Finally - New System

[CincySouthernRwy]

My machine died months ago (February?) - it was my 450W power supply's fault. I cobbled together a "Millenium Falcon" machine from spare parts set aside after previous upgrades, but started building a Rolls Royce-quality replacement named, appropriately enough, "The Beast". I had help from two tech-oriented friends who build their own machines also. I finally received the final piece yesterday - the new video card (amid diabolical laughter). My hope is that it may be able to run TRS2009 - I don't think the old machine would have done that without creating at least a neutron star out of our sun.

Specs:

Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0 GHz True Quad-Core, Socket AM3
Mainboard: Asus M4A89GTD PRO
Video: Gigabyte NVidia GeForce GTX 295 (1792 MB GDDR3 on board RAM)
Power Supply: Silverstone Olympia OP800
HDD1: Seagate 200 GB 7200 rpm (old drive - boot)
HDD2: Seagate 200 GB 7200 rpm (old drive - TRS2004)
HDD3: Seagate 2 TB Barracuda SATA 5900 rpm (new drive for Trainz - will it be enough?)
RAM: 4 sticks of Transcend 2 GB DDR3 1333 (8 GB total RAM)
Case: Silverstone KL03
Recommended extra cooling fans

The Beast is quite an upgrade from the Prescott I upgraded to 3-4 years ago.

Before I tear apart the "Falcon" to pull the hard drives for re-installation, I wanted to test out the new hardware and make sure it fired up. When I plugged it in and turned it on, all I got was a green LED on the mobo that lit up. Nothing else happened. No power supply fans kicking on, no extra cooling fans spinning or lighting up, nothing.

Is this normal? Do the mobo and processor require the boot drive in order to spin the fans? My wife claims that her laptop's power supply doesn't appear to work until she does something with it after boot up, which strikes me as odd. I can move the boot drive over, but I'd hate to do it, get no improvement, and not be able to get to the internet without confiscating the laptop from my wife.

 

[lewisner]

My current machine is a Packard Bell 6810 SLI and at the momemt it has an Athlone 64 4000+ CPU, 2 x Nvidia 8800GT 512MB GPU's a RAID HDD consisting of a 300 GB and a 320 GB drive.............but only a 400 Watt PSU, and yet it runs OK?
The Mobo has big problems so I am upgrading it with a quad core AMD CPU on a Tri Sli capable Mobo and a 700 Watt modular PSU

One thing I don't understand is - what relevance would the size of your 2TB HDD have to it's ability to run Trainz? Surely it's all in the RAM and graphics?
BTW my new Mobo will support 16GB RAM so I'll be shopping before the end of the year :mop:

 

[RRSignal]

No, you do not need a hard disk to have your machine POST. First things first, make sure all your PS connections are solid and check the connection to the power switch. If you think the power switch might be flaky you can try shorting the two power terminals with a screwdriver tip, being careful not to touch anything else.

Your 2TB drives seem like they'd be slow to me if that's in fact their spindle speed and I hope your old drives are SATA-II.

 

[saintjimmy]

Check the manual to see what the green LED means. It could be telling you something that might need fixing, such as a bad cable, improper voltage setting on PSU, etc.

And I hope that you play other games than just Trainz. If not, that GTX 295 is a terrible waste, as Trainz scales horribly (if at all) in SLI and ATI's Crossfire. You'll only be using the power of one of the GPU's on there, which would be equivalent to a GTX 275. A GTX 470 or ATI 5870 is much more powerful single-GPU wise, which is how Trainz uses it.

 

[CincySouthernRwy]

lewisner - Perhaps HDD size is no longer a factor, but it used to be that the more stuff you accumulated for Trainz, the more disc space it all took up, which slowed down Trainz. Ergo, the larger drive.

RRSignal - yeah, I just realized today that the 2 TB drive is only 5900 rpm. Seems like 7200 rpm was becoming the standard a few years ago, so the fact that this was even available is puzzling. It's my first SATA drive, so maybe that makes the difference? Guess I'll see how it goes.

saintjimmy - I guess I should have mentioned this, but the green LED means that the mainboard is receiving power. It lights up when the mainboard is on, which is the weird part. I always thought a power supply had to have its fans running when supplying power. This thing doesn't budge. But none of the other cooling fans come on or light up, either (can't you just get a cooling fan anymore without the juice-thirsty Coney Island light display, too?). Aside from this LED, there is no other indication that I've done anything to this metal box. Usually there is more to see.

No, I don't play anything else. I don't have time. Trainz or research. I used to play baseball and Star Wars: Rogue Squadron - does that tell you how long it's been?

I only have the one video card - I didn't realize until I read the manual that I could run more than one card in SLI mode. Oh well. My goal was to max out the hardware in RAM, video, and processor capability. Those three seem to control Trainz usability. I figured when they come out with TRS2016 and I can afford to upgrade again, I'll have long passed the ability of this card (sometime in 2011).

I have no idea what an ATI Crossfire is. Is this an ATI video card? The only ATI card I've ever had was a Rage IIc back in 1999. It was okay.

 

[RRSignal]

RRSignal - yeah, I just realized today that the 2 TB drive is only 5900 rpm. Seems like 7200 rpm was becoming the standard a few years ago, so the fact that this was even available is puzzling. It's my first SATA drive, so maybe that makes the difference? Guess I'll see how it goes.

Well, as far as I can remember, I haven't even seen a SATA drive that does less than 7200 in the last 3-4 years, except maybe for laptops. It makes a big difference though, the spindle speed. For optimal performance, you would want to have gotten a Raptor, which runs at 10,000 RPM - and, yeah, is priced accordingly!

saintjimmy - I guess I should have mentioned this, but the green LED means that the mainboard is receiving power. It lights up when the mainboard is on, which is the weird part. I always thought a power supply had to have its fans running when supplying power. This thing doesn't budge. But none of the other cooling fans come on or light up, either (can't you just get a cooling fan anymore without the juice-thirsty Coney Island light display, too?). Aside from this LED, there is no other indication that I've done anything to this metal box. Usually there is more to see.

That why I was wondering if this is an issue of your PSU even being able to power on. Your mobo may be getting power, but all modern PSUs require an input to be driven to ground (#PS_ON or /PS_ON in technical literature) to tell the PSU to start up. The screwdriver trick I mentioned should handle this - if done carefully and properly.

I have no idea what an ATI Crossfire is. Is this an ATI video card? The only ATI card I've ever had was a Rage IIc back in 1999. It was okay.

Crossfire/X-fire is ATI's branding of the very same concept that nVidia calls SLi - two or more video cards (or single video cards duplicated on one piece of circuit board) acting in parallel. There are technical nuances, but the exact same idea.

 

[lewisner]

CincySouthernRwy, the thing about the 2TB HDD is that it is VAST - with my combo of 620 total GB I don't really need the second one and I used to run TRS2006 pretty well on my old (2003) PC with an Intel Pentium 4 CPU, a Geforce 550 256MB GPU and an 80GB HDD!
I might be asking the obvious here but have you asked this problem on a dedicated PC forum? I've used this one http://computerhope.com/ and usually got a workable answer, though you sometimes have to contend with the arrogance of some of the regular geeks
I had one one problem (I think it was my PC refusing to boot) and the solution I found was nothing more complicated than disconnecting the PC and holding the power button in for a minute then reconnecting it!

 

[whitepass]

You need to put in a case speaker so that you can hear the bios beeps witch will tell you what is not working. Also try your ram one stick at a time, I had a stick go bad and my computer would not post.

 

[JCitron]

Here are some things to check, Adam:

The secondary power is plugged into the motherboard.

Some motherboards have an additional 4- or 6-plug power connector in addition to the regular power connector. The machine will not boot up without this.

- The processor is seated properly.

Check that your processor is seated properly in the socket. It may require lifting the heatsink off and checking that it's flat in the sock. The ZIF sockets and the pinning are a lot different now than we've been used to. The chip is now flat, as you probably noticed, and the pins are in the socket. Also check that there are no bent pins in the socket. If they are, you may have to replace the motherboard.

- The RAM is in the correct slots.

Depending upon how much RAM you have, you may have to install the DIMMs in only two of the slots, and only in slots 1 and 3, or 0 and 1, depending upon how your board is numbered.

- Check that you have power going to your video card.
NVIDIA cards require a seperate power connection. Make sure this card is powered as well, otherwise your system may not boot.

Your hard drive should be fine, albeit on the slower side, in my opinion, as I've always gone for the 7200 RPM drives. I've seen a few of these around lately, and they seem to work okay, Perhaps these drives have a faster on-board cache so they operate equally to the 7200 cousins.

John

 

[CincySouthernRwy]

For optimal performance, you would want to have gotten a Raptor

A Raptor never showed up in any of my hard drive searches. Hmmm. Never saw it on Newegg, TigerDirect, etc.

I might be asking the obvious here but have you asked this problem on a dedicated PC forum? I've used this one http://computerhope.com/ and usually got a workable answer, though you sometimes have to contend with the arrogance of some of the regular geeks
I had one one problem (I think it was my PC refusing to boot) and the solution I found was nothing more complicated than disconnecting the PC and holding the power button in for a minute then reconnecting it!

No, there appear to be soooo many geek forums and I would visit them so rarely that I don't bother. If I have a tech issue, a Google search usually turns up the appropriate responses from those forums. I may try computerhope.com. Thank you.

I've tried the power button trick. Nada. I tried swapping the external power cable. Nothing. The mobo LED doesn't even come on anymore. Like neutrinos, I only saw it once.

you can hear the bios beeps witch will tell you what is not working. Also try your ram one stick at a time

I think the BIOS would beep if it would get that far. It doesn't. It doesn't turn on at all. Pressing the power button produces no discernable difference from not pressing the button.

The RAM, though, I hadn't thought of. Hmmm.

The secondary power is plugged into the motherboard.

Yep.

The processor is seated properly.

Yep. Took my sweet ol' time with that step. Even watched it from the side.

The RAM is in the correct slots.

According to the extra vague instructions they provide these days, I can put RAM into all four slots without any problem. So I did. Four 2 GB sticks. If I had only installed two, then I would have to have either used slots A1 and B1 (gray in color) or A2 and B2 (blue in color).

Check that you have power going to your video card.

Yes, there is both a six-pin plug and an eight-pin plug. But why would a video card prevent the machine from even lighting up? I can see not getting anything on the monitor (to which it has not even been connected to), but not getting the fans to spin and the appropriate LEDs to light up? My old machine does at least that much.

Your hard drive should be fine, albeit on the slower side

I hope so, I didn't even realize it was only 5900 rpm until recently, I had gotten used to everything being 7200 rpm. Perhaps that refers to something else, but it's a Seagate Barracuda, and those are supposed to be among the best out there. Perhaps the logic is that a 4-cylinder Porsche runs as well as an 8-cylinder Mustang?

 

[RRSignal]

A Raptor never showed up in any of my hard drive searches. Hmmm. Never saw it on Newegg, TigerDirect, etc.

Here's one at Tigerdirect. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4177125&CatId=2458

Caution - I wouldn't buy any HDD at Tigerdirect, nor would I buy one that is "OEM." I love Tigerdirect, but I've had too many problems with their drives, all of which are sold OEM. I buy Retail Boxed only.

I've tried the power button trick. Nada. I tried swapping the external power cable. Nothing. The mobo LED doesn't even come on anymore. Like neutrinos, I only saw it once.

I think the BIOS would beep if it would get that far. It doesn't. It doesn't turn on at all. Pressing the power button produces no discernable difference from not pressing the button.

Hmm. Do you have a reasonably modern PSU you can swap in? Even if it's not as powerful as your current one, just to see if it starts? You can take your video card out if needed.

Oh, and be sure the power cord seats firmly.

 

[steamboateng]

Western Digital Velociraptors

Western Digital Raptors are 10,000 rpm HD's. I have been running 2 of these puppies in Raid 0 configuration for years on my 5 year old rig. I highly recommend these puppies if you have extra $$ to buy 'em. Fast loading and read times are the bonus these offer in game. Routine disc cleaning and defrag go quite quickly also.
I had one go bad about 18 months ago. Western Digital covers 'em under a 5 year warranty; because I was running a raid set-up I couldn't tell which HD was bad. Sent them both to WD, who sent me 2 new (upgraded and larger capacity) ones at no charge (except postage). WD was quite helpful and freindly, providing also a downloadable utility for reinstalling raid configuration.
Many gamers nowadays forgo the raid set-up, gaining speed from SATA 2 mobos, and not wishing the hassle of raid configurations if an HD goes bad.
Western Digital's latest entry in the high speed market is the Velociraptor series, which are SATA 2 compliant and highly touted. Again, these are expensive and shunned by gamers in the $$ value per gigabite crowd. More for folks who eat thier cake with lots of icing hanging off their mustaches to lick on later. For the cost of two raptors, you can easily afford an 80 GB solid state HD, and eat lots of cake with lots of icing.
Regards

 

[lewisner]

I had a look at those Raptors and if I wanted to replace my 2 x 300GB HDD's with them they retail at £180 EACH in the UK!
BTW I finally rebuilt my PC and although everything worked - all the fans came on - I got no signal the monitor. An IT guy at suggested removing two of the 4 x 2GB RAM sticks and that worked; I got a picture.However that was the start of my problems because neither Windows 7 nor Windows XP would install. W7 kept demanding some mysterious drivers and XP stalled at 34 minutes. I searched everywhere but every solution I found failed.
Finally I have had to admit defeat and pay a guy to sort it out.
As Homer Simpson said "If at first you don't succeed, give up and have a beer!"

 

[steamboateng]

Homer is no stranger in my 'puter room! At least once I had to haul 60 lbs. of antiquated silicon across town to let the local gurus have a go at a Win XP reinstall. And they still screwed it up, forgetting to install some necessary AGP driver software. I suppose they had PCIE on the brain and forgot some of us still drive around in Model T's. (My new video card took some undeserved nasty verbal abuse for several weeks, untill I discovered the "oversight".)
Regards and good luck with your new build.

 

[lewisner]

Glad I am not the only one! It really sucked that I managed to get the thing assembled but was defeated by Windows.
Incidentally although the Mobo was TRI SLI capable I only installed 2 Nvidia 88GT GPU's. The IT guy I know suggested that it might have been better to install just one to get the system up and running because Windows might be confused by the new config , but it was too late because I had already sent it away.
On the positive side it should be a real number cruncher when it is running.

 

[hocky]

Hardware

Glad I am not the only one! It really sucked that I managed to get the thing assembled but was defeated by Windows.
Incidentally although the Mobo was TRI SLI capable I only installed 2 Nvidia 88GT GPU's. The IT guy I know suggested that it might have been better to install just one to get the system up and running because Windows might be confused by the new config , but it was too late because I had already sent it away.
On the positive side it should be a real number cruncher when it is running.

Your systems are only as good as your operating system windows xp pro 32 bit will only let you see 3gb of ram
you must be running windows 64bit achetecture to realise all your ram, so what operating systems are you all using?

 

[RRSignal]

Your systems are only as good as your operating system windows xp pro 32 bit will only let you see 3gb of ram
you must be running windows 64bit achetecture to realise all your ram, so what operating systems are you all using?

I seem to do as well with 4Gb as most people with similar hardware do with 8 as far as Trainz is concerned, so a 32-bit OS works for me. Plus, amount of memory aside, I understand Trainz doesn't benefit much from 64-bit architecture.

That said, I'm planning on formatting one of my spare drives with XP-64. I have a few sticks of memory lying around so we'll see what happens with 6Gb. But any gain I get is more likely to be from the fact that it will be a clean install versus my current machine with a million apps and data files on it.

 

[lewisner]

Your systems are only as good as your operating system windows xp pro 32 bit will only let you see 3gb of ram
you must be running windows 64bit achetecture to realise all your ram, so what operating systems are you all using?

To continue the saga my "new" PC is up and running using Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit OS. I only have 4GB of the 8GB RAM I bought installed but partly because it has an AMD II X4 635 CPU installed it gives very smooth running on my detail-heavy route. The PC suffers regular crashes but I think I can get them sorted

Details are Coolermaster 700W modular PSU
ASUS M4N82 Mobo Tri Sli capable
AMD II X4 635 CPU
2 X Nvidia 8800GT GPU's in SLI mode
2 x 2GB DDR2 RAM sticks
2 x SATA HDD's (300GB + 320GB in RAID config 0)

It gets a Windows Experience Index of 5.9 with the GPU's scoring 7.3 out of 7.9!