Recent content by red_onion

I appreciate all the excellent advice. I'm going to give it a day or two to see if anyone comes to AMD's/the Trinity APU's defense. Otherwise, it's Intel inside and a 7K-series Radeon. Thanks again.

(DELETED - double posted.)

I really, really appreciate the insight. I try to support AMD when I can--Intel is too close already to ruling the world--but gaming is important to me, and I guess you can't argue with benchmarks. I neglected to mention that I do need to tuck a new monitor as well as the OS into the same...

I'm interested in any opinions re. this from-scratch budget gaming build. Note please that my budget is ~$800, and I use the PC mostly for gaming and general use. Everything's coming from newegg: * CPU: AMD A10-5800K Trinity 3.8GHz (4.2GHz Turbo) Socket FM2 100W Quad-Core Desktop APU (CPU +...

You're right; I took a look at the specs for my G.Skill RAM and see that the voltage requirement is 1.8v to 1.9v, so apparently I'm already at the maximum. Fine. Maybe I'll eek my way up to 1.5v on the CPU and see if stability improves at 3.2 Ghz. The highest I got was 1.45v. Or maybe I'll...

Interesting. Okay, any suggestions about how high I can/should go with my DDR voltage? Right now it's set to 1.90v and can go as high as 2.45v in 0.05v increments. Is there some stock "highest safe voltage" for a pair of 1Gig DDR2 800Mhz sticks? While we're at it, you describe 1.6v as...

I bought this processor because I wanted to try overclocking and this one was supposed to overclock effortlessly. I can overclock to 3.0 Ghz with stock voltage (1.35v) as promised, which is cool, but when I change the multiplier from 15 to 16 (3.2 Ghz) and raise the voltage to 1.4 as instructed...

Thanks for the comments. This turned out to be no big deal; the folks at Microsoft e-mailed me with instructions on what I should delete on my machine and a zipped .bat file I could run afterwards to set myself up again. I'm updating painlessly once more. :)

Are you getting an error that points to your 3850? There are a lot of things that could be causing what you describe. Any chance you're using a Creative sound card? I used to have a similar-sounding problem that was caused by my Audigy 2 (was never solved with any driver version I tried; I...

Yep, it's 8.1. I just rebuilt this machine, so all my drivers are fully updated. I've seen the same issue with the logo movies described by a handful of other folks in various forums, usually with 3850 cards, but not always. One person suggested renaming those movies so that they are skipped...

Well, an update: all the demo versions I downloaded perform with exactly the same problems I described above. The good news is that I was able to solve the transparency problem by moving my "shader" quality from medium to high, leaving all the other settings on medium (where the game assigned...

@ Zylatis: Cool and Quiet is software that will automatically adjust your clocking and voltage dependant on current need. Once installed, you have to enable/disable in your BIOS. If you're overclocking, chances are you want to hit a certain speed regardless of actual need, so Cool and Quiet...

For what it's worth: I recently had to repair/reactivate XP SP2 on a homebuilt after a major upgrade where the only things left to the orignal PC were the case, one hard drive, and my DVD/CD-RW. Windows notified me after the repair that I'd made "significant changes" and would have to...