And why on earth do you think the PSU would be affecting performance? Honestly, between slow boots and flaky video, the first thing I'd blame would be the motherboard. It's kind of responsible for both of those things (including, as it turns out, feeding 75w to the video card - although I have no idea if the 6950 actually draws from the x16 slot)



Your mobo probably came with monitoring utilities, no? Try one of them. Or try one of the other monitoring utilities out there.



That would let you check the 12v output at least.



Cheaper than buying a new PSU

Just pulled out my mobo and did that test; the red light remains on with the card in the other x16 slot. I said that I felt the light was related to power as it always is on when the computer is "off" (and hence providing a trickle of current to the mobo and therefore the GPU) and normally turned off when the computer and card turned on. I can only hope that the card itself didn't get damaged in some way, as there was and instance in which I plugged in the card when the computer was off but plugged in (and hence the mobo had that trickle of standby power). The two fans on the card are spinning, so it's getting SOME power, but the red LED remains stubbornly on and the card is throwing out no discernable video. I also continue not to spot any obviously blown capacitors despite that symptomatic sound and smell of a blown cap.

For what it's worth, the aux 4-pin mobo connector (my mobo only uses the huge [20?] pin connector and the 8-pin] shows a steady 12.13 volts with my 6950, one hard drive, and my motherboard plugged in and powered on.

Edit: For the sake of curiosity, swapped in a spare (slightly better) motherboard that I have had lying around for a long time and never succeeded in getting working. To my surprise, computer booted with 9800 card. Swapped in 6950, no joy. Swapped 9800 back in, plugged in my quartet of drives, front panel cabling, and all those fun things, found the proper plate and ridiculously strong spring screws to secure my massive HSF, booted into Ubuntu, joy, Windows, fast and smooth. So I guess it was the motherboard, and I need to RMA my 6950. Luckily it's only been about 7 months, so I'm hoping to not have too many problems.

Sorry about the necro post, but this trolling opportunity was too good to pass up.

So...uh....how does the performance stack up against this beast of a machine?

Not so good, that owns my build. I did eventually get my card RMA'd by ASUS America, and I'm definitely looking to potentially upgrade motherboard + RAM + CPU when Ivy Bridge comes out in Q2.

*bump* And now I'm finally thinking of upgrading. I already have DDR3, so I'm going to hold off getting my 16B for now, but since I was already designing a machine for Sara, it looks like the following two are pretty solid. I'm having a hard time telling what I get for the extra $20 between the P8Z77-V PRO and the P8Z77-V - any thoughts? It also seems to me that all the i7 seems to offer over this particular i5 is hyperthreading, and for the sort of media and gaming tasks that I throw at this machine, the improvements will be negligible.

CPU: http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0388577
Mobo: http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0386887

That mobo & CPU look good to me, go for it.

As for Pro vs. non-Pro - well, your $20 gets you a PRO in the name... I don't know what else, maybe a different bios or software. Looks like maybe the pro has a couple extra accessory parts as well. Possibly also a newer rev of the board.

Hmm, fair enough. Thanks as always for your sanity-check and expertise, Kllrnohj.

I cant wait till I have the funds to build my Dream PC.

At first I was planning to do this upgrade as a get-more-power sort of thing, but at this point I'm 90% sure that my mobo/CPU/chipset are slowly dying, and I want to do something about it before I'm completely SOL.

Ah. poor computer. I am looking at 8GB AMD 6core 3.4Ghz proc. Full PC for like 500 bucks, with 90 mail in rebate. Now just to get the cash.

You should post a topic with the parts you're considering so we can critique it for you, as Lincoln and I recently did.

OK. Kinda short links . tehe. Will do

I ended up with the i5 3570K and the Asus P8Z77-V Pro for my own build. I was going to save $20, miss two back-panel USB 3.0 ports, and just get the non-Pro for $190, but Microcenter ended up having a new bundle deal on the Pro for $150 this week if you got it with the 3570K. I'll install them when I get home after work this evening. Luckily I have some Arctic Silver and a giant non-stock HSF to install, so maybe I'll even be able to goose up the clock speed a bit.

*bump* Installed the motherboard and processor. Was frustrated to discover that (of course, silly me) my massive LGA775 cooler doesn't fit on the i5, or more specifically, under it. Using the stock cooler for now, temperatures seem nominal, but I'd like to beef it up. Here's where the problems start, though. I had four sticks of 2GB DDR 1600, of which I knew one was bad, leaving three sticks. I tried all three sticks, a bright red LED lit on boot. Consult manual: "DRAM fault LED". OK, bad seating? One stick bad? Can't deal with 3? I tried two. Same LED. The manual and the internet discuss the "MemOK" button to pick failsafes, seems like a decent idea. I tried it, the LED started flashing, the computer rebooted a few times, and voila, video and BIOS settings. However, Windows 7 freezes during the flag-pulse part of boot, and an Ubuntu LiveCD dumbs be to BusyBox with "unable to find a medium containing a live file system". I have SATA set on IDE for now, by the way; I know that AHCI makes Windows 7 flip out, at least on my current setup. I notice that the quite old DDR3 that I have is labelled 1.9V, and the i3/i5/i7 are only spec'd up to 1.65V for RAM, so I probably need to get new RAM ASAP, but is that the problem, do you think? Will everything clear up with proper RAM? I've underclocked this DDR3 1600 down to 1066 for "safety", but it made no difference.

And while we're on the subject, an 8GB 2x 4GB set that anyone would recommend, so that I can get myself up to 16GB if it works out? Newegg ranges from $47 for 9-9-9-24 Corsair Vengeance with giant red heatsinks at 1.5V to $55 for Patriot and G-Skill RAM, 8-9-8-24 at 1.65V and 8-8-8-24 at 1.6V respectively. Help!

*shrug*

You could try underclocking and undervolting the RAM. Or just buy some 2x4GB because it's super cheap.

I tried underclocking it, and I seriously hope my motherboard is undervolting it to at least 1.65V to protect my CPU. I suspect that if so, the 0.25V+ undervolting could be what is making it so unstable, though. Did you have any thoughts about the RAM that I posted?

G.Skill and Corsair are both good RAM - the timings don't really matter all that much, just pick whatever.

Although reading your post again it doesn't sound like a RAM problem, but you want to get new RAM anyway so whatever. The real problem sounds like you need to go switch SATA mode to IDE or whatever.

*bump* Just grabbed a $200 27" LCD monitor from NewEgg; I'm going to try some of the monitor configurations on the front page of this topic. It's a Black Friday/Cyber Monday sort of thing, so grab it before it's gone:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824009424

*bumpity bump* 27" monitor is here, but it brings some surprises. Namely, I didn't realize that the Catalyst Control Panel can't create one giant "monitor" out of heterogeneous monitors arranged at arbitrary locations, resolutions, and rotations. I know that the NVidia panel for Linux can do it; does anyone know of such a feature for Windows and ATI/AMD?

Don't think so (though the missing pixels there would be incredibly annoying, I think). It also happens to refuse to do bezel compensation with displays that report different DPI, which is troublesome because one of my 22" displays reports its DPI wrong so I'm stuck with a break right around the centerline when I team those two display.