the computer from hell

this past weekend my little brother wanted to upgrade his computer, the week before last my grandfather had passed away and he was taking it kind of hard so i purchased him bad company 2 to hopefully help him feel a bit better and get his mind off of that situation, he goes by the name of ShawdowShark. but we ran into a problem. his cpu was a huge bottleneck on his computer, old P4. if your familiar with 3dmark06 his score was a low 6000 points and that's with a HD4850. this problem cause long load times and choppy game play when a lot of people were on the server. so he decided on a upgrade. Asus 890GX motherboard, Phenom 1055T X6 @ 2.8Ghz and OCZ ddr3-1333 8gb of ram. got it all back together and went to turn in on. here is a couple pics:

here is before, me and my cousin built it out of spare parts we had to give him something when he graduated high school. P4, 2gb ddr2 ram, asus mobo, and the video card he purchased. the case my cousin painted for his own use but found a case he liked better




New parts:


all together, and clean!



after that last picture is when all hell broke loose. first issue we ran into was the O/S blue screen the moment we tried to install the video drivers. its alright i had this problem before. double checked the mobo manual and found that asus has a little card you need to plug in the white slot when using only one video card. ok so i changed that now the o/s was just BSOD when i tried to boot it. so i tried to reinstall windows and it BSOD during install. so i gave up and went to bed. 3 hours later i woke up with chest pains and went to the hospital. 3 hours came home and said it was inflammation of the lungs. then went back and started working on the pc again. unplugged 1 stick of ram and the high speed drive and started it. everything was GOOD! no issues installing anything. even ran a benchmark to see what his improvement was. 3dmark06 score jumped to 13500! went and put everything back together and low and behold it stops working. BSOD left and right. pulled out the stick of ram i pulled out before and it works fine! so we take the ram set back to the store which is 15miles round trip. (i drive a 99 jeep wrangler that's lifted so i get crap gas millage but would never give it up!) we get the set replaced and head back home. i let my little brother install the ram and he fubars it. mobo starts beeping which signals theirs no ram and we both smell something burning. crap smell the ram and it smells burnt. so we take it back and grab a new brand set and bring it down to a 4gb set from patriot. get back home and put it in still nothing. guess the mobo fried, well we hope. so were gonna take that back and hopefully he will be able to join us on the larger servers!

Holy shit... Computer problems really know how to piss me off.. Guess you feel the same, huh?

So waht you 're going to do now

out of the 50 or so pc's i have built i have NEVER had so many issues. i'm waiting for the roads to clear up ( we got 10" of snow last night) then were going to take the motherboard back and get it replaced. then it better work or i'm going to beat this thing with a sledge hammer.

Do you know if they are going to replace it.

yeah, he purchased a 2 year- no questions asked warranty

gotta love the smell of fried electronics...

then it better work or i'm going to beat this thing with a sledge hammer.

Be creative when doing this and take the necessary video's and post them for TKC entertainment.

haha reminds me of when my hard drive just suddenly fried in my old HP P4 desktop. Heard a beep, then a crackle and the computer shut off. Turned it back on, wouldn't boot. then I smelled smoke and looked at my PC and it was smoking and I was like HOLY CRAP. had ALL OF MY MUSIC AND VIDEOS on it, and it no longer works

then a week later my brother's ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (old card I gave to him when I got the HP) just decided to burst into flames randomly...that gave me a scare. Looked inside the computer to work on something for him and noticed one of the transistors was glowing red. I was like "that cannot be good..." sure enough a few seconds later *POOF* FIREEEEEEEEEE. I grabbed the cleaning rag I had and beat it out (all the while the computer was still on, lol) then shut it off and told him "Yeah....you're gonna need a new video card." He asked why and I told him and he was just like O_O

Let us know what is going on man.

about to leave now, but look what i found!

[(TKC)-o]T3[o]

Yeah.. that doesn't look good.

Aside from the computer issues.. will your brother be interested in joining a clan once he's squard away? If so, let him know how to sign up, we'd love to have him.

I'll ask him but he is currently in a clan for counter strike source.
got the computer back together with the replacement mobo and wouldn't ya know! another ram stick that's dead.......
ARRRGGGAAAAGSHGDKLJFAHSHL
forget it he can wait till the weekend before i got back up there....

He should be alright with 2 Gb, at least to play. Sorry to hear about all the trouble though. I can say, that mobo is effing awesome. I've got it as well and picked up a USB 3.0 1 Tb HDD from Wal-Mart for $105-10% discount (wife's dad works for Wal-Mart). I get around 100 Meg read/80 Meg write and I'm pretty sure that the drive has 5400 RPM platters.

here is an update, went and replaced the last set of ram and wouldn't ya know it they failed too. but i think i might have found the problem. turns out the mobo was trying to overclocking the ram which was in turn frying them when more then one stick was installed. so i went into the bios and changed the DRAM settings to DDR3-1333 and got the 2 sticks to at least boot. but i have a good feeling that one stick fried when i tried it the first time. o well head back to the store and replace them again next weekend.