Thursday and Friday I am troubleshooting an odd problem with my computer. The monitor goes into power save mode, then very shortly later the computer seems to freeze up (by lack of response from the keyboard). It started only during games, but start happening other times too, even when I was away from the computer. I suspected the issue was either my overclock or power supply. While both had been stable at 3.9GHz for two years, either could destabilize over time if pushed too hard, and both were.

I did determine the issue was with the 700 watt power supply. I think upgrading from the 4870x2 to two 6950s a few months ago was just a bit more than it could handle, especially with the water cooling six harddrives, and lots of fans.

While I had pretty much solved that problem and found I could work around it for now by lowering my CPU overclock (3.9GHz CPU takes up a lot of power vs a 3.0GHz CPU). I found another problem. My Crossfire was disabled on my two 6950s cards. I've seen this happen twice before. Now I'm wracking my brain trying to remember what I did to fix it last time. I open the case and checked the Crossfire cable and then push down on both cards to make sure they are seated properly. Unfortunately this caused a problem with the water pipe between the cards. The pipe runs water from one card to the other and now has a trickle of water seeping out of it. Crap! Now I got to drain the water and fix this.


Saturday I decide instead of fixing the leak I'll just remove all the water cooling, take a break from that. And go back to air cooling. I run out to Fry's Electronics and by a Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO for my CPU and put the stock AMD coolers back on the video cards.

But two problems arose from this. First was the side panel with the 200mm fan would not fit with the Hyper 212 EVO installed on the CPU, it was too tall. I had to take the fan out of the side panel to make it fit. Kinda disappointing. But the bigger problem was with one of the AMD 6950 coolers. I tried over and over, but could not get the heatsink to make good contact with the GPU core. Other one worked fine. That one card would idle at 70C and instantly shoot up to 100+C if I loaded a game (and I instantly closed it). Over and over, I tried to make that heatsink fit the GPU. Even swapped the heatsink to the other card and then it had the same problem. So definitely something just not right with the heatsink.


Sunday I decide I have to go back to water cooling. So the computer gets torn down again, and the water cooling parts reinstalled. Instead of that stupid ass Crossfire water pipe, I just used a short tube between the two video cards. That thing did worry me when I first got it since it doesn't screw it, just rests between the cards and held in place by rubber o-rings. It has grooves to prevent it from sliding, but the weight of heavy copper water blocks on the graphics cards caused the gap between the cards to widen a bit over time and that is why it no longer fitted correctly and leaked.

There was a casualty during all this work. One of my memory sticks got damaged. It was a 2GB stick with a large heatsink on each side of the memory. When installing and removing the memory, I put pressure on the heatsink and unfortunately one side came off. The heatsink was glued directly onto the memory chips and one the heatsink came off, two memory chips came off with it. *cry* I'm going to have to scavenge some memory from my other computer.

It's Sunday night and the leak test is running. Going to let that run overnight, if there are no leaks by Monday morning, then I'll be done. My original issue is still there, I'll be running the computer with probably little or no overclock until I can replace the PSU.

Computers are fickle beasts.

 

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I spent my weekend with no power and shoveling 16" of snow

Especially when you fiddle with them !


Hope it's all sorted ok Ravyn, although whether I could have gone to bed knowing there may be water leaking in an electrical appliance while I was deep asleep is another matter altogether!

Oh, I drained and pulled out the video cards and motherboard Friday night, immediately upon finding the leak. Then Saturday I removed the water blocks and began installing air cooled parts instead.

Mother nature's devil's day/night prank?

 

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I went to augusta, ga to see my band play. 6hour drive there 5 hour drive back on sunday. I hung out with some friends and played a little bit of Rift on the laptop with the sucky gpu.

 

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Follow up on my computer meltdown last weekend. That odd issue where my monitor would kick into power save mode and the computer would freeze up. I had assumed was either due to an old overtaxed power supply or failing CPU overclock. I believe now it was neither of those things.

After putting my system back together for the final time, I cleaned up some excess cables behind my computer rack and I noticed that the power strip that my desktop and monitor were both plugged into had a Kill-A-Watt meter plugged into it. I had used that to monitor power usage of my entire system with monitor at one point. But that meter had been plugged in continuously monitoring for at least a year I think.

I removed the meter. And now I seem to be completely stable again with my old overclock. All is working again as it had been for almost a week now. Man, that was a lot of work, just because of that stupid meter.


I am RMAing that memory kit that was damaged. It was a 4GB (2x2) DDR2-1000 2.1v kit. Sadly Patriot informed me they no longer make that. The best they can offer is a DDR2-800 1.9v kit instead. I looked on NewEgg and that appears to be the only 4GB DDR2 kit they even sell now, so I guess I'll just take what I can get. Though in hindsight, I'm now wondering if I shouldn't have tried to get them to offer me a DDR3 kit instead. Drat, too late. Already said I'd take the slower DDR2 one.