Upgrade Part II

The hardware arrived on Friday as promised, so I got nothing done this weekend. As with most upgrades, not everything was compatible. The biggest problem was that the power supply I had was not powerful enough and the case was actually to small to fit the video card into. The BFG GeForce GTX 280 is a monster, the picture does not do it justice. That was just the beginning of my woes though.

I stopped by Fry's on my way to my tax appointment, conveniently located within a block of Fry's, and picked up a new case and power supply. I got a huge case, the Thermaltake V9 that is very open, with enough cooling to take care of anything. I can safely say this is the best case I have worked on and it looks cool too. In any case I highly recommend getting a case with the bottom mounted power supply and the 230mm fans. Even though the case has four fans in it in addition to the one on the video card, processor and power supply, it runs much more quite than my last one with only 2 fans. The bottom mounted power supply simplifies working on the case and gets it away from the processor. I also picked up a Corsair TX850W power supply, they make good memory, so I hoped they could produce a decent power supply too. It is well reviewed for being stable and quite. I recommend spending the money on a decent power supply if you are building your own system. Power fluctuations can lead to all kinds of intermittent problems that are a pain to trace down.

Being overly optimistic, since I had all premium parts, I hooked everything up. Even with the bigger case the video card literally extended into the area a floppy drive would go and I had to remove a few pieces of the case to get the thing in and then put them back. I really hope I do not have to reset the BIOS as it is under the video card. The video cards are getting a little ridiculous. Anyway, I got everything plugged in and connected, turned on the power, and nothing. The motherboard actually has a power button on board, so I tried that. Still nothing. I unplugged every device one by one and still nothing. So out comes the motherboard. I remove the processor even and plug it into the old power supply. That gets it to at least light up, and go through the error codes on the board. Unfortunately this probably means the power supply, motherboard, or processor are bad. I reconnect the processor. Still works on the old power supply. I plug in the memory (bad memory can lead to some weird problems too. Still works. One more try on the new power supply, and it works fine. I go through plugging in one item at a time. Everything works.
I think it was just mocking me. I have concluded that computers require a certain amount of sacrifice before they will work. It is usually a blood sacrifice on one of the random sharpened bits of metal they hide in the cases. Usually somewhere you have to reach in to plug something in that you can not actually see. This case was exquisitely design though and actually had little rubber covers on the sharp pointy bits. So it got no blood. It did get about 4 hours of debugging though.

So I had a working system with two 1.5TB and two 250GB hard drives in it and no OS. This is when I find out that the motherboard does not have an actual RAID controller on it. Its software RAID, boo. I wanted to use the two 1.5TB drives as a RAID 1 array and the two 250GB drives as a RAID 0 scratch space. Fine I can do it in software. I actually bought a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium to try it out. I got the 32 bit version because I remember what a mess 64 bit XP was and have heard they did about as good a job on Vista 64. It installed relatively painlessly. It installed wrong, but at least it was relatively quick. It just stuck everything on the first drive it found. Fine, I could still RAID it in software I thought, but I thought wrong. The software that actually goes with the hardware would not boot in Vista. The native configuration options are there in Home Premium, but when you go to apply them it gives you a lovely message that spanning is not supported in this version of windows. I have been running RAID at home for the last 15 years. How is this Premium? Now I know why it cost less than XP, it has less functionality. Windows XP handles RAID just fine. I will accept this for now and move on. I will try out Windows 7 I guess when it comes out. It will probably just charge you every time you boot up.

After installing updates, drivers and basic software, which took several hours and many reboots, I installed a couple games. GTA IV for me and Sims 2 for Liz. It seems besides annoying you with pop ups it is also reading a novel while booting up each program. Even the Sims 2, which is old, took a good couple minutes to start up. I had thought the computer had crashed and I went to get something to eat. To my supprise it actually was loading when I got back. GTA IV is actually a little faster to load. And the graphics are amazing for about an hour, then it crashes with an out of memory error. Apparently that is a known issue with GTA IV. Rockstar has really gone down hill. The story is still good, and I can run everything maxed out smoothly, so it is beautiful, but seriously, dying after an hour due to a memory leak. After looking online I guess I am lucky, some people it only lasts 30 minutes.
I really upgraded for Video editing though and I will start that this week. If I have as many issues as I do with that I am just going to find my XP disc. The hardware is willing; we will see if the OS is.