upgrading..

BlackHawk*K · Post by **BlackHawk*K** » 22 Jan 2004, 23:08

howdy all,
just dropping a line letting anyone interested know that im upgrading..

this may take a few days. unfortuanatly i got a bunk Mboard... a MSI K7n2 Delta - ILSR damn nice board its a shame to see it didnt work. im going to try to trade it in for another one tommarow..

got a Nvidia MSI FX5700xp vidio card with 256 ram.. damn nice card.. i been talking to the techs about the 5900 series and heard that they have gotten alot of returns on them due to defective parts... this has alot of the featurs the 5900s had but based on a hoped up 5600 GPU so i guess its a good toss up and a alot cheaper then the 5900 series. will give it a go for a few years and see hehe... upgraded to a AMD 3000+ CPU. see how it works its only 333 mhz FSB but im sure i will live. the idea is to get his out of the way for when the wife goes to school. i think this may be my last upgrade for awhile hehe. on a note of cooling... the thermatake Volcano 11 CPU fan does a great job keeping the CPU cool. its at 92 degrees F right now... not too bad at all, BUT, its noisy as hell... i may have to get one of the kids to sit on the computer case so it doesnt take off, becuse it sure the hell sounds like its going to! uhg. anyhow... will let you guys know of any updates as i can. im on my old Mboard right now.. soon to be the wifes new school computer...

have a good one and will catch you all on the flip side
<S>! and good huntings.

Firemane · Post by **Firemane** » 24 Jan 2004, 06:54

BH- let me know what you think of that upgrade. I am still using my 950 MHz Athlon and Geforce 3. I don't have any money to upgrade, but it's nice to hear what works for other pople. Really, I need to get a new joystick and might need to replace one of my CD drives. I'm esp. intyerested to hear what your framerate in MW looks like, and how far you can push up your resolution setting compared to your previous setup. Is your system an Athlon XP, or one of the new AMD Hammers? Being a simulation (and running an older graphic engine), I think Mechy won't respond as much to a high end video card as it will an increase in CPU power. I bet your new combo will work well, tho.

<S>

BlackHawk*K · Post by **BlackHawk*K** » 24 Jan 2004, 12:10

well ive had some problems setting this up for some reason... im not realy sure what happened. usualy im pretty savvy on getting these things togather. i can tell ya i got alot of being good for the wife becuse she has gone above and beyond on the understanding thing. my first motherboard had a bad Bios... i put it togather and it posted Once then no more... no matter if i cleared the cmos or what i did it made no difference. like most places, the place i got the Mboard from dont allow returns or swap outs due to how often user errer causes problems. and that leads me to the second Mboard i bought...

i had to buy another Mboard, i got the same thing and this one seemed to work fine. except...... i kept getting blue screens and then memory dumps to disk... first it was something to do with the hard disk. then something else. then the vidio etc... was driving me nuts... once when i rebooted the AMD XP barton core 3000+ CPU was running at 1.3 gigs! thats like the 1500+ i upgraded from.. while trying to get that figured out i did one of the most stupid ass newbie things in the world... to set this board to defualt safe mode settings to allow it to repost. ( becuse i set something wrong in the bios) you have to not only clear the bios with the jumper, but you also have to switch the FSB to 100 mhz with another jumper. well i must of done this 100 times by now and it still woundnt go to the aprox 2.0 GHz it was supposed to. well one time i forgot to move the clear cmos jumper back to save.. so now feeling like a total idiot, bauling out of frustration hehe, i gave up for the night and went to the store this morning to get ANOTHER mboard..... they didnt have one. but the store tech suggested that i remove the Bios chip off the first Mboard and try it in this one.. so i did that... no good didnt work. so now im realy frustrated thinging i got to wait till monday to buy another Mboard and start this stuff all over again. so i removed the bios chip again and decided to put the bios chips in the boards they came out off... becuse the first one is most defently not working on either Mboard.. i pluged this bios chip back into this motherboard and on that futile moment i decided what the hell and pressed the power button and low and behold it worked!!! and i got my CPU set correctly first try. its almost like i had to pull out the bios to make sure it cleared the problem. very weird... i spent a month reading up on this motherboard and CPU combination reading good things and bad and never ran across the problems i did this weekend.

one thing to note and IMPORTANT!!!
it seems that the Nforce chipset is picky about Ram... i recomend getting name brand high grade ram for this Mboard... i bought the cheaper stuff and i had all kinds of problems with the blue screen and memory dumps. now it seems fine but i just got it running too. i got to format and reinstall and update everything so i still got alot of work, once im done i will post the results and my full system specs if anyone is interested.

aslo, here i got a spare motherboard minus the bios... the tech told me if i can find a compatable enough bios to get this thing to post to dos, i can use a bios flasher with the correct bios version for the Mboard and effectevly recreate the right bios chip. i havnt decided if im going to try to do this or not yet. depends on how wifes upgrade goes as well, but if anyone has some spare bios chips laying around and willing to mess around with it, and i get frustrated enough, someone out there might get a free Mboard LOL.

well, till i get back.

<S>!

Firemane · Post by **Firemane** » 24 Jan 2004, 12:24

BH- That sounds like a nightmare, sorry you had so much trouble. If that 2nd mobo craps out on you, go somewhere else. I don't know if you get a good deal at that store, but if they won't support their product, then the heck with them. That's a lame excuse, they should at least test the board for you, esp. before they sell it to you. Local stores don't generally have low prices from what I have seen, so they need to offer some service for the price.

Have you ever tried to mail order any, esp. from Newegg.com? They have that board for $116. I have only bought one mobo from them (my ancient Asus A7V) and it works fine, but a friend of mine has RMA'd boards to them and they gave no arguement. NewEgg will also get the order to you within just 2-3 days if they have it, and their web site tells if they are in stock. I can also recommend a couple of good web sites that have good reviews of motherboards.

BlackHawk*K · Post by **BlackHawk*K** » 24 Jan 2004, 22:46

well ive considered online stores but i would have to go the money order route... and then the time it takes to get there, to cash it and to get the stuff back to me, and if something else goes out then you got to send it in and go threw the mess again. the only thing this store dosnt allow to be returned is Mboard more then anything. and that was becuse of stupid things like i did with the second one.. its a miricle the thing worked. i still dont know how it worked but it did and im very glad LOL. ive been playing around with installing stuff and played a few games of HALO with the graphics tweaked all the way up and ive had no problems this round. i think i finaly got it! YAY. i think part of the realy big deal i was having with it running in windows was the cheaper ram. it was Elixer or something like that. this brand of ram i traded in ( with no trouble BTW) is made by inferion and works great so far.. i still got to install mercs. meaning i got to install mw4 veng... then the mech packs.. then mercs then the PR1. then the mektek, then the NB maps and all the files that go with the maps... LOL to be honest im procratinating a little on it :-? back ot the PC shop, about the only bad thing about em is the all sales final on the Mboards... other then that they bend over backwards to help you out.

BlackHawk*K · Post by **BlackHawk*K** » 24 Jan 2004, 23:20

ok here is the load out to BH special PC from hell....

---AMD XP CPU, Barton core ( 512 L2 cache) 3000+ runs at 2.1 GHZ

--- used to have a Thermaltake Volcano 11-Xaser edition CPU fan on this thing. However the damn thing was SOO FREAKING NOISY! for you jet fighter sim guys... it might work ok... becuse it sounded like a jet takeing off! GRR returned it..

--- Got instead..ThermalTake TR2-M2 Great fan! nice and quite and keeps things cool! info on it is here: http://www.tr2tt.com/English/Products/coolers/m2.htm

---MSI K7N2 Delta ILSR Motherboard.
http://www.msicomputer.com/product/deta ... _text=k7n2
(notes. very picky about ram, from what ive read on forums it has to do with the nForce2 Ultra 400 Chipset chipset. )

---MSI FX5700-VTD256 Video card
http://www.msicomputer.com/product/vga/ ... 700-VTD256
( very good Video card. from what i hear it uses they same type of Ram as the 5900 series but uses a realy hopped up 5600 GPU. dunno though, havnt researched all that )

--- 2 sticks of 512 MB PC3200 DDR ( Infineon )

--- 1 Western Digital 40GB, UDMA 100, 8MB cache Hard drive ( use that as boot and OS disk )( fast little bastich)

--- 1 Maxtor 80 GB. HD ( old HD that i had in old system just keep it for larger storage files etc )

--- 2 Seagate Barracuda 120GB, 8MB cache, Serial ATA hard drives. ( these are on a raid and striped. so they run twice as fast as a single HD ( 150 Mbs for SATA drives.. but also twice the capacity, so its like a big 240 GB drive thats fast.. )

--- 1 Liteonit DVD R/RW drive ( had this in old system as well good burner! wallmart special.)

--- this is all stuffed into a ThermalTake Xaser III V1000A PC case. Its big, its heavy, its aluminum.... it locks up and good for keeping kids out of it ( hint feather!!!

) oh and its pretty... ok ok i admit it, im Vain when it comes to flashy lights and pretty high tech looking things...
info on this case is here : http://www.thermaltake.com/products/xaser3/v1000a.htm

--- ProView monitor 17" ( from fred meyers LOL. )

--- Logitech Z-640 speaker system
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm?page= ... nguageid=1

umm i think this is it.. i know alot of this stuff would be cheaper in a few months and if i ordered it online and all that.. but i wanted to get it done this weekend and to the rest of it.. i doubt i will be able to upgrade for a few years, so i decided to do this while i could. i been suffering buyers guilt since i bought the first part. but wife been a good sport about all this and she is actualy insisting on it.. i just hope i made the right choices on this for a few years, time will tell i guess... will answer any questions anyone has on any of the parts. and will get those screen shots for ya Firemain hehe. so far Halo looks Very good. also noticed the Refelctions on stuff with this video card are realy good too. on some water scenes you got that mirror tint on high side of the waves its great lol. when i first started up halo for the first time after this new V card, i kept dying becuse i was looking around too much hehe.

Firemane · Post by **Firemane** » 25 Jan 2004, 12:13

I'm glad you got it going. I'm sorry if I came off as a know it all, I just wanted to pass on some ideas. I didn't want you to bust your bank book on mobos. I'll be glad to hear what you think of your new system's performance in Mechy. Mechy doesn't have as many of the neat features like the new games do so I dont know how much of a difference you will see. The new CPU should help you crank up the resolution.

BlackHawk*K · Post by **BlackHawk*K** » 25 Jan 2004, 16:02

from what i can see so far. it realy dosnt help mercs that much.. you can crank up some options in the control pannel to help smooth out the lines a little but thats about it that i can see.. the biggest thing that you first notice on this video card is the reflections on stuff.. unfortunatly MW4 games dont seem to support this feature. looking at water like in games HALO and MORRWIND III its an awsome site... the water is clear for the most part except the upper side facing you and that has a mirror aspect to it... i believe the ATI cards first used this feature and now looks like Nvidia glommed on to the idea. Games like Auquanox 2 benifit alot with these cards. but with that game, even the nvidia 5950s would have a problem running it at full super video settings. Ghost Recon came with the video card but i didnt realy notice many spectacular graphics on that game so far. i think the best upgrade at this point for both pocket book and performance would be the 5600 series of cards... they have much the same features as this one..

i got mercs installed... just the plain jane... no additions yet. what i want to know.. is how mw4 would look hmm... lol it looked good in 3dfx.. anyone around here still play that? and would ppl be interested in a little mechy revival?

Featherhorse · Post by **Featherhorse** » 26 Jan 2004, 07:25

BlackHawk*K wrote: Its big, its heavy, its aluminum.... it locks up and good for keeping kids out of it ( hint feather!!! )

You Bitch! You're the one that jinxed me! I was trying to figure out hwat my new rig was going to be, I even created an .xls speadsheet to justify $$ spent to wife. I walked away for dinner, and when I get back, nada. Zip. ZILCH! Ironically enough it was when you posted this.
When I rebooted I got an invalid disk error, and can't boot.
I'm down till new rig is built.

Laterz Gatorz,
Fethr

P.S. No BH, I really don't think you had anything to do with it. My kids all deny everything too.

Buffalo Six · Post by **Buffalo Six** » 26 Jan 2004, 14:33

Blackhawk.............

Try talking to Sir Death or Hound 5150.....they build PC's for a living and have thier own PC biz. They also have very good prices. Might help you out.

Featherhorse · Post by **Featherhorse** » 30 Jan 2004, 08:27

OK, I just ordered my new rig, and Lord, Mincemeat, and Hulk willing, I'll be back online next week.

VGA ASUS FX5700/256MB
DDRAM 512MB|PC-3200
DVD+/-RW LITEON
CPU AMD 64 |3200+ ATHLON 64 2.0 GHz
HD 40GB|WD 7200RPM 8MB
MB ASUS K8V DELUXE K8T800
CASE ASPIRE| XDREAMER II ATX BLK

The Wife says I have to play at least 2 hours a night for the next six months, or the girls get it.
Oh well, LET'S DROP!

Fethr

BlackHawk*K · Post by **BlackHawk*K** » 30 Jan 2004, 13:21

wow sounds nice feather, i was looking at the 64 bit AMDs too but was a bit spooked at it being so new. But, on a good note. i think MS has made a new version of windows XP just for the 64 bit CPU... so that should make some things screem. meanwhile i got this spare motherboard i got to see if i can fix up and use for something lol. oh well its all fun and games till someone pokes an eye out...

Malin · Post by **Malin** » 12 Mar 2004, 08:59

you make me so jealous.

My PC's been awaiting a motherboard upgrade for a year now, I'm still running an old GA-7DXR+ (133 bus) which is really sad because I've got an XP2400 (Which is overclocked to 2.2ghz though

) but the board is let down by only having 4x AGP and I've got an 8x GeForce 5600FX 256mb card

also theres none of this fancy new hyper threading and stuff to speed up the RAM (but I have got 1GB of Kingston DDR 333 now).

I've even picked out my new board the GA-7NNXP but a question for you techies out there, If I put in the new motherboard can I just plug in my existing RAID drive and will it recognise it or do I need to start from scratch setting it up????

The main downside is I'll need a new case which means the wife will notice the upgrade then I'll be in big trouble

Guess I'll have to wait until July when my bonus comes through

Malin

Falker · Post by **Falker** » 12 Mar 2004, 20:53

I might be a day day late and a dollar short Mal , but I still got ya beat. That is, … I’m almost going to post this one up a day earlier then you , what with the time zone span and all , Heh. Yes , sounds like BH has a sweet system going. I think we'll all need to get one of those if were going to play Virtual Reality someday. :rockin: I hear Fether is in the makes of building an awesome machine as well. I’ll follow up and grab me one of those too sometime this summer I hope.

I guess this computer thing has become more like building a Muscle Car. It’s something a man can build that’s fast and hot looking at the same time. And that’s something to be proud of. Good luck in camouflaging your computer case . Maybe you could leave the lights running on your old Computer sys up front and have the mean machine hidden in the back some ware out of sight , where she cant see it. She might fall that : )

Falk

Featherhorse · Post by **Featherhorse** » 16 Mar 2004, 12:35

I need to figure out how to post up a pic, so you can see the nifty Blue cathode tube, and all the Anodized chrome cable wrap I put on all the wiring in my box.

Still doesn't do anything for getting me more play time...
But it's Blue.

Fethr

BlackHawk*K · Post by **BlackHawk*K** » 16 Mar 2004, 15:36

What you do is upload the picture to a website. then i think you use a tage thingy i did it with my 'mechboy' mag cover i can look at that and figure it out maybe.

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upgrading..

upgrading..