First, a little background:
6 years ago, while I was in college, I wanted to play better games than my laptop could handle. Seeing as I was broke, I decided to try my hand at building my own rig. That went exceedingly well thanks 100% to this site. Over the years that followed, I have added memory, upgraded video cards, and done some other little things to stay current. However, this fall I decided it was time to scrap the oldie and start over.
My wife and I are expecting our first child any day now. In preparation, we bought a new HD camcorder. My wife is not a techie at all, but she wants to be able to edit the movies from our new cam and burn them to discs or upload them to share with family. This led to my new project, to get my computer ready and able to handle HD video editing.
I knew I would need a bigger hard drive and a BluRay burner to even get started. Then I started looking into more requirements and decided I'd need a better video card too. When I built the machine, I played a lot of games, but the only thing I play now that I'm "grown up" with a job and wife is Civ4, which my rig barely handled on low settings. Displaying and editing HD content was going to require something beefy.
So, I finally decided I would just start from scratch. I wanted something that I could build without breaking the bank, but would leave me plenty of room to upgrade in the future. I read about and got excited over the new i7 stuff, even though I'd been an AMD guy before. I knew that was way more than I wanted to spend on a mobo, but I figured I could splurge and hopefully have one board for years.
My build ended up as follows:
GIGABYTE GA-EX58-EXTREME X58 Motherboard
INTEL|CORE I7 920 CPU
EVGA 896-P3-1267-AR GTX260 Videocard
6 gigs of Crucial DDR3 RAM (3 X 2 gigs)
Thermaltake-850-Watt TR2 RX Power Supply
Seagate 1.5 TB hard drive
LG BluRay burner
I put all this in my old Thermaltake Armour case, kept my old 80 gig hard drive and Lite-On DVD-ROM drive, and installed Windows Vista SP1. I did all this Sunday, and have been trying to get everything working the last couple of evenings. My problems started with attempting to get all the updates for Windows. I got a blue screen a couple of times, and the computer just randomly shut down a couple times on its own. When I finally got all the Windows updates installed, I moved on the get the lastest drivers from the various websites. Same mix of occasional blue screens and random shut downs for this as well. Now I've been trying to get Civ4 installed and the thing keeps shutting itself down during the installation.
I have to get this computer working soon guys. I've spent way to much money already, as my wife keeps reminding me, and we're going to start taking video as soon as that baby pops out, any day now. I have no idea why it shuts down. There are no problems POSTing, and Vista seems to start up ok everytime. The only hangup is that I get a screen asking if I want to start Windows in safe mode, etc. after a crash, but my keyboard doesn't do any good on that screen. It sits for 30 seconds and then Vista starts.
The shut downs are happening randomly, sometimes when the DVD is spinning, sometimes when I'm downloading something, and at least once when it was sitting idle waiting on me to get a beer.
Sorry that's so long. I really appreciate any help any of you can give me.
6 years ago, while I was in college, I wanted to play better games than my laptop could handle. Seeing as I was broke, I decided to try my hand at building my own rig. That went exceedingly well thanks 100% to this site. Over the years that followed, I have added memory, upgraded video cards, and done some other little things to stay current. However, this fall I decided it was time to scrap the oldie and start over.
My wife and I are expecting our first child any day now. In preparation, we bought a new HD camcorder. My wife is not a techie at all, but she wants to be able to edit the movies from our new cam and burn them to discs or upload them to share with family. This led to my new project, to get my computer ready and able to handle HD video editing.
I knew I would need a bigger hard drive and a BluRay burner to even get started. Then I started looking into more requirements and decided I'd need a better video card too. When I built the machine, I played a lot of games, but the only thing I play now that I'm "grown up" with a job and wife is Civ4, which my rig barely handled on low settings. Displaying and editing HD content was going to require something beefy.
So, I finally decided I would just start from scratch. I wanted something that I could build without breaking the bank, but would leave me plenty of room to upgrade in the future. I read about and got excited over the new i7 stuff, even though I'd been an AMD guy before. I knew that was way more than I wanted to spend on a mobo, but I figured I could splurge and hopefully have one board for years.
My build ended up as follows:
GIGABYTE GA-EX58-EXTREME X58 Motherboard
INTEL|CORE I7 920 CPU
EVGA 896-P3-1267-AR GTX260 Videocard
6 gigs of Crucial DDR3 RAM (3 X 2 gigs)
Thermaltake-850-Watt TR2 RX Power Supply
Seagate 1.5 TB hard drive
LG BluRay burner
I put all this in my old Thermaltake Armour case, kept my old 80 gig hard drive and Lite-On DVD-ROM drive, and installed Windows Vista SP1. I did all this Sunday, and have been trying to get everything working the last couple of evenings. My problems started with attempting to get all the updates for Windows. I got a blue screen a couple of times, and the computer just randomly shut down a couple times on its own. When I finally got all the Windows updates installed, I moved on the get the lastest drivers from the various websites. Same mix of occasional blue screens and random shut downs for this as well. Now I've been trying to get Civ4 installed and the thing keeps shutting itself down during the installation.
I have to get this computer working soon guys. I've spent way to much money already, as my wife keeps reminding me, and we're going to start taking video as soon as that baby pops out, any day now. I have no idea why it shuts down. There are no problems POSTing, and Vista seems to start up ok everytime. The only hangup is that I get a screen asking if I want to start Windows in safe mode, etc. after a crash, but my keyboard doesn't do any good on that screen. It sits for 30 seconds and then Vista starts.
The shut downs are happening randomly, sometimes when the DVD is spinning, sometimes when I'm downloading something, and at least once when it was sitting idle waiting on me to get a beer.
Sorry that's so long. I really appreciate any help any of you can give me.
It is worth it, however, for the better surface contact.
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