It’s turned me into a veritable expert on computer hardware.
After the saga of getting it up and running, the crashes have finally stopped. I can’t get the thing to crash anymore, and I finally have all 8 gb (4x2gb) of RAM installed.
The mobo’s an nVidia 570A SLI, which means it’s two generations ago – back when they were making Pentium Ds – the first of the dual-cores and slightly faster (if twice as greedy in the power market*) as the following models. The thing’s set to run default at 800 clock speed on a theoretical maximum of 16gb of RAM. ‘Course, when the damn thing was made, getting 8gb to run at anything took fiddling with more power than the mobo was set to give.
As it turns out, after a week or so of this newly configured Vista machine crashing two hours into any application – usually with an error logged to nVidia’s video card drivers crashing (and I’ve used every new licensed driver / beta driver / unreleased OEM driver I could get my hands on) – and no more than half an hour on any application that makes use of DirectX 10 and/or PhysX, my first instinct was to give up and reduce from 6gb to 4gb and check to see if that made the stability better**. (8gb, when I can get it to start by fiddling with the DIMM voltage and loosening up the timing, can’t run the desktop for more than half an hour, let alone a game) Read the rest of this entry »