xDLGx

My old gaming PC ran a Cooler Master true power 1000w for over 4 years without issues. I've now sold that PSU so it's still going strong.

7970 is still a very solid card and at high resolutions it does better than many newer cards thanks to the memory amount and memory bus. For high resolution you'd need a GTX 780 to really beat it and that's just not nearly in the same price range. You can always wait... some people wait forever and never buy anything. I was thinking about waiting with my new build but I decided that I wanted to do some gaming now, not later, plus sell my old hardware while it was still possible to sell it. I'm sitting on a 7970 Matrix Platinum now, went from GTX 580 SLI. I'm getting better performance in high resolutions (1600p monitor).

I'd guess that at least half of all the people who purchase extreme edition CPUs or top of the line OC motherboards are not making use of the extra cores or any of the extra features they are paying for = wasting money for bragging rights.

As already mentioned there is no point to SLI single slot cards... single slot cards are for using Word and Facebook. With the normal 2-slot cards it makes very little difference in temperature if you leave a gap between them or not as long as they use the reference cooler design which is designed to suck air in through the back edge of the card and out back of the case. With third party open air coolers you really need spacing between your SLI/crossfire cards or most will overheat.

Well in some games there is less difference than expected even when you double the number of rendered pixels, while in other games your fps just dies. Would be cool if you had a 1440p monitor to compare with though.

Does it look any different? Maybe your "overclock" (or downsampling as it's really called) didn't work properly. It should be more taxing on your GPU. The GPU does the same amount of work it would do if you had a 1440p monitor and ran at native resolution. There are some games that lets you do this in the normal settings... like ARMA II for example, where you set two resolutions - one output (or 3D resolution) and one display resolution. If the output is higher than the display (and the display is always limited by the monitors native resolution) it downsamples. It looks better, just like when you make a large image smaller in photoshop.

Sounds a lot like corrupted browser cache. Might have to fully clear cache, stored passwords and everything. Can try with a different browser first to make sure it's not something else.

Might wanna try downloading the bios file again and maybe use a different usb stick, possible that the file is messed up. And I just quickly looked it up, that motherboard has got two bios chips so no need to worry if you break one bios, you've got a backup.

Pretty sure that's a dual bios motherboard, just hard reset and see what happens. If it doesn't work (probably won't) just switch to the other bios. Then reset the first now broken bios back to the default and try updating again. If it doesn't have a dual bios clear the cmos. Consult the manual.

Should still have audio output in the back, try those.

Found even more info on this locked drive issues and possible ways to unlock it, which I will try next time. Apparently a Linux boot disc has been able to unlock windows drives for a lot of people, ie. do what Windows own repair discs completely fail to do.

Even if the automatic repair doesn't work you can run the command prompt in the repair suite and manually run a lot of commands to correct file problems, boot sector etc.

I guess it's possible that a program like game booster fiddles with the wrong files.... either way, why is he paying money? This sounds like a typical situation where Windows repair would actually work.

If you're using the front panel connectors for the headphones it's not unusual that the cable isn't shielded well enough. Or are you plugged directly into the motherboard?

Mine are what makes most of the noise right now, probably more the air moving through fins that makes the noise, the fans themselves are pretty quiet. Was hoping to run them off the CPU fan headers with voltage regulator but the regulator makes almost no difference.... guess I'll have to Y split the fan controller.

Yeah I haven't had any problems starting the machine and getting into the bios during this whole mess, that has always worked. Never even had to press delete like a crazy person (have to do that on my old pc). One press is enough.

Yeah it was the reserved partition... all messed up. Impossible to fix while it was "locked". No it doesn't seem to react at all on keyboard inputs to boot from optical drive. It asks for it and gives me a few seconds, but it doesn't care how many "any keys" I press :p From within the bios itself there is an override menu where you can click on available hardware and attempt to boot from them. I've contacted MSI about this. I should also try a different optical drive, but that'll have to wait until next time. I haven't got any optical drive installed at all now, only time I normally use one is when I install the OS for the first time.

If I connect my fans to normal 12 volt they spin at 1300 rpm or so. If I connect them to 7 volt they spin at 1200. I find that a bit odd.... shouldn't they drop to 700-800?

I am back up and running again, took a lot less time to reinstall everything (only two days worth) than to troubleshoot. When I encounter a problem I really like to find the source of the problem and a fix for it, a fix that doesn't involve reinstalling, so I'm not happy. One issue with the reinstall (maybe that's normal for Win 8, used it for the first time 3 days ago), is that when I did a clean install it left that bugged up locked 350 mb partition as formatted unallocated space? Found that a bit odd. I used AOMEI to merge the partitions now. The only clues I've found to possible causes of the screwed up boot sector / locked windows drive error is the Windows Fast Boot feature corrupting files. From everything I've read about this problem (and there are A LOT of threads out there) Microsoft doesn't seem to acknowledge any problem, instead they blame the user and viruses. The "locked drive" error is supposedly some "feature" meant to protect your PC from theft.... or some complete BS like that. Another thing I'm a bit concerned about is that the latest bios version for the motherboard doesn't let me boot from a disc drive no matter what, it spins it up but then just goes to the hard drive anyway. The standard version or the bios does lets me boot, but only via manual override from the bios, not via boot order.

Ugh.... now I forgot to only have 1 drive connected while installing so Windows 8 in all its wisdom decided it was best to place the boot files on the standard HDD meant for backups and storage. I am really frustrated about this whole situation. I could have saved half a day just reinstalling Win 8 (installation was only two days old) but I wanted to find a solution to the "locked drive" problem. I hate to reinstall again in a day or two due to the same error.

And windows 8 installer can't find my system image backup.... fantastic

Yeah... online it's only problems and no working solutions. Scary that it doesn't seem to be an uncommon problem.

I think the core of the problem is that the drive is "locked" still, doesn't matter what I do unless I manage to "unlock" it somehow. Piece of shit.

Because all the repair changes I'm trying to do is being done to the reserved drive, which is empty. At least from reading the knowledgebase at Microsoft it says that the commands make changes to the reserved drive... which is pointless.

I have now managed to boot with the disc again, I used the bios switch. It still won't auto boot on the disc but it boots on the disc if I use manual override from within the bios to do it. Anyway, already tried everything on that link. Something I can't find among any guides or tips around this problem is that there is a new "partition"... that my Windows installation drive has turned into E: and a new drive is system reserved. Now the reserved drive is D: and it has a temp folder with a bunch of boot error logs in it. Just FYI I've got two SSDs in this machine, one with OS and one with select programs only. I've also got a normal HDD but it's disconnected now, needed cables for the optical. Don't ever use optical so didn't install one in the case :p