Check specs to build a new PC…

[Marlen Mathers]

Dave – thank you for that feedback In the last couple of days – Iv’e gotten quite an education on “system integration” Let me see if I can explain where I’m at.

{.. you probably need at least three power supply connections.
If you bought a new power supply, it’s almost certainly an ATX12V version 2.3 supply. This will have a main 24-pin power connector for the motherboard; that’s the main supply, but not the only one to get things going. }

I am powering with the Corsiar HX series 850W ATX 12v 2.3 / EPS12V 2.91. I have the 24pin power connector in, as well as the “dual 4 pin” ATX just above the CPU (and yes – I did have to remove the knockout to use the full 8 pins)

{And finally, you need a 6-pin or 8-pin ePCI power cable run to your graphics board, in most cases. Leseee… lucky you… yours want TWO 6-pin ePCI power cables connected. }

Mne needs 2 6 PIN and I am running that off my PSU which had the cable connector.

{So that’s the most obvious stuff. Make sure you have your three DIMMs in the appropriate color-coordinated slots (all blue or all black), and obviously, seated well.}

I think I need help with this one. What DIMMS are speaking of? I have my AUSU GPU in a blue PCI 2.0 16x slot – and all 6 sticks of RAM in their slots. I have nothing else installed on the board.

I went thru a series of troubleshooting from forums on the web and calling into ASUS support. When I couldn’t even get the “BEEP” to sound in POST, I took out the RAM and the GPU and still had no “BEEP”. THe people at Asus said in most likely hood the board was bad. Figuring the CPU rarely is bad out of the box and that the PSU was powering fans and lighting up LEDS.

I’m looking to replace the MB (even if it just see if that’s it) unless anyone else has something else I can look into.

As always THANK YOU for these helpful thoughts. Let me know if my info here spawns any additional thoughts and good luck with the render!

[John Rofrano]

[Marlen Mathers] “I’m looking to replace the MB (even if it just see if that’s it) unless anyone else has something else I can look into.”

If you can even get it to beep, I would agree that the MB is probably bad. Get an RMA number and send it back.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Marlen Mathers]

just got the RMA from NewEgg – very nice guys to work with – they said they normally don’t refund MB’s via RMA, but they made an exception – which will allow me to head out locally today and get replacement and continue to build…(I’m trying to get this done while I’m home from work this week).

By the way nobody had the MB ASUS P6X58D-E X58 R locally, so I’m going to pick up the Asus Rampage III Formula LGA 1366 X58 ATX. I think I’m good to go with this board given my other components, but if anyone sees a reason why this would be a bad choice, I’d love to know…thanks again…
Marlen

[Marlen Mathers]

Well after many hours (ans with a lot of help from people in this forum) I m up and running. At least with the OS Windows 7 running and all vital system components working properly.

The problem turned out to be a bad MB. I replaced it the the ASUS Rampage III Extreme – so I suppose I’ll spend a lot of time on some ASUS forums learning about overclocking – as it seems that this is what the MB does well and should help with the HD rendering time ( I think!)

I do have one issues though. I installed 3 1TB Western digital drives. The first one was my boot drive and Windows 7 Installed nicely on that. The other two drives I left alone until I went into the BIOS and used the Utility to stripe those two drives in RAID O. However when I rebooted, I can not see the RAID? I went back into the BIOS and saw the raid under the “drives” section, but they don’t appear in Explorer when I reboot.

What am I missing to get this to show up?

Again your help is much appreciated

[Dave Haynie]

Start up the Disk Manager (Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Storage) and see if you can find the stripeset listed there. From the disc manager, you can create a partition, format, etc.

-Dave

[Marlen Mathers]

Hey Dave –

it does show up in DISK Manager as “DISK 1 Basic 1863.02 GB Online Unallocated” – but when I right click on it – it only allows me to create a new “New Simple Volume” all other options fro striped/spanned mirrored/RAID 5 are greyed out?

[Marlen Mathers]

okay… I took a chance by choosing new volume – which I was reluctant to do, becasuse it said it could only be performed for One disk. However, it seems that it looked at the 2 separate drives as one due to what I previously set up in the BIOS…so it looks like I’m good to go

Thanks for the direction…
Marlen

[Fabio Mereghetti]

Yes, you have to see it as a single hard drive.

I would create a primary partition (or more than one, if you like) and format it (them) with an allocation unit size of 64k if you’ll put mostly video files there. But I don’t know if nowadays there are bigger a.u. sizes to choose from at formatting time.

Better wait for some expert to answer more precisely.

[Dave Haynie]

Here’s the thing.. there are different ways to create a stripeset (RAID0), or other kinds of RAID.

You set it up using the software RAID support in your BIOS. This abstracts the drive as a single drive to anything that lives above… like Windows. So you only see the one drive.

You could have skipped the BIOS setup. Windows would have seen both drives in Disk Manager, and perhaps allowed you set up a stripeset there (what’s allowed varies by the version of Windows you run). In this case, the low-level drivers see two separate drives, but the Windows filesystem manages the RAID, so at the desktop level, you see the two disks.

And of course, you can also use a “hardware” RAID, which is code for saying some other computer is doing the many->one abstraction, not the CPU(s) on your PC itself… all RAID is actually done in software. For example, I have a Drobo unit here, with four 2TB drives, which shows up over Firewire800 as a single hard drive volume. And in fact, the volume shows up as 16TB, even though there’s less actual storage there. If I were to run low, I could swap in some 3TB drives (one at a time, to allow the new drive to be used) and boost up my actual storage.

-Dave

[John Rofrano]

[Dave Haynie] “You could have skipped the BIOS setup. Windows would have seen both drives in Disk Manager, and perhaps allowed you set up a stripeset there (what’s allowed varies by the version of Windows you run). In this case, the low-level drivers see two separate drives, but the Windows filesystem manages the RAID, so at the desktop level, you see the two disks. “

Isn’t this undesirable because your OS will have the additional task of managing a software RAID instead of using the hardware RAID that’s built into the motherboard (and more efficient)?

[Dave Haynie] “… all RAID is actually done in software”

I don’t understand this statement. The RAID that’s built into the motherboard and accessed via the BIOS is firmware which is always faster and more efficient than software. Why do you say that all RAID is done in software?

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com