My pc doesn't rock, can I still save something?

[FirionRAzar]

Hy people.....

I'm maybe obsessed with silent pc's..........

My PC
AMD Phenom II X2 550BE, Ac Freezer 64pro, PSU Arctic Cooling Fusion 550R, Sapphire pc-am3rs790G Motherboard (BIG MISTAKE), Sapphire 4870Vapor-x 1GB, 2x2GB Kingston DDR3@1333MHz, Samsung 1tb hdd sata2 f3 series. Sounds nice....

My complains: the motherboard wasn't able to over-clock the cpu stable at any other clock setting than the factory setting, voltage tweaking was also a no-go and something seems wrong with the PWM too
I removed the graphics card.... trying to use it for surfing with the on board solutions...being fine till I hit anything above 720p resolution.

Question... WHAT can I do to have a balanced pc at all?

UPDATE:
Well ...I've managed to sell the main board, CPU, HDD and the case. I did put the HDD from my laptop into the new configuration without the 4870GPU. So the pc is a low power, low noise configuration. (Some of you ask: What did he bought?....Answer: Something cheap )
Intel Core i3 530 (sadly with the stock cooler)
MSI H55M-E33
Cooltek K3 Evolution case (before that I had Raidmax Aztec)

Well....the Intel HD GPU is far away from almost any kind of games but video playback works great, my RAM showed some BIG performance losses... the main board isn't as smart as the 790GX chip set but all problems with PWM, voltage setting, over clocking are gone because MSI did a fine job (thumbs up!!!).

I need to say I'm impressed by Intels CPU...that LITTLE thing has a lot of power.... I forgot completely it has HT (4 threads and working ).....it has really half the power consumption as my ex Phenom II (under same load and performance: 48W vs 96W with on board GPU's)

The biggest surprise was the temperature: not over 35 degrees Celsius (25 degrees room temperature, Phenom II with big Arctic Cooling Freezer 64: 45 degrees)
I'm using the stock cooler which to be honest is more a joke than a cooler (after searching the Internet I wasn't awaiting any miracles). It's a VERY small piece of hardware! The fan isn't quite noisy but at 2000rpm and not being balanced still recognizable. The CPU is running so cool that even a cheap no performance cooler is capable of cooling it. It is reminding of the dark ages of pc's using passive small coolers (Pentium 2). Can we really return to those days thanks to high efficiency CPU's?

I will change the stock cooler for something more serious and will install my "old" GPU (bye bye energy efficiency) and hope for something reasonable for games..... sooner or later I will sale my 4870 and go for a Nvidia GTX460 1GB (MSI twin frozer) and maybe one day a SSD.

Thanks to everybody trying to help me with advice, bewaring me of buying (again) the wrong hardware
Firion

 

[Griffolion]

Everything looks great apart from that Sapphire motherboard. Try getting an Asus one. Like this one.

Whats your PSU by the way?

If you're not getting good FPS with the 4870 and the Phenom at that res then something is wrong, its not just the combination of your parts. Anyway, start with the motherboard. Good luck.

 

[FirionRAzar]

Everything looks great apart from that Sapphire motherboard. Try getting an Asus one. Like this one.

Whats your PSU by the way?

If you're not getting good FPS with the 4870 and the Phenom at that res then something is wrong, its not just the combination of your parts. Anyway, start with the motherboard. Good luck.

Well it is the Arctic Cooling Fusion 550R PSU...... I can't say anything else than it is absolutely silent and only under heavy furmark testing it starts to get warm...but still not revwing up his tiny fan... the gpu is connected with the proper pci-e power connectors..I mean no adapters or stuff like that.

thanks for your idea, as soon as I got rid of this jetway rebranded motherboard.

 

[Griffolion]

I've not known Arctic Cooling for their PSU's, it might be an idea to research some reviews on it to see if it has shown to be unstable or weaker than rated.

But a must is the replacement of that motherboard. Asus, Gigabyte etc are the ones to go for.

Also see if you can sell your Phenom on Ebay and put that towards a tri-core Phenom as games are starting to take advantage of more than 2 cores nowadays.

 

[guanyu210379]

Hmmm...
I think your problems are either the mobo or PSU or perhaps even both.
The rest you can keep.
For better performance, get at least an X3 or better as suggested by Griffolion.

References :
PSU : Corsair, Tagan, Enermax, Seasonic, Silverstone, Antec, PPC
Mobo : ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI.

 

[FirionRAzar]

Well actually I'm not planning to go further upwards....I'm just intending to save as much as I can from this failpurchase.....the graphics card was excelent in games like prototype and Mass Effect 2 ...only need for speed shift was struggeling sometimes, batman arkham assylum and other stuff that seems to be more nvidia friendly...as I wrote my laptop is sometimes giving me the same framerates at things that like nvidia parts....

I don't think that any kind of psu would be overkilled at 320W peak usage....especially that it does have separate 12v Rails for the pci-e connectors

Well I've tried to sell my phenom in my country and had a very bad taste after most of them took a look at the manufacturing series...and yes it's of the first series that can't be unlocked to have 3 or 4 cores...and from the initial buying price of 104Euros nobody wanted to give me more then 50euros after 3 months of usage..so I don't think it's rational to lose 50% price so fast....

 

[guanyu210379]

Try to replace the mobo first, than "if necessary" the PSU..after that "if you want it", get a new proc.
Do it in those order.
If it is not necessary and if you don't want it, you just have to get the mobo.

Yup! It is that fast, generally it is valid that as soon as you have opened the box, the value is already reduced up to 50%, even if you haven't used it at all.

 

[asteldian]

WoW is a very CPU intensive game, GTA4 uses multi cores and I guess is quite CPU intensive. The lower your resolution, the more pressure is put on your CPU. At 1240 x 1024 the CPU is under a lot of pressure.

In an ideal world, a x3 RANA 440 would help as it gives the extra core. Failing that, you really need to OC your CPU, which as everyone has said, means getting a decent motherboard. Certainly your GPU does not need changing unless you buy a bigger monitor

 

[FirionRAzar]

WoW is a very CPU intensive game, GTA4 uses multi cores and I guess is quite CPU intensive. The lower your resolution, the more pressure is put on your CPU. At 1240 x 1024 the CPU is under a lot of pressure.

Well actually WoW was a real killer for me because I got beaten by a amd 7750 at stock 2,7GHZ, only 2x1GB ddr2@1033MHz on a Asus M3N78 Pro and a Palit 9600GT...... so I can't imagine it would have been the cpu..
I took the 9600 to my pc. It was a big kick in the b***s for me to see only 5fps more, he didn't try my 4870 on his machine. )

Thanks for your response!

 

[asteldian]

What resolution does your friend play on?

 

[FirionRAzar]

What resolution does your friend play on?

I don't remember quite well...I think it was 1024*768...it doesn't matter because i took my case over to him and fitted his crt to my pc when this benchmarking happened...

 

[FirionRAzar]

Best answer selected by FirionRAzar.