First New Rig In 4+ Years!

PC related discussion and other issues.

First New Rig In 4+ Years!

Postby p1nkfl0yd1an on Mon Aug 29, 2011 8:11 am

CPU - I5 2500k
Cooler - 212+
Motherboard - MSI P67A-C43(B3)
PSU - Antec Green 650W
Video Card - Gigabyte GTX 560Ti
Memory - G.Skill 8GB 1333
Case - HAF912
Optical Drive - Asus DVDRW
HDD - 1 TB Seagate 7200rpm Sata 6.0Gb/s

It took an all night mission last week to work the kinks out, but everything seems to be behaving for long enough to snap some pictures with my wife's droid and upload them.

Some Pictures
http://imgur.com/a/LzFa0#jjzFs Little Album Of The Finished Rig
http://i.imgur.com/6h0t7.jpg Non-Modular Behind The Motherboard Aftermath

One question I do have is in relation to the video card. Bad Company 2 seems to crash it... a lot. Googling seems to have uncovered an ongoing argument as to the cause of this. Most people claim that nvidia's drivers don't get along with BC:2 when it comes to 560ti cards, while others claim that someone's been asleep at the wheel over at Gigabyte when it comes to quality control of their 560 Ti OC and SOC models.

To try and determine whether or not I should just RMA the card, I downloaded Metro 2033 and ran the game on the highest settings possible for more than an hour to see if it crashed or overheated my card. With the fan turned up to 100%, my 560 ti OC never went above 57 degrees... a damn good temperature considering the stress 2033 puts on your system. Next I ran the 2033 benchmark tool at least a dozen times at max settings, also never crashed. The minimum framerates I saw on 2033 with my 560ti were in the 15-16fps range with an average of around 30. I was impressed with my little rig considering how ridiculous 2033's graphics get.

Next I opened up BC:2's settings file, and switched the DX level to DX11 (as opposed to "auto") after some people over at reddit claimed to have success in getting their 560's to behave via this method. I seem to be having better luck, being able to run BC:2 for more than an hour without a crash in most instances. However, it does still do it from time to time.

Tl;Dr - Should I just RMA the damn thing to be sure I'm not playing with a faulty card?
All in all you're just another brick in the wall
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Re: First New Rig In 4+ Years!

Postby Dives on Mon Aug 29, 2011 8:22 am

Does it BSOD?
BC2 has conflicts with Realtek sound drivers which results in BSODs on many system. I get it too. I solve it by changing my windows audio device to my Logitech USB headset when I play.
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Re: First New Rig In 4+ Years!

Postby p1nkfl0yd1an on Mon Aug 29, 2011 8:45 am

Nah, no bluescreens. My problem is affectionately known as the WSOD. White Screen of Death. The screen suddenly flashes to white, but you can hear that the game is still running. You can even hear yourself fire bullets if you click your mous button, or in most cases, get killed since you're effectively blind. If you alt tab out or ctrl alt delete you usually get a message about OpenGL driver conflicting with the Display driver. I had one crash today that black screened on me though.

I've been running other benchmarks all night so far. My scores are comparable to what results I'm seeing for 560 ti's after google searches. (25.1fps when I Max out Heaven at 1080) More importantly, nothing crashes this card except BC:2.
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Re: First New Rig In 4+ Years!

Postby Sorrow on Mon Aug 29, 2011 9:19 am

Silly perhaps but are you sure 650W is enough? I see people running lesser cards on 750+W
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Re: First New Rig In 4+ Years!

Postby p1nkfl0yd1an on Mon Aug 29, 2011 9:27 am

Only time you'd need 750+W with 560ti is if you have more than one of them. I've heard that you can even be safe with a quality 500w psu so long as you're not running SLI or any intense CPU and GPU overclocking... yeah a quick google on the subject says anything 550 or above should be fine. It seems like lately Nvidia and Ati's newer products are improving in the power efficiency department. Same goes for Intel and Amd with their CPU's. 2500k is remarkably efficient (and runs cool as well.. some people are getting 2500k's up to 5GHz on aftermarket air coolers alone. But they won the chip batch lottery)

I suppose it's worth mentioning that I ran 3dmark06 for shits and giggles. It told me my scores couldn't be used for leaderboards due to the fact that it hasn't approved my drivers yet. I'm wondering if that's an indication that Nvidia's latest drivers still have issues to work out.
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Re: First New Rig In 4+ Years!

Postby zombie@computer on Mon Aug 29, 2011 10:16 am

in my experience you should never use the *latest* drivers, always one version earlier. Not sure if that still applies nowadays, since win7 i let windows handle the 3D drivers.
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Re: First New Rig In 4+ Years!

Postby p1nkfl0yd1an on Mon Aug 29, 2011 10:24 am

Suppose that's a good point zombie. Gotta say I've never gone through windows for my drivers. Should I just google "560ti windows drivers?"
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