Update....

I believe that something in the power circuit has been toasted, after some advice here. The mobo will post and run with both the x2 and the phenom, but will only idle. As soon as I try to do anything that puts a substantial load on the system, i.e. games, Prime95, Seti it will run from anything from a few minutes to a couple of hours before locking up and freezing solid. I'm listening to radio on the internet on it now as I type this just before I go to work. It's not quite right as the sound skips a little bit intermittently, which it never did before, but stable enough to browse internet, do emails etc...

Gotta go to work now, and seti is on pause 'til new machine is up and running.

regards, Gizbar.

good thing you have all the nice new gear coming soon

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

... just gotta decide whether to go for windows 7 on the updated machine. ...

For a clean new machine, give one of the main Linux distros a try? :-)

For a first-try I'd suggest Mandriva One Spring (2009.1) or Kubuntu depending on taste.

The Mandriva One is 32-bit and can run diskless from the CD or be installed. There's 64-bits in the "Powerpack" versions. The Kubuntu comes in 32-bits or 64-bits as a free download. For your new machine, best is to go 64-bits!

(The "KDE" desktop version should be quite familiar in layout.)

Good luck with your new cruncher!

Cheers,
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Hi once more...

@Questor - I know the caps problem first hand. I had a gigabyte mobo which ran my first home built pc (an XP 1600+ with a whole 512Mb of ram, lol! It was pretty good at the time) which died. It would do the same thing, i was constantly rebooting it. The caps bulged and leaked on that one. I had forgotten about it until you reminded me. No such luck on this one tho. The caps all look pristine, so my suspect is still, as advised on here, knackered power circuit. I can't see anything obvious on the motherboard either. The little electrons have gone silently...

@Skildude - Thanks. It should all be here tomorrow (SAT). I paid a little extra for the Sat delivery, so it would definitely arrive when I was at home. Would have liked to go with the big boy's core i7, but been an AMD user for a few years, am more at home with them than intel, and quite frankly, i7 is out of my meagre budget! I also want to keep team green alive, as team blue need someone to keep them on their toes. I'm not going down the route of which is better, as they take turns in being the best. Everyone knows who's in front at the moment. Hope they can be caught and passed soon. That'll make them work even harder. If there's only one player, what happens to research and innovation then?

@ML1 - I've not done much with Linux. I've had a little play with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope, but was hoping to be a bit happier with using it before making it my main OS. I also have a couple of printers that I don't know if I can get drivers for yet, so I need a bit more research. I'm also the one my friends ask when their machines need troubleshooting (normally virii and such), so up til now, I keep using windows for familiarity. I also keep windows running constantly as I hate taking my seti offline. And, I'm not sure you can do cuda processing on Linux yet. I'm sure someone here can advise?

Thanks for all the help and suggestions. I like to give credit where credit is due, and I also like to help others if I can. I do appreciate the time and trouble that has been gone to, to help me. Every time you think you are getting on top of it all, a new and different problem arises, and the help and information is invaluable.

regards, Gizbar.

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A proud GPU User Server Donor!

... Every time you think you are getting on top of it all, a new and different problem arises ...

Look at it the other way - another opportunity arises - how else do we continue to learn?

Keep learnin'

F.

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... It should all be here tomorrow (SAT). I paid a little extra for the Sat delivery, so it would definitely arrive when I was at home. Would have liked to go with the big boy's core i7, but been an AMD user for a few years, am more at home with them than intel, and quite frankly, i7 is out of my meagre budget! ... If there's only one player, what happens to research and innovation then?

Great stuff for your new bits. Hope you have a smooth assembly tomorrow.

I rather like some of the AMD innovations even if they can't boast the top performance spot at the moment. Their system of cache utilisation looks rather good despite the extra complexity for maintaining coherency across the 3 cache levels. Also, for some time now they've had the memory controller, high speed inter-chip links (the AMD "HT") and a crossbar data switch integral with the CPU that Intel are only now just catching up with.

The real question is how well that all gets converted into useful performance and at what price for a complete system.

... not done much with Linux. I've had a little play with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope, but was hoping to be a bit happier with using it before making it my main OS. I also have a couple of printers that I don't know if I can get drivers for yet... not sure you can do cuda processing on Linux yet. ...

It's always a bit of an initial jolt for anything new. Whether you keep with it depends on why and how you make any change...

Most printers with the possible exception of just one manufacturer are all well supported, usually automatically. Even if you have a printer that is not on the support list, no "special driver" is needed if you have a ".ppd" file for it. A good check is just to Google "distro name printer name" and see if there are any comments for it.

I'm running CUDA with Boinc on this Mandriva Linux. Crunch3r has one or two science application compiles and the latest Boinc 3.6.xx supports it ok. Also, I may be rolling my own soon-ish if a few experiments unfurl ok.


Happy crunchin',
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Have fun with your new kit!

Shortly after posting yesterday I noticed one of my boxes had no lights on. The 600W PSU was no more. I've had a couple of PSUs go recently and even though the spec says it is more than capable of supplying the box I'm dubious of how far you can push some of these PSUs. I'm running it on a power meter and that is showing the overall consumption to be nowhere near.

Heat of course is always a problem here also and it's on the rise. As per skildudes comment, I've also recently purchased some wireless NICs to put in a couple of machines so I can distribute them around the house - no nice cool basement unfortunately. If I'd actually got around to doing that perhaps I wouldn't have had the problem.

I fortunately had a spare 750W which I've now fitted so back up and running.

Touch wood this will fare a bit better.

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GPU Users Group