Awesome, glad you got there.
thinkklinck wrote:Used your iso burner, burned, put CD back in, nothing happens
As groan suggests, if the BIOS wasn't told to boot from the CD drive and/or you didn't reboot after putting that newly burned memtest disc in then nothing would happen.
Oy!
A little surprising that a 1000W power supply wouldn't be giving enough power to your graphics card. If you only have a single vid card, you should be able to get away with as little as 650W or 750W. I know nothing about "Cougar" brand power supplies but if a 1000W wasn't enough to power your rig I'd consider looking into a possible replacement. Maybe just one of the leads was busted, but that shouldn't be acceptable. The rest of your parts seem pretty high end, no reason to skimp on power supply.
Awesome, glad you got there.
Thin_J wrote:thinkklinck wrote:Used your iso burner, burned, put CD back in, nothing happens
As groan suggests, if the BIOS wasn't told to boot from the CD drive and/or you didn't reboot after putting that newly burned memtest disc in then nothing would happen.
Oy!
Your avatars are too similar
As for the quote mis-assignment, was posting from my phone
It's not certain that the supply is the problem, so if you just jump in and replace it now, you may be disappointed. But just in case, here's some thoughts.
Both your chip and your GPU are power-hungry, especially if you overclock. Bulldozers will apparently overclock a long, long way, but their power consumption goes into the hundreds of watts to do it. And, I gather, the 7970 is very similar, likely built on very similar technology. You can get a crapload of speed out of them if you're willing to shovel a crapload of power into them, and if you can figure out how to cool that much heat being generated.
Because of that, if you have any plans on overclocking, going big on the supply is probably not a bad idea at all. For stock usage, you'll need about 14 12 volt amps to comfortably run a 125-watt CPU (125 watts, divided by 12 volts, is a little over 10 amps, and then another few amps for your motherboard, RAM, and drives.) Then your GPU has a max TDP of 230 watts; input wattage can't exceed output heat, so you'd need another 230 / 12 = 19.1 amps for that. So call it about 33 amps total, maybe a little less. A 550W single-rail supply will usually provide 34 amps on its 12V rail, so it would be just enough to run everything at absolute maximum, all at once, with no overclocking. A 650 would give you some overhead. And, because the chip demands can be so extreme, you'd probably want to go up to at least 850 if you plan to really OC, maybe even a kilowatt if you plan to really push it. (which seems ludicrous, but if the review sites are right, you can put an insane amount of juice into those chips.)
Seasonic and Corsair are two of the better brands you can buy. Seasonic is probably a little better, but they're usually more expensive.
But, again, we don't yet know that this is actually your problem. It MIGHT be, but that's far from certain. A 5% drop in your input voltage is pretty terrible, honestly; a good supply is supposed to hold it to within about 1%. You might want to actually hook up a real voltmeter and see what's happening with that supply while you're playing.
Oh, and if it has multiple rails, which it should, try swapping around to different rails -- rails 1 and 3, f'r instance, might be weak, but 2 and 4 might be good enough to run your computer well. You probably wouldn't want to keep using the supply, but that would prove for sure that the supply was the problem.
By the way, are you overclocking at all? I don't think we've asked you, and that's kind of a big deal on AMD products.
By way of comparison, on the Intel side, we usually tell folks that a 430W is fine for stock clocks, with a CPU and any single discrete card, and that a 550 will handle any CPU overclock; we barely even talk about GPU overclocking here, so that doesn't usually enter into the equation. So telling you with a straight face that you could actually use a kilowatt supply, when you're not running three graphic cards, is a very weird thing.
You might want to ask over on HardOCP and other forums that have more AMD experience. Not very many of us have those chips anymore; I don't think anyone that routinely posts here has a Bulldozer. So, while someone here might certainly have seen a relevant discussion someplace, posting on other forums will give you a better chance of running into someone who's dealing with (and maybe solved) the exact same problem themselves, and might save you the trouble and expense of buying a new supply.
We're not really fanboys or anything, we've just ended up on Intel in this generation because it's so strong, and we're leaning NVidia on graphic cards because they're cheaper for similar speed in games, with better drivers. We were all about AMD graphics a couple years ago, and we may be again, but right this minute, we're essentially all on Intel CPUs, and a substantial majority are on NVidia graphics.
I would bet its the Powersupply.. dirty and inconsistent rails can lead to all sorts of system instability.
I would bet its the Powersupply.. dirty and inconsistent rails can lead to all sorts of system instability.
Agreed. It would be interesting to get some stats from forum posts such as this to see what the ultimate culprit is for most 'weird' system instability. Of all the things to swap out in a build, I'd say PSU is one of the easier and less costly ones to do if you need to eliminate things. It's the foundation every other component relies upon, while being low profile.
I found mine was still covered too, but the cost of shipping was at least half of the cost of a new one, and then I'd have nothing to power my PC while I'd be waiting for Corsair to process it, and there would be no guarantee it would find a fault. Get talking with support though and see what they say.
I found mine was still covered too, but the cost of shipping was at least half of the cost of a new one, and then I'd have nothing to power my PC while I'd be waiting for Corsair to process it, and there would be no guarantee it would find a fault. Get talking with support though and see what they say.
Not to mention if they do find a fault what will they replace it with? The same model? Not ideal....
I was also wondering if you were overclocking the CPU, which would also increase power demands by a large margin, and could certainly induce instability. If you're doing any OCing at all, stop doing that before doing anything else.
Assuming that everything is at stock speeds, I tend to think that the power supply is your most likely culprit, but we just don't know for sure. RAM is another strong possibility, and then there's a long, long list of lower-probability things it could be. Before you spend any money, I'd again suggest you ask in more AMD-focused forums, because you might run into someone who's had your exact problem.
If you don't get any other useful advice or hints, then power supply is probably the next thing to try, but it's far from a certain fix.
If you don't get any other useful advice or hints, then power supply is probably the next thing to try, but it's far from a certain fix.
Googling forums he is going to find a ton of other Amd 7xxx card owners with same issue. My 7850 is RMA'd to Gigabyte. Many of the [Solved] threads are about their card being refunded for another product, Sleep Mode/ Bios Upgrade, or they jiggled some cables and it somehow works now.
Sigh. Well, at least it's not hardware.
Since going with my 7750 I've had hard locks in Guild Wars 1 and 2, but nothing else. I seem to have solved that by underclocking the GPU with MSI Afterburner, which is what the Rivatuner crew are now working on.
It doesn't seem to be likely with these games, but maybe try setting up an underclocked profile in Afterburner and see what happens.
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