FMod

It might cost you money, unless you bought your PSU there. It's hardly a good idea to invest money, time and gas into saving what's going to be an old, not-so-good PSU. You can test it at home anyway. Here's how: 1) Unplug everything from it. Get it out of the case. 2) Connect a fan to the 4-pin molex output, assuming you have any that you can connect. 3) Plug the PSU in. 4) Take a piece of wire and briefly short-circuit the green cable with any black cable on the 24-pin output. You should hear the PSU start its fan. The other fan should start too. These "eggs" are not a result of professional testing, it's just what users click, so don't put much stock in them. Can be useful to filter out lemons (if you see something with 1 or 2, it's probably trouble), but not much more than that. There are better PSU out there than Corsair TXV2, but they will cost you a lot more (usually well over $100). It's not the quietest PSU out there, but let's quantify. Out of retail grade PSU in its power range, in terms of noise level it's about top 25%, power delivery quality top 10%, build quality top 5%, efficiency top 30% (good 80+ Bronze). The Antec you were considering is about top 50% in noise level, power quality and build quality, and lower 50% in efficiency (80+, but not Bronze or above). It's their bottom-end unit. And it's 5 year warranty from Corsair vs 1 year from Antec, for $5 difference it's a no-brainer. TXV2 is currently the best bargain among power supplies, it's on par or better than the HX line, while priced just a bit above the old TX. And it's good even at its regular price of $120, getting one for $75 with shipping is almost a steal. If you were looking for a PSU in the $150-$200 range, I'd have other suggestions (both Seasonic and CWT units). In the $250-$500 range, other suggestions as well (Platinum rated supplies from Seasonic, Antec, Kingwin, Enermax; in kilowatt range, SS-1000XP is the reigning champion, above a kilowatt you have no choice but to look at others).

Whether a typo or not, it's an excellent piece of advice for just about every situation in life. Well, except for the website part, that one is optional.

No reason to at all. It's just a modular ATX supply. All you need is enough output for your components, which TX650V2 has that with plenty to spare. 20+4 is 24 - it wouldn't be there if it wasn't compatible with standard ATX motherboards (which you have). You don't need to worry about any of that, just get the PSU I recommended, it will work fine. It's a recent design Seasonic inside, so power quality and build quality are as good as you can ever get for under $100. There's also a 5 year warranty on it, and Corsair's customer support is on the better side.

Possible but not likely if it went down quietly (won't start one day). It can do, but I would still recommend this one instead: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139020 At $75 after rebate it's only an extra $10 and a much better unit inside. edit: It's actually free shipping vs $10 shipping, so comes out to the same price. Definitely take the TX650 V2. Another option is: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817207013 - the exact same unit inside, but with more toyish looks and a couple more connectors (you won't need them though).

Short answer: No. Long answer: There were some obscure ways with very old hardware (floppy drives, CRT displays), but the process was usually very obvious, took considerable time, and had a very small success rate. None of these ever spread anyway. It does sound like your PSU died. Check around for the obvious like on/off switch, power cables, the fuse if present. Good PSU to buy are Corsair TXV2, Seasonic S12 or M12, Nexus (unrelated to this site), Antec Truepower New, Antec HCG-620, in about this order. Different PCs have different wattage, you need to list your major components to get it.

Razer mechanical keyboards are the least reliable mechanical keyboards you can find. Weird seeing how they all use Cherry switches, but seems like Razer found a way. Razer mice aren't as notoriously unreliable as Chinese brands, but Logitech, Steelseries or even Saitek monstrosities blow them out of the water in terms of build quality (sadly not always in terms of usability). So it's no surprise your headphones fell apart. Razer doesn't even have the facilities to make them, they're subcontracted to some Chinese OEM. Not that others don't do it, but somehow Razer seems to pick out worse OEMs than the rest. Now, as to the advice to get Sennheiser, for $80 don't do that either. Sennheiser offers about the next worst bang for your buck right after Bose, especially in cheaper models. Sure, some of their models, HD 500 and above, are pretty good - but not as good as similarly expensive Audio-Technika models, and not as affordable as similar quality Beyerdynamics or Philips. If it was 2008-2010, I'd say go get Philips SHP-895 while supplies last. Sadly, they only lasted so long. New Philips are still good, but not that kind of a steal. If you like mostly neutral sound, go for Sony or Philips. If you want deeper lows, go for Beyerdynamics. If you want maximum fidelity at the expense of some roughness, get AKG. Avoid gayming brands as much as you can when talking about audio products.

You should have bought a FM1 Athlon and HD6850, if it was recently, or an Athlon X3 before, but well, too late for that now. The amount of RAM means almost nothing, except in high-end GPU. GTX580 has just 1.5GB. The game doesn't even know what CPU you have. And since intel's i5 and i7 are just two marketing names for the same line of CPUs, it wouldn't matter if it did. Geforce GTS250 has: * 4.8 times the memory bandwidth, * 4.6 times the computing performance, and * 7.2 times the texture fillrate of GT520. That's why his game looks better - his card has more than 5 times the power. So a used card from ebay (or elsewhere) could still save your build for very little money. A GTS250 in good condition costs $50 to $60 there with free shipping. I'm not suggesting more powerful cards due to their price and power consumption.

What were you expecting with GT520? It's about the cheapest new video card money can buy (except for HD6450 that is like $2 less). They put these into servers and office PCs that lack onboard video. If a store sold you a "gaming" PC with this GPU, they were quite dishonest in their advertising. Overclocking is not going to solve it. You need a GPU. I'd suggest getting a GTS240 or HD4850 or HD5750 or higher off ebay, or a new HD6750 or higher or GT545 or higher. In call cases "higher" is preferable.

That's an older and now disproved misconception, based on the chip codename being GK104. As most people expected GK100, GK104, GK108, etc, it was presumed that GK104 would be the midrange card. What happened is both companies hoped to launch HD7xxx/GT6xx in mid-late 2011, which would be respectively Tahiti XT and GK100. Designs themselves, then, were complete in early 2010 already. However there were severe troubles with manufacturing these chips, so the launch has been delayed. While production issues were being fixed, NV had the time to develop an updated chip design, which got the next alphanumerical designation in sequence. That used to be so with the previous generation, although not exactly. More precisely, ATi counted each scalar processed in its 5D or 4D vector unit as a 'core', while NV counted each 4D vector unit as a 'core' (this had some basis in architecture). Currently both architectures are very similar, and both count each scalar processed as a 'core'. They are not really cores anyway, so the distinction is academic only.

Average power is actually the same under load (3W more for 680 over 12 seconds, 3W more for 7970 in peak). In idle 7970 consumes less, but 680 consumes less under some loads like video playback. Overall, they're neck to neck here. GTX680 has less consistent performance than 7970; it delivers stellar fps under some conditions and lags behind under others. Unfortunately, it works best in low resolutions or under lighter loads, and drops the worst under the heaviest loads. Overall performance results under medium-heavy load (1920x1080) are as this: 680 OC > 7970 OC > 7950 OC > 680 stock > 7970 stock > 580 stock > 7950 stock The results under heavy load (2560x1440 or 1920x1080 3D) change: 7970 OC > 680 OC > 7950 OC > 680 stock > 7970 stock > 7950 stock > 580 stock It would be a tough choice today. On one hand, 680 is faster on the average, on the other hand, 7970 is faster when you need it the most, i.e. when your fps is at its lowest. The worst-case scenario recorded was in Metro 2033, where 680 OC provided 31 fps average and floored at 18, while 7970 OC had 36 average and floored at 20. This lack of performance in tough scenarios is a direct result of 680's narrow bus width of only 256 bits. If you're into 3D displays and gaming with 3D glasses, 7970 might be a better choice, but check 2560x1440+ or stereo 3D benchmarks for your game specifically. If the most you play is Skyrim, 680 seems to be your card. But then you are only getting 76 fps rather than 70 fps with 7970... big deal when your display caps it at 60 fps. Well, at least you know you have more headroom - but on the other hand HD texture packs will skew things back towards 7970 with its wider memory bus. Really it will boil down to price. Both cards are unreasonably loud with stock cooling, but 680 is a little quieter (43 vs 46 dB). However, you definitely do not want either of them in reference design. Both cards suffer from poor power supply design with only a 4-phase VRM on 680 and some issues noted with 7970 VRM. Remembering how many 570's died from overclocking (and RMA rejects these), you might want to avoid overclocking a reference 680. Custom PCB and cooling designs offer better reliability and better cooling with less noise. As always, Asus is going to be the best (sorry folks, I'm not being a fanboy, but triple-slot DirectCU II cards with 12-phase VRM's are just that good), but unreasonably expensive. Look out for less expensive offerings from other makers, basically anything with 2 or 3 fans on it, that may cost only a bit more than reference designs, but work much quieter. Powercolor, Gigabyte, EVGA, what have you.

I meant a photo, with an actual camera. And a short video, if the noise is moving. It's a bit more bother, but it's the only way to diagnose it online. Unlikely. The pin will usually bend/break all the way if it can't go in. I'm pretty sure this is better than whatever the static problem is. And it will help see if the problem is related to the GPU. Also: Don't ever pay attention to that. You don't know where the results came from and what other components there were. Sandra and other comparison benchmarks are also absolutely terrible at assigning "weight categories". The consequences of poorly working GPU/CPU etc are more often freezes, artifacts, crashes, not performance loss.

Your PSU is good, at least in theory. Everything really should work fine. This is not an overclocking issue. When did the problem first start, and does it happen 100% of the time or less? From what state or states does it occur? Specifically: 1) Just plugged in; some time went on; pressing the "on" button 2) Turned the computer off by pressing the Power button (on the case or the keyboard) 3) Turned the computer off by selecting "Turn Off" in windows If it's (2) or (3), there is a possibility that your computer is not actually off, but in hibernation. Failure to resume from hibernation is much more common and associated with OS faults.

Or take a photo of your display. It's really much more explanatory. Factory overclocking is no different from o/c at home, it's still overclocking and it does increase potential glitches. So underclock your GPU and VRAM to about 10% less than its design speed and see if the problem goes away.

Well, a photo would describe it. It's just not clear. Anyway, make sure the video card is connected to the PSU. It has these 6-pin connectors. Or that the card really has nowhere you could stick a 6-pin. It's supposed to have these connectors, two of them.

How does it look? A photo would be good. Or just describe it better. Is it over the whole screen, is it b/w or color, does it change or stay still, etc. A few points: * GTX460 should have a power cable to it. In fact it has two connectors and both need a cable. Are you sure there's none? * If it's a CRT, try plugging it into something else. * Nvidia cards are vulnerable to chip desoldering, a severe issue. It often manifests itself as fixed color noise over parts of the screen.

Best bang for the buck in your case is going to be Athlon II X4 631 (yes, on FM1), or 641. Has to be FM1, these are 32nm and overclock better. Phenom II is only a little better for a lot more buck. For GPU, it lines up like this - 6850, 6870, 560Ti 448 cores. These are the ones most worth buying in their respective price ranges.

Building a PC is not as hard as it sounds. When they were creating the architecture, the whole idea was that users would buy the pieces and assemble them on their own. It's as easy as it gets, you just insert one thing into another and fix it with a few screws. And everything is new and clean, it's not like crawling under a car. The only part that requires some caution is dropping in the CPU, but the worst that can happen is you bend a socket pin that's easily fixed back with a needle, and you have to be careless to do that. A first-time build will probably take you the whole day, if you take your time to read the manuals through, but the experience will stay with you and will be useful throughout the PC's lifetime. And it's not all about cost, it's about quality. When you control exactly what components go into your build and how exactly, you can get a solid, lasting, quiet system. I can turn the amp off in the middle of a demanding game, squeezing 4.8 GHz out of the CPU, and only hear my own breath, the mouse sliding, an occasional noise outside. You don't get that with systems coming in a box. Well, you can, but for outrageous kind of money. For me it just took the right case, the right cooling, the right voltages on everything (voltages are a very big deal), and the right fan speed curves. Thermaltake PSU are OK (unlike the baseline 500W unit), but not the best. If it's TR2, it's just old. If it's Toughpower Grand, it's overpriced - inside there is a cheap CWT DSG platform that Corsair only has in their TX series. If you haven't bought it yet, Better take Corsair 750TXV2. They have it, it's a Seasonic platform (note that PSU simply built by them aren't necessarily as good as the ones they choose to sell under their own brand), and it's an improvement over TX's and Thermaltake's CWT platforms. If you were considering something more expensive, going all the way to 750AX also makes sense. AX is rebranded Seasonic Gold, the best PSU line on that list. TXV2 can be a little loud (still quieter than what you were considering), AX is completely silent when not gaming.

As of a few days ago, Intel's Ivy Bridge CPU became available for purchase. Not officially, but legally. The premium is about $100 now, but you have to understand it's something you aren't supposed to be able to buy yet. As of today, enough of these have been bought and tested to make a few conclusions. I'll just summarize what they are. 1) Yes, IB is faster than SB. It overclocks a little better (5.0 is fairly accessible) and works a little faster at same clock. Overall, it's about half the step SB is over Nehalem, or Nehalem. In some applications less, in some more. 2) Yes, IB does work on existing motherboards. However, it works very poorly on most of them. Common symptoms include no overclocking, no dual-channel memory, haphazard frequency jumps and core dropouts, rare freezes, generally low performance. These issues may or may not be fixed by BIOS updates. Predictably, Asus boards do good, and, even more predictably, Gigabytes barely manage to start. The rest are in between. 3) No, you should not buy a Z68 motherboard and an Ivy Bridge CPU today. Your mobo may be updated and get good performance, it may be updated and still have lackluster performance, and it may be left as is. How much are you willing to stake yours will be case #1? If not a lot, wait till new boards are out.

Not quite. Spinrite was originally written back when a hard drive itself would often cost as much or more than the data on it. Its main weaknesses are a non-sparing read algorithm, writing the data back to the same drive, and trying to mix up data recovery and hard drive repair. So it's for people who have one HDD (not everyone had that many), and are concerned about both restoring the data and getting some more life out of their hard drive. Today this kind of thinking is completely out of whack; the first rule of data recovery is you don't touch the old medium any more than you have to, and definitely don't write back to it. The difference in operation is that Spinrite will read each bad sector 100-1000 times, write the data in a good sector, then read another bad sector. ddrescue (and any other modern software) will read the whole group of sectors selected for recovery, write it to another drive, then read it again and try to get more good data out, then read again. If bad sectors are really bad sectors, it doesn't matter. But today they rarely are. So many "bad sectors" appearing so suddenly more likely indicates a mechanical problem with the drive, like a failing bearing or an internal scratch. Any use of the drive continues to damage it. It's good that it's external, that means you can easily unplug it when not working with the data. If you have issues using ddrescue, make sure you can use R-Studio, it's actually more complicated. ddrescue is as close as it comes to one-click solutions among functional software, and it's freeware, but it's based on Linux. So things you don't know about may well be something easily found on the net.

The data can almost always be recovered. In your case it appears clearly recoverable. For perfect recovery you will however need to do some serious work, using serious software. Depending on how valuable the data is, two alternatives are professional recovery (it costs $$$) and trying a simple freeware tool. Spinrite is not serious software. What's worse, it's very liable to destroy your data. It's a leftover from floppy and 5-megabyte drive days. Do not use it under any circumstances unless you know exactly what you're doing (and you wouldn't be asking here if you did). I'm clearly not going to try explaining how to use software such as MHDD. The most you could use is probably R-Studio. Use the demo version first; if and only if you can use it, and can recover small files, and can see the files you need, but it won't recover them, then consider buying it. Only if. Your case is probably not so serious as to actually require such software. At least it doesn't appear serious to me, but I'm not a pro. A better tool for the job is probably ddrescue. Read the manual and try to copy the files with it. In either case disconnect the hard drive when not recovering data from it and do not attempt to use it other than for recovering your data, before you recover it.

That's a FM1 mobo actually, newer socket. AM3+ is just as dead, since Bulldozer didn't turn out any good, and what is there costs way too much. FM1 Athlons are close to on par with X4 Phenoms, and they overclock very well. You do want to overclock one, it's 2.6->3.3...4.0 GHz boost that takes you past mid-range Intels. Not to mention the stock cooler is noisy anyway. The only real step up is LGA1155/i5-2320 platform, but it's a very big step in terms of price, from $60 to $100 for the mobo, and from $90 to $190 for the CPU. In terms of bang for the buck, Athlon X4 631 is at the very top of all CPU: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html , as long as you ignore $1 CPUs. That's not overclocked, and it overclocks well, versus i3-2130 that only touches it stock and doesn't overclock at all. A 250GB HDD today is likely very old, so it's slow, losing its reliability, and, well, small. At this point the only component from his old PC that can be reasonably salvaged is the case, and it's probably cheap junk you can buy for $20 (while I picked a good case). That PC, if not disassembled, may still have residual resale value, although I wouldn't count on much.

Your bottleneck here is the video card (GPU). Everything else is tolerable. Not up to date, but tolerable. Passmark rates Phenom X4 9500 here: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=AMD+Phenom+9500+Quad-Core - about par with SB Celeron G530. Keep in mind that CPU performance has little effect on most games, Skyrim excepted. Any game designed to run on consoles can run on your CPU. The best course of action would be to: 1) Replace the GPU. Install Radeon HD6850, maybe GTX 560. For more money, GTX560Ti 448 core or HD6950, but your PSU almost certainly can't handle that. 2) Buy yourself a decent display. I prefer as large as you can fit, but at least 22" would be closer to modern. Prefer lower resolutions, like 1680x1050, over higher resolutions. 3) Keep saving up for a proper upgrade. In about half a year, replace the rest of the PC, just keeping the GPU you bought now. Ask your friends, anyone who goes to college or is known to be at least OK with computers, to help you if you can't build it yourself. The best PC you can build right now with this amount of money is this: Display - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824236078 CPU - one of these: http://www.gadgetland.in/2012/02/13/amd-athlon-ii-x4-638-641-price-specs-and-release-for-budget-users/ - not in stock now, let's say $90 Motherboard - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157277 Heatsink - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103099 Video card - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130738 RAM - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220569 PSU - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139020 HDD - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145475 Case - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129042 That comes to $925 CPU included, minus $35 in mail-in rebates, for $890 total. There is no keyboard, mouse or DVD unit included however. But it's faster (in games) than the ones you linked, and it includes a monitor.

FNV players are lucky, comparatively - I dug up Morrowind recently and started playing a bit for nostalgia value (Skyrim is just so bad). Now with MGE XE, SSAO, 3D vertex water. Can't squeeze out any more than 15 to 20 fps in Balmora... now that's slow. Delfs1970: Try installing Poco Bueno textures. They look better than NMC's in just about every single aspect. There are fewer textures, but they are all created with more attention to detail. You could remove NMC pack completely, or install Poco Bueno on top of it. I run all my games off SSD, it doesn't help the framerates measurably at all. Maybe loading times a little. Even a 5400rpm HDD is not the bottleneck in games. This is an old post, but just to avoid misleading anyone, no. Dual-GPU cards are just regular chips with SLI or Crossfire packaged on one PCB. On software and driver levels, they are two video devices, and work the same way.

Neither, they both suck. GT530 is a joke of a GPU, HD6750 is too. For games, you'd be way better off just getting a good GPU (like GTX560 or HD6870) and nothing else. Look somewhere else entirely. If you can't assemble a PC on your own, your options are limited, but you at least want somewhere they allow you to pick what exactly each component is to be. Need i5 (not i7) CPU and a good GPU, GTX560 or HD6870 or higher. Oh, and that 16" monitor - what's that, a cheap LCD or a CRT? I don't think I've seen a lot of those. You almost definitely want to replace this bit. Just keep the CPU, keep everything else, replace the GPU and the monitor. My preference would be something in 20" to 23" range with 1680x1050 resolution, a good compromise between tougher 1080p and enough detail for most everything.

Are you hosting your online business at home? Then it would be a good idea to keep two computers. One as a server, one for everything else. Otherwise the server will become unresponsive whenever your PC is running a game, and offline whenever it crashes. And web surfers won't come back tomorrow, they'll figure you for dead. You almost certainly already have an old PC, and it will suffice. With ordering an assembled PC from any builder, the main problem is you don't know what components exactly they are putting in. Sometimes you don't care, but almost always you should, especially since they often omit very important information. Also, there are a few major problems with the configuration: What's that 500GB drive doing here? You're getting another one, above. Or get 2x2TB, if you need 2 HDD. Strange they're not telling what it is, like they do with all other components. That almost certainly means Seagate (the cheapest, and the least reliable maker). They package an extreme-overclocking targeted i7-2700K CPU with a stripped-down, powerless motherboard - pretty typical. It's OK for non-overclockers of course. But no use for 2700K there. That's not needed - 20% overclocking on new CPU only takes about a couple minutes. Especially since they're certainly counting from the stock clock of 3.5 GHz, up to 4.2 GHz. And doing it wrong, SB CPU should be overclocked via turbo boost multipliers, not via stock clock rate increase. So remove that. Doesn't sound good. There is no such thing as "standard power supply". An easy bet that it's not a Seasonic. You might luck out and get a Channel Well PSH, which will be reasonably quiet. Or you might not, in which case all the noise reduction made will be useless. A 575VA or 345W UPS for an o/c'd PC with a 700W PSU is a joke - unless the PC is running idle, the UPS will go screaming in ten seconds and shut down, been there, seen that. You want a 1000VA unit here. Maybe a 750VA will do. Most of their stock configurations are :facepalm: ridiculous, so I wouldn't be surprised at getting a noisy PSU in an otherwise silent build. Don't get sucked in by all the "FREE" stuff. It's all already in the price, or sometimes bundled by the component maker (e.g. games with GPU or CPU). "Specials" like that run something like 300 days a year, the day after one ends, another one begins. What in the world is this, two video cards from different makers in one PC? That makes no sense whatsoever, they won't work together, and since the Radeon here is much less powerful, it's not done for Physx either. Pick one.