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To Rebuild or Upgrade !?!

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I am in need of some ideas for repairing my fairly new rig as well as preparing it to handle AVHD for Premiere Pro & After Effects CS4. I have had the Blackbird 002 gaming system (without the water cooling option) running for the past two years. Over that time the system has been buggy with respect to any heavy processing for video or photo editing. Now it recently has boot issues and has even frozen up while looking through the BIOS menus. Not sure what may be the problem but I am trying to see what my options are.



Here is my system configuration:



Processor

- Quad Core - Intel(R) Core2(TM) Quad-Core 2.93GHz QX6800



Memory

- 2 GB 800 MHz CORSAIR PC2-6400 DDR2 SDRAM



Thermal Management

- Air Cooling



Motherboard

- ASUS Striker Extreme 680i



Graphics Cards

- NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX, with 768MB of GDDR3 SDRAM



Physics Acceleration

- AGEIA PhysX(TM) 100 Series PCI-E Accelerator Card



Power Supply

- 1.1KW Power Supply



Operating System

- Microsoft(R) Windows Vista(TM) Ultimate



Any help would be appreciated...





Regards,



David

More about : rebuild upgrade

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Best solution

Homebuilt system Authority

It's not like your stuff is particularly bad. Personally I'd start RMAing stuff or something. With problems like that it would have to be the mobo RAM or CPU. Most likely in that order. Then again if you just want this as an excuse to upgrade I'd say go with either the i7 920 or the Phenom II 955.
Homebuilt system Authority

dmmahoney said:
...
Here is my system configuration:

Processor
- Quad Core - Intel(R) Core2(TM) Quad-Core 2.93GHz QX6800
Ok. Should overclock fairly well.

Memory
- 2 GB 800 MHz CORSAIR PC2-6400 DDR2 SDRAM
Need more. DDR2 is getting more expensive. Either buy a 4GB (2x2GB) kit now, or choose the rebuild option and get DDR3.

Thermal Management
- Air Cooling
Ok.

Motherboard

- ASUS Striker Extreme 680i
Hmmm. I've read so much about stability issues with nForce chipsets. Premium mobo or not, with the problems you've been having, I'm not sure how worthwhile a lot of diagnostic effort is before replacing this mobo.

Graphics Cards

- NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX, with 768MB of GDDR3 SDRAM
Ok. Getting a little dated, but if it meets your needs, fine.

Physics Acceleration
- AGEIA PhysX(TM) 100 Series PCI-E Accelerator Card
Meh. I'm not sure too many titles use this. You may or may not be able or want to move it to another mobo if you rebuild.

Power Supply
- 1.1KW Power Supply
Since this rig would have run just fine on a quality 500W PSU, my guess is this is an overrated, inefficient piece of...stuff. If it has a little red voltage switch on it, replace with a quality, modern PSU with full range active PFC (no little voltage switch) and 80+ certification. Antec, Corsair, Seasonic, PC Power & Cooling, and Enermax are among the better brands. For a single video card, 500W-550W is enough; for two cards in Crossfire or SLI 750W should do.

Operating System
- Microsoft(R) Windows Vista(TM) Ultimate
If you like it, no reason to change.

Any help would be appreciated...
Hopefully I did. What is your budget for upgrading or rebuilding? Do you want to "get by" or look to the future?


Regards,

David

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Homebuilt system Authority

^^ I'll second that one. That QX isn't outdated - yet. If you bump the clock speed upwards of 3.4 or so, it still holds its own against current gen chips.

I noticed DDR2 just fell a tiny bit, grab it ASAP. It's going to go up, that's guaranteed.

Did you check-
That all fans are running correctly?
That all dust and debris are cleaned off of the internals?
Temps with any of the available monitoring software?
Do you have a ram cooler/fan? (if not, get one)

If all that is good, then u should go ahead and rule out Bit/Driver Rot by doing a COMPLETE reinstall of the OS + a Solid Format and disk check.
This will ensure that u have solid hard ware and a solid base OS.
If you can get thru all that without BSOD's or freezes then u will know it probably is a driver/software problem.

False_Dmitry_II said:
He froze in the BIOS so that effectively makes sure it's a hardware problem.


Even the Mem Test seems to fail at some point. This is the second pair of DDR2 RAM that I have tried. Any other ideas?
Homebuilt system Authority

Well, you need to call the tech support of each of those three things and see what they think the problem would be. Then if you can get access to compatible hardware try it. If a friend has a 775 system then you can simply put your CPU and RAM in it and if it all checks out that way then you know your motherboard was bad, etc.

Then RMA until you have a working system.

It probably isn't the power supply because you're saying it freezes not reboots or turns off. There isn't really anything else to do other than run through those kinds of tests.
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