Didge3

Well I didn't note that I have a 970 too because it isn't really relevant to my issue. PSU was on an offer way back when I got it (Corsair don't sell it anymore) and I intended to eventually upgrade to an i5 but the Pentium has still been enough for me so far

So I was moving my system to a new case today, no problems got it all swapped over and booted up fine, once I'd done that I then went about plugging everything else in (internal headers, I/O etc), now the USB 3 header lead was only just long enough and it went in at an angle, after this it wouldn't post with just the 'CPU' red light on. I pulled the USB 3 lead out and damn, bent two pins with it which had actually bridged and come into contact with each other.... So now it won't post no matter what I do, unplugged everything, reconnected, even tried re-seating the CPU and of course I've straightened out those pins in the USB 3 header. Could those bridged pins have taken out my mobo and/or CPU? System is, Asus Z97-A Pentium G3258 Corsair AX750 PSU Thanks

Right, thanks everyone for telling me about the importance of looking for recent benchmarks, did a bit more googling but with a filter of up to a month old and have decided the 780 is now out. I'm between the 970 and the 290x which I'm sure I'll be able to work out as tbh they seem very similar in performance and price so I'll just go whichever I prefer when it comes to buying.

Right thanks for the info. Driver issues is something I'm going to have to look into to find more recent tests comparing these cards.... This is the offending video that started me all off though We should all know and trust the LLT benchmarking tests right? So skip past Linus' ramblings to like 3/4 through the video and look at the benchmarks that have me confused, the 780 comes out on top (admittedly by not much of a margin) than the 970 and the 290x, so where does this leave me? If we drop the AMD possibility for a second is the 970 still better than a 780 despite this video?

Well good to hear they've stuck with some of the naming system.... A 290x is easily in budget, a 390 isn't. I'll have to do my research to see if its a serious contender. All you guys have done is give me more to be confused about! :huh:

Admittedly I last owned an AMD card when it was still ATi, a Radeon 4670 I believe back when I was about 16 and had no idea what I was doing... Are they even still called Radeon's? I'd have to do my research as honestly I have no idea what AMD have been doing since the ATi name was dropped...

No offence but I don't want to go team red :rolleyes: and yup that's the monitor

Hi I know this is a common question and quite boring but I'm just making myself more and more confused trawling the internet... I desperately need to upgrade my GPU (currently a 650 Ti BOOST) as I've finally upgraded my monitor from an old Dell 19" 1440 x 900 to a Dell 24" 2560x1440. The 650Ti would happily play GTA 5 (which is probably the most demanding game I play) at 1440x900 on High settings with most of the settings near max at around 30-40fps, nothing desirable but certainly playable. I knew 1440 would be too much for my 650 so I haven't even attempted it since getting the monitor a few weeks ago so now I need a new card, I'm on a fairly tight budget and have around £200-250 to spend on a used card. Now I'm struggling between a 970 or a 780 (not a Ti), both are pretty much exactly the same price on the used market and most sources point that the 970 is better and with wanting to play at 1440 the extra VRAM will help but then I went to checkout a video on LLT of the 970 and it came out lower than the 780 in pretty much every test??! So now I'm super confused, I don't really massively care about the power consumption of the 780 as my PSU has more than enough overhead to handle it and heat is well managed in my case so also not a problem, I just want the best performance for my money, as far as I can tell it seems the main pro of the 970 is the extra .5GB of RAM but the 780 does seem to perform slightly better, well according to the LLT 970 review, elsewhere will have you believe the 970 is the better performer. Anyone shed any light? Thanks

So I'm planning on getting myself a new graphics card for Christmas, leaving me with a spare graphics card to do something with. I fairly regularly visit my parents and sometimes spend the holidays there which leaves me without my desktop so I'm only able to play older games or games in sub-par frame-rates on my laptop (Dell Precision M6400 with an nVidia FX3700M which will just about scrape GTA 5 along in 720p on low/medium settings at 20-25fps) Obviously this isn't particularly desirable and this laptop has A LOT of connections so I'm revisiting a solution that I haven't looked at for a few years as it seems to be a fairly dated solution with newer laptops having quite respectable GPUs nowadays anyway. eGPU's, for those of you not in the know these are normal desktop GPUs plugged into a PCIe slot that connects to an expresscard slot or a mPCIe slot. The problems I'm having and would love if anybody had any knowledge/experience with are, Sourcing a Expresscard to PCIe or mini-PCIe to PCIe adapter seems quite impossible (well in the UK anyway) searches bring up the opposite thing, PCIe to mini-PCIe adapters... Having not actually done this I don't really know how well it works, peoples experiences online are generally good saying its certainly an improvement over laptop GPUs, one of the biggest limitations of this setup is an Expresscard slot or a mini-PCIe is only x1 (so the equivalent of a PCIe x1). I've read in places that you can combine multiple to get x2/x4 but how on earth I'd find an adapter for that I'll never know! My laptop has 5 mini-PCIe slots, 3 of which are free and the Expresscard slot so this could be another potential solution. I've been told before that nVidia cards will not operate at less than x4? Which would seriously limit my options because it either means definitely getting (or making??) some sort of frakenadapter to get x4 or having to buy an ATi/AMD card which would defeat the point of using my old nVidia card that is in my current desktop, is this minimum x4 true or not? Sorry for mammoth post and life story :rolleyes: but any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

Yes 8.1. All updates installed. It's quite a widespread issue from google searches but I can't find a solution. Lots of the threads end with, 'I turned Defender off and got X antivirus instead'

Windows Defender doesn't work in the way that Norton (for example) works. Norton supposedly makes use of idle time scheduling too and begins tasks when the computer is idle but on user interruption Norton continues to finish the task whilst the user is doing other tasks. Defender is supposed to immediately interrupt what its doing when the user even so much as moves the mouse, it shouldn't take more than ~10seconds to stop what its doing.

I'm not certain when this started happening but it was quite some time ago, at the time I was in the middle of Uni though and gave up troubleshooting it at the time. I have Windows 8.1 installed on an SSD, all the latest updates are installed etc. I use Windows Defender as my antivirus (who doesn't anymore?) Now if you google my issue lots of other people seem to have it too, but I can't find a clear explanation or a solution to it. When my computer is idle for a period of time the CPU and disk usage are swamped by Antimalware Service Executable, which is Windows Defender doing what it should, running maintenance tasks during idle periods, however its supposed to immediately drop what its doing if the user starts doing anything, this is where the problem starts - it does not stop. It'll hog 70-90% of my CPU for 5mins or so before eventually letting up, this is usually accompanied by high disk usage too. Now my PC has always had another issue but I've never linked them before until recently when I resumed trying to troubleshoot my issue and found somebody else explained their issue which is awfully similar to mine. When I sleep my computer, it usually resumes itself for some reason without any input (everybody is out so nobody has touched it), resume from sleep on input devices are switched off in the BIOS, if I sleep it I can't get it to resume without pressing the power button itself, wiggling the mouse or stabbing the keyboard do nothing. So why does it resume itself? Windows Defender is why, according to a post on another forum the network adapter is somehow triggered when any new device connects to the network which resumes the computer, immediately Antimalware Service Executable is hogging the CPU and disk. So I tested this theory, with my computer put to sleep and no programs running but still wired into the network, I turned my sisters laptop on, as soon as the laptop connected to the Wi-Fi my desktop woke up from sleep. I did the same test again but unplugged the ethernet to my desktop, it remained asleep this time. I've read things such as Defender is trying to scan itself so put the Windows Defender exe in the excluded file locations, I've done this. It had absolutely no effect, I also struggle to believe even Microsoft would oversee something so stupid... Has anybody any insight into this other than ditch Defender and use another program? I cannot for the life of me work this out?? Sorry for the long post but its hard to explain whats going on here....

Ahh some progress, I underclocked a significant amount and it seems to occasionally stutter but hasn't crashed. Core clock is down 180Mhz from stock and memory is down 200Mhz. Taken a bit of a performance hit but for the time being my computer isn't crashing. I guess that probably means my card is on the way out? I regularly monitor temps and things (just something I've always done) and my the GPU core never exceeds 50c in gaming, it usually hovers between 40-45c so its not like a thermal thing :unsure:

Still crashes Will try it in a friends system to check its not the card itself. Do you think its worth reinstalling all my motherboard/chipset drivers?

Thanks, I have switched it to maximum performance and will get back to you if it still crashes. I am worried that it could have been affected when the mobo died but I've been hoping its driver related but the card is kinda getting old a bit now (I got it very shortly after the 650Ti was released and it's been in 3 systems now), it'll probably be due an upgrade when GTA 5 eventually releases but I hope it isn't a hardware fault.... Thanks again for the help