Computer Upgrade

I upgraded my computer this holiday season and ran into some problems. Thought I'd document some of them here. I built my rig from parts; I spent a lot of time this month reading up on new technology. It had been a few years since I last built a higher end PC. In the end I basically went with newegg recommendations and I wasn't disappointed with their parts choices. It was easy to figure out compatibility too.

My first small problem was with my power supply. I had a CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX and I couldn't find the 4-PIN connector. Turns out that the 8 PIN connector could be separated into two 4 PIN connectors. I had to read the manual before I noticed. I don't know if this is standard in power supplies nowadays, but I had never encountered it before.

The second problem was with my motherboard. The screen stayed black after powering it on; I heard no beeps, it wasn't going through POST. I got a M4A79XTD EVO with a Phenom II X4 955 CPU through a newegg combo deal. I read a lot of reviews that said the combo was bad because the 955s being sent out were C3, which are incompatible with the BIOS shipped on the mobo (motherboard.) Furthermore, you couldn't update the BIOS without a compatible CPU. After googling, I found that C3 was the revision number of the processor. On ASUS's page, http://support.asus.com.tw/cpusupport/cpusupport.aspx?model=M4A79T%20Deluxe, I found the list of supported CPUs for the mobo. Each revision of AMD's CPUs has its own model number. Mine was HDX955FBK4DGIBOX. Took me a second to realize that the "BOX" could be ignored. It turned out my CPU was C2, which worked with bios on the motherboard. In the end, it turned out my RAM was bad on arrival. I'm glad I was able to figure out the CPU issue or else I would have probably tried to return the motherboard.

Lastly, I gave my wife most of my old parts, one of which was an ASUS A8V DELUXE motherboard. I was unable to install Windows, I kept getting a BSOD (blue screen of death) saying that "The bios in this system is not fully acpi compliant." However, the bios was ACPI compliant and I never had problems while I was using it. The bios even had an "Enable ACPI" option, which was on. I decided to reset the CMOS and see if that would fix it. Since I lost my manual and couldn't tell where the jumper was, I simply removed the motherboard's battery for 5 minutes (make sure all power to the computer is unplugged first.) That did the trick.

Those were the trickier errors I ran into, but I had lots of other issues such as bad drives, configuring jumpers correctly, making things reach... stuff that required opening the machine a lot, but nothing that wasn't obvious. So, I spent a lot of time building systems for my wife and I, but now that they're running, I'd say it was worth it. Hopefully, you can avoid the problems I ran into.