My current setup is as follows:
Cooler Master Ammo 533 (w/2x 120mm Antec Tricools)
485w ATX 2.0 Enermax Noisetaker
ABIT AN8-Ultra
1GB (2x512) PC3200 Crucial Ballistix
Athlon X2 3800+ w/Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro
250GB WD2500KS
XFX 7800GT w/VF-700cu
Creative X-Fi Xtrememusic
I built it around the turn of the year as a replacement for my aging system that wasn't doing my games any justice. It did work well, for a few months, but the system's performance seemed to slip slowly over time until it got to the point where I find myself at now.
Things seem to get worse and worse, and my gaming performance has gotten to the point where I can't even play Counterstrike: Source without the framerates hitching up at least a few times - and on the settings recommended by the game, no less. It used to be that I could play on any server with no fear of the framerate ever slowing down to the point where it would affect me, but now when I'm in any sort of a crowd at all and there are multiple people on-screen, the framerate often drops below 50 and even dips down into the 30s now and then. That's totally unacceptable for the performance to drop like that.
The Windows performance is pretty sluggish as well at times even when loading simple applications such as Creative's media player. While the load times are not entirely unreasonable, I believe that they are slower than the speed system is capable of doing. It takes a fair amount of time to boot up and to shut down, and right after it initially loads Windows if I try to run anything it starts chugging like my venerable Pentium M laptop. I just find it awfully strange that a dual core processor acts like that given that not a whole lot is loaded at startup.
And last night, when I was browsing the internet looking at Antec's case lineup the system suddenly blue-screened and displayed a MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION error. Not knowing what this was, I looked it up and was surprised to learn that, apparently, this means that something is very much wrong with my hardware but I don't have any idea what the problem could be. I've had to send back or replace so many parts over the course of this system's short life that I guess I didn't even consider the possibility that something could be wrong again.
I'm not really sure where to start looking. If it's of any relevance, I also have issues with hooking up USB devices to this computer. It will not recognize any outside USB-capable device such as my LG VX9800 cell phone or my Iriver T10 MP3 player. Other USB devices, however, such as my USB mouse and keyboard, work just fine.
This isn't a case where the usual suspects are to blame. Spyware, viruses, fragmentation, drivers and the like are out of the question as far as those issues go. And despite what my setup might suggest, I really don't do any overclocking anymore and when I did several months ago I never pushed my hardware beyond a mild boost. Assuming the temperature diodes in the system are even remotely accurate, my temperatures are excellent thanks to the case's ample ventilation.
Building a system isn't so bad, but troubleshooting it is a pain in the rear and I'm not yet experienced in doing it. Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated.
Cooler Master Ammo 533 (w/2x 120mm Antec Tricools)
485w ATX 2.0 Enermax Noisetaker
ABIT AN8-Ultra
1GB (2x512) PC3200 Crucial Ballistix
Athlon X2 3800+ w/Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro
250GB WD2500KS
XFX 7800GT w/VF-700cu
Creative X-Fi Xtrememusic
I built it around the turn of the year as a replacement for my aging system that wasn't doing my games any justice. It did work well, for a few months, but the system's performance seemed to slip slowly over time until it got to the point where I find myself at now.
Things seem to get worse and worse, and my gaming performance has gotten to the point where I can't even play Counterstrike: Source without the framerates hitching up at least a few times - and on the settings recommended by the game, no less. It used to be that I could play on any server with no fear of the framerate ever slowing down to the point where it would affect me, but now when I'm in any sort of a crowd at all and there are multiple people on-screen, the framerate often drops below 50 and even dips down into the 30s now and then. That's totally unacceptable for the performance to drop like that.
The Windows performance is pretty sluggish as well at times even when loading simple applications such as Creative's media player. While the load times are not entirely unreasonable, I believe that they are slower than the speed system is capable of doing. It takes a fair amount of time to boot up and to shut down, and right after it initially loads Windows if I try to run anything it starts chugging like my venerable Pentium M laptop. I just find it awfully strange that a dual core processor acts like that given that not a whole lot is loaded at startup.
And last night, when I was browsing the internet looking at Antec's case lineup the system suddenly blue-screened and displayed a MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION error. Not knowing what this was, I looked it up and was surprised to learn that, apparently, this means that something is very much wrong with my hardware but I don't have any idea what the problem could be. I've had to send back or replace so many parts over the course of this system's short life that I guess I didn't even consider the possibility that something could be wrong again.
I'm not really sure where to start looking. If it's of any relevance, I also have issues with hooking up USB devices to this computer. It will not recognize any outside USB-capable device such as my LG VX9800 cell phone or my Iriver T10 MP3 player. Other USB devices, however, such as my USB mouse and keyboard, work just fine.
This isn't a case where the usual suspects are to blame. Spyware, viruses, fragmentation, drivers and the like are out of the question as far as those issues go. And despite what my setup might suggest, I really don't do any overclocking anymore and when I did several months ago I never pushed my hardware beyond a mild boost. Assuming the temperature diodes in the system are even remotely accurate, my temperatures are excellent thanks to the case's ample ventilation.
Building a system isn't so bad, but troubleshooting it is a pain in the rear and I'm not yet experienced in doing it. Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated.