towards a video card if you can swing it. I won't try to recommend one because I've not kept up myself. If you're set on getting an IDE card, maybe skip the SATA HD for a video card and upgrade later?

Just a thought.
Jer

It's such a downer, you know? I was intending to get a copy of Windows 7, and then an SSD drive. I was going to get a video card with a built-in water block, and I was going to stuff a two radiators into a HAF-X case. The whole thing was going to be bathed in blue LED light from every single fan within the case. I was going to get a Ceton InfiniTV 4 so that when I wasn't playing games or watching movies on Blu-Ray (or via Netflix), then I could use the computer to watch FiOS directly.

I was even contemplating getting a Killer Xeno Pro, hahaha!

I figure I'll continue this project anyway though. Like when I get my tax returns next year. By then, however, I might want to think about getting another motherboard altogether. I guess I'll see.

Perhaps I will go with NewEgg instead, hmm...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148698
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16815158082

I suppose I could afford a video card after those two things, but I don't think it could be more than $50. I don't know if it would be worth it.

Yeah, the 7800GS would most likely be faster than the integrated 8300GS if it wasn't for the AGP issue with the old card. With only 16 streaming processors you weren't going to be doing any ultramode on that anyways. I'm pretty sure you aren't going to be happy about it's performance.

Basically just about any discrete video card that is Dx10 or better (easier to describe the hardware better by using a DirectX version) will be a worlds better than that integrated one. I would avoid the 8400GS, G 210 or GT 520 as they are the extreme low end of what is out there.

I would have given you some recommendations but it's witching hour at NewEgg and it seems that all of the mail in rebates expire Sept 30, we'll take a look again tomorrow and see what they have on the cheap.

Here's a 240 GT for $25 after mail-in rebate. It's a low end card, but not the very bottom end and will definitely be an improvement over what you're using.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814150553

Father Xmas will probably have better suggestions than mine. If this is the first computer you've built, congrats, the next one will be better, stronger, faster. Have fun with it.

Jer

The best AMD/ATI one is this Sapphire HD 5570 since SeedyXX found the best nVidia one.

This list is of video cards that list for under $60 before rebate at NewEgg, that has at least Dx10 class or better hardware, 128-bit memory or higher and use DDR3 or DDR5 memory. The memory type and width restrictions I used are to remove the really slow cards from the list. The DirectX Class restrictions eliminated any really old cards that may have popped up in the search.

Thanks to both of you. I think I will go with the nVidia card.

I think I'll have to rechristen this mix of old, new and cheap, "Froedrick".

I got the GT 240 today, and so I decided to install it in order to see how it looked, and plus I was a little eager to see it in action. Installing it was more or less a smooth operation. However, I think there might be a problem with the motherboard.

As you can see, Grandville looks fine:


But then I checked out Atlas Park:


As well, when I first ran CoH with this card in place, at first it was extremely slow to respond, and for a moment I thought it had crashed. Alt-tabbing to another program caused it to "wake up" and instead of a single frame from the game, it was actually running smoothly.

I tried all the x16 slots and this behavior did not change.

I say it's the motherboard, because of a similar incident that happened with it back when I first got it a few months ago. At the time, I had gotten a entirely cheap GT 210, thinking it would be better than the onboard video. I then attempted to play Tropico 3 with that system, and the game's graphics were entirely messed up. More than that, eventually even Windows XP's desktop would not show in anything more than 4-bit color (!). I pulled the video card out, and switched to the onboard video, and everything was fine. Also, the game ran fine that way as well, albeit with very low settings!

At the time, I blamed it on the cheap video card. But now I think I might have evidence that something else is going on. But I still don't know exactly what, yet. If it's that motherboard that's busted somehow, that's going to make me really angry indeed.

Damn. Sorry if these suggestion seem too obvious: updated drivers, or maybe a prior version? Is it fully powered (a power connector on the card, besides the power it draws through the slot)? Is there dust or debris in the slot that can be blown out with compressed air? Are there any BIOS updates for that mobo?

I hope you can get something working. Good luck.
Jer

I don't understand it myself, but have found doing this, and other 'switch-off/on-then-back' has fixed stuff for me. A couple of times ingame, a strange 'bar' has appeared...I disabled Geometry Buffers, then enabled it again. Problem solved. At times, a reboot will help. It's very good that you shared your solution, as it may help other players!

That's another old feature that modern motherboard chipsets don't have and require an additional controller chip, PCI slots. The old PS/2 mouse and keyboard connector are also legacy and on their way out with some motherboards having one or none at all.

I think IBM has some legacy free motherboards. PCIe only for slots, USB only for peripherals, SATA for internal drives. No floppy or IDE connector support. No PCI slots. No PS/2 connectors. Serial and Parallel ports have mostly gone the way of the dodo. With the introduction of USB 3.0 should start the ushering out of IEEE 1394 aka Firewire as well as eSATA ports.

Still within 30 days!

OK, so since my last post, I managed to get some overtime and some extra money. I also managed to run plenty of diagnoses on this frankenmachine that so far refuses to work correctly.

Long story short, the MSI motherboard was bad in some way. As in, anything in a PCIe x16 slot would get seriously borked by this thing. I'm pretty sure it took the video card with it (what with the game suddenly freezing, and the screen showing red streaks everywhere, and always always with the mangled textures). As I'll further explain.

I swapped the MSI NF980-G65 motherboard for an ASUS M4N98TD, which uses the same nForce 980a chipset. I'd had the XFX GT 240 video card stored in its anti static bag, since the MSI motherboard seemed to behave itself when using its onboard video (but I had to play CoH at very close to the minimum settings, meh!). I plugged it into the ASUS motherboard, and at first all seemed well. It certainly had no problems with Direct3D or OpenGL stuff, and there were no mangled or corrupted textures anywhere. Alas, my joy was to be short lived when I discovered that this card was now having problems with anything related to hardware accelerated 2D. This includes CoH's user interface, streaming videos from Netflix via Silverlight, streaming YouTube videos via Flash with hardware acceleration turned on, and having hardware acceleration enabled in Firefox and Thunderbird. Any of these things can cause anything from mangled 2D graphics in the offending application, mangled gadget boxes in the desktop window frames (in CoH's case, mangled looking or even invisible window gadgets and sliders), or even a BSOD if the video driver ends up stuck in an infinite loop. Feh!

I tested both the system and video RAM for several passes (and several hours) each, and each and every test came back with zero errors. I even regressed the driver from the current version to the previous version (I used Driver Sweeper to ensure a clean uninstall and reinstall). So if it's not the RAM or the drivers then I would have to wager that it might be the GPU that's causing the problems somehow. Either it's badly designed, can't handle the stress I'm trying to put on it, got damaged thanks to the MSI motherboard, or some combination of all that. Either way, I decided to order myself an ECS GT 440. I might have jumped the gun on the video card, but I was all "meh, I'm so tired of this!" I haven't received it yet, but if these problems persist after installing it, I'm gonna start believing in... what's the word for when objects retain the "memory" of other things they have touched? LOL.

Did you do a clean install of the OS? It doesn't sound like you did. Both of those motherboards use nvidia 980 chipsets. (Meaning they are a couple of years old) I thought nvidia got out of the chipset business.

I generally stick to AMD chipsets only as they just work. Since your not bothering to get a quality video card, why bother with a SLI MB? Waste of money.

Both of your video cards are from resellers who have reputations of making stuff cheap. XFX stuff is cheap but generally works good enough. ECS has a worse reputation mostly because they are the branded motherboards that Frys gives away when they sell CPU + Motherboard bundles at a loss to clear inventory. Basically, you get the CPU sold at a loss and you can just dump the MB in the trash and you still got a bargain. Other people will sell the MB on fleabay for $10 + Shipping to some poor person who doesn't know better.

Edit: You did jump the gun. the 440 might be competitive with low/mid end video cards from 5 years years ago!

I did indeed perform a clean install of the operating system. Though that operating system is still Windows XP Home (I have two OEM licenses for it; three if you count my laptop). I'd gotten a Seagate 160 gig SATA drive to use as the boot drive, and that is what I am using currently.

It's funny what you say about XFX. I was able to find plenty of negative opinions about them. I'm starting to think that I can find plenty of negative opinions on just about every company, haha.

I'm guessing you mean "high quality" video card. I sure would like to get something even better, but after spending that much on a SLI motherboard, I can't now afford a high quality video card, let alone two of them to engage SLI mode. Right now I just need "a video card", and I'm starting to get a bit tired of the GT 240 (I managed to find plenty of negative opinions on that GPU as well, lol).

But I must say, I'm starting to miss my old 7800 GS...

When I say high quality I mean a good GPU. So far you bought 2 very low end cards that are found in $329 computers from e-machines or a Frys brand PC.

XFX, ECS, Asus, MSI are resellers. Some are better than others. Some use better quality components than others.

You are correct that it if you dig hard enough you can find someone that hates X. I'm sure if you dig hard enough you can find people that like something awful too.

Heck, I bet there are people out there who think the Ford Pinto was the best car ever made and are still driving one today. I'm sure there are people that think the Cimmaron was the best Cadillac.

Finally, finally, the GT 440 was delivered to me! I installed it, and made a clean re-install (as well as an upgrade) of the video drivers. So far, none of the problems I had before have even come up.

And it looks like I can play the game! Yeah, I can't dial up all the settings to 11 without it turning into a slideshow, but who cares? I can actually play, which is better than not being able to play.

Still, after all these problems, I find myself unable to trust this system yet. So I'll have to run it through its paces for a while, and see if it doesn't break somehow. But as of right now, I'm convinced of the MSI motherboard's problems with its x16 slots, and that it took a perfectly good GT 240 down with it. Sigh.

Glad you're finally back on a stable-ish system.

Sorry you went through all that hell just to get things working again.

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