Hello!
The last week or so I've been dealing with an odd issue I haven't quite been able to figure out. Motherboards are my weakest link when it comes to PCs so that may very well be the root cause that I'm overlooking. I'll explain the series of events down below.
My system is pretty old (bought it from a friend a while back) but has held together quite well. I've been looking into building a new one and went to check what RAM I have to see if it would be compatible with the new rig I was looking into at the time. I opened up the machine, took out a stick of RAM to write down what it is, and popped it back in. I had booted once while it was missing that one stick and everything seemed fine. I booted down and replaced the RAM and again everything seemed fine as best I can remember, but ever since then I've had a weird stutter in games like the framerate is getting hit, but even setting everything to lowest settings doesn't make a difference. Also loading web pages, which before was instantaneous, now seems to be more difficult for the machine.
I've tried everything I can think of including changing the thermal paste on the CPU and went so far as to completely disassemble the machine and put it back together with better airflow and removing two unnecessary hard drives. That seemed to help slightly for some reason but the issue persisted. I began testing the RAM and found that if I remove one stick now (didn't do this before) the OS will stick on "Starting Windows." If I remove two sticks it won't boot at all. Also, after placing the sticks back in after that I got a message from the mobo asking me to either enter the BIOS and set everything how I want it or boot with default values. I had seen this once before around the time the issue started but I don't remember if it was when I was originally messing with the ram or before. I checked everything in the BIOS and didn't see anything unusual (to my knowledge) and booted to Windows which again worked fine. I tried loading some games again and still had the stutter, although the first time I loaded a game within a minute or two the machine seemed to lose signal to everything connected to it (mouse, keyboard, monitor, etc). I did a hard shutdown and turned it back on and it hasn't done that again since. I haven't tried updating the BIOS as they appear to be on the latest version already and I'm worried I'll brick the machine.
Here are my specs:
CPU: AMD Phenom II X2 555 3.2 ghz
RAM: 12GB RAM GSkill Ripjaw DDR3-1600
MOBO: M4A79XTD EVO
GPU: Radeon HD 6600
HDD: Windows is on a 90GB SSD and everything else is on a plain old 500GB drive
At this point I'm guessing the issue is the motherboard going out but again that's my weakest area of knowledge so I thought I'd run it by you guys. If there any any tests you'd like me to run and paste here please let me know.
The last week or so I've been dealing with an odd issue I haven't quite been able to figure out. Motherboards are my weakest link when it comes to PCs so that may very well be the root cause that I'm overlooking. I'll explain the series of events down below.
My system is pretty old (bought it from a friend a while back) but has held together quite well. I've been looking into building a new one and went to check what RAM I have to see if it would be compatible with the new rig I was looking into at the time. I opened up the machine, took out a stick of RAM to write down what it is, and popped it back in. I had booted once while it was missing that one stick and everything seemed fine. I booted down and replaced the RAM and again everything seemed fine as best I can remember, but ever since then I've had a weird stutter in games like the framerate is getting hit, but even setting everything to lowest settings doesn't make a difference. Also loading web pages, which before was instantaneous, now seems to be more difficult for the machine.
I've tried everything I can think of including changing the thermal paste on the CPU and went so far as to completely disassemble the machine and put it back together with better airflow and removing two unnecessary hard drives. That seemed to help slightly for some reason but the issue persisted. I began testing the RAM and found that if I remove one stick now (didn't do this before) the OS will stick on "Starting Windows." If I remove two sticks it won't boot at all. Also, after placing the sticks back in after that I got a message from the mobo asking me to either enter the BIOS and set everything how I want it or boot with default values. I had seen this once before around the time the issue started but I don't remember if it was when I was originally messing with the ram or before. I checked everything in the BIOS and didn't see anything unusual (to my knowledge) and booted to Windows which again worked fine. I tried loading some games again and still had the stutter, although the first time I loaded a game within a minute or two the machine seemed to lose signal to everything connected to it (mouse, keyboard, monitor, etc). I did a hard shutdown and turned it back on and it hasn't done that again since. I haven't tried updating the BIOS as they appear to be on the latest version already and I'm worried I'll brick the machine.
Here are my specs:
CPU: AMD Phenom II X2 555 3.2 ghz
RAM: 12GB RAM GSkill Ripjaw DDR3-1600
MOBO: M4A79XTD EVO
GPU: Radeon HD 6600
HDD: Windows is on a 90GB SSD and everything else is on a plain old 500GB drive
At this point I'm guessing the issue is the motherboard going out but again that's my weakest area of knowledge so I thought I'd run it by you guys. If there any any tests you'd like me to run and paste here please let me know.
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