Well.... I took the plunge and ordered gear for my new HTPC - Page 3

Is it just my end, or are those pictures broken?

Also, just got my new motherboard and ram. Tonight I get to migrate my Phenom II X4 from 6GB of DDR2 to 32GB of DDR3.

Looks like the top of your case would fit a 200mm or bigger fan. I'd have gone with one of those. They are super quiet. I had a cooler master HAF case that came with 2 of them. Was my favorite part of the case... Wish my Lian Li had mounts for bigger fans.

Pics work fine now. I'm guessing there was a sharing permission issue, but you could see them since you we're logged in?

You're describing what sounds like an analog-style noise issue, which shouldn't exist in your all-digital HDMI hookup.

My first thought would be an open analog line somewhere. Turn off Mic and Line inputs in Windows sound control panels, on both the recording and playback sides. An analog input with nothing hooked up could cause an issue like this, as Windows is still listening to it for input. Also, unplug any USB audio devices you may have, headsets and the like.

Any luck?

To be clear, you disabled that front mic in the control panel as part of your testing? It really sounds like Windows is mixing something in software in to your silence. What happens when you hit mute in Windows? Does the noise get louder and quieter when you raise and lower Windows volume? If it stays stable when regardless of Windows being at mute or 100%, then that sounds like a weird ground loop issue. If the noise varies based on Windows software volume control, that sounds like a software mixing issue.

In other news, installed my new motherboard and 32GB tonight. Then rapidly remembered that Window 7 Home Premium has a 16GB cap that I knew about but totally spaced on. I am suddenly very anxious for Windows 8 to hurry up and release so I can use that other 16GB. Thankfully it's only a couple weeks away and $40. About the same time as the CPU I'm waiting on. I was already planning on moving to 8. Now I just have another reason to.

With just Chrome open and running for an hour, Windows has already chewed through 10GB, leaving me 6GB free.
Edited by darklordjames - 10/8/12 at 4:16am

Pre-fetch, yo. Windows really wants to load stuff up before you know that you want to use it. It also would really like to just let things sit in memory when you open stuff instead of having to dump or flush to swap file.

My new board doesn't have an IDE port anymore. Compact Flash is an IDE standard interface. I had a fast 16GB CF card hooked up to my old board's sole IDE port to host my swap file. You'd be amazed at how fast platters are when they don't have to worry about jumping back and forth to a swap file while trying to load something. I am sad that I can't have it anymore and am thinking about picking up a small SSD for system files. Maybe I'll do that right before the Windows 8 upgrade and wait a little bit on the CPU upgrade.

I'm thinking about a $100 128GB Crucial M4 for Windows, swap and apps. Then my 1TB RAID1 drive will hang out for Steam, music and photos.

I really wish flash would hurry up and hit current platter prices. I could really go for a pair of $100 1TB SSDs. Prices are still dropping quite rapidly on these things, just not quite fast enough. Soon though we'll hit a point where it simply costs less in raw material to make the physically smaller SSD. Cellular and portable media are already there, laptops are making the transition, and desktops are being dragged kicking and screaming....

Run a 50' power extension cable and plug the PC in to another circuit in your house. If you have a UPS in the house, drag it to that PC and plug it in so any nasty noise the PSU is making gets isolated. Turn off the projector. What happens?

If you go into your recording devices properties, there's a "listen" tab. Check that, maybe you have a device set up to listen to it. Maybe a device, like onboard audio, has it setup to listen to one of the inputs and could be causing feedback.

Alright. In preparation for Windows 8 in ten days I just ordered up a 128GB Crucial M4 SSD.

Still patiently waiting for my 8-core Piledriver to release...

Scott,
I don't come to these forums as often anymore as I should, so just now found this thread. When I built my system 2 years ago, I had problems with the audio (still do actually). I spent in excess of 30 hours probably trying to fix everything. Tried everything under the sun...

Anyway, I wanted to comment about OC'ing the CPU. It's been my experience that OC'ing is really overrated and the potential problems don't justify the gains. Someone will respond and argue, but good for them, that's been MY experience. I have tried OC'ing the last 3 of my CPU's...my current one is an i7-930 (no slouch) and I can only do about .2 MHz or so before I start getting lock ups...it's not often, I may go long periods of time, but eventually it happens...anyway, I'm getting off on a tangent.

I just wanted to say that almost always in today's game the bottleneck is the GPU and not the CPU...you'll go farther in getting more FPS with upping your GPU instead of the CPU virtually everytime. I know it's too late now, but just wanted to say that. If you have less than 6GB of RAM (4 the bare bare minimum), that will be a bottleneck too.

Are you sure you were following the proper guides for OC'ing? something is not right if you can only OC .2 mhz. I've built over 300 pc's and have never come across a chip that can't oc at least 600mhz over stock. That 930 should be able to get to 4.2 with everything on auto with no problems.

It seems that Tom values absolute stability and his time over getting some free clockspeed. I agree with him. I passed the point a while ago where I have more toys and money than time to spend on playing with said toys. As such, if I desperately want more clockspeed in something, I'll just buy it.

It's not as if I haven't overclocked things before. My Pentium MMX-233 ran at 266mhz, the max multiplier for my 430TX board. My Celeron 400 ran at 560-ish. My Celeron 1.1 at 1.35ghz. Then I got bored. Once you do it a couple times I find it hard to care about overclocking, especially on the not-particularly-important-anymore CPU. Besides, things are baby-easy now. Flick "on" for the overclocking option in your bios. Ooooh. Where's the skill, the voodoo?

In adddition, a stable max overclock is still a finicky beast. Let's say we take a 3.2ghz chip and get it to a perfectly stable 3.8ghz on day one. Six months to a year down the road when the thermal compound is a little dryer, the heatsink is a little clogged with dust, and the motherboard and PSU's caps are starting to drift a bit from spec things start to crash. Now we're wasting time troubleshooting again.

Yes, yes, of course the next argument is going to be "dat don't happen!!!1one". If it's not happening, then you didn't get the max stable overclock on day one now, did you?

"I have never come across a chip that can't oc at least 600mhz over stock"

Either this statement is some fanciful exaggeration, or you haven't been doing this very long. A Celeron 300 running at 900mhz would have been magic. You've done the legwork to make sure that your 300 machines are actually stable a year down the road? That the user isn't just wrongfully blaming a bad overclock on Windows being a crashy piece of crap, never reporting the issue because they don't know how to properly identify it? If you are doing this professionally, then I would argue that you are doing your clients a grave disservice by shipping overclocked product.

Someone then always makes this argument... the "you must not be doing it right" argument. These are likely the same people that argue putting an aftermarket chip in your car will give you an extra untapped 90HP. Perhaps you are right, perhaps I wasn't doing it correctly, even though DarkLord is right it's fairly easy these days. I do value stability. I didn't say I couldn't get it to post. I got it up to 3.8Mhz, but what's the point if in the middle of Skyrim my computer hard locks? Like I said, it's not the bottleneck, so.... Anyway, to the overclockers out there, have at it. It's just not for me.

Yeah, the thrill of five extra fps is not worth the agony of hard locks in a game you haven't saved for hours either. Besides, after you add all the gizmos to get a solid overclock you could have probably upgraded to nicer parts to begin with, not to mention the added noise. Overclocking is great for benchmarks, but games not so much to me. Whatever makes you happy though, and that's the point of this hobby.

Installed Windows 8 Pro on my new SSD tonight. This new desktop is cleeean. After years of Windows cluttering up the screen with information that I don't care about, Win 8 is refreshingly sparse so far. I spent some time with the beta on my Mac Mini, but this is the first time I'm committing my primary system to Windows 8.

For those unaware, the upgrade is $40 until January. It launched this morning at midnight-ish PST. You can get it here:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/buy

Now I get to actually use all 32GB of my ram, since there is no more arbitrary 16GB limit in Windows. Next to decide on a case and HDD for a Steam box, and pick up my FX-8350.

Scott - I still think the issue is a grounding problem somewhere. Have you sourced power from some other room yet, and plugged the PC and sub in to the same power strip for testing purposes?

Any compatibility issues to be aware of with Win8 and games?