New rig not working :(

[Brawl]

Well I order double of these parts for 2 gaming PCs


Intel Core i3-2120 Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz LGA 1155
ASUS P8B75-V LGA 1155 Intel B75 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
ASUS HD7870-DC2-2GD5 Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0
LEPA B650-SA 650W SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified
CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 EVO RR-212E-20PK-R2

1st PC works fine 2nd one is having issues.

I put a solid state HD in 2nd one and the 2nd has an existing PSU from my last PC. A Cosair 750 TX bought back in 08

That PC died on me. I swapped out the Vid card and MB and still it would not come back from BSOD or video shredding so I figured both or CPU had to be defective.

So in this new one I installed the HDD and fresh windows vista 64-bit. I install just MB drivers and LAN drivers. As soon as I try and load AMD drivers from either the CD that came with the card or DLed them from AMD site I get issues. The resolution drops to 800x600 and I get "Catalyst" has stopped working and eventually it just reboots itself. Since the only existing part from the dead PC is the PSU can that cause something like this? I thought about trying to swap the working vid card in PC1 but if its a PSU issue I don't want it to frying the working card.

Any ideas?

 

[Wamphryi]

Have you upgraded Vista to Service Pack 2 and applied all the updates before installing the drivers?

 

[Z1NONLY]

If you have two identical motherboards and processors, You should be able to move the working OS and drive back and forth between rigs for troubleshooting. (No need to reload drivers and such)

You should also be able to use the "known-good" parts from your working rig to isolate the problem(s) with the bad one. (just keep track of what part came from what rig)

 

[Brawl]

Have you upgraded Vista to Service Pack 2 and applied all the updates before installing the drivers?

I am assuming you need at least the MB and LAN drivers before you can get windows to even work , I don't have the update on a jumpdrive or anything yet.

 

[Brawl]

If you have two identical motherboards and processors, You should be able to move the working OS and drive back and forth between rigs for troubleshooting. (No need to reload drivers and such)

You should also be able to use the "known-good" parts from your working rig to isolate the problem(s) with the bad one. (just keep track of what part came from what rig)

OK bought new corsair solid state HD and put it in "known-good" PC1 (has all the same hardware) that runs same Vista64 fine. After installing Vista64 on new HD I then install MB drivers from CD that came from MB (Bus/LAN/USB). This allows me inet access to do the Windows update process. Few hours later I get "Windows fully up to date" message in update window. I then try to download latest AMD catalyst drivers. After drivers load and PC resets it comes back in 800x600 mode and get numerous ATI Catalyst crash messages.

It seems to be a driver issue but those same latest drivers work fine on my HD that I installed in the PC originally. The HD that works was pulled from the older PC and had windows already on it when I updated the drivers afters putting the PC together. The Only thing I can think is it has some kind of update because its old that allows the ATI drivers to work.

Any ideas?

 

[Z1NONLY]

Well at least you know you are dealing with software now.

 

[noise]

If I'm reading all this right, the problem seems to occur when an SSD gets involved.

PC #2 didn't work when installed on an SDD
PC #1 which was working fine; stopped working when using another SSD.

I would be looking in these areas:

BIOS update - specifically if any storage fixes are mentioned.
HDD - Perform a fresh install on the HDD (not SSD) see if issue occurs.
Vista - As an OS it is pretty failboat, try installing Windows 7 and see if the same issue presents itself.

You can legally download an ISO of Win7 from here, uncheck the box for activation to allow 30 days use.

http://techdows.com/2011/07/download-windows-7-integrated-with-sp1-iso-official-direct-download-links.html

 

[dingo07]

Throw Vista in the garbage and get a real OS - Windows 7 Home 64bit

that's your problem

 

[Brawl]

Throw Vista in the garbage and get a real OS - Windows 7 Home 64bit

that's your problem

Actually problem turned out to be 2 separate things.

1. Since I narrowed the ATI drivers as being the main issue I tried and DLed SP1 manually from Microsoft website and that fixed the the problem of ATI errors messages.

2. Now that I had the software working fine in the "known good" PC, I swapped over to the problem PC and still had the issue of the PC rebooting every 8 mins or so sans the ATI issue now at least. I ran over to Frys and grabbed Corsair TX650M and popped it in and the problem was fixed. Seems that the TX750 that I had in from my previous PC that had the MB/CPU/GPU all die was in fact bad as well. I am thinking that I must have suffered some sort of electrical surge or something that wrecked every component in that PC. Good thing about Corsair is their warranties are 5 years long so I might have a chance at getting it swapped out

 

[dingo07]

Actually problem turned out to be 2 separate things.

1. Since I narrowed the ATI drivers as being the main issue I tried and DLed SP1 manually from Microsoft website and that fixed the the problem of ATI errors messages.

2. Now that I had the software working fine in the "known good" PC, I swapped over to the problem PC and still had the issue of the PC rebooting every 8 mins or so sans the ATI issue now at least. I ran over to Frys and grabbed Corsair TX650M and popped it in and the problem was fixed. Seems that the TX750 that I had in from my previous PC that had the MB/CPU/GPU all die was in fact bad as well. I am thinking that I must have suffered some sort of electrical surge or something that wrecked every component in that PC. Good thing about Corsair is their warranties are 5 years long so I might have a chance at getting it swapped out

You're still Half-Crippled by using Vista!!! get with the program, and get onto W7!