[ask] Building PC with limited budget

[wonderwrench]

Hey did you get your parts ordered? If so what did you end up going with?

Bill

[juliand_fergie]

Hey did you get your parts ordered? If so what did you end up going with?

Bill

Hello wonderwrench, I'm sorry I haven't able to visit the forum until now. Thank you for all your support. In the end, I end up with the same specs with minor changes:

AMD AM3 Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition
Mb ASRock 870G Extreme3
RAM PATRIOT PSD3 4G 1333 KH (2 X 2G) DDR 3 Module
Harddisk 3.5Inch WDC SATA II Caviar Black 500Gb 32Mb
VGA Digital Alliance HD 5770 1Gb 128Bit DDR5 -> instead of HD 4870
PSU Seasonic S12II-520W Bronze -> instead of M12II-520W Bronze
Optical Drive LG DVDRW 24x

along with few parts from my old PC:

LG LCD W1953S
3.5 Inch Seagate SATA I 80 Gb (ST3808AS)

I changed from HD 4870 to HD 5770 because the HD 4870 with 1 gigs of RAM is currently out of stock, in almost every computer store that I could find in Jakarta. They only have HD 4870 with 512mb of RAM.

I also changed my PSU from M12II-520W Bronze to S12II-520W Bronze. The main reason is simply a budget.

I'm using Windows 7 Ultimate. The performance so far is nice, I got 5.9 rating on Windows Experience Index. What was that suppose to mean?

The CPU temp. is currently showing 45 C on a normal usage, is it normal? I'm also able to unlock the X2 core into X4 3,4 Gigs. The Asrock board provides an easy tools known as UCC to unlock it. But for now, none of my parts are being overclocked.

The only main downside is, sometimes the whole system doesn't perform like it should've been. Sometimes, it took me about 10 to 20 minutes to copy 3 gigs of a compressed (*.rar ) folder to another drive. For example, I used Ultra ISO to mount an Image file on my drive. then, I copy the file from the virtual drive into my harddisk. The file size is around 3,3 gigs (single compressed file). And it took me almost 30 minutes to complete the process, which is riddiculous IMO. So I cancelled it, and try to do same thing the day after. And guess what, it only took not more than 3 minutes!

Today, I'm playing Far Cry 2 and it run smoothly until I was killed (on the game), try to reload it, then... somehow it crashed and the PC restarted automatically. Next thing, the harddrive was not detected on BIOS. I turned it off and turn it on again, and it's still not detected. So I turned it off again and leave it for about 10-20 minutes. And it works well until now.

What could possibly caused something like this to my PC? I also partitioned my harddrive into two drive (100 gigs for the system, and the rest for various files). Could it possibly caused by the harddrive, or maybe something else?

Thank you for your further information, I really appreciates it.

Best Regards,


Juliandi

[wonderwrench]

The only difference in those two PSU's is the M is modular and the S is not.

Windows Experience Index explanation.

Your CPU temps look OK. What is the hottest you have seen under heavy load? You can use IntelBurnTest to load the CPU. Warning watch the CPU temp closely. Cancel the test if the temp goes over 65C.

First check the SATA and power cables going to the drives and make sure they are completely and squarely plugged in. SATA cabling is a poor design and prone to connection issues. I have had similar symptoms on my main PC before. Take a look in Windows event viewer and see if you have any related errors caused by a bad connection or bad cable. If you still have problems try another SATA cable. Double check all electrical connections while your at it.

If you are still having problems try locking out the 2 extra cores and see if anything changes. Run WD data lifeguard diagnostics on the drive. If that's not it strip your system down to the least amount of parts needed to run, cpu, 1 stick of ram, video card and hard drive. It's possible you got a bad drive.

Hope this helps
Bill

[wonderwrench]

"Today, I'm playing Far Cry 2 and it run smoothly until I was killed (on the game), try to reload it, then... somehow it crashed and the PC restarted automatically. Next thing, the harddrive was not detected on BIOS. I turned it off and turn it on again, and it's still not detected. So I turned it off again and leave it for about 10-20 minutes. And it works well until now."

If you like you can disable the automatic reboot on error to make it easier to diagnose the problem. Go to control panel, system, advanced system settings, advanced tab. Under startup and recovery open settings. Uncheck automatically restart. When an error occurs now you will get a blue screen instead of a reboot. The error message should give us a general idea as to the problem. I'm still thinking its drive cabling or drive related by your explanation of the problem given above.

[juliand_fergie]

Hello wonderwrench, thank for your advice.

I have checked & re-checked the cabling on my sata drive, and I didn't find anything odd, though. But I do switch the sata cable into an another sata plug. I also removing a software from the Asrock CD called 'AMD Overdrive' & 'AMD Fusion', and since then my PC run just fine. I haven't counter anything wrong till this moment. I don't know which of those steps that contribute the most, but it surely did something good to my whole system.

[wonderwrench]

Hello wonderwrench, thank for your advice.

I have checked & re-checked the cabling on my sata drive, and I didn't find anything odd, though. But I do switch the sata cable into an another sata plug. I also removing a software from the Asrock CD called 'AMD Overdrive' & 'AMD Fusion', and since then my PC run just fine. I haven't counter anything wrong till this moment. I don't know which of those steps that contribute the most, but it surely did something good to my whole system.

Nice to see you got it fixed. BTW I have never had good luck with tweaking programs included with motherboards.

Bill