Games: Skill training completed – Game rigging III
Posted in games on March 22nd, 2010 by Roblob – Be the first to commentI haven’t really logged into Eve the pasts few weeks, but it is not entirely because I haven’t felt like playing much. You see, I decided to upgrade my gaming rig to a more capable system. My old setup with its AMD Athlon 3200+ processor and a Nvidia GF7600 GS graphics card couldn’t really handle most modern games. Running two Eve clients dropped the framerate on the other window to just above 10 fps, while the focused window would top at about 20-25 fps. Hell, I couldn’t even play Dwarf Fortress smoothly on the machine.
I really like building computers. It’s a sort of hobby with me, but of course I can’t practice it too often. Computer parts are really prohibitively expensive when you move out of the entry level and where’s the fun in building just adequate systems? =)
Of course, nothing ever goes as planned when building computers. Much exasperation ensued as I tried to get the damn thing to work…
The old horse gets a makeover
My old comp served me faithfully for about three years and I used some pre-owned parts to build it to begin with, so it was no wonder its age was beginning to show. My computers are usually a result of several iterations of upgrades. I think the origins for the previous build was about four years ago when I wanted to silence the system.
Back then we were living in a two room apartment and my ‘workdesk’ was located in the corner of our living room. My wife kept complaining how my computer kept up such whoosh that she couldn’t watch the television in peace. I used this as an excuse to break the machine apart and build a new one with silence in mind. I didn’t really upgrade anything on the performance side, simply worked on the noise problem.
I bought a new case (Antec P180), a new power supply (Seasonic S12), a new hard drive, some fans and various quiet cooling kits. The result was a very quiet system and I was happy for a year or so until I ran into performance problems with World of Warcraft.
We were just beginning our house project so budget was a bit tight and so I decided to shop around for second hand parts. I bought a pre-owned processor (AMD Athlon 3200) and some memory, but ultimately had to buy a brand new mobo (Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe) and graphics card (Asus GF7600 GS). The graphics card was the only passively cooled one I could get my hands on in a hurry, so it had a bit lower performance than I had wanted but at least it was totally silent.
Again it was nice system and I was really happy with it even though it didn’t have any real power on the graphics side. It ran WoW smoothly enough and that was pretty much the only thing I played back then. During the years I’ve had to get a new main hard disk as the old one broke and I did buy a new monitor last year too.
The new monitor is what eventually pushed the old system over the edge. A 1900×1200 resolution was simply too much for the 7600 GS and most games I own started to choke on anything but the minimal settings. So I started to shop around for a new setup and this time I didn’t really want to go cheap on much anything.
Mind you, I don’t go for the top of the line on anything (other than the mobo maybe) when building computers; there’s simply too much premium on the prices of the best components. The second best is usually where the price and value really meet.
So my new setup was this:
Intel i5-750 processor Asus Maximus III Formula P55 motherboard Sapphire Radeon HD5770 1GB Vapor-X graphics card 3x2GB Kingston DDR3 memory WD Caviar Black 500GB hard drive WD Caviar 100GB hard drive Seasonic S12-II 500W power supply Sony DRU-700A dvd drive Antec P180 case BenQ G2400WD 24" monitor Hyundai L90+ 19" monitor
The new parts were the processor, mobo, graphics card and the memory. Rest I figured I could keep as they were working ok and would not really affect performance. The only thing I was worried about was the length of the CPU power line from the Seasonic PSU as the P180 case is a bit challenged in this aspect. The P180 relocates the PSU to the bottom of the case which is good for heat control, but not so nice when your PSU has shortish lines. With my old setup the CPU line was constantly under tension as I had to route it under my graphics card and past the CPU.
Siren song of the PSU
My fears were unnecessary as the new parts fitted in very nicely. The old parts were giving me some trouble however. Being a new mobo model the Maximus didn’t have any IDE connectors and of course my older HD and DVD had never even heard of SATA. Well, they weren’t critical components anyway so I could get a new DVD drive and some adapters later on. No biggie.
I soon had the system ready to run and excitedly I switched the power on and waited for the windows to boot. Immediately I realized that something was wrong as the machine emitted a high pitched electric screeching or squealing sound. Things seemed to be loading otherwise smoothly so I tried to pinpoint the sound within the case. The noise occasionally turned into a varying pitch chirp, much like the sound that my old ZX Spectrum used to make while loading games from a cassette.
After a moment of acute listening I decided that it was the power supply making the noise. Well, this was a higher power setup compared to the old one, so maybe the PSU was running at the peak of its range and was screaming out its pain. Since everything seemed to be functioning correctly I decided to proceed with the driver installations and shop for a new PSU the next day. It wasn’t long before I had to power down the system as the annoying noise was giving me a headache.
The next day I went and bought myself a Nexus RX-8500 850W PSU which was said to be a nice, quiet power supply with plenty of power for my needs. Back at home I took the system apart again and fitted my new power supply in. Powering up the system I was greeted by the same obnoxious noise emitting from the new PSU. WTF?
So this wasn’t a problem with the PSU after all. I started browsing the tech forums for clues about the problem. It turned out that PSU noise is a pretty common phenomena and the most common reason was a capacitor noise due to faulty components. I was really confused as how could it be that both my old and new power supply had broken down at the same time?
The more I thought about it the less it made sense for the PSU’s to be at fault here. The noise must be generated by some other component of the setup. But which one?
I started swapping out parts as I had the old gear sitting right there. Nothing seemed to change the situation. Frustrated I browsed some more. The funny thing was that the noise seemed to change with my browsing activity. Especially mouse activity like resizing the browser window totally ended the noise. I googled some more and hit a forum where such symptoms were discussed.
The discussion was really just a lot of guessing but one post caught my eye as the person simply said that changing a C1E setting in the BIOS had helped him. When another guy chimed in to agree with this I decided to give it a try. It seemed like it was either this or hauling the whole kit back for a RMA.
But first I looked up what the setting did: C1E basically allows the system to throttle down the CPU when it is idle by lowering the front side bus speed. Well, this sounded interesting.
I rebooted the system and went to the BIOS. There under the advanced CPU options was an innocent looking line with just the text C1E enabled. I changed it to disabled, saved the settings and rebooted again. To a world of blissful quiet.
Good times, bad times
I’m not going to bother finding out exactly why the C1E causes the power supply to squeal like that, but disabling any unnecessary hardware options seems like a good idea. The systems nowadays are full of features that are nice and handy in some circumstances, but completely unnecessary for most users.
So for anyone suffering from a screeching (or squealing, chirping, buzzing) electric sound emitting from their PSU: try disabling the C1E option from the advanced CPU settings in BIOS.
That’s all for today. I know this post wasn’t what most of you were expecting but I needed to offload this experience somewhere. I’ll get back to Eve soon. I promise. =)
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