*****THE OFFICIAL "SPEC ME" THREAD*****

Well UPS arrived a little while ago and I not have all the parts together (Hooray!). It seems like the vast majority of the noise is coming from the 4870, I can't even hear the case fans or PSU over it, but the sides are all open atm so it won't be so bad. Now during bootup I'm having trouble getting a signal to my monitor. I'm running a DVI cable from the 4870 to the monitor and not getting anything on either DVI output. I'm assuming during the initial bootup it expects there to be a vga connection or such? Tips?

 

That may be a problem. Make sure the card is seated properly and that it is plugged in.

The adapter takes 2 molex plugs to make another 6-pin VGA. Look in the box and see if you got one. All of them are supposed to come with one. Mine did.

 

Success. My problem was I didn't have the ATX12V plugged in. I thought the 24pin cable that goes to the MB carried all the power, and it wasn't until I figured out that my PSU came with an 8-pin ATX12V connection that could also be split apart into a 4 pin configuration did it all come together

 

hmm, thats cool...I might get an HX620 after all...but are you sure it's enough to power the gpu?

 

Shamb1es,

Glad you're sorted out. Sweet rig ;P

GTR35,

LMFAO!!! yes I'm sure. I'm running mine with an OC'd quad an hopefully another HD4870 when they drop in price some more. Like <$250. Also, my particular 620HX was capable of 750W before shutdown. I don't recommend you depend on that, but they are under-speced with a 620W rating.

Oh, and to everyone else. Tell me if you find any Mushkin XP series DDR2-800 with the Micron D9 chips and the 4-4-3-10 timings. It's pretty elusive now but I want a matching 4GB set. This is the best RAM I've ever owned.

 

lol, ok, so is mushkin a good brand? and btw corsair is not doing so well, they lack new products

 

The HD4870 is quiet, but obviously if your system doesn't POST, the fan runs at full speed... haha

 

what does POST mean?

 

Power on self test - it's the part of the BIOS you always see when your PC powers up, not the bit you only access to change settings.

 

Running into another problem. Have the old DVD drive hooked up, and while the BIOS detects the drive, when I try to boot from it the system just hangs with a blink cursor on a blank screen. This happens with my ubuntu and vista boot disk.

DVD drive and HDD are both on the same IDE chain, HDD set to master, DVD to slave. HDD is hooked up on the IDE cable first while the DVD is at the end.

Edit: Tried a 2nd DVD drive, changed the jumper between master/slave/cable select. Had the same results. Sure wish I could use this new rig

Edit 2: Played with the HDD jumper, kept it as master, DVD as slave. Somehow it's working now. Might have properly seated the HDD jumper when I played with it. DVD now loading (Now that I look at it, i'm pretty sure the first drive I tested was a CD only drive, got to love old technology)

Edit 3: Dear lord, I only make it about 10 seconds into the Vista disk before it hangs on a screen showing only the vista background and the mouse cursor which I am able to keep moving. I really can't win and will probably leave this until morning now.

 

That's meant to happen, Vista does that. in 5 minutes vista will start installing, be patient!

 

chee, Vista sure is a pain when it comes to installing the OS...no wonder it's not good

 

Yup, it will hang for 5 minutes or so there, and another moment after you click the next button, takes considerable time to install, and often fails during the hardware installation section if you have an incompatible motherboard (note that a few core 2 duo motherboards are incompatible). Once it's finally installed, be greeted with an OS that takes four times as long as XP to load. Turns out the files not accessible problem is with windows itself, and not just vista, but XP has an easy fix to sort the problem out, Vista doesn't.

 

so that means you must buy the hardware with "Vista Certified" onit. Most of the components are now Vista compatible isn't it?

Oh, you know DDR3, what speed can a motherboard support upto? Because Nahalem only supports DDR3 1066 not higher unless you OC it...what is the use of buying an DDr3

 

the god-awful nforce 700 chipsets support the higher speeds I think.

 

ha, ok right...even X58 doesn't support that high...

 

I happened to leave the room for a while and on my return found out that the vista install is just hella slow. It probably doesn't help that I'm using an old 30 gig IDE drive. I also have a 320 gig 7200 IDE HDD that I was planning on using as a second HDD but on second consideration I think i'm going to replace the 30 with a small but fast SATA2 drive and install my OS on that and still use the 320 as a 2nd data storage drive. It'll end up being

SATA: Fast, smaller drive with OS, Apps on it
IDE: 320gig for data storage
IDE: DVD Drive

The HDD market seem pretty convoluted as RPM's aren't the end-all of how fast they are and I can find little useful information about performance of models. What are some good 7200 for bang for your buck? the 10K/15K are out of my price range.

(PS Ended up staying up all night playing with the rig and now I'm trying to complete a linear algebra assignment on 3 hours of sleep )

 

Samsung Spinpoint F1s are reasonably fast, but will never match the OS performance of even the slowest 10k drive as while the data transfer rates are very similar, the response times of 10k drives make them miles faster for installing and booting an OS.

 

Hi

IDE and SATA are basically the same, there speed are close if not the same. The only difference is the cable and the name, thats about it. Unless your old 30GB is 5400RPM if not it'll be the same. In other words the slowness is not your hdd it's the OS itself, Vista installed much slower than XP.

And goodluck with your project...

 

That's not all there is to it though, Only with S-ATA can you get the latest developed drives and greater capacity. IDE doesn't restrict the speed of drives as such (though it would cut the speed of the velociraptors and SSDs, all the other HDDs would be unaffected), but buying IDE means buying old, which means buying slow, as newer drives are inherently faster. Also, IDE cables are big, and connectors are lacking on modern motherboards (the vast majority only have enough for 2 drives to be attached)