Jeez this is turning into a tech blog by the looks of it. And I’m not going to be helping with this post either =P So the holiday break has come and gone for me already. Start classes up again on Monday. I really wish I wasn’t in the boring trimester. Makes it much harder to return. But hey, you gotta do what you gotta do to get your edumacation going on.

Anyway enough about that. Had a wonderful Christmas! Was able to get most of the parts I wanted. Right now I’ve got a Q6600 oc’d to 3.1 ghz, 4 (2×2) gigs of A-Data DDR2-800 ram, a-bit IN9 32x-max mobo (which I’ll talk more about later), and a Cooler Master 750w PSU. Also got a CPU and VGA fan. Only thing I wasn’t able to get was a 8800GTX. So instead I got a 8800 GT which by no means sucks. Right now everything is running smooth as silk. Working on OC’ing my GT but it’s a fairly long process that I’m way too impatient for =P Everything in my rig is running at an awesome mid-40C degrees and I have to say I’m lovin’ it /subliminalmcdonaldssucks/. Despite the wonderous condition my rig is in right now, there was a lengthy process to get it to that state.

After I assembled my rig for the first time, it booted up just fine but for some reason it wouldn’t detect either of my IDE DVD drives. Well actually it was able to detect my drives, but for some reason it wasn’t able to read from them. Read online and found out that the BIOS out of the box sucks. So I had to go through the laborious process on learning how to upgrade the BIOS and learned that you need to use floppy. At that point I was panicking cause I haven’t owned a floppy drive since the late 90s. Also I couldn’t run to the store quick because I finished assembling everything around midnight. So I did s’more searching and found you can upgrade the BIOS with a USB flash drive and omg I was estatic. After about an half an hour of learning how to do that, I was finally able to upgrade to the latest version. Crossed my fingers, booted up, and… still won’t read my DVD drives. Crap. I just want to install my freakin’ OS!! Called it a night because I was too frustrated to continue.

Next day went out and bought a SATA DVD drive in hopes that would solve my problem. Got back, plugged it in, and BAM it read the DVD! “HELL YES!,” I proclaimed. Started the installation for Vista x64 and looked like it went through just fine. System rebooted to finish installation like normal. Vista started to load, then suddenly my system powers down by itself! At first I was like, “Hmmm. Okay let’s try that again” only for the same thing to happen again and again. Looked all over the internet till 2 in the morning to no avail. So I ended up posting on abit’s website hoping for a fix and hit the hay throughly defeated.

Two minutes after lying in bed, I shot up ran over to my computer, took out one stick of RAM, and booted up. Crossed my fingers and toes, closed my eyes, turned my back, and prayed. Turned around, opened my eyes, and saw Vista finishing it’s installation! Omgf I was estatic. Booted into Vista the first time and by God it ran smooth as all hell. Though I was still longing to use all 4gb of memory, so in a pity attempt I powered down, stuck the stick back in, and booted up. Stopped again at the Vista loading screen. Argh!! Took it back out and Vista ran fine. So again I just gave up and went to sleep, happy that at least my system was finally up and running after two days of torture.

Over the next few days I scoured the web high and low looking for a reason why to nary a clue. Ran every form of tests on my RAM thinking one might be DOA, but alas neither sticks were bad. Then one day I happened across a post about a Windows hotfix for x64 systems with 4gb of memory and I was like “Holy shit that’s me!” Installed it, inserted my stick, and wham! Vista loads! I nearly jumped up and down giggling like a school girl. Over the next few days I was happy that everything in my rig finally worked like it was suppose to. Ran 3DMark06 and got back a miserable score of 8000, which was horrible for a rig with my parts so I ran some tests and found out that my RAM and my GPU were slowing me down.

Was wondering why the RAM was acting slow, so I put on my thinking cap and thought about what slows RAM down. Then I remembered somewhere that the two RAM slows paired together are not always the same channel hence both sticks not running at the full speed. So I put the sticks in slots 1 and 3 and yey! Full speed ahead =D One problem solved. Now onto the 8800GT. Took a gander at the temp it was running and saw it at 70C . I was in shock! I wasn’t even using stock cooling for it and had opted for a VGA fan. Everyone who used it was saying theyre GPU’s were at 40C and mine wasnt anywhere near that. So I thought my fan had gone haywire. Took a peak at it and it was running normally. Everything was plugged in just fine, nothing appeared off. Tried all sorts of fan control software and boosted the fan as high as it would go yet still nada. So if the fan isn’t the problem, then what else could be causing the temperature problem. Then I remembered that I accidentally went a little heavy handed on the thermal paste. So in my last attempt at solving the problem, I removed the fan and wiped off the paste, then reapplied just a small half-pea-sized drop, plugged it back in, and then booted my computer. My monitor returns “No source.” WTF! Took a look inside and, “Oh hey, didn’t push it in all the way. Oops.” Pushed it in well and made sure it was connected. Booted up and everything seemed dandy. Got into Vista, checked the temps, and YES! It’s now at 45C =D Booyahkasha! Ran 3DMark06 again and this time I had a 12000 score which is toward the higher end of my rig’s power. And that was earlier today. So hey I’m overjoyed with the results. Now I’ve just gotta finish OCing my CPU and GPU. I know I can get a little more juice out of both of them if I try hard enogh.

So hey yeah that was a long read. Hope you two ( Yeah I’m pretty much resigned to that it’s just me, Joey, and Rob here ) actually read this all the way through and hope you’ll learn something from it o= And I pray that you’ll never have to go through what I did over the past week xP

On a lighter note, I’m not highly allergic to seafood anymore! Horray! Though I’m still going easy on the seafood just in case =P