re the original problem - gfx card screw. IMHO it's very important to screw the card down tight. The idea of the screw is to hold the card in place (affixed to the case) to prevent motherboard damage when the cable gets tugged etc. I sometimes have to bend the mounting plate when installing a card to make it line up, but the card must be tightly screwed down.
The 610 and the 4350 I have now do both screw in fine. I did find a site earlier on that was a voltage calculator. I entered in as much information as I could and it recommnded a PSU of around 380W, so with 680W, i've got almost twice what i need - with obvious variations for accuracy I suppose.
First disconnect all Hard Disk Drives (HDD) except the one Windows is installed to, then boot to diskpart to see if the Windows partition is marked as "Active" if it is then do the 3 separated startup repairs out-lined in this tutorial at the link below.
If not use Step Two # 1 to mark it active then do the startup repairs to get Windows booting again.
First disconnect all Hard Disk Drives (HDD) except the one Windows is installed to, then boot to diskpart to see if the Windows partition is marked as "Active" if it is then do the 3 separated startup repairs out-lined in this tutorial at the link below.
If not use Step Two # 1 to mark it active then do the startup repairs to get Windows booting again.
Thanks for that. I only have the single hard drive and I made sure the partitions were correctly created with my recovery disk. But then I still do have my 500gb hard drive that I took out so I could always put that back in with the new card to see if I get the same problem.
Ok, it's bugging me now so I'm going to try the 500gb drive back in the machine with the GFX card i bought yesterday. I suppose the barometer of whether or not it works is if Windows installs and runs normally without dying, hanging or telling me i need to 'select a new boot device'.
I've only skimmed through your saga but to solve these sort of problems you need to not keep swapping hardware! - untill you find the cause of the problem, such as cheap nasty power supply.
Get back to basics, how the PC was when it worked properly with the old card, then add the new card including any power leads that the card requires.
As max99 has already said, a crap 680watt powersupply might perform worse than a decent 450watt supply.
However, if you're really stuck then maybe ghost your current setup, then reload the OS from scratch with the new card and make sure you've loaded the up to date mobo and graphics drivers etc
It seems like there are too many variables. if you have onboard graphics, use that to see if you can get a stable setup with first the old, then the new drive. once that is hunky dory, then start playing with graphics cards.
If that case is as warped as the pictures suggest then I'd remove the motherboard and run it out of the case and see if the card starts working properly. If only some of the pins are connecting properly then issues will crop up.
Obviously you have to do this carefully on a surface that doesn't conduct electricitiy and make sure all items are out of each other's way. But it's a relatively easy check to see if the PSU, mobo, hard drive and graphics card are working (no need to plug in DVD or card readers etc for the purpose of the test)
The setup worked absolutely 100% fine with the old 500gb drive and the 4350 card. had that for many, many months without issue - didn't run hot, nothing overdoing the CPU etc..
The onboard graphics did work with that setup as well although I never really needed to use them.
I put the GT610 back in and the 500gb drive and rebooted. Windows loaded the installation disk, but I've been sitting here for nearly 20 minutes staring at the blue screen (not a BSOD) waiting for the installation program to actually activate and start running. I suspect that if I take the GT610 back out and put the 4350 in then it will start fine as that's the setup I've been running up until now.
The PSU is not as cheap and nasty as it could be, but it's not exactly a decent branded one either. The next logical step is to swap it out.
These are the frustrating kinds of problems, as you can't be certain which part is at fault until you've replaced it and given it a thorough test. The fitting of the motherboard, and the motherboard itself are also possible factors.
I've just spent the last few hours (again...) trying to get the original setup of the 4350 and 500gb hard drive working again and nothing happened. tried plugging the SATA cable from the hard drive into each of the 4 internal SATA ports, one after the other, and rebooting, re-deleting and re-creating & formatting the 500gb drive to start clean.
Took forever to pick it's way through the install process only to get to the point of selecting the drive to install to and it gave me "Install Failure: Windows cannot be installed to disk 0 partition 1" each time.
Suggests it's potentially an issue with RAID drivers, but then somewhere else suggests setting AHCI mode in the BIOS instead of SATA.
I've put the 2TB drive back in for now and rebooted and everything is running fine, so I think i'm going to leave it well alone for now as I really don't want to spend another few hours on this.
Thanks for all the help and replies - do appreciate them
.. which is the motherboard bundle I got early last year. He said the PCIe slot should more than cope with the two cards I mentioned and he also said that the only thing he could think of was a power supply issue, even though he said that the one I have should be enough, he wondered if it wasn't actually the voltage specified.
Soo..what i've decided to do is if Ebuyer end up returning the 6770 to me as fully working, which is likely, then i'm going to sell that on and put the money towards getting a good 80 rated PSU - something like a Corsair or one of the other good brands.
Then I'll just re-visit upgrading the GFX card later in the year - I took the GT610 back to PC World today and got a refund.
Thought i'd pop back and say that we (hopefully..) finally have a winner
Kept looking at various cards over the weekend and identified the Radeon HD 6570 as a contender due to the fact that, according to futuremark, it can run a significant number of games on minimum setting and more than a few with recommended settings as well.
Sleeping Dogs, Battlefield 3, Max Payne 3, and Batman: Arkham City, to name a few that it'll cope with on minimum.
Decided to go for it and got it. Got home, fitted it and - so far - everything is working nicely
Temperature on the card is running at 28 degrees as I type, and the CPU temperature on each core is stable at around the 40 degree mark so it's not like it's putting any unecessary load on anything.
So it looks like i've finally cracked it (and not literally this time ... heh )
Thought i'd pop back and say that we (hopefully..) finally have a winner
So it looks like i've finally cracked it (and not literally this time ... heh )
I have nothing constructive to add but I just wanted to acknowledge and share the painful frustration you and we have all been through playing this game over the years. WHY DOESN'T ANYTHING EVER JUST WORK! :mad::mad::D Glad you are sorted
I have nothing constructive to add but I just wanted to acknowledge and share the painful frustration you and we have all been through playing this game over the years. WHY DOESN'T ANYTHING EVER JUST WORK! :mad::mad::D Glad you are sorted
Thanks
Been down that road many times, even before this. You think it's just a matter of plugging it in and away you go but no ..
Somewhere on this forum is a thread containing a near running commentary of a night where I literally never went to bed while trying to get something working. That was 'fun'
Going to add to this as it seems it might be related. Everything has been running fine for a few days. I've been playing PES 2013 and also Assassin's Creed 3 as well.
Been surfing, listening to music at the same time - generally doing everything i normally do.
The CPU doesn't really run hot - the average temp bounces around 40-50 and occasionally 60, but the system overall isn't under a huge amount of strain.
Been trying to convert an AVI file to DVD format tonight using a variety of programs - even tried some hooky versions (which I will obviously delete...) just to see if something works, but the pattern seems to be the same with everything. Basically it gets about halfway and then dies with a blue screen of death and the "A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary process.." error.
Obviously I'm thinking that the extra workload that the machine is under doing the conversion might be causing an issue with the new GFX card and causing the BSOD, but then I would have thought that playing something like Assassin's Creed 3 would have put the machine under more strain?.
I'm running the conversion again as i type and if it dies again (which i suspect it will), i'll try using the onboard graphics and disconnecting the 6570 to see what happens.
This GFX card focus needs to be given a back seat!, encoding for DVD is a CPU intensive thing. Nothing to do with the GFX card.
Since this PC seems to have a history of overheating I suggest it's a heatsink/cooling issue on the CPU
When playing games the GFX card is taking the bulk of the graphics load, that's what they are for.
For encoding DVD files and similar that's not a graphical load, the CPU is doing the work.
With games, sometimes a GFX card is insufficient to do the rendering and the CPU kicks in and assists.
Download a CPU stress-test app, "Prime95" is the usual choice.
Also download an app called "SpeedFan", this will display the temps on the CPU cores.
Both from Softpedia.com or your favourite site.
Run SpeedFan, then run Prime95 and look at the temps via SpeedFan
I did notice speefan and prime95 as options to try last night actually but it was late and dvd flick was happily ticking along without issue so i didn't want to frighten it
I don't remember saying my PC has a history of overheating though. yes, i fried the motherboard last year but that was the old motherboard and that was because I was trying to upgrade the CPU on it. I bought a CPU that didn't apparently work, so I threw it out.
The next day I decided I wanted to try it again as i'd found some more information about what might be wrong, so I went outside and fished the rubbish bag out of the wheely bin outside my flat and retrieved the CPU from the bottom of the bag. After letting it dry out for a day, I fitted it again and killed the motherboard.
Yes, I fished a CPU out of a rubbish bag and installed it in my PC. I did that
I'll try the stress tests later on though and see what happens. I'm not hugely keen on the idea of having to re-seat the CPU or even get a new one i suppose, but we'll see.
to cut a long story short, I cleaned and reseated the CPU. took as many precautions as I could, used the correct alcohol wipes etc..
running convertxtodvd at the moment with open hardware monitor running alongside and both CPU cores are a stable 69-70 degrees at the moment, about a quarter of the way through, so I'm hopeful. by this time earlier on, the temp was a LOT higher
#edit
Convertxtodvd process has finished without a hitch. I sat and watched it from start to finish (35 super exciting minutes .. heh ). The warmest the CPU got was 74 degrees during the actual conversion process.
The build process had the temp dropping to 50-55 degrees.
Obviously i'll try the stress tests later on to be more thorough, but I wonder aloud if the virus i picked up last week that had the CPU running at 100 degrees for god knows how long effectively "cooked off" the remaining thermal paste on the CPU?
Maybe cleaning and re-applying some new paste has solved the problem? Here's hoping
Maxing out a CPU at 100% should never be a problem. The machine should not shut down.
I appreciate that. I did notice it got to 105 degrees at one point of the conversion process earlier, for the record. Each time i ran convertxtodvd last night, it BSOD'ed on me, but not this morning after I cleaned the CPU and re-applied some paste.
Obviously I accept it might not necessarily be related, but i'm just grateful it seems to work.
I'll just have to keep an eye on it - I'll probably still invest in a good PSU at some point in the future though.
Comments
I imagine it's random and if the old card was left in the problem would occur eventually.
Here's some info:
http://www.sevenforums.com/bsod-help-support/126363-weird-reboot-select-proper-boot-device-problem-2.html
First disconnect all Hard Disk Drives (HDD) except the one Windows is installed to, then boot to diskpart to see if the Windows partition is marked as "Active" if it is then do the 3 separated startup repairs out-lined in this tutorial at the link below.
If not use Step Two # 1 to mark it active then do the startup repairs to get Windows booting again.
Startup Repair - Run 3 Separate Times:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/105541-startup-repair-run-3-separate-times.html?ltr=S
Or this:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/304666-30-reboot-select-proper-boot-device-error-problem
You can answer me directly you know, I don't bite
Thanks for that. I only have the single hard drive and I made sure the partitions were correctly created with my recovery disk. But then I still do have my 500gb hard drive that I took out so I could always put that back in with the new card to see if I get the same problem.
Here we go again .. heh ..
Get back to basics, how the PC was when it worked properly with the old card, then add the new card including any power leads that the card requires.
As max99 has already said, a crap 680watt powersupply might perform worse than a decent 450watt supply.
However, if you're really stuck then maybe ghost your current setup, then reload the OS from scratch with the new card and make sure you've loaded the up to date mobo and graphics drivers etc
Obviously you have to do this carefully on a surface that doesn't conduct electricitiy and make sure all items are out of each other's way. But it's a relatively easy check to see if the PSU, mobo, hard drive and graphics card are working (no need to plug in DVD or card readers etc for the purpose of the test)
The onboard graphics did work with that setup as well although I never really needed to use them.
I put the GT610 back in and the 500gb drive and rebooted. Windows loaded the installation disk, but I've been sitting here for nearly 20 minutes staring at the blue screen (not a BSOD) waiting for the installation program to actually activate and start running. I suspect that if I take the GT610 back out and put the 4350 in then it will start fine as that's the setup I've been running up until now.
These are the frustrating kinds of problems, as you can't be certain which part is at fault until you've replaced it and given it a thorough test. The fitting of the motherboard, and the motherboard itself are also possible factors.
I've just spent the last few hours (again...) trying to get the original setup of the 4350 and 500gb hard drive working again and nothing happened. tried plugging the SATA cable from the hard drive into each of the 4 internal SATA ports, one after the other, and rebooting, re-deleting and re-creating & formatting the 500gb drive to start clean.
Took forever to pick it's way through the install process only to get to the point of selecting the drive to install to and it gave me "Install Failure: Windows cannot be installed to disk 0 partition 1" each time.
Looking at this site ..
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproinstall/thread/b8fbf1de-0d93-47ae-8ea8-70534f1816ba
Suggests it's potentially an issue with RAID drivers, but then somewhere else suggests setting AHCI mode in the BIOS instead of SATA.
I've put the 2TB drive back in for now and rebooted and everything is running fine, so I think i'm going to leave it well alone for now as I really don't want to spend another few hours on this.
Thanks for all the help and replies - do appreciate them
http://www.maplin.co.uk/6000-x2-athlon-cpu--motherboard-and-ati-4350-512mb-graphics-kit-351732
.. which is the motherboard bundle I got early last year. He said the PCIe slot should more than cope with the two cards I mentioned and he also said that the only thing he could think of was a power supply issue, even though he said that the one I have should be enough, he wondered if it wasn't actually the voltage specified.
Soo..what i've decided to do is if Ebuyer end up returning the 6770 to me as fully working, which is likely, then i'm going to sell that on and put the money towards getting a good 80 rated PSU - something like a Corsair or one of the other good brands.
Then I'll just re-visit upgrading the GFX card later in the year - I took the GT610 back to PC World today and got a refund.
Kept looking at various cards over the weekend and identified the Radeon HD 6570 as a contender due to the fact that, according to futuremark, it can run a significant number of games on minimum setting and more than a few with recommended settings as well.
http://community.futuremark.com/hardware/gpu/AMD+Radeon+HD+6570/games
Sleeping Dogs, Battlefield 3, Max Payne 3, and Batman: Arkham City, to name a few that it'll cope with on minimum.
Decided to go for it and got it. Got home, fitted it and - so far - everything is working nicely
Temperature on the card is running at 28 degrees as I type, and the CPU temperature on each core is stable at around the 40 degree mark so it's not like it's putting any unecessary load on anything.
So it looks like i've finally cracked it (and not literally this time ... heh
I have nothing constructive to add but I just wanted to acknowledge and share the painful frustration you and we have all been through playing this game over the years. WHY DOESN'T ANYTHING EVER JUST WORK! :mad::mad::D Glad you are sorted
Thanks
Been down that road many times, even before this. You think it's just a matter of plugging it in and away you go but no ..
Somewhere on this forum is a thread containing a near running commentary of a night where I literally never went to bed while trying to get something working. That was 'fun'
Been surfing, listening to music at the same time - generally doing everything i normally do.
The CPU doesn't really run hot - the average temp bounces around 40-50 and occasionally 60, but the system overall isn't under a huge amount of strain.
Been trying to convert an AVI file to DVD format tonight using a variety of programs - even tried some hooky versions (which I will obviously delete...) just to see if something works, but the pattern seems to be the same with everything. Basically it gets about halfway and then dies with a blue screen of death and the "A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary process.." error.
Obviously I'm thinking that the extra workload that the machine is under doing the conversion might be causing an issue with the new GFX card and causing the BSOD, but then I would have thought that playing something like Assassin's Creed 3 would have put the machine under more strain?.
I'm running the conversion again as i type and if it dies again (which i suspect it will), i'll try using the onboard graphics and disconnecting the 6570 to see what happens.
Since this PC seems to have a history of overheating I suggest it's a heatsink/cooling issue on the CPU
When playing games the GFX card is taking the bulk of the graphics load, that's what they are for.
For encoding DVD files and similar that's not a graphical load, the CPU is doing the work.
With games, sometimes a GFX card is insufficient to do the rendering and the CPU kicks in and assists.
Download a CPU stress-test app, "Prime95" is the usual choice.
Also download an app called "SpeedFan", this will display the temps on the CPU cores.
Both from Softpedia.com or your favourite site.
Run SpeedFan, then run Prime95 and look at the temps via SpeedFan
I don't remember saying my PC has a history of overheating though. yes, i fried the motherboard last year but that was the old motherboard and that was because I was trying to upgrade the CPU on it. I bought a CPU that didn't apparently work, so I threw it out.
The next day I decided I wanted to try it again as i'd found some more information about what might be wrong, so I went outside and fished the rubbish bag out of the wheely bin outside my flat and retrieved the CPU from the bottom of the bag. After letting it dry out for a day, I fitted it again and killed the motherboard.
Yes, I fished a CPU out of a rubbish bag and installed it in my PC. I did that
I'll try the stress tests later on though and see what happens. I'm not hugely keen on the idea of having to re-seat the CPU or even get a new one i suppose, but we'll see.
running convertxtodvd at the moment with open hardware monitor running alongside and both CPU cores are a stable 69-70 degrees at the moment, about a quarter of the way through, so I'm hopeful. by this time earlier on, the temp was a LOT higher
#edit
Convertxtodvd process has finished without a hitch. I sat and watched it from start to finish (35 super exciting minutes .. heh
The build process had the temp dropping to 50-55 degrees.
Obviously i'll try the stress tests later on to be more thorough, but I wonder aloud if the virus i picked up last week that had the CPU running at 100 degrees for god knows how long effectively "cooked off" the remaining thermal paste on the CPU?
Maybe cleaning and re-applying some new paste has solved the problem? Here's hoping
While those temps might be ok for some CPU there was evidence (the BSODs) that the temps were too much for the CPU you have.
For the CPU you have the maximum working temps can be found online somewhere.
Maxing out a CPU at 100% should never be a problem. The machine should not shut down.
I appreciate that. I did notice it got to 105 degrees at one point of the conversion process earlier, for the record. Each time i ran convertxtodvd last night, it BSOD'ed on me, but not this morning after I cleaned the CPU and re-applied some paste.
Obviously I accept it might not necessarily be related, but i'm just grateful it seems to work.
I'll just have to keep an eye on it - I'll probably still invest in a good PSU at some point in the future though.