xDLGx

Sounds like the CPU or the motherboard died on you. This is when you wish you'd picked the GD65 Gaming instead of GD45, since it has the on board diagnostic codes to help with exactly this type of problem.

Another + for Zotac. Only been in contact with their support twice but both times I had a reply the same day.

Getting technical support from Microsoft is like bashing your head against a brick wall, unless you're on an enterprise license.... where the real tech support staff work.

GPU when using any higher overclock profiles with manual set fanspeed. Other than that any noise from the PC drowns in the noise from my table fan this time of year. Always using closed headphones with the PC anyway.

Not running some network priority app that's reserving most of your connection for possible game traffic while a game is running? Epic speeds you've got by the way.

As long as you're staying on 1080p I'd go with the 770. If you were to get a 1440p or 1600p monitor then 7970.

Weird noise from the HDD is bad, that said a normal HDD does make noise while working and different brand HDDs sounds slightly different. If you're not used to HDD noise it can be difficult to know if it's a healthy or unhealthy noise. I've got no idea how experienced you are with different hardware or if you've experienced HDD failure before and know what to look/listen for. A few times I've also encountered people who think their HDD is making bad noise when it's in fact the ball bearings on a fan that's gone bad. Things that otherwise can make an HDD extra noisy (without it being on the verge of breaking) is high file fragmentation, disk being almost full, virus/malware or some bad software. Anti-virus software can sometimes do things way wrong and bog down a computer completely, seen that happen a lot of times because something just isn't 100% compatible.

Yeah well the few reaching the highest possible clocks are sure to make a lot of noise about it. I see you've also got two cards so you need two equally good overclockers, which either requires very good luck or spare cash to buy, test and resell cards until you've got two good ones to keep. Any overclocking you can do is a bonus. Many cards can barely be overclocked at all.

Like above poster said it is throttling, but in a good way. Has nothing to do with the HDD. It's just throttles up and down depending on usage. Start some test program, run a lot of flash based browser windows or whatever to put some stress on the system and the CPU will stay at a high clock and work. SInce it's laptop it might end up throttling down due to heat, but you won't know that unless running some stress test or games while monitoring temperatures.

Don't really do anything in bios until Windows is installed except maybe upgrade the bios with the latest version. You always test your computer fully with everything running at default stock speeds and settings. If it doesn't work at defaults it won't work overclocked. No you can not raid two different SSDs or HDDs or mix SSD and HDD. Need to be identical units. When you set up a raid array all drives involved get whiped. There are a lot of rapid start features, I'd advice against using them now, especially bios ones as you then skip some diagnostic tests during boot. CPU you can check in Windows later. If you PC booted up at all the CPU is generally ok. That scratch is worrysome though.... but not seen it so can't tell.

It's normal that it jumps up and down all the time (whenever it's being used/not used) unless you disable all adaptive and power saving features of the cpu. Or set the PC to do folding or something in the background :p

These new "features" that can brick your system were introduced with Win 7 and continued in Win 8. I never had problems prior to that, in fact I've never had a boot sector break on me until Win 8.

It's easy as long as the command works. I went through a day of troubleshooting and eventually reinstalled the last time it didn't work due to this amazing drive lock "feature".

It's the same with my Win 8 installation, I forgot to disconnect all but the intended system SSD when reinstalling it so the installed in all its wisdom placed the boot sector on my normal HDD. Considering all the problems I had prior to the reinstall with failures to repair boot sector and locked Windows drive I think I'll just leave it the way it is, instead of trying to boot without the HDD and run a repair procedure.

I've always used Afterburner before but now with the ROG 7970 MP card I've got GPU Tweak works better. Other software can't seem to increase the voltage or even report the voltage correctly on this card.

It's amazing that it took MS like 20 years to fix that

I know, it was just a quick test before installing the waterblock.

I'm liking mine, even though I mostly got it as a temporary card while waiting to see what the 9000 series bring (it came with 8 games included). It beats my previous GTX 580 SLI setup for sure. Mine doesn't seem to be a great overclocker though, starting to see artifacts pretty early in Heaven after moving much above the factory overclock. Still experimenting so we'll see. So far I haven't heard the card make any noise except when I manually set the fan speed to make sure that they even worked :p The size of the card is massive. It's not only a 3-slot card. It's also longer than a standard card and much wider.

That was the original plan for the "return to res" tube, I meant to take that out via the 8-pin cpu hole and behind the motherboard. Turns it it was just too tight. The hole is not perfect and you had to do several tight bends. I also didn't have all the angled fittings I'd needed to just experiment and try things out. Due to the sound padding on the side panel it's a bit cramped back there, you can't cross any of the thicker cables and the tubing, not enough room for that. I have plans to try again, when I have to do maintainance and take it apart anyway. With sleeved cables the thick cables will be more flattened. I'll also have purchased a lot more angled fittings to experiment with. With future water cooled GPU(s) the loop will also be better with a second thick 240 radiator in the front, filling up that empty void.

You're probably being tricked by not being able to do anything to "adjust CPU ratio". If it looks greyed out and unclickable try typing (numbers... like 40 gives 4 GHz with a core clock of 100, 40 x 100).CPU ratio mode should be there, it's in my MSI bios.

Think the official number is 105c where it should shut itself down.

On stock cooler at stock clock my 4770k hit 100c in prime95

I got my first own PC when I was 13 or maybe 14. It was a Pentium 133 MHz with 8 megs of ram. Only specs I remember.

My digital camera decided to die when trying to take proper photos of the system running without having to use flash :blink: What a piece of crap. Either way, step two with this will be to fix some braided cables and a custom windowed sidepanel. Also looking at different solutions for GPU support as that card is heavy as hell. Need to mod the Lian-Li GPU support somehow to make it fit.

I've got no solution for this, just saying that maybe it's good that I went with an AMD GPU for my new build. Had no problems with installing the link software and driver. Maybe try a different USB port for it?