Dual core goodness Jan 8 2006

I got bored with my old machine (an AMD 64 3200+ running inside a Shuttle box) restarting itself because of ‘heat issues’ every half an hour while playing the superb City of Villains, so ordered the bits to build a new box. All new parts, except my hard-drive (bought a 300GB Maxtor SATA drive late last year anyway, more on that later), and my CD-RW/DVD combo drive. It’s a dual-core AMD 64 X2 3800+, 2GB RAM on an nForce4 SLI board, with a 256MB PCI-E nVidia 6800 GS graphics card. I plan on getting a second 6800 GS card, probably next month, and finding out what the SLI fuss is all about, but for now the machine still flies along. I’m really pleased with the results (I’m most pleased when playing F.E.A.R at full-res, with all the graphics and performance options on full :-), but getting here was a royal pain-in-the-ass. Turns out compatibility between the Maxtor DiamondMax drives, and the nForce4 chipset isn’t great when using SATA drives, and upon reading some of the reports of flashing drive firmware, and data corruption, I’m actually kind of pleased that my incompatibility problem seems to have been limited to the nForce chipset drivers. Once I had the machine up and running, I started installing drivers, but by the time I got around to the Windows SP2 upgrade, I was getting random lockups, and hangs. Anyway, bored of this, I started the diagnostic process. Two days later, and embarking on a rigorous routine of testing each individual driver I was installing (I’d tested all of the hardware components already), I finally was getting somewhere. Convinced it was SP2 itself that was screwing things up, I hit some forums. Turns out the Maxtor DiamondMax 10, perhaps just the 300GB SATA model, doesn’t get on with the nForce chipset IDE SW drivers that are an optional part of the forceware installation. Simply saying 'no’ when asked whether you’d like to install them fully resolved my issue (at least, so far so good - not sure when I can stop saying that, but 36 hours and counting…), and so here I am with the machine that I first had up and running four days ago. Anyway, I care not, its a beast, and after a second graphics card, perhaps a dedicated sound card, and maybe a second hard-drive gets added, it’ll truly be a 'sweet rig’. Or something.