My HTPC/Photo editing/Gaming/Everything setup!

[Rowdy S13]

Thanks! The video card is kind of nuts, but I really don't like the way it looks. Seems to run fine though, so it will stay for now I am not doing full water cooling, just the water cooler on the CPU. It's a Corsair H100i water cooler, all self contained just for the CPU. So as I said the piece on the CPU is the water block, pump, and controller, then you have the lines to the radiator, all of which comes all together. You don't have to deal with filling anything, just install it like a normal heat sink (more or less) and mount the radiator and fans. This case is made for this type of cooler, and I am sure there are others that are as well.


Sean

 

[Rowdy S13]

Lets first update with a pic! I added some lights to the mix because, well why not really I actually had a bunch laying around for another project that wasn't working out very well. Anyway, I went to the local Micro Center with a buddy of mine the other day and got a set. Long story short, I ended up needed some of my spare parts because of how I positioned them. I needed a second transformer since my extension cables are apparently garbage. It all worked out in the end, and here is the result!

I think it looks pretty good. That same day we kind of ran through everything and got it all set up pretty well. We slightly overclocked the CPU to 3.8 (from 3.4), got the memory first running at its correct 1866 speed, and then overclocked it as well a very small amount. For some reason it was running at 1600 default, which I have seen other people say as well which is strange. Anyway we got everything up and running, put some load on it all to make sure it would stay nice and cool and called it a night. The next day I went though some optimization of the system, mostly just windows things to clear up some space and speed up the boot. I can now go from fully off to loaded in Windows in 30 second, just loading windows is somewhere around 7-8 seconds.

Now for the problems So I had tried to rip the special features BluRay from Pacific rim. I had borrowed the movie from a friend, and wanted to watch the special features just not on the main system. Point is, I ripped the disk using MakeMKV, and then shrunk it using Handbrake. When I went to watch it, it was just a 3 min clip of drawings and no audio. I thought that was strange, but just ignored it thinking I had done something wrong. Now yesterday I was downloading a file, and trying to show someone something on FB (so nothing very intense) and it gave me the blue screen of death! I need to look at the logs to try and see what the problem was I guess. I was always told that when it did that, it was memory. However someone said that it could be one of (or both I guess) the SSD's as well. I will say that when I installed windows this time around it was not very cooperative. But it restarted and I was on my merry way again after that, for a while. I later tried to rip Watchmen BluRay just to mess around with doing it since I have literally only ripped a single BluRay up to this point. So I pop it in, and nothing. I tried to look at "My Computer" and it says nothing is there (not even a blank or full disk). I tried a DVD and it was fine, went back to a different BluRay and same problem.

So essentially I have had a single blue screen of death, and it is not reading BluRays at all now. Not that the blue screen of death is the cause of the BluRay problem though since it seems to be messed up before that. Also, less important is that it will randomly start itself after I shut it down. This may be from the wireless software though, either way I am not too worried about that compared to the others.

What do the experts have to say?!


Sean

 

[itschris]

First... awesome looking machine. That's so damn neat and clean. Great job on that.

It's very hard to diagnose issues when you have mutliple things wrong which can be cause by multiple things as well. I'm sure smart guys will jump in to help, but document as much as you can here so we have resource to look back upon. That's what I've been doing on my build thread. Posting a problem then having either someone else tell me what to do or figuring it out myself. It's good to look back for others if they encounter similar issues.

 

[Rowdy S13]

Thanks! I tried to make it as nice as I could

I got the BluRay player issue fixed it seems. I updated the firmware on the drive and it seems to be working. I am ripping Watchmen right now, so I will report back. As for the Blue Screen of Death, I am just going to pretend it never happened for now


Sean

 

[Rowdy S13]

My plan failed me! It blue screened on me again last night, so now I need to put in some effort to figure out what is going on.

In the meantime I would really like a solution where I can put a disk in, and rip it directly to a very high quality (better yet loss less) format that Plex can play directly without picking a million options, or running it through multiple programs. READY..... GO!!!



Sean

 

[itschris]

Maybe try eliminating a set of the RAM modules. If it blue screens again, swap the other set. That way you can eliminate the RAM as an issue. Perhpas there's more elegant ways to do that, but that's how we did it back in the day.

I think if you just use MakeMKV you'll be fine.

 

[Rowdy S13]

Maybe try eliminating a set of the RAM modules. If it blue screens again, swap the other set. That way you can eliminate the RAM as an issue. Perhpas there's more elegant ways to do that, but that's how we did it back in the day.

I think if you just use MakeMKV you'll be fine.

I can do that with the RAM for sure. Actually, now that I am thinking about it, there is a diagnostic tool built into the motherboard.... Its a button that is near the RAM and some LED's. I should look at that.

My problem with MakeMKV is it creates lots of small files, not one single MKV file. I poked around settings a little yesterday, but didn't see anything that would effect that.


Sean

 

[itschris]

It should make one MKV file. I usually pick the movie and audio only, but it should create just one file. I've never messed much with the settings, but pretty certain if it's creating multi pull files for one movie you can change that.

On the other hand, you may just to rip ISO and be done with it. I'm trying to decide which to go myself...if ISO, than DVDFab is the way to go.

 

[Rowdy S13]

Well good news first. I think I finally figured out MakeMKV and its working great as a single solution now. Not that I have the space to be ripping movies uncompressed, but I have done a few to test it all out and its working well. My network on the other hand, not so much. The wireless (router is 802.11G) cant handle the data of uncompressed 1080p. I will take care of that soon enough though, for now that is all working as I would like.

Now for the bad(ish). It dumped on me again yesterday after freezing while transferring a bunch of files from an external. We were trying to move somewhere around 40GB on USB 3.0 and it just froze. So I restarted it, tried again and it blue screened. We transferred what we needed, then later on I ran the windows mem test and everything checked out A-OK. I am going to read on how to use the on board memory tester today or tomorrow and see what that gets me. I really hoped that the optical drive firmware was to blame. All in all though, that is not that massive of a problem for a new computer with a mix match of parts meant to be messed with

 

[Rowdy S13]

Just a bit of an update, I think I finally figured out my blue screen problem. After getting VERY frustrated at it the other day because it was starting to get very frequent, I decided to dive in and solve it once and for all! As it turned out, the first thing I did ended up catching the problem. I had already run the Windows Memtest, and it had come back OK so I went straight to pulling modules. I started by pulling the sticks in the #2 and #4 slots, and started it up. After a few hours or trying to get it to crash again (doing things that almost always made it crash previously) I had 0 issues. Actually, it even seemed to be a bit faster with just the two sticks. So I shut it down, and I put the two sticks I had pulled out into the slots I was just running (#1 and #3). I clicked the power back on, and it wouldn't even start! I tried a few times, and it would recycle once then hang on a black screen. I swapped it back, and again ran for hours with no problems. I am not going to say that one of (or maybe both) sticks are the only problem since I never tested the #2 and #4 slots, but I think its safe to say they are A problem.

On the plus side, I was editing photos in CS6, ripping DVD's in Make MKV, backing up catalogs in LR5, and had a few browser windows open including streaming some Pandora all at the same time and I was using ~35% of my memory, and ~4% of my CPU I am going to do a little bit of research and see if maybe I would be better off with two sticks of better memory, or if I should stay with 4 like I had. It seemed faster, but then again half of what I was using wasn't bad memory like before either.


Sean

 

[itschris]

I knew it. If I had a dime for everytime a RAM module screwed me. Back in the day, this was a very common problem. I'd say get two new sticks. For what you're doing, it's certainly not going to hurt you at all. Glad you worked it out. I know how frutrating it can be.

 

[Rowdy S13]

Yeah I have had plenty of issues of my own with memory as well. What made it tricky was how intermittent the problem was, but looking back it makes sense. It seems like when I would get into a situation that used a lot of memory I would have an issue. If I was idle, or doing easy tasks (web browsing) it would stay stable. Chances are it was primarily using the modules in slots #1 and #3 in that case. If I started to do memory heavy things, and it started to rely on the bad stick(s) in slots #2 and #4 it would crash. I also think it was a problem that got progressively worse as well. When I first put it all together, I backed up all of my external hard drives, which is 3.6TB worth of stuff (2.5TB on USB3.0, and 1.1TB on USB2.0) and I did it almost all at the same time with no issues. A couple weeks ago I tried to get some files off of a friends drive (~40GB USB3.0) and it crashed 2 or 3 times during that.

I am waiting on an RMA from G.Skill so I can exchange the memory. I will stick with using all of the modules for 32GB of memory. I think having more will become helpful when I am sorting and editing pics which was one of my main functions of this system. I still really need to figure out a NAS solution though and get some HD's for that. I have been backing up DVD's, but I don't have a ton of space to keep going. Actually I dont even really want them on the drive that is in this machine to be honest, but I figured I could get a start on them


Sean