Calling all computer gurus... need advice

[lil_Blue_Ford]

Whoa... it went up? Wtf...
Still not bad temps, but that's not right.
Somehow air is being drawn in the wrong direction, or in such a way that it's actually warmed the CPU up, Obviously right? But that's what you need to figure out. Does the fan have a speed control on it? Where are the other fans, besides your CPU placed? I see one on the top.
To clarify what I told you before, because I'm not sure what you sealed up or filtered; You do not want to seal up the front of the case, unless you have an intake fan in front, in that case, you could seal around it to make it more efficient. If there's no fan in the front, you want to leave it totally open, so air can easily be pulled through. If there's a side panel fan, most likely it already has a metal grate type filter over it, so leave it alone too. If this doesn't help, you may have to rearrange some things. Give me a better idea of your layout and maybe I can help.
It took some doing, but I have most all of my wires either routed around the edges of the case, or tucked behind the motherboard panel. Zip ties help out a lot too.

Yea, idle temps now are about 32-33*, though I have seen them dip to 29* at times. (I was getting a pretty solid 31* at idle before). The Mobo got slightly cooler (36 and 33 now), and the Mobo doesn't heat up much when I'm gaming (ran COD4 for 3+ hours last night, CPU went up to 46-47* and the Mobo was at 38* and 41*).

The two 80mm fans that came attached to the case had no speed control plug. The 120mm I got I thought was supposed to have a speed control plug... but the fan I got had no speed control plug. Looking back, it appears I misread the ad.

Fans...
My vid card has a fan, not sure which direction it's pushing air.
I have the case fan on the top of the case in the middle, it is an exhaust.
I have a case fan almost perfectly opposite of the CPU, it pulls air into the case.
I have a 120mm fan set to exhaust in the back of the case.
My PSU has it's own internal exhaust fan.

I put filter material over the ports where air can be brought into the case and over each fan opening. I decided that may prove to be in my best interests since our house is still under construction and there are no doors on the bedrooms yet, just a curtain. Dust is part of life, lol.

 

[DeanMoriarty]

Nice. That sure is a purty PSU.

The motherboard temp dropping really isn't a bad trade-off, and I forgot you'd said it was quite dusty there.
I think what's happening is the back exhaust fan is pulling away a bit of the cool air the side fan is bringing in to the CPU, but you've still got good temps, I'd leave it the way it is.

 

[smokey]

Not to bad Looking there. he heat rise is due t the filters you put on slowing the air flow, but the temps are still very good.
If you zip tie your cables to gather the temps may drop a little due to better air flow from not hitting the cables and slowing.
I like the case for the fans that is why I told you to get it and the price is not bad.
Looks like you have a nice system over all that should last you awhle.
Need to get a pic of it all lit up glowing Blue in the dark Now

 

[lil_Blue_Ford]

Nice. That sure is a purty PSU.

The motherboard temp dropping really isn't a bad trade-off, and I forgot you'd said it was quite dusty there.
I think what's happening is the back exhaust fan is pulling away a bit of the cool air the side fan is bringing in to the CPU, but you've still got good temps, I'd leave it the way it is.

Not to bad Looking there. he heat rise is due t the filters you put on slowing the air flow, but the temps are still very good.
If you zip tie your cables to gather the temps may drop a little due to better air flow from not hitting the cables and slowing.
I like the case for the fans that is why I told you to get it and the price is not bad.
Looks like you have a nice system over all that should last you awhle.
Need to get a pic of it all lit up glowing Blue in the dark Now

I may still try to re-arrange the wires some, but I was having a bit of trouble trying to get all of the wires from that larger PSU routed out of the way.

I'm going to get another couple shots of it after I clean up my mess around here some again (haven't really had much time) and I need to sit down an figure out how to shut off the flash on my digital camera to get a pic of it all lighted up. Not that I really care about the lights (I would have been happy without them), but... they're there so I saw no reason not to light 'em up.

Thanks you two for all the help you've given me on getting this monster put together.

I finally got ahold of my uncle yesterday, he had forgot about helping me assemble this thing and had called an left a message the other day, I had been forgetting to give him a call an let him know it was ok. Talked with him for a bit and he seemed rather impressed about how good of a computer I got and that I was able to get it together and working.

 

[DeanMoriarty]

I wound up taking my whole setup apart after I built it to reroute the cables because of the way the PSU, Mobo and CPU heatsink sit so tightly together... plus it gave me the opportunity to cut a hole in the front for a 120mm fan and completely cut the fan holes out in the back for better airflow.
After a couple years of dealing with the noise and dust though, I think next time I might try for a fanless system.
Most dig. cameras, pressing up on the navigation pad scrolls through the flash options.

These were taken many upgrades ago...

 

[lil_Blue_Ford]

That's a pretty sweet lookin comp you got there!

And yea, I think I've been bitten by the bug... I'm already starting to think of planning out for building another comp... one set up to do a quad vid card setup and ....lol

 

[lil_Blue_Ford]

Ok... now I got a :wtf: issue....

Computer worked fine Sunday night... left it on when I got done playing COD4 at almost 2:30am. Got up at 7, checked real quick for messages, then shut down cuz I wasn't gonna be back home till around 10pm. Got home, fired it up, and get an error message that my sound woln't work until I install the drivers. :wtf:

No problem, I'll just re-install the drivers off the disk that came with my mobo, right? Wrong. It says the drivers are not installed, starts installing them, then says install failed. Try it again and get the same result. Shut down comp, boot back up, same error message, same problem when I try to re-install the drivers. Try re-installing a couple times, then try shutting down and re-booting again. Same issue. Now I'm really irritated. Figure, whatever, I can play a few rounds of COD4 without sound and deal with it tomorrow. Try loading COD4 and it throws a windows error and dumps the game. Shut down, restart, try again, same deal. I'm so pissed off that I just shut the comp off an go to bed.

Fire it up this morning and everything works on it's own... try playing a couple rounds of COD4 and get kicked out on a windows error once and out of the game server for some weird error, but everything else seems ok. Try going into Firefox to post my troubles and it promptly dumps with an error. Restart Firefox and so far it's ok.

But now I'm concerned that something is going on that shouldn't be. Ran AVG (both the anti-virus and anti-spyware) and Spybot to no avail. I don't know what else to check, my Intel Utility software says everything is as it should be.

 

[DeanMoriarty]

I'm wondering if your game doesn't have something to do with the errors you're having. Your sound drivers would be an odd choice of targets for spyware or virus's.
I would do some searches and see if you can come up with a compatibility issue with COD4 and your sound card, or on-board sound. or just sound issues in general with the game. Try checking for patches for the game. Make sure XP is up to date.
If that doesn't work, check the sound card (or mobo manufacturer if it's on-board) website for a more recent sound driver.
You could also try uninstalling and reinstalling the game.

If none if this works, post back exactly what the error messages you're getting are.

Good luck.

 

[smokey]

Did you install any patches to the game?
Install any other updates (windows or t any other program) before these errors started.

 

[lil_Blue_Ford]

Only thing that I can think of that might have been something is windows updating.

Game ran fine again, threw a couple errors that booted me out but hasn't had an issue for the past 3 hours....

Not really sure what to think now...

 

[DeanMoriarty]

How's she running now?
9 times out of 10 this is some type of multi-media error.
Considering how integrated multi-media is into software and the OS, a sound error can cause the PC to do some pretty strange things.
Another thing you can do is try uninstalling the drivers, and either installing a generic XP driver, or searching windows update for one.

That game looks bad ass btw... I need to upgrade my graphics card soon. Lol.

 

[lil_Blue_Ford]

I posted that right before I sprawled out on my bed for the night... this is the first I've been on it today. So far so good. Maybe it was just a lil glitch that worked itself out.

COD4 is pretty bad ass, I love it. I was a bit concerned cuz they tell you to have a minimum of a 2.4 ghz dual core, but my comp doesn't seem to have an issue playing it. They also say 512 mb ram for xp and a GeForce 6600 or ATI Radeon 9800pro or better vid card. I got the game from a guy who got it and tried using it on his Dell, but it couldn't handle it at all. My comp doesn't seem to care.

I've logged a lil over 10 hours of online play so far, up to a level 22 now. Played the single player campaign mode a bit too, but got frustrated with this one level and decided to play the online part for awhile to help build my skills before trying it again.

 

[DeanMoriarty]

It's amazing what you need to play certain games now days.
I can't justify spending more than $100 or so on a vid card... 9800's have really dropped in price though. I remember checking them out when I first built this system, I think they were about $350. Probably pick one up now for under a bill.
Then again... I may just wait until I can build a new system, so I don't waste money on an AGP card.
Decisions, decisions...
I've played games fine that supposedly have higher processor requirements... with an old fx 5500 card and a Gig of ram. Sometimes I just have to lower the frame rate and resolution to get it to play smooth.

 

[lil_Blue_Ford]

Not that I enjoy bringing a thread back from the dead....

But just on the off chance that someone stumbles across this in the process of searching for information (or wanders into it again like I did).... it's time for an update....

The PC I built is still going strong, although it did go through a few more upgrades and problems (but I'm posting from it now).

The sound on the mobo sharted the bed. I ended up doing a lot of poking around and researching and finally settled on an HT Omega Striker 7.1. Turned out to be pretty decent and I've been happy with it.

IIRC, my problem that started happening with my last couple posts in this thread turned out to be one of my sticks of memory was malfunctioning. Tracked down which one it was and pulled the pair. Corsair warrantied the pair out, no problem (and I was able to run the comp on the other pair until the replacements got here). Even though only one stick was bad, since they were a matched pair, Corsair swapped them both.

My XFX video card literally blew up on me. It was working fine when I went to bed one night (no programs running, monitor in sleep mode) and woke up to find that the vid card detonated. Literally. Three of the capacitors blew apart. Did a little research and found out that this was a problem for XFX. I figured since it was supposed to be lifetime warrantied, I should be ok, right? Nope. XFX told me that they couldn't find my warranty registration information so the card had no warranty. When I argued and included the information that I found about their cards having problems with capacitors, they told me to take a hike. I would never recommend their cards to anyone at this point - their customer service sucked.

While it was down, my faithful lappy also gave up the ghost. Holyford86 told me he had most of a computer he got that supposedly wasn't working right but had a good vid card, so he sent me all he had. I popped that vid card in until I got a replacement. I also discovered that the computer stuff he sent me had a 3.2ghz quad core that was the correct upgrade for my comp... soo... it found a new home. Only problem with it has been that the temp reading for it comes up as a negative number instead of a positive number in the software from Intel to monitor temps an such. But I don't complain much, the price was right.

My new vid card ended up being an EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX+, it's a honking huge card, but it's done well. The only problem I had with the new card had nothing really to do with the new card. When I got the card from Newegg, the box looked like a rugby team of gorillas used it for a football. Not only was the outer box smashed to heck, but the box the card was packaged in was badly smashed. The card looked ok, but with all that damage to the packing, I didn't want to take a chance. I called Newegg and they promised to get a replacement sent out and to send me a free shipping label for returning the damaged one (props to Newegg for that one), but it would go by regular shipping since that was all I originally paid for. I called up UPS then and pitched a fit over the whole thing..... The next day UPS was at my door with my new card (it ended up getting overnighted) and they took the smashed stuff with them (Newegg told me the driver wouldn't pick it up, it would have to be taken to a UPS center).

I also upgraded my processor cooling - Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro.

While I was at it, I played around with fan location, punched some new cooling holes and the like. Cooling still isn't quite the way I'd love it to be, but it's satisfactory.

Upgraded my mouse to a Logitech gaming mouse too.

COD4 runs flawlessly even at high settings (I can get frame rates of over 200). Got into playing some Black Ops too, and that works well.

If I think of it, I'll get an updated pic up.

 

[lil_Blue_Ford]

Also... if someone would care to move this over to the computer forum, it would be appreciated, thank you!