It’s been a long time between posts (basically a month) so here’s a quick redux as to what I’ve been up to:

- Family bullshit
- Looking for a new computer
- Old computer died
- Got a new computer

The final point is what I’ve been spending most of my time on for the last few weeks.  I was on the lookout for a new computer in late Feb.  Was talking to a guy from work before Easter who has a side business in building PCs from wholesale parts and managed to get things specced out not too badly.

Then my old computer died.  Kaput.  Went from working one day to not working the next.

Still, apart from being irritated I wasn’t that worried as all I had to do was speed up my PC purchase and make do with my eeepc in the meantime.  I ordered the PC, went on Easter leave and after I came back it was ready to pick up.

So, hot new pc.  24″ widescreen LCD monitor.  Vista (well, that’s not all that hot but I thought I’d try it).  I got the PC, set it up, mounted my old hard drives and went through the entire rigmarole of transferring and installing things.  Did a c0uple of WoW raids, played some Fallout 3 and it all looked bloody fantastic.  I was really happy.

Then I got an SMS from my girlfriend that the power at the house had gone off.  I didn’t think too much of it, probably that the breaker had been thrown and I’d just have to flick it back on when I got home.  I got home, did that and then went to start the new computer.

Nothing.

Lights are on but nobody is home.

After a lot of troubleshooting and some frantic SMS’s to my PC supplier, I still couldn’t get it booted again and resigned myself to driving it around to his place for some troubleshooting.

Turns out that power surge had destroyed my week old power supply.  Turns out that trying to warranty a power supply that had been broken by a surge is a tricky business, because if they test it and discover it’s a surge, not only won’t they warranty it but they’ll charge you for the testing.  I sucked it up and bought another power supply.

Got my PC back.  Seemed a bit flaky but I put that down to the fact that during troubleshooting it wasn’t shut down all that cleanly.  Fired it up and started WoW and almost immediately got pulled into a 10 man Ulduar raid.  Was running for about 2 hours and was about to fight Freya when my PC just went off and was showing the same symptoms as before.  Wouldn’t turn back on again.

Fuck.

Time to drop into the troubleshooting cycle.  Unplug and replug parts.  Sit the PC on its side.  Run it without most components connected.  Surely something else hadn’t gone dodgy due to the power surge that hadn’t been picked up?  Finally got it going sitting on its side with the graphics card not screwed in and the case cover off.  Looked a lot like the graphics card was stuffed.

The next night I got home and the PC turned on without an issue.  Seeing my good fortune, I decided to get into some gaming, so after WoW for a couple of hours I finally installed Crysis, set everything to High and started shooting things and marvelling how nice it looked.

Boom.  PC shut down after 2 hours of that.  Same symptoms.

This time I went to the extent of completely removing the motherboard from the case to determine if it was shorting after a period due to vibrations.  Did that, started the PC and it booted fine.  That was promising.  Screwed the motherboard back in the case, put everything back where it was (sans decent cable management) and turned it back on.  Worked straight away and ran for another hour or so before I called it a night.

At that point I was down to one of two theories.  First one was a short whereby the case vibrations eventually caused it to occur after a period of work.  The second one was the graphics card was shutting itself down (rightly or wrongly) due to heat.

The next night I spent a bit of time playing Fallout 3 earlier and then had dinner with my parents.  Back at my place and demonstrating the new machine, I turned on Crysis and as a demonstration slash stress test turned everything up to Very High with full 16xAA (at 1920×1200 mind you).  Needless to say it was pretty juddery, even on a new machine.  Then my computer died 30 seconds in.

Ok, now it’s looking like heat.  Surely though a graphics card shouldn’t just die straight off after playing WoW for a few hours.  It’s a huge bloody thing with two fans and heaps of heat sinks.  It’s a GTX 260.  It’s brand new.  I’ve never had a graphics card shit itself due to heat before and take the PC down with it.  Surely it’s been stuffed by the power surge as well.

Then I did some research.  Apparently the automatic fan control mechanism on those cards which are supposed to ramp up and down the fans depending on heat don’t work all that well.  From what I’ve seen, they don’t work at all, leaving a hot card with the same fanspeed as a warm one.  Also, there was a separate large exhaust fan that could be attached inside the case which I was given but wasn’t attached during the build (natural airflow and the back fan should have been enough)

So, I now have my back fan manually set to high, the large exhaust fan mounted and set to high and I also have temperature monitors and manual GPU fan speed tuners set up to see how that goes.

Didn’t have a crash last night.  I’m not sure if I’m just covering up an actual issue with more fans.  Don’t particularly want to be without a computer for a week again.

Bloody computers.