RAM Errors (Update: Now It's Much Worse)

[dencorso]

Errm...

@TrevMUN: You actually want me to believe you have no money to buy another board and memory sticks, but actualy do have plenty money to sink in an overpowered 850W PSU? Are you kidding or what?

[TrevMUN]

On 2/10/2019 at 11:30 PM, jaclaz said:

Actually *needing* a 850 W PSU sound like a high-high end gaming machine, and overclocking is so '90's  .

Are you really sure-sure you need such a powerful PSU?

At this moment I'm trying to figure out whether I do or not. A techie friend of mine doesn't think I would get much benefit from overclocking the CPU, unless my multimedia production projects sufficiently rely on the CPU and properly take advantage of hyperthreading. Since I don't know if I will need that extra horsepower, I wanted to leave the option open of pursuing it with a sufficiently beefy PSU rather than having to buy a new one down the road. Assuming that it would be safe to do so with my current UPS.

If I don't do any overclocking, the peak load wattage for my intended setup would be 698W. The calculator recommended a 750W PSU for that. Well within my UPS' capacity. However, that techie friend of mine said that when buying a power supply, I should buy one that actually has 50% more wattage than the peak usage determined by power supply calculators. He says this factors in power supplies losing performance as they age, and he considered the PSU the most critical part of a computer. By his metric that would mean that I'd need to look at buying a 1200W PSU.

So I'm not sure what to think. I've canvassed some of my other techie friends; most either say "don't hook your UPS up to a computer with a PSU wattage rating that's higher than your UPS' output, ever" or "As long as your peak wattage doesn't exceed the UPS's output it should be fine." Roughly an even split. I don't know what to think.

On 2/11/2019 at 7:13 AM, dencorso said:

Errm...

@TrevMUN: You actually want me to believe you have no money to buy another board and memory sticks, but actualy do have plenty money to sink in an overpowered 850W PSU? Are you kidding or what?

Reviewing my posts in this thread, @dencorso, I have no idea how you came to such a conclusion. This leads me to believe you are intentionally and maliciously misinterpreting what I said.

To be clear, I don't fault you for not remembering my previous posts and threads in MSFN over the years, like when I had asked almost five years ago about the feasibility of upgrading my desktop to a DDR4-based configuration. (Even though you were active in those topics.) I also don't fault you for seeing some of my recent posts elsewhere in which I have mentioned being in the process of buying a new set of parts of my computer. (Which outright invalidates your claims about what I've said.) I certainly can't fault you for not knowing about the extensive discussions I've had with friends and acquaintances on viable parts for a new setup, though @XP-x64-Lover can vouch for me.

I do fault you for putting into people's heads (like @Mcinwwl, who upvoted you) the idea that I said something I didn't, particularly when there was no reason for you to stoop to such a level. That's an absolute dick move on your part, and I do not appreciate it at all.

But fine. Let's clear the air, since this thread has gotten off-topic as it is.

In 2008, I overhauled my desktop computer with the goal of having a long-lasting, future-proofed setup which would not need a complete overhaul for a long time. That included parts which were, for the time, a big investment. Up until these hardware issues started happening last year, it seemed like these parts would last indefinitely no matter how hard I pushed them on a daily basis.

I don't like contributing to the e-waste problem. If a computer's still working, I'd prefer to find that computer a use. As I already mentioned earlier in this thread, I had plans to reuse the entire setup in another PC, something which would not need current-generation high-end parts.

However, there's a two major considerations where I am in my life right now that shape my choices:

First, I've been diagnosed with cancer and have a genetic predisposition for other cancers. I had to go through chemotherapy while I was studying for my Bachelor's, and that left me with very little money by the time I got started on my career. This is a major reason why I have not worked on upgrading my desktop computer sooner: I have had to spend the past year or two just trying to make back the money I had to spend finishing my degree and staying alive. Even then, I've been saddled with medical debt, some of which was sent to a debt collection company despite trying to stay on top of the bills. In order to ensure I live for a while longer I need annual monitoring with CT scans and MRIs. Where I live now, these are incredibly expensive.

I would have preferred to wait a few more months before buying the parts I need for the new configuration, but the hardware issues with my current configuration have forced my hand. Yet it's still a slow process precisely because of my financial situation. I've been trying to rebuild my credit, which has suffered at the hands of debt collectors even as I continue to negotiate with them. I can't just snap my fingers and buy everything I want right this minute.

The other major consideration is that I don't have a large living space. In spite of my best efforts, my career prospects required me to pack my bags and move halfway across the country to one of the more expensive places to live in the nation. I took only what I could fit in a car. To avoid having to spend half my paycheck on rent and half-again on utilities, I've been living in sublets.

So, having walked you through my current life situation, you should now have a better understanding of my thought process. If the problems behind my computer's current configuration were relatively inexpensive to fix (replacing an aging, faulty PSU or a few RAM sticks) I would be inclined to hang on to those parts, even given my current living conditions.

Just so we're clear, using a new PSU intended for a far more power-hungry setup in order to diagnose whether or not the PSU is the source of the hardware problems does not mean I would keep using that new PSU for my current setup. I would be more inclined to buy a less powerful PSU to replace the ailing PSU, were it confirmed that the old PSU is indeed ailing.

Replacing the CPU or motherboard, however, is a different story. At that point I would be more inclined to just sell the parts that still work and recycle the rest.

So, there you go. I didn't expect to have to explain my life situation just for because I sought help regarding how power supplies and UPSes interact, but here we are.

[dencorso]

5 minutes ago, TrevMUN said:

I do fault you for putting into people's heads (like @Mcinwwl, who upvoted you) the idea that I said something I didn't, particularly when there was no reason for you to stoop to such a level. That's an absolute dick move on your part, and I do not appreciate it at all.

I didn't actually say you said anything. Nor did I mean to offend. The simple opening of this thread shows a single-minded insistence in fixing a rig that seems to be foobar, and this creates the idea you aren't able to at least replace the board for another used one of the same model and maker and also buy one brand new memory stick to go with it. From my POV, that's OK. But then, when you start talking about a huge 850W PSU I got surprised and expressed it. As for your health problems, you have my sympathy and my respect. But have in mind RL sucks everywhere, and money don't grow in trees here in Brazil either.  I also try to avoid contributing to the e-waste problem. That's why I decomissioned 3 perfectly working Athlon XP machines and sold or gave away to friends all their parts. Had I kept one to use as a hardware firewall, I'd have a 600 W PSU running all the time... instead, I do that with a Raspberry Pi running OpenWRT. Makes sense in my book.

[TrevMUN]

12 minutes ago, dencorso said:

I didn't actually say you said anything. Nor did I mean to offend.

I'll take your word that you didn't mean to offend, but from my perspective, you did make such statements in a nondirect way; "you actually want me to believe" and such.
 

Quote

But then, when you start talking about a huge 850W PSU I got surprised and expressed it

It shouldn't have been a surprise; I did outright state "Because it's taking time for me to earn the money I need to buy parts for an all-new setup, I am continuing to try and determine what's causing the problem and if it is salvageable." So it's not like I didn't already talk about working toward buying new parts for my PC.
 

Quote

That's why I decomissioned 3 perfectly working Athlon XP machines and sold or gave away to friends all their parts. Had I kept one to use as a hardware firewall, I'd have a 600 W PSU running all the time... instead, I do that with a Raspberry Pi running OpenWRT. Makes sense in my book.

I had actually been thinking about using the current parts in my desktop for just such a purpose. That is to say, as a hardware router/firewall PC. I had first heard about Linux-based PCs acting as routers and firewalls in 2009ish and the idea intrigued me. I thought it would be a good way to continue getting use out of these parts even after a future overhaul.

It'd all be moot, though, if it turns out the motherboard or the CPU are behind the hardware failures. It just wouldn't be worth hanging on to everything else, especially when I am gathering parts for a comprehensive upgrade.
 

[jaclaz]

JFYI (and as a side-side note) it is a few years (I believe 2011 or 2012) that I sourced (for around 30-40 Euro each) some used "terminals" Fujitsu Futro S210/220/300 that sport :

Transmeta Crusoe 800 MHz(entirely passive cooled)
Internal PSU (no external "brick")
Expansion slot (1) that I use for a network card.
PS/2 connectors (besides Serial, Parallel and VGA) 

*like*:

https://www.ebay.it/itm/Fujitsu-Siemens-THIN-CLIENT-PC-FSC-FUTRO-S300-800MHz-256MB-CF-Standfus-Stromkbel/233116340957?

I replaced the tiny CF card with a 4 GB one and quickly and half-@§§edly installed on it Zeroshell and the thingy has been churning away 24/7 ever since.

To be fair the first one was replaced by its brother a couple years ago because the PSU died (power surge/lightning).

jaclaz

[TrevMUN]

Pretty sweet little system, @jaclaz! The "gate guard" idea I had for reusing my desktop's current setup probably won't be feasible until and unless I have the financial stability to get a large enough living space, like a studio apartment or something. At the moment internet access is being handled by the landlord.

Speaking of power supplies, do you think the 80+ efficiency ratings would have an impact on the recommendations I've gotten from others? That is to say, people who recommend getting a power supply with 50% more wattage than your predicted peak usage, or like my techie friend who says I should get double that amount to account for performance degradation?

In terms of accounting for efficiency loss as the power supply ages, would I be in better shape if I got a 750W or 800W PSU that's Platinum or Titanium 80+ efficiency rather than a 1200W PSU that's not?

Also, some other observations regarding my system: prior to shutting the system off for a whole day, my keyboard had been developing an odd behavior pattern where it would appear to "fall asleep," as in, stop responding and then suddenly repeat the last keystroke it recognized for a second. Leading to things like thisssssssssss. When hooked up to my laptop computer, the keyboard didn't exhibit this odd behavior, but it would do so when hooked up to the computer later; didn't matter whether I used the front panel USB outlets, or the motherboard's outlets in the rear.

Another thing is that the LEDs on my case flickered a few rare times. At the moment I can't recall if they plug directly into the power supply or if they go through the motherboard first.

When I shut down the computer for a while day on the 5th after finding RAM errors, the keyboard no longer acted strangely when hooked up to the desktop computer, and there hasn't been any flickering in the LEDs either.

Describing this situation to some of my other friends, they still think this points more to the motherboard failing than the power supply, but I'd like to test and see.

[jaclaz]

Back to topic, I am a non-believer (not entirely unlike dencorso   ) but what I don' t believe in is:

a) that your PC (unless it is actually a high end workstation or - worse - a gaming machine) would actually need anything more powerful than 550/600 W, maybe 650 W
b) that power supplies quality actually matters [1]
 

Why don't you post your full specs and let us double check if you actually need an actual "monster" PSU?

In my experience some of the "Online" calculators are sometimes way off and tend to be overly "cautious", i.e. the result may suggest a PSU that is much more than what is needed, even if taking into account  some "spare".

Getting double the suggested power is - let's say - conservative. 

 

Anything  750 W or higher is a "monster" in my personal opinion, being equivalent to 1 HP or more (an image is worth a thousand words):

the thingy that produces hot air in your PC has the same power of a large mammal that can lift 75 Kg by 1 m in 1 second (and may weight some 400-600 Kg and eat 20 pounds of hay each day) 

jaclaz

 

[1] This needs to be explained.

With the exception of a - by now mythical - Epson (with a DX2 66 processor) that worked just ok for some 22 years (not all of them, but nearly all, 24/7) that I decommissioned (and it was still working just fine) only a couple years ago, I had several - in practice every - PSU in service I ever had fail, one way or the other and for one reason or the other, the sample size is in the order of a few tens of machines so relatively little, still ....

... I never managed to find a meaningful pattern:

1) I had "El-cheapo" PSU's fail
2) I had "Mid-range price" PSU's fail
3) I had "known brand" PSU's fail

(though never used/tested the very high end ones that cost the same as a full computer)

I had El-Cheapo ones last the same or longer than "high price/brand" ones and the (what would be normal) opposite

Edited February 14, 2019 by jaclaz

[TrevMUN]

6 hours ago, jaclaz said:

Back to topic, I am a non-believer (not entirely unlike dencorso   ) but what I don' t believe in is:

a) that your PC (unless it is actually a high end workstation or - worse - a gaming machine) would actually need anything more powerful than 550/600 W, maybe 650 W
b) that power supplies quality actually matters [1]

I'm not sure why you're comparing yourself to dencorso. You've been a lot more constructive in your replies. My offhand remark last page about people making condescending "" comments wasn't about you, either; even when I first came here years ago I could see " " was something like a writing tic or catchphrase of yours. Anyway, it looks like there's someone else posting in this thread eager to cheer anyone on who appears to be dunking on me ...

I think this is a case where either I've not made my intentions with the new setup obvious enough, as I did refer to them previously.

For example, you say that my desktop's new setup won't need a 650W power supply unless it's a high end workstation or gaming machine. In responding to dencorso I linked to one of my earliest threads on MSFN where I briefly mentioned the sorts of things I do with this rig. In fact, in that same post I had mentioned to you that I do multimedia production, albeit not directly.

Part of the reason I needed high-end parts (for the time) when I overhauled my desktop in 2008 was precisely because of the stuff I do regarding multimedia production. This desktop is also my daily driver and so I often find myself having a lot of things running at once. In the years hence, what was awesome for a PC in 2008 is not so hot in 2019. To be frank though, I was feeling the squeeze as far back as 2011 because my machine would run out of resources to handle many of my 3D rendering and animation, 2D animation, illustration, and audio/video production projects.

I had to seriously cut back on what I do with this machine. I was looking forward to DDR4 back in 2014 for that very reason, it seemed like an opportune time for an overhaul. Of course, cancer threw one big monkey wrench into my life, and it's only now that I can afford to make big (if piecemeal) purchases toward my goal. Nevertheless, I'm going to do now what I did in 2008, and aim for parts which will provide a major boost in performance and serve me reliably for a very long time.

7 hours ago, jaclaz said:

Why don't you post your full specs and let us double check if you actually need an actual "monster" PSU?

In my experience some of the "Online" calculators are sometimes way off and tend to be overly "cautious", i.e. the result may suggest a PSU that is much more than what is needed, even if taking into account  some "spare".

Getting double the suggested power is - let's say - conservative. 

I'm down for that. While I do that, I'm also going to explain my thought process so certain people don't make assumptions.

First: As I indicated elsewhere recently the new setup is using an X99 motherboard. Around this time last year @XP-x64-Lover announced getting drivers for that OS working with the ASUS SABERTOOTH X99 series, and I wound up purchasing the TUF variant after conferring with her.

That means having to pick a CPU compatible with the Intel X99 chipset. I'm currently looking at purchasing a Broadwell-E CPU to capitalize on this, as the Broadwell-E series is better suited to tasks like multimedia production instead of gaming (which tends to benefit more from fewer but faster cores) compared to, say, Skylake. The price on these chips has gone down significantly since their initial MSRP, too. So, I'm trying to consider whether to go for the Core i7-6950X or the Core i7-6900K. Even the Core i7-6900K is a huge investment, but I aim to make this an investment hat will last at least a decade. For the power supply calculator, though, I was assuming the 6950X. Yes, I can see myself using those ten cores. I abuse the hell out of the four cores on my desktop's Q6600 as it is.

RAM has been one of the biggest bottlenecks for my work, as my current setup runs out of resources rather quick (and having to rely on lot of virtual memory is bad news given the hardware problems happening ... ) For RAM, I got a pretty good deal on four 16 GB (64 GB) of DDR4 sticks. However, I plan to (eventually) buy another four sticks and put this machine at 128 GB, but I think the 64 GB is plenty for now, until the desktop is running on the new configuration. Still, for power supply calculation purposes I assumed a full eight sticks of 16 GB.

When it comes to the GPU, I initially considered getting an older AMD FirePro at first. I reasoned the price would go down enough that I could snag a great multimedia production card at a fraction of the price it was at launch. However, I've found that the current lineup of general purpose GPUs has caught up to the 2012 era AMD FirePros. In fact, the GeForce GTX TITAN X is currently selling for as much (or a little less) than the AMD FirePro W9000, and yet from the tests I could find it's not only on par in many stats, but appears to outperform the FirePro in several benchmarks! What's more, the TITAN X appears to draw considerably less power (a techie friend attributes this to newer, more energy efficient tech).

A dude named Matt found a way to get nVidia's 970/980/990 and even TITAN X to play nice with XP and XP64. This is the major reason why I'm considering getting a GTX TITAN X. 

(For those thinking this is a gotcha moment, let me point out what Matt himself says: "But, even as revolutionary as OS emulation has become with the advent of hardware virtualization, it still doesn't compare to a bare metal native OS install. This is especially true when running games that may utilize OpenGL or DirectX, 3D applications and other computer-intensive processes. This typically comes down to GPU restrictions, although even that sector of virtualization is making strides with innovations like NVidia Grid. In my case specifically, I keep Windows XP 32-bit on-hand for a select handful of very obscure and specific applications, including some games and programs developed with older technologies and frameworks from the 1990s." I have similar habits regarding my work.)

I'm also looking at getting an SSD, after conferring with XP-x64-Lover and also looking at the topic on proper SSD care and maintenance under Windows XP we have here on MSFN. I had previously avoided SSDs given the problem of limited write cycles and what happens when one fails compared to a traditional HDD, but seeing the guides here on MSFN I'm willing to set one up purely for the operating system and nothing else. This will be in addition to a the Blu-Ray drive I already have, and the HDDs I already use (two at the moment) along with my assorted USB devices.

In the power supply calculator I highballed an estimation of what devices I have; even though I'm currently using a basic keyboard and mouse, for example, I picked "gaming keyboard and mouse" and four USB 3.0 devices. (All I really have is a SATA/IDE to USB external adapter, a pen tablet, a wireless adapter and some thumb drives, though.)

Also, a word on the desktop's case. I use the NZXT Phantom 820, which has a 200mm fan, three 140mm fans, a built-in fan controller and card reader, and a few strips of LED lighting. We're not talking anything too crazy like the RGB rainbow stuff that's popular nowadays, but I think it bears factoring in. The case is the last major upgrade the computer's had, which was years ago. The reason I got the case was because my computer used to have a mid-tower with a few 80mm fans, and I kept experiencing hard drive failures due to woefully insufficient cooling. This case keeps my drives clear away from the rest of the hardware, which I like; helps keep dust out and isn't bad at cable management, either. I should say, one of the fans wore out and had to be replaced, and I wound up getting a Thermaltake RIING 140mm Red LED fan to replace it. Some of the other case fans might need replacing in the future, too.

So, there you go. I hope that gives you sufficient information on my projected power usage.

Also, your postscript about horsepower is amusing given my colloquial reference to that earlier in this thread.

[jaclaz]

So, essentially it is what I would call a "high end (graphic) workstation".

64 GB of RAM are usually enough on those machines, but sure , if you plan on 128 GB you need to take that in account.

I don't know about the investment value, ten years is a rather far horizon when it comes to computing, only three or four years ago buying a SSD would have had a rather steep cost, nowdays they can be had for (metaphorically) peanuts, compare with:

https://blog.westerndigital.com/truth-ssds-hdd-vendors-do-not-want-you-to-know/

again an image is worth a thousand words (it is a 2015 forecast, but it came out as pretty much accurate):

Actual prices last quarter:

https://www.minitool.com/news/ssd-prices-fall.html

 

jaclaz

Edited February 15, 2019 by jaclaz

[TrevMUN]

Indeed. A 120GB SSD I was looking into getting had a special deal for $30. I was pleasantly surprised. Still, for sheer volume and potential of data recovery in case of drive failure, I prefer HDDs for storing files and such.

So what's your take on the power supply needs? I can't seem to find any power supplies that come in 800W spec, only in the 750W and 850W ranges. 650W might be too close for comfort from what the power supply calculators say the peak wattage would be ...