While building my new rig I came across a problem I’ve experienced before, but for some reason has never been seen by anyone else here at pcGameware, which quite surprised me.

Therefore, I thought it would be a good idea to document what happened and how I went about resolving the issue. This problem has been around for quite a while now when building new rigs which contain a new Motherboard with an up to date CPU, so read on for more details as you may have come across the same problem!

So one day you decide to upgrade your PC, or maybe you have even decided to switch platforms from Intel to AMD or vice versa for whatever reason, just like I did. This means you need to buy an appropriate motherboard which is suitable for your given socket type and also an appropriate CPU to go with it. In my case I purchased the following:

At the time, all I knew was that the CPU I had purchased was supported by the motherboard and I thought nothing else of it. Of course when it came to assembling my rig I came across a problem I had seen before which I totally forgot to think about when using a latest CPU, but this didn’t however become apparent until I actually tried to boot the PC!

So I was happy with the way the build had gone and it was time to power up the PC. Pressing the power switch the fans came on and I waited and waited. Nothing happened! This is where you start to panic and think that one of the components you have purchased i.e motherboard, CPU or memory is faulty as the PC won’t POST.

Usually the motherboard has some sort of on-board diagnostics which you can use to diagnose the fault, and in this case each component has an LED next to it which is supposed to light/flash while the component is being checked, but there was nothing. This made me wonder if the motherboard was at fault at first as no LED was being lit next to the CPU, which should in theory be the first component to be checked.

I didn’t have a spare rig to test the CPU or memory as this was a completely new build on a new platform and nobody at pcGameware was running on an AMD platform. At that point I thought I was going to have to send something back, as obviously something was at fault. I then decided to re-check that the CPU was indeed compatible with the motherboard so I went to Asus to check again. Funnily enough my range of processor was the only one that had a different BIOS revision and this made me wonder if that is what the issue was. Had my motherboard been shipped with the older BIOS as the processor was indeed quite new? There was no indication on the packaging as to what revision the motherboard came with and even if there was, I doubt the vendor would check to make sure they weren’t sending older revisions out to customers.

So I was faced with a few options as to how I could proceed down this path:

• Return the motherboard to the manufacturer
• Return the motherboard to the seller
• Take the motherboard to a computer shop and have them update the BIOS
• Obtain a CPU which was supported by an older BIOS revision and update it myself

I wasn’t sure if the manufacturer would update the BIOS, I know some do but the turnaround would be quite long. Returning the motherboard to the seller was an option but again this was going to take time to get a replacement, time which I did not have. After contacting a local computer shop, they wouldn’t provide this service without also selling me a CPU as well as charging a fee, as they couldn’t just charge for updating the BIOS, as the CPU would then be classified as being used! I mean what computer shop doesn’t have spare used CPUs lying around surely! So the only option left was to buy the cheapest CPU on the list (AMD Sempron 145 2.8GHz at £29) and have it delivered by next day post.

When the CPU arrived, an older Sempron, I promptly installed it and again tried to get the PC to POST. It did indeed, proving that the motherboard was indeed shipped with an older BIOS, which was confirmed when the BIOS revision was displayed on the screen. I promptly updated the BIOS with the latest revision via USB and then replaced the old processor with the new.

I then turned the PC on for the final time, to check that it would POST now with the latest CPU. It did indeed and all the motherboard diagnostic lights lit up as well confirming that the motherboard, CPU and memory were also fully functional now.

So the lesson to be learned from this, is that if you plan on upgrading and you’re going to be replacing the motherboard or CPU and don’t have a spare compatible CPU lying around, double check with the seller that the motherboard being shipped to you has the latest revision of BIOS that is required for you to be able to POST. Otherwise you’re either going to incur more cost to yourself or have the hassle of having to send everything back to be replaced!

Maybe one day motherboard manufacturers will be able to get round this issue, but until then we will have to rely on the processor manufacturers giving them the up to date information they require prior to shipping the product, or for us to continue going through this whole process yet again…

Well, some what predictably the recently reviewed Kingston HyperX SSD has yet to be prised from my machine and I think to be honest it’s gonna stay that way! Some of our components find their way onto eBay but this is one I have decided to keep. The performance was far in excess of my old Crucial C300 and the Kingston is also twice the capacity, that’s good enough for me…

I have also updated the benchmarks on my rig page after upgrading to the latest NVIDIA (280.26) drivers, as there seems to be some minor performance improvements.

I was so impressed with the Vertex 3 SSD in my recent review I decided to upgrade from my existing (already pretty fast) 2nd generation Corsair X64 drive!

The Corsair drive was the limiting factor in my WEI score – being the lowest score (7.3) of all the components tested.

Continue reading “pcGameware rig settings – Greg’s Upgrade” »

While reviewing the Asus GTX 570 DirectCU II graphics card there was a niggling thought in my mind. That thought was; that I really wanted to see what 2 of these cards would be like in SLI. Well luckily I had the chance to find out; below is a look into what it’s like to SLI 2 triple slot cards and why I would not recommend it!

Continue reading “SLI with triple slot cards – good idea?” »

 
So being a long time Battlefield Veteran, I was delighted when I recieved an invitation to begin Alpha testing the new version
 

 
So just to let you guys know the pcGameware team are on the case.

That’s about all I can say for now as there is a hefty NDA in place!

You can sign up now for news direct from EA at

http://www.battlefield.com/battlefield3

Well after a concerted effort on finding some gaming time and stretching my brain a little, I managed to do something that I must admit that I usually don’t do, and (shock horror) finished a game!!!

I loved the end of Portal and have to say that Portal 2 doesn’t disappoint. For all those out there playing Portal 2 and maybe who have dropped it to move onto something else, all I can say is, keep at it!!!

I won’t go into any other detail here, as I just don’t want to give anything away. Suffice to say play on and enjoy the ending!!! To stop early and not complete it would be Lunacy.

Well, it became apparent when carrying out my review of the G.Skill RipjawX memory that my Unigine Heaven benchmark score was a little on the suspect side (was too low). I re-assessed my machine after all the issues I had with memory speeds and voltages around the BIOS settings, needing to be configured using the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (Intel XTU) to get them set correctly.

Bottom line is that after re-running a Unigine Heaven test after re-configuration via the Intel XTU, my score climbed quite dramatically. This has now been reflected in the new Rig page update.

Along with that I have re-run 3dMark11 now that I am running the new build 1.0.2, and listed that new score as well. Lastly my ATI graphics drivers have been updated to version 11.6 (latest as of 21st July 2011).

So all in all, after that little lot, a Rig page update was on the cards.

Here at pcGameware all of the reviewers are gamers and we don’t just review kit we actually play games too! Over the review period the hardware being reviewed actually gets used as part of our normal gaming routine.

The pcGameware team play one game above and beyond any other and that game is Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Maybe you’ve been lucky enough to bag one of our dog tags, a highly prized possession I’m sure! Below I have listed the main team members with a link to their stats:

James (Bad80y) – stats
Terry (ChargeNut) – stats
Greg (Shaddow) – stats

Over the last few weeks; when not playing BFBC2, I have been busy finishing Crysis 2 (a good game really!) and Mass Effect 2 (a very good game (great ending!), looking forward to Mass Effect 3). I have also been playing Portal 2 with Terry and must say that I have never laughed so much in a game in my life (it’s a great co-op game and there is nothing better than sending your partner into a brick wall at the last minute just for fun!).

Continue reading “What you playing then James – part 1” »

TIM or Thermal Interface Material is what we use to ensure that we get a good heat transfer between our CPUs and heatsinks. It performs a rather important job and without it your CPU core temperatures would rise significantly.

Here at pcGameware we ALL use Arctic Silver 5; why? because its been around a long time, its got a proven track record and we all need to use the same stuff to allow for true comparisons to be made. But recently something was brought to my attention (thanks Greg) and it was via this link that I began to think that maybe we need to pay a little more attentions to TIM and a little more thought may need to go into our CPU & Cooler reviews…

Continue reading “A quick word about TIM” »

Well the dual/triple boot issue is all but resolved, it would seem that by setting the base-clock back to 100MHz (or by setting Profile 1 via XMP (see previous post)) seems to help matters greatly. The strange thing is that it’s not apparent that the issue is resolved immediately, let me try and explain (this may take a little explaining).

If you just change various settings in the BIOS and test for your dual/triple boot your are likely to see it happen almost consistently. That is because the board seems to behave differently after a cold boot (i.e. some time has elapsed), this makes both fixing and testing extremely difficult. So the best way is change a setting and run with it for a while. I have run with the base-clock at 100 and my memory at 1600MHz 6-8-6-24 2T for some time now and I only see the boot issue occur if I power down the rig at the wall to work on it, for the rest of the time the rig boots fine every time. So let’s call it 90% fixed, that’s the best I have for now…

Also I have updated the benchmarks on my rig page as not only are there new NVIDIA drivers (275.33) that seem to be showing a significant speed boost in 3DMark 11. But there is also a new version (1.0.2) of 3DMark 11.