PC Master Race Fuck. Pee Cee is deeeeed :(

[Scouse]

Was kinda hoping it was just the graphics card. Was playing Rocket League last night and everything went orange. Thought sod it, and went to bed.

Won't boot. If it was just GFX card then it'd still make it into windows, right? Then I could connect by RD. But no. (Though I may just take the card out and see if it boots just in case).

Currently it acts as my PLEX library, work machine, games machine and main web browsing device. It's got an SSD for the O/S, one for games and another 4 3Tb hard drives in it which are pretty much chock full.

So, what do I replace it with and how? Does it make sense to build a nice little gaming rig and then buy a NAS of some sort to hold all my files. (Surely that'd save electricity so I don't leave my PC running a lot). If so, what sort of NAS?

Do I scrap the big PC or do I just buy a new M/B, RAM, CPU, GFX card then plug my existing drives back in. (I guess that'd be most cost effective).

I'm not skint, so could spend if I needed to - but I don't really *want* to. (I'd rather buy another bike for bikepacking or spend money on holidays, or, frankly, pay a bit of the mortgage off). I don't game above 1080p but don't see the sense in building a PC that won't at least run a rift if I go nuts / break my leg in the future.

Advice pretty please. 1) Whole new PC + NAS? 2) Resurrection with new components, no NAS. 3) Ressurection + NAS?


If we can decide on the above then we can talk specs

 

[caLLous]

Do you have onboard graphics or an old graphics card lying around for testing? Do you get BIOS POST beeps? Any output on the screen at all? Keyboard lights flash on startup?

I'd always recommend a separate system for storage, whatever you do. I put my storage server together from scratch so no idea for the off the shelf NAS options but you wouldn't need to buy disks. Are your drives just drives or are they strung together in some sort of array (be it RAID or DrivePool or SnapRAID or whatever)? If yes then that's something to think about when deciding how to bring your disks back online in a new system and if it's a new storage system (yay ZFS) then you'd need to buy new disks to back stuff up to for the switch over (or just nuke your existing ones if you don't care about what's on them).

 

[Scouse]

Gets so far then hangs. Graphical artifacts a plenty. Pretty sure it's not GFX card but a mate has a spare that he can bring round tomorrow. But I'm pretty sure it's done for. (It's an old Phenom II X3 black edition AM3 box).

I would need to buy drives - mine are *chock* full. And I'd be wanting to migrate the data over to a (bigger) NAS solution. Never used ZFS (and frankly, find it hard to spooge over file systems nowadays whereas in my y00f I'd give a shit about that sort of thing) and haven't the patience or inclination to build my own so something with a decent number of bays that I can spam mahoosive HDDs that would run a plex server natively would keep me happy. But not against it as most NAS's seem to run it natively anyway.

I'm tempted with option 3 - buy a NAS and populate it and buy some bits for my PC and just rebuild that with better stuff + current disks. Would give me time to migrate my sh33t off my PC in an orderly fashion.

 

[Raven]

New amd processors and graphics cards are looking pretty decent for a budget these days.

 

[Scouse]

Could just be the processor, ram and M/B tbh. I hear that top end AMD is like 90% of intel for half the price?

 

[Raven]

What's your budget for a full PC ?

 

[BloodOmen]

Depends what you use it for really, can prob put a decent one together for a reasonable price using one of the new AMD cpus, they do start cheap but they ramp up in price fast... I think the top end AMD cpu is like £500? or something, lowest is around £200 ish.

 

[Scouse]

What's your budget for a full PC ?

Not got one in mind. I don't game above 1080p (I connect my PC to a 42" telly and sit on a sofa) but can't see the point of building a piece of shit - something that'd be a bit future proofed would be good - particularly from CPU rather than GFX standpoint (VR is wank at the moment but CPU's are underutilised - so a decent CPU and a wanky GFX card may do the trick as can always swap out GFX in the future). It may even be that the existing GFX card isn't the problem - could be MB or CPU). But likely not do the full PC build. Got a 650w power supply, case and a bunch of hard drives...

 

[Syri]

Pretty sure it's the graphics card. Usually if the card goes, it will stop Windows from booting, even if there's onboard graphics in there as well. If you have onboard graphics (can't remember if that chip does or not, and mobo needs to have the connectors as well) stick the monitor on there, take the card out and try it. Almost all the time you get graphical artefacts, it's the graphics card. CPU or MB will usually not pass POST either bleeping loads or just running a fan or two, nothing else.

 

[Scouse]

Swapping it out tomorrow night. We'll see. But it's got me thinking of the need for a more robust solution anyway so...

 

[old.Osy]

I would go for option two in your OP. Things back to how they were and all that. After all, we're conservatives.

 

[Scouse]

I would go for option two in your OP. Things back to how they were and all that. After all, we're conservatives.

That'd certainly be the most cost-effective solution. But I do have the encroaching hard end to my disk space. We'll have to see

 

[Bodhi]

I have a Phenom X2 in my main PC (even gets used, occasionally ) and have onboard graphics, so you should be able to use that, depending on what board you have.

Personally I would go for the NAS option however - get an HP Microserver, install OS of chice, load drives, off you go. I've gone for Ubuntu on mine, I'm sure Windows would work just as well to save reformatting drives etc.

 

[Scouse]

Swapping it out tomorrow night. We'll see.

So, out comes the 7870 and in goes my mates R9 280x that he's going to sell on fleabay. Doesn't fix it.

Take out 280x, hoover pc. Like, really go at it with the brush appliance and bristles. What have I got to lose? 280x back in. Nope.

Kick PC. Hard.

Works.


Put 7870 back in. Defo broke. 280x works. Graphics card was fucked. At least I get a pretty decent upgrade for the 80 quid I'll pay my mate for it.

So the moral of the story is - kick PC = best fix. Now to ignore my impending hard drive snafu until the next time something breaks...

 

[Scouse]

Must be getting about 25% more FPS with the new card. Suddenly I'm a lot better at Rocket League