New GoGo Parts incoming

[Aprox]

So, I decided to take the plunge and buy new core parts. I decided to with the following.

Intel Q9300 Quad @ 2.5ghz
Asus P5K Pro
4GB (2x 2GB) Corsair Dominator DDR2 1066

Should be a pretty huge upgrade over what I have now. I thought long and hard about doing this, hard to justify the cost. But in the end I figured it would save me money due to the faster rendering and such. I'm curious if anyone has any experiences with the Q9300 or Q9450 and can offer any insight on how it performs relative to older dual core chips.

Current system:

AMD Athlon 4800+ (939)
Asus A8N SLi Deluxe <---- Dying 🙁
2GB (4x 512) Corsair 3200

 

[ElementalDragon]

to be honest, you shoulda looked for the Q9450 rather than the Q9300.

 

[Aprox]

It was a decision based on money. I know the Q9450 has twice as much L2 cache, but its also almost $100 more.

 

[ElementalDragon]

aah. yeah.... it is a bit more costly. i still kinda gotta pay my recently purchased hardware off. Newegg Preferred Account/BillMeLater can be both a blessing and a sin. lol

 

[American Zombie]

Actually the price difference on Newegg right now is 80 dollars and for twice the cache I would have went for the Q9450.
What is 80 dollars when you are spending at least 1/2 a grand?

 

[madmatt]

I'm with AZ.

 

[ElementalDragon]

yeah..... AZ does have a point......

 

[Aprox]

I realize its a better cpu, but to be honest I was already straining myself making the purchase as is, saving $80 is a lot. The purchase was ~600, so $80.00 is 13%, that's quite a bit. Anyways, I don't want to discuss my financial decision I was fully aware of what I was doing.

Does anyone have any experience going from AMD dual core to Intel Quad?

 

[ElementalDragon]

<<<<<

BIG difference. and i even went from the X2 6000+ to my current core 2 quad Q9450.

the funny thing was..... even after swapping out the CPU and Motherboard to two completely different manufacturers (motherboard from Asus to Abit, CPU from AMD to Intel)...... Vista still was able to boot perfectly fine. Granted it had a sh*tload of hardware driver installations to do right away, which took a little while to complete.... it still ran. reinstalled anyway. figured that either way it would be better to start fresh.

 

[Aprox]

Awesome, I'm looking forward to it. I'm also curious to see if this CPU has been holding my GPU back at all.

Thats pretty funny that Vista still worked after that, gotta give MS props for that I suppose. 😀

 

[roirraW "edor" ehT]

Yes, that's impressive. Probably an accident by MS though. Nothing that useful could be on purpose! 😉

 

[Aprox]

Well I got my parts today, put it together this evening when I got home from work. I've been having some major issues, I'm actually stumped. ha.

At first it would post fine, although I was having issues with boot priority (only worked once). As I tweaked bios settings it became less and less stable during post, until now... it just freezes following the quick memory test. The bios is not the most recent, but I cant do anything about it. I cant boot from a disc/usb/hd, enter bios or do anything at all. I tried resetting the cmos a couple times.... but even that is not working (thats a huge WTF). *sigh* Maybe it will fix its self....

 

[kcnychief]

Have you tried removing everything except for one module of RAM, cpu and video card? That's all you need for a minimal boot I believe, of course will get errors about no HD 😀

Try reseating even those, but then try again. Or you can even try with just CPU to try and get beeps to indicate RAM failure, etc.

 

[Aprox]

Yes I have, I even tried uninstalling and reinstalling the cpu, I'm getting quite desperate!

This issue is odd, it makes the post beep sound, starts up and goes through the usual post screen stuff.... then just hangs. If I remove the video card or memory I get the appropriate error beeps... so I know its not dead.

What I am thinking it is that the bios I have installed does not support the cpu I have installed..... BUT, I don't have another 775 chip available to me to use to flash it. I was afraid of this, but I *really* thought it would come with a more up to date bios. The one installed is almost 9 months old, while the h/w revision is 2008.

 

[kcnychief]

Interesting - and surprising at the same time. I would have thought Asus would be more on their game. Maybe pick up a cheapo P4 LGA 775 chip for testing?

 

[Aprox]

Well, I managed to get the bios updated. Not quite sure what happened, but after some poking around it finally posted. So now that the bios is up to date it works great.... BUT I cant boot from a cd now. :-\

The boot priority is all setup correctly, when a bootable disc is in one of the drives it will hang and not do anything. If there is no bootable disc in the drives, it will try to boot from the HD (old xp install).

 

[Aprox]

I was finally able to boot from an optical drive, however I could not do it via IDE no matter what I tried. So, I had the bright idea to strip down my USB hard-drive and jerry-rig a dvd rom to it and boot via USB. Low and behold, it worked! haha, totally ridiculous... but working. :smoker:

 

[kcnychief]

That sounds like a cool mcgyver trick, nicely done 🙂 You should get a SATA optical drive.

 

[roirraW "edor" ehT]

Strange it wouldn't boot optical drive via IDE! Glad you got it working sufficiently. I hope the problems stay away.

 

[Aprox]

I do need a sata optical drive, but more thing to add to the long shopping list.

Thanks guys, I'm finally up and running with Vista Business SP1 64bit & XP Pro 32bit