Computer help!

[Ralphie]

First I would check to see what type of power connector your motherboard uses, ATX12V (4-pin) or EPS12V (8-pin).

If the motherboard uses ATX12V, then I would suggest this power supply: Antec EarthWatts EA-650 GREEN 650W ATX12V v2.3 SLI Ready CrossFire Certified 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC Power Supply. Its only $10 more then what your looking at, yes its 100 watts less then your current choice, but the quality is more then likely superior, and antec typically under-rates their equipment. Also take the negative reviews with a grain of salt (for any product, 4-5 stars with 50 plus reviews is very good), especially in regards to "dead on arrivals, or fails in a short time", as even the top brands have a failure rate around 5-10%, especially considering most of them all come from the same place... china. The only computer items i've seen that have a virtually non-existant failure rate are:

1. Power supply cable, that wasn't caused by physical abuse.
2. Intel Cpu's when handled properly, and not abused/overclocked or allowed to overheat because the heatsink is so clogged full of dust, or the case lacks sufficient ventilation, etc.

I've been breaking and repairing computers for the last 20 years, I've almost seen it all... still waiting for the day I see something that spontaniously combusts, closest I've seen is sparks / smoke.

Don't even get me started on all the "computer abuse" I've seen / done.

Hmmm well the one you posted seems good for what i need.....but one q

It says it has 2 pci 6+2 pin connectors.

I have two 6 pin connectors on the card but whats the +2 mean?!

This is the one I found
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817339002

But I haven't checked what kind my mobo needs, so when I get a chance ill figure that out lol.

And I agree with your post 100%. You clearly know your shit so I may PM you with some questions if I hit a wall(if you don't mind)

And you don't have to sell me on Antec, I've had them before and NEVER had a problem with them.

Only reason why I would go with a no name is because ive bought no name in a pinch and they never failed.

In fact the one that came out of the PC i replaced this one with, was star tech or some shit and it never gave me any issues.

If your going to have a problem out of the box with an item, it can be a 400$ item or a 50$ item...shit just happens.

For $64, id gladly get an antec....now to just cough up the dough lol.

Man, my "new" video card is a GeForce 7900GT... you're replacing something better than what I fairly recently upgraded to!

If your power supply is only 400, and it suggests 600... that's a big deal. I'd think that has to be a factor. Especially if it's stock Dell crap... because Dell uses the cheapest junk they can, usually!

Well the only reason why I am upgrading the video card is because I have been collecting Bluray (mkv) files for streaming to my 60'' tv in the family room.

Now that I actually have the 60'', and a computer that has some balls, I want to play/stream them.

On my old PC, when I would play these files they were choppy.

When I got this new pc with the GEforce 8500, they almost play but still are choppy.

This new card is made for HD video/gaming, and my buddy has played mkv files in front of me clear as day.

So if i put this card in my PC and the mkv still chop, its my processor and not the card but im sure the Intel duo 2 will be good enough for them to play.

Id be surprised if i need a quad core to play mkv with an HD card.

[deevergote]

Now a quad core is something I DO have
I picked up an AMD Phenom 9850 last year for cheap-ish ($100 or so, I think) from Tigerdirect.com. If your mobo can handle it, it might be worth looking into anyway. I'm sure they're even cheaper now! (though if you're running an intel chip, they tend to be a bit more expensive...)

[Ralphie]

Ya i have like no money right now...only necessities.

Until I can raise the funds for the PSU, the HD card will sit on the shelf lol.

I would LOVE a quad core....the only thing holding me back from being able to process 1000s of raw pictures that are like 3500x2500 lol and HD 1080P video from my SLR.

Im going to hold out for the iMac that my wife will eventually get.

That will come with enough power to do what I need to do photography wise.....then this PC will be my media center.

[cloudasc]

Hmmm well the one you posted seems good for what i need.....but one q

It says it has 2 pci 6+2 pin connectors.

I have two 6 pin connectors on the card but whats the +2 mean?!

This is the one I found
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817339002

But I haven't checked what kind my mobo needs, so when I get a chance ill figure that out lol.

And I agree with your post 100%. You clearly know your shit so I may PM you with some questions if I hit a wall(if you don't mind)

And you don't have to sell me on Antec, I've had them before and NEVER had a problem with them.

Only reason why I would go with a no name is because ive bought no name in a pinch and they never failed.

In fact the one that came out of the PC i replaced this one with, was star tech or some shit and it never gave me any issues.

If your going to have a problem out of the box with an item, it can be a 400$ item or a 50$ item...shit just happens.

For $64, id gladly get an antec....now to just cough up the dough lol.

Well the only reason why I am upgrading the video card is because I have been collecting Bluray (mkv) files for streaming to my 60'' tv in the family room.

Now that I actually have the 60'', and a computer that has some balls, I want to play/stream them.

On my old PC, when I would play these files they were choppy.

When I got this new pc with the GEforce 8500, they almost play but still are choppy.

This new card is made for HD video/gaming, and my buddy has played mkv files in front of me clear as day.

So if i put this card in my PC and the mkv still chop, its my processor and not the card but im sure the Intel duo 2 will be good enough for them to play.

Id be surprised if i need a quad core to play mkv with an HD card.

The 6+2 Pin is for video cards that use 8pin power cables. I got dual gtx 580's, each one has a 8pin (power supply has a 6+2 plug) power & a 6pin power, it allows you to use the plug with either.

In regards to HD .mkv movies, I have two laptops that I use to stream movies from my NAS (Network Attached Storage) Device/Appliance fitted with 2x 2TB HD's. One laptop has a Core 2 Duo 2ghz (living room), the other has a Core i5 2ghz (bedroom). First one has a Nvidia Quadra video card with 32 cuda cores, the other has 48 cores. Both can play 1080p .mkv files easily, they each have 4gb of ram. I then use a program on my android phone called unified remote to be the keyboard and mouse for each computer (through wifi). Since your doing the whole theater thing, you should check it out. Oh and I'm talking about streaming 14-16GB .mkv files, through a nas unit that has a max network throughput of about 200 Megabit, or around 20Megabytes per second, write is 8MB a second. From the sound of your setup you should have no problem playing your movies with the new video card.


Your probably wondering what would I need a 1200 watt power supply for? Heres my baby:


Act 1 -Initial Case Build Out
Act 2 - Installing of Internals
Act 3 - Air Cooled Beast

Case: Thermaltake Armor A60 w/ 7x Aerocool Shark's High Air Pressure (70+ CFM at 28db; 4x intake, 3x exhaust)
Motherboard: Gigabyte X58-UD7 ver 2.0
CPU: i7 980x 3.3ghz Hex core (Tested up to 4.2ghz stable on air w/hyperthreading enabled)
RAM: 24GB (6x4GB) Kingston 1600mhz DDR3 @ 1333mhz (6 Slots is hard on the cpu's imc, just to run at 1333 mhz I had to up the imc voltage to 1.25, if I wanted to run it at 1600, I would have to bump it up to 1.40.
Power Supply: Antec High Current Pro 1200 watt
Graphics: 2x GTX 580's in SLI
HD: Seagate's 1TB 7200rpm, 2x 500GB 7200rpm
CD/DVD: CD-R/RW / DVD-+R/RW
Monitor: Asus 24" LED 1080P monitor & 17" 1280x1024 Hyundai LCD
Keyboard: Microsoft Natural Pro (circa 2001) beige, the only buttons that don't work are the volume down and mute button (thanks wifey for spilling something in it).
Mouse: Intellimouse Explorer 4.0 (this one is crap, I bought it because the previous one that I bought with my keyboard was absolutely fantastic back in the day!)

It had been 10 years since I last built a desktop, been living off a laptop since 04 ish till I built this. That was a time of beige computer cases, and no windows, led fans, cold cathodes, watercooling, etc.

My last uber rig:
Case: Inwin Beige Mid tower
ASUS CUV-4x
150 watt no-name power supply (this is the 3rd one its on)
PIII 750@ 867mhz
768MB of PC-100 DIMM's
Most notable video card was a Geforce Ti 4600($400)
10/100 Ethernet Card PCI
56k ISA Modem ($80)
10GB Primary Hard drive, 27.3GB storage drive (replaced with a 120GB)
Sound Blast Live! PCI w/ Expansion Slot add-on board (It was like $300 back then)
CD Burner: Plextor 12/10/32x w/ Burn Proof ($300, one of the very first, if not the first cd burners that got rid of "coasters" and "frisbee's")

[Ralphie]

Damn thats a beast!

Ya mine is not that fancy.

Just your usual XPS system from Dell.

My buddy who does IT had it sitting in his house....so I guess it was a work PC...so it isn't fancy, but it is a pretty decent system so I want to get this HD card going so I can start watching my bluray backlog lol.

[Hopeless]

yea sounds like power supply like everyone else was saying.

i remember the first time i got a "badass" video card. when elder scrolls oblivion just came out and it wouldnt play on my 64mb card lol..

a) buy 128mb video card
b) plug in video card
c) run power from my old ass power supply to video card
d) startup, get super excited
e) start ES: Oblivion, start orgasming awesomeness because its working.
f) get halfway through opening video..... PSU/Computer catches on fire.

haha was so tragic.

I havnt built a pc in 2 1/2 years when i had a 3.0ghz intel quad core, dual 9800 gtx's, and 8gb of ram on vista 64bit.

i run a laptop now with the i5 2.6, 1gb nvidia video chipset, and 16gb of ram... does all i need it to do. (skyrim, SWTOR, Mass Effect, Starcraft 2, Etc)

[trickedaccord92]

The 6+2 Pin is for video cards that use 8pin power cables. I got dual gtx 580's, each one has a 8pin (power supply has a 6+2 plug) power & a 6pin power, it allows you to use the plug with either.

In regards to HD .mkv movies, I have two laptops that I use to stream movies from my NAS (Network Attached Storage) Device/Appliance fitted with 2x 2TB HD's. One laptop has a Core 2 Duo 2ghz (living room), the other has a Core i5 2ghz (bedroom). First one has a Nvidia Quadra video card with 32 cuda cores, the other has 48 cores. Both can play 1080p .mkv files easily, they each have 4gb of ram. I then use a program on my android phone called unified remote to be the keyboard and mouse for each computer (through wifi). Since your doing the whole theater thing, you should check it out. Oh and I'm talking about streaming 14-16GB .mkv files, through a nas unit that has a max network throughput of about 200 Megabit, or around 20Megabytes per second, write is 8MB a second. From the sound of your setup you should have no problem playing your movies with the new video card.


Your probably wondering what would I need a 1200 watt power supply for? Heres my baby:


Act 1 -Initial Case Build Out
Act 2 - Installing of Internals[
Act 3 - Air Cooled Beast

Case: Thermaltake Armor A60 w/ 7x Aerocool Shark's High Air Pressure (70+ CFM at 28db; 4x intake, 3x exhaust)
Motherboard: Gigabyte X58-UD7 ver 2.0
CPU: i7 980x 3.3ghz Hex core (Tested up to 4.2ghz stable on air w/hyperthreading enabled)
RAM: 24GB (6x4GB) Kingston 1600mhz DDR3 @ 1333mhz (6 Slots is hard on the cpu's imc, just to run at 1333 mhz I had to up the imc voltage to 1.25, if I wanted to run it at 1600, I would have to bump it up to 1.40.
Power Supply: Antec High Current Pro 1200 watt
Graphics: 2x GTX 580's in SLI
HD: Seagate's 1TB 7200rpm, 2x 500GB 7200rpm
CD/DVD: CD-R/RW / DVD-+R/RW
Monitor: Asus 24" LED 1080P monitor & 17" 1280x1024 Hyundai LCD
Keyboard: Microsoft Natural Pro (circa 2001) beige, the only buttons that don't work are the volume down and mute button (thanks wifey for spilling something in it).
Mouse: Intellimouse Explorer 4.0 (this one is crap, I bought it because the previous one that I bought with my keyboard was absolutely fantastic back in the day!)

It had been 10 years since I last built a desktop, been living off a laptop since 04 ish till I built this. That was a time of beige computer cases, and no windows, led fans, cold cathodes, watercooling, etc.

My last uber rig:
Case: Inwin Beige Mid tower
ASUS CUV-4x
150 watt no-name power supply (this is the 3rd one its on)
PIII 750@ 867mhz
768MB of PC-100 DIMM's
Most notable video card was a Geforce Ti 4600($400)
10/100 Ethernet Card PCI
56k ISA Modem ($80)
10GB Primary Hard drive, 27.3GB storage drive (replaced with a 120GB)
Sound Blast Live! PCI w/ Expansion Slot add-on board (It was like $300 back then)
CD Burner: Plextor 12/10/32x w/ Burn Proof ($300, one of the very first, if not the first cd burners that got rid of "coasters" and "frisbee's")

Very nice looking build .... what's its primary function for you? I mean do you do alot of video and/or music editing or is it just an Overpowered beast for everyday use and gaming?

And for the OP I am working on a similar problem with a friends PC. He brought it to me after upgrading the video card and like you is using a dvi to vga adapter and it won't work. Plugged it into my monitor straight dvi and it worked. For some reason some of these cards dont like adapters. If you know anyone with a dvi monitor see if you can test it out on that before going and upgrading your PSU.

[trickedaccord92]

Oh and here is my build I finished in Febuary.

Antec 1200 v3 full tower
Intel i5-2500k
ASUS p8p67 motherboard
EVGA GE Force 560Ti
16gig corsair vengance ram
Corsair 750 enthusiest power source
OCZ 120g SSD + 1TB WD HDD
ASUS DVD drive
ASUS 27" monitor
win 7 premium OS

Logitech g110 keyboard
Logitech g9x mouse
Earforce PX21 headset

Thinking about selling my 560Ti to my friend and getting a 680 ...

Primary use is gaming

[cloudasc]

yea sounds like power supply like everyone else was saying.

i remember the first time i got a "badass" video card. when elder scrolls oblivion just came out and it wouldnt play on my 64mb card lol..

a) buy 128mb video card
b) plug in video card
c) run power from my old ass power supply to video card
d) startup, get super excited
e) start ES: Oblivion, start orgasming awesomeness because its working.
f) get halfway through opening video..... PSU/Computer catches on fire.

haha was so tragic.

I havnt built a pc in 2 1/2 years when i had a 3.0ghz intel quad core, dual 9800 gtx's, and 8gb of ram on vista 64bit.

i run a laptop now with the i5 2.6, 1gb nvidia video chipset, and 16gb of ram... does all i need it to do. (skyrim, SWTOR, Mass Effect, Starcraft 2, Etc)

I remember my first video card upgrade to the following system:
Built by Micron
Pentium 166 non-mmx
32MB of PC66
S3 Virge 2MB
Sound Blaster 32 Awe
4.3GB Hard Drive
4x CD-ROM

I added a 3dfx Voodoo 2 8MB to it, and it was like a brand new computer, I loaded up F22 Raptor and was in AWE.

Very nice looking build .... what's its primary function for you? I mean do you do alot of video and/or music editing or is it just an Overpowered beast for everyday use and gaming?

I built it so it would be cable of handling virtualization. With it I can simulate very complex networks, with a small footprint.

So far I've had up to 11 operating systems running at one time.
2x Win2k8 Servers
2x Vmware ESX Servers
6x Win2k3 Servers
Running ontop of Win7 64bit Pro, through VMWare Workstation.

I've done some video editing/encoding with it, uploaded some FRAPS video game captures with settings maxed at 1080p to youtube, as part of capability testing. Metro 2033 is the only game so far to heat up my video cards and push them to their limits, more so then either Crysis.



Lately though I've been playing Skyrim; before that I finished Arkham City, a fantastic game by the way, but the framerates weren't what they were supposed/could have been due to programming issues. I mean its only using maybe 20-30% of my gpu's, and my fps would drop below 30 sometimes. There was also one fight with the joker, that I had to turn physx off, as the fps dropped down to like 8fps.

[Ralphie]

Damn Ive never even heard of that game but it looks fucking amazing.

You think I could run it with my setup?

[trickedaccord92]

Nice I just started playing around with Fraps not long ago. Recording videos of BF3 and Skyrim. Nothing I have felt the urge to keep though. For BF3 I mainly use it to call out cheats and hacks.

frame rates often fluctuate in some games not due to our hardware but the game being designed to run at a max frames in some games to help systems not quite as overpowered.

I have seen some $6k+ systems that get buggy in BF3 due to the way the game is designed to run through Origin.

The video looks awsome. How long of clips do you record at a time and what do you use for your splicing + editing?

Oh and sorry if we have gotten off topic just let me know and I will start a new thread. I might start one anyways for people to leave in depth PC game reviews and videos for all the PC gamers to get an idea of what they might want to play.

[cloudasc]

Damn Ive never even heard of that game but it looks fucking amazing.

You think I could run it with my setup?

I think you should be able to run it for the most part with your system, its notoriously more crippling then crysis. Oh if you think it looks amazing, just keep in mind youtube cuts hella quality on them, especially noticeable full screen. I'm almost tempted to try and upscale future videos to 4k res or something so theres not so much of a quality loss. If you keep the video windowed thats how it looks full screen when playing.

Nice I just started playing around with Fraps not long ago. Recording videos of BF3 and Skyrim. Nothing I have felt the urge to keep though. For BF3 I mainly use it to call out cheats and hacks.

frame rates often fluctuate in some games not due to our hardware but the game being designed to run at a max frames in some games to help systems not quite as overpowered.

I have seen some $6k+ systems that get buggy in BF3 due to the way the game is designed to run through Origin.

The video looks awsome. How long of clips do you record at a time and what do you use for your splicing + editing?

Oh and sorry if we have gotten off topic just let me know and I will start a new thread. I might start one anyways for people to leave in depth PC game reviews and videos for all the PC gamers to get an idea of what they might want to play.

The longest clip i've recorded was this:


I mainly used Windows Movie Maker due to simplicity, but when it came to the crysis video, WMM couldn't load parts of the files that generated by FRAPS (since it broke it up into chunks), so I was stuck using WMM to generate my intro portion for the specific video, and I had to use Adobe Premier to compress the video down to something uploadable.

Heres the statistics for the Video I posted above:
RAW = 63.7GB! @ 60fps
H.264 = 1.74GB! 10k VBR (Max 20k) Bitrate, 320kb audio @ 30fps

Yes thats right I uploaded a 1.74GB file to youtube, it only took at least 8 hours. Compressing the video in Adobe took about 3 hours if I remember correctly. WMM is much quicker for whatever reason.

[trickedaccord92]

I think you should be able to run it for the most part with your system, its notoriously more crippling then crysis. Oh if you think it looks amazing, just keep in mind youtube cuts hella quality on them, especially noticeable full screen. I'm almost tempted to try and upscale future videos to 4k res or something so theres not so much of a quality loss. If you keep the video windowed thats how it looks full screen when playing.



The longest clip i've recorded was this:


I mainly used Windows Movie Maker due to simplicity, but when it came to the crysis video, WMM couldn't load parts of the files that generated by FRAPS (since it broke it up into chunks), so I was stuck using WMM to generate my intro portion for the specific video, and I had to use Adobe Premier to compress the video down to something uploadable.

Heres the statistics for the Video I posted above:
RAW = 63.7GB! @ 60fps
H.264 = 1.74GB! 10k VBR (Max 20k) Bitrate, 320kb audio @ 30fps

Yes thats right I uploaded a 1.74GB file to youtube, it only took at least 8 hours. Compressing the video in Adobe took about 3 hours if I remember correctly. WMM is much quicker for whatever reason.

Holy hell thats a lot of video ... what are using for harddrive/drives? I currently have a OCZ 120gig SSD for my OS and main games I play and a 1TB WD HDD for storage.

[cloudasc]

Holy hell thats a lot of video ... what are using for harddrive/drives? I currently have a OCZ 120gig SSD for my OS and main games I play and a 1TB WD HDD for storage.

All seagates, and 7200 rpms. One 1TB main drive, two 500 gb drives for whatever, like virtualization, video capture etc. My 4tb nas is my archie, its already over 3/4 full. Between all available hard drives between all my computers I got about 8tb of storage.

[trickedaccord92]

Nice I really like the loading times on the SSD but its just so small ... between my OS, BF3, Diablo 3 preinstalled files, Diablo 3 Beta, and various little programs I only have 18gig of space left on it.

My 1TB WD is mostly empty though with only like 30gig of pics, and video on it.