GeneralJock
New member
Hello Everyone,
This is my first post in this forum, and it's basically just a braindump, so feel free to ignore. I'm a moderately capable Joe who likes building PCs and mucking about with them.
However, I haven't been active in system building for quite a while. Apart from helping my son built his first proper desktop for his 15th birthday, I built myself a monster about 7 years ago and it's gone strong ever since with only one failure (Corsair power supply) so although expensive at the time, it's done me well. It was a monster at the time anyway: i7-3770K, 16GB RAM, and an ASUS GTX 980 all stuck onto an ASUS Z77 mainboard. All the games of the day on max setting.
A few years ago I started to have random phantom faults. PC wouldn't start, then sometimes it would, and occasionally it shut down on its own. I took a guess and dumped the Corsair 850 for a EVGA 1000W and never looked back. Rare for a Corsair to fail only after a couple of years, but there you go.
A month ago I started getting really weird stuff happening: Windows 7 hanging on boot, then booting okay, then booting but with no icons on the desktop (!!). Then booting okay, and then just randomly crashing. Then the keyboard wouldn't work at the log-in page, then it did. I am scrupulous on virus protection (BitDefender) and had no reason to suspect a virus. Finally, it crashed out big time until I could only boot from USB. On doing that, the SSD boot drive would read sometimes, then not, then fail and finally couldn't be read at all.
I've changed the SSD for a new 500GB Kingston, taking the opportunity to check and remake the cabling, hoover the whole system and clean it up. The system booted fine. My data, documents and games are all on a separate HDD so once I got a few installs sorted everything ran fine. Except...
Firstly, I cannot get rid of a USB driver fault in the "Other devices" section of Device Manager. All the USB controllers are working fine. I've updated everything from the ASUS website, unplugged all the USB devices, replugged them in, and it just won't go away. I've disabled it, and it's had no effect on anything. But also I am getting constant hangs (disabling USB device didn't affect that) usually for around 5 - 10 seconds, apps not responding. They always come back, but hang in "Not Responding" mode for that period. Caches all emptied, drives defragged, Windows diagnostics reports no faults. And as of a couple of days ago I've had high voltage warnings on both the 3.3V and the 5.0V buses. I go straight to the ASUS monitoring tool, and the buses report at 3.312V and 5.040V steady.
Anyway, I've decided I've had enough and there's probably a gremlin on the board somewhere. Going to upgrade to a newer board, faster RAM and a newer i7 processor, probably an 8700 or the like.
Rather than upgrade to an expensive new GPU, I'm going to pick up another same-box GTX 980 and get an SLI-ready board and couple the two up.
I'm also going to switch to Windows 10. Whilst I still prefer Windows 7 as an OS, it's just too much effort to apply all the updates and fixes now, so I've decided to bite the bullet so I'll bundle one with my new hardware.
Anyway... thought I'd share that. If you're inclined, I'd welcome any comments or thoughts on the driver issue, the voltages, the choice of new hardware, the plan to try SLI and Windows.
If you got this far, thanks for reading!!
All the best, Jock.
This is my first post in this forum, and it's basically just a braindump, so feel free to ignore. I'm a moderately capable Joe who likes building PCs and mucking about with them.
However, I haven't been active in system building for quite a while. Apart from helping my son built his first proper desktop for his 15th birthday, I built myself a monster about 7 years ago and it's gone strong ever since with only one failure (Corsair power supply) so although expensive at the time, it's done me well. It was a monster at the time anyway: i7-3770K, 16GB RAM, and an ASUS GTX 980 all stuck onto an ASUS Z77 mainboard. All the games of the day on max setting.
A few years ago I started to have random phantom faults. PC wouldn't start, then sometimes it would, and occasionally it shut down on its own. I took a guess and dumped the Corsair 850 for a EVGA 1000W and never looked back. Rare for a Corsair to fail only after a couple of years, but there you go.
A month ago I started getting really weird stuff happening: Windows 7 hanging on boot, then booting okay, then booting but with no icons on the desktop (!!). Then booting okay, and then just randomly crashing. Then the keyboard wouldn't work at the log-in page, then it did. I am scrupulous on virus protection (BitDefender) and had no reason to suspect a virus. Finally, it crashed out big time until I could only boot from USB. On doing that, the SSD boot drive would read sometimes, then not, then fail and finally couldn't be read at all.
I've changed the SSD for a new 500GB Kingston, taking the opportunity to check and remake the cabling, hoover the whole system and clean it up. The system booted fine. My data, documents and games are all on a separate HDD so once I got a few installs sorted everything ran fine. Except...
Firstly, I cannot get rid of a USB driver fault in the "Other devices" section of Device Manager. All the USB controllers are working fine. I've updated everything from the ASUS website, unplugged all the USB devices, replugged them in, and it just won't go away. I've disabled it, and it's had no effect on anything. But also I am getting constant hangs (disabling USB device didn't affect that) usually for around 5 - 10 seconds, apps not responding. They always come back, but hang in "Not Responding" mode for that period. Caches all emptied, drives defragged, Windows diagnostics reports no faults. And as of a couple of days ago I've had high voltage warnings on both the 3.3V and the 5.0V buses. I go straight to the ASUS monitoring tool, and the buses report at 3.312V and 5.040V steady.
Anyway, I've decided I've had enough and there's probably a gremlin on the board somewhere. Going to upgrade to a newer board, faster RAM and a newer i7 processor, probably an 8700 or the like.
Rather than upgrade to an expensive new GPU, I'm going to pick up another same-box GTX 980 and get an SLI-ready board and couple the two up.
I'm also going to switch to Windows 10. Whilst I still prefer Windows 7 as an OS, it's just too much effort to apply all the updates and fixes now, so I've decided to bite the bullet so I'll bundle one with my new hardware.
Anyway... thought I'd share that. If you're inclined, I'd welcome any comments or thoughts on the driver issue, the voltages, the choice of new hardware, the plan to try SLI and Windows.
If you got this far, thanks for reading!!
All the best, Jock.
