Duke23

I'd have to sort of go with Elthy on this one. I'm not a professional, expert, etc but I'll tell you what I'd do for what it's worth, and everyone can feel free to give me an evil look. If you're 100% sure you're not ever going to overclock, I'd personally go with a cheaper mobo, the non K processor if it's cheaper, use the stock CPU heat sink (If I'm not mistaken that CPU does come with one -- hey, get those pointy sticks away from me!) and use the cash you saved to get a GTX-760 or better. I also agree that you don't need the 750w PSU, I'm sure you'd be fine with a 500 or 600 and even that is giving you a fair bit of wiggle room. Unless you do start running more than one GPU, which I wouldn't recommend anyway for gaming. But I can't say anything really because I have the CX-750 as well; I got a deal on it and I figure it's never a bad thing to have more power than you need, just be aware for budget's sake. I'd also skip the sound card for now since most motherboards these days seem to be more than adequate for normal use. It might not be studio quality but you can always upgrade later if necessary. I have that same HDD and it's solid but I'm also partial to the 250gb Samsung 840 Evo SSD I just bought, it blows any HDD out of the water so you might want to pick one up in addition to the HDD if it's feasible for your budget. Even if you're going to wait a good little while to overclock (I like to keep my options open) I'd still use the stock heat sink for now but still get the K processor and the good mobo of course, and when you're ready to experiment go for a liquid cooling system. But that's me. There's nothing to be scared of with overclocking you just have to do a little research, use common sense, and watch your temps and overall stability. In most cases if you screw it up bad enough the computer will just shut down and you start over with lower settings no harm done. Speaking of the GTX-760, Camacha if you're reading this I'm crossing my fingers that I just fixed my problem. I was coming up with nothing for a while and then I had a freeze with KSP, Skyrim, and Netflix each running alone within a couple days, so next thing on the list was to look closer at the GPU. I ran Display Driver Uninstaller (the successor to Driver Sweeper? Some sources say Driver Fusion is) and you were right, I still had some residual R9 stuff hanging around. I used it to uninstall EVERYTHING and I'm going to put it through its paces in the next few days and see what happens. I know I just recommended the 760 but I can't blame the card for my own negligence and even with the crashes (assuming it was GPU related) I'm happier with it than I was with the R7-260x OC and the R9-270x Gaming put together.

26. I was starting to think I was in a minority here but maybe not.

I see. Nothing wrong with being fussy when it comes to computers, that can save you a lot of trouble. Just curious, do you work on them for a living? I'm just a self taught nerd, I guess I learn something new every day... I spent a lot of time in my childhood screwing up computers and had to learn how to fix them too because no one was going to do it for me, found out it was kind of fun. Ah but that all started back in the dark ages of DOS and Win3.1 I can't seem to avoid trouble on this project though, I give up for now. I tried to reinstall the OS but now for some unknown reason Windows says it can't set itself up on my hardware. Sigh. I even tried the msoobe trick but that failed, so I just reverted to my backup. It won't let me over provision now even after a forced TRIM so I did it manually in disk manager and it tells me I have just a bit less space than recommended that I can shrink. I guess this could be solved by doing the secured erase, something I couldn't really do easily with a non working partition earlier. Something I did do was take the time to go into the registry and BIOS to enable AHCI. I didn't think it would make much difference but I saw notable gains in the benchmarks for the SSD and, well, inconsistency on the internal HDD. It changes every time while the SSD stays about the same (I read that it could make a small difference with them as well). Now that I think of it, I wonder if AHCI being disabled is the reason it couldn't install? lol. I should really think these things through, but I guess half the fun is trial and error. Another day maybe. A computer that works 99% of the time is better than one that works 0%.

Sounds like about as much of a headache as I'm having lol. Best of luck. Sorry I guess I kind of ran that all together. I meant have you seen performance gains from using secure delete on the SSD? I thought that was only for (older) systems that don't support "trim".

I'm not sure that I did. I remember running something to that effect after uninstalling the old card but I'm not sure if that was the one. Have you seen gains in performance? I thought that was only for older systems like XP. I remember seeing some benchmarks for crossfire in particular where the initial numbers looked great but user experience was about the same or worse because it was spitting out duplicate frames and other random junk.

Yes, I was trying to be prepared. I figured in the future I'd overclock the CPU and also possibly XFire two graphics cards with overclocks of their own. It turns out though, that if you just get a decent graphics card from the start, you don't really need two. I'm going to go ahead and reinstall my OS just to cover my bases. I'd be happy if that's all I have to do for now. I will be running that one very soon, I got my flash drive working again with that on it. I did actually. I did a full burn-in with Furmark and the CPU was stress tested for a while with S&M (I think). Both seemed to be working flawlessly. I was thinking earlier maybe it's none of this and something in the registry, which is why I want to go ahead and reinstall the OS to see if it helps. I wonder if one of the old GPUs didn't uninstall "everything" properly? With the 260x I could directly trace system crashes to it, based on clock speed changes and frequency of the crashes. Above a certain core clock and it would go on the fritz, and any memory clock increase was bad news.

Thanks for the response. I have tried different configurations trying to pinpoint it but not much luck so far. I'll continue and use some of the suggestions you gave. Of note: -my PSU is a Corsair Builder series CX 750, it should be more than capable. -problem persists between hard drive and SSD with the same install. -seems to happen more often when I'm gaming with two monitors connected as opposed to one, but it's usually several days apart so it's hard to tell. I can't replicate the problem other than start up a game and wait (for days). -the graphics card was a manufacturer defect. I ran a Radeon 260x OC for a couple months before and my GTX-760 ever since with no problems, at least nothing like that. The Radeon cards have their own set of issues in general... -I did the Windows memory test last night and it showed nothing wrong. I was going to use a third party program on my flash drive but something happened to that drive and it needs to be reloaded. -I have run SFC and it also came up with nothing. Problem is most of the spare parts I have laying around are older because that's mostly what I still work on for friends, sadly. Athlon64s, P4s and Core2Duos, DDR / DDR2 RAM, IDE hard drives, etc. I do still have the 260x though as a backup. For what it's worth I disconnected my DVD burner when I installed the SSD because I thought it came with a cable and didn't buy one I have a gut feeling this is a problem with the motherboard but I need to confirm that somehow. It happens sometimes within 12 hours and sometimes waits a week or so. Seems to be mostly when gaming, very rarely when watching a movie or converting a video, never just idling or browsing the web which makes it harder to test for with any certainty. ("it's working, but did I wait long enough to be sure?" lol). The thing with this motherboard is that it doesn't have the best track record (the model, not mine.) from what I understand it wasn't originally made to run any 125w processor, they changed something in the revision model to allow it but warned strongly against any overclock to the cpu whatsoever if you're running an FX-4350/8350. That to me makes it questionable but at the time it was a great price, I wanted the thing up and running ASAP, and I planned to upgrade several components within the year anyway, that being one of them. Again thanks for the tips, I'll take it under advisement and continue my search. I still want to replace this motherboard even if it's not the problem, so I can do a teensy weensy overclock You're very right about the VM too, pretty much anything other than using file managers and word processors is annoying. I tried to run Win98 in one for an old game I was having trouble with and it was painful at best.

Tried my hand at a boat earlier but it didn't turn out well... This was just a test and I was going to build the rest around it, but I got discouraged. It would do about 20m/s with the nose down in the water, and when I tried to put it on shore it fell into pieces and my Kerbal rolled up onto the beach. (I enabled infinite fuel for the first time ever on this test because I realized I forgot fuel lines after finally getting it to water.) Very nice! What's it look like? Mine is only good for LKO missions unless I refuel it in orbit but it's got a little over 5000 DV with all the tanks topped off. Pretty useful bird once I got some of the bugs worked out, it's great for sending up SCANSats and adventurous Kerbals with little green deathwishes (you'll see in the video) or tracking down anomalies... That's my next goal, to build a new one capable of visiting Mun / Minmus with no refuel. I think I'll go try to land this one in the flats on Minmus just to see what I'm dealing with since I've never really done much with horizontal landings off Kerbin, unless you count my rocket rover / hopper (Mun) which was much smaller.

Interesting, I had run across a program for sandboxing but I never really used it. I normally just fire up a virtual machine for testing since I occasionally like to play with viruses I find on other people's computers. Trying to find out what all they affect, ways around any lockouts it imposes, alternate methods of removal, repairing the system to a usable state after a particularly nasty one, that sort of thing. This was just in November / December of last year that I bought this RAM kit, maybe it was a Black Friday thing? I remember buying a few parts around that time. You're right though, I had forgotten that DDR3 has been around a while and it's "about that time". Pretty sure even the normal price for that kit was around $75 at the time now that I think about it. [Warning, computer rant unavoidable] I'd like to keep this computer a while but it's irritating me again. My system freeze just happened again for the first time in a while, and it turns out it's not KSP specific because this time it was during Skyrim (not related to my KSP ctds, those are gone and seem to have been caused by loading too much into memory by chance while already being close to the 32bit limit). After a hard restart I turned on all my monitoring software and loaded the game back up and NOTHING in this entire computer is getting above 55 degrees with Skyrim, RAM usage was well below the 32bit limit and VRAM usage was about 1.5gb. No overclocks, no viruses, PSU is overkill, and all my drivers are up to date except Realtek HD audio because it won't let me for some reason. This wouldn't irritate me near as much if I could just figure out what's causing it so I can replace / fix it! No error logs because the whole system locks up (but the monitors stay on and keep displaying the last frame, oddly enough). I think I'm going to run a full test on the RAM while I'm asleep to eliminate that and if it comes up clean I'm probably going to reinstall the OS. I have already tried reseating the RAM and the graphics card. Should have just done the fresh install when I put in the SSD to be safe but I wanted it right then. If that doesn't help I guess I'll break down and buy a new motherboard, something in the Asus 990 series. Currently running an MSI 970a-g46 and I have never really trusted this thing to properly handle my FX-4350. Thing is, I was using less than 50% of the processor at the time so I don't see why it'd be overloading the VRMs or anything. I like fixing things but I can't fix that which I can't diagnose... Really hoped to put off upgrading the mobo but I might pull my hair out if I don't try it, and I lose enough of that in the shower every morning. But if you (or anyone) has another idea feel free to throw it out there. I wonder if my old graphics card messed something up in the motherboard, I can't remember if it ever did this before it. I had a Radeon 270x Gaming Edition literally catch on fire about a week after I bought it... It looked pretty cool while it was doing it though, and I have to give it credit for the fact that I was still playing Skyrim while it was on fire. I heard the sizzle and thought I was near a torch, then I saw flames in my computer case through the plexiglass and pulled the plug. I didn't worry about it too much at the time because it was as far away from anything except a case fan as possible and only managed to singe the nylon netting off one of my PSU wires, but it could have damaged something internal I guess. Crazy stuff. /rant

Confirmed again... The SSD seemed to help "a little" but the RAMDisk didn't change anything. That's the boat I'm in Camacha. I have 2x4gb G.Skill Ripjaws X that I paid ~$55 for, now the same kit is almost double that! I must have caught a sale or something. I'm looking at a 16gb kit to do the same thing you're talking about but I got 8-8-8-24 timing on the ones I have and the lowest I can find in 16gb kit is 9-9-9-24 so I don't know if they will play nice for dual channel mode. If it slows down the ones I have I guess it's no big deal. I could always try to crank them all up to 1866mhz to compensate

I made a demo video for my Valkyrie series SSTO and the VTOL variant prototype. I swear I had the video named and sitting on my computer before soulsource said he had fun with spaceplanes Video is sped up 3x throughout to make the boring parts less boring and less obvious when I do something stupid. The VTOL variant hasn't actually made orbit yet (I doubt it will with the extra weight / drag), or transitioned from horizontal flight to vertical landing. Edit: I take that back. Kind of rough, but it worked!

That, sir, is awesome. The Whack never disappoints! Me too...

I was watching a basically how not to crash VTOLs because that's all I've ever done with them, even though I "know" the basics I kept getting frustrated and quitting. So I decided to make a couple and try again. The first couple were really just hovercrafts that ended up in pieces as usual. Then I thought hey, I have a spaceplane that I keep modifying the crap out of, why not mess with it some more? First attempt wouldn't lift at all as I expected (it's heavy) so I just decided to do some stunt piloting. I lit all the air breathing engines and lifted off, shut off the vertical ones then pulled up as hard as I could, stalled, then the thrust overcame it and I was able to flip it over. Got out of an accidental (stalling again) dive followed by a flat spin that this plane is so fond of doing at low speed (No screenshots of this part unfortunately, too busy cursing) but I barely regained control. Then I went to buzz some of my old junk in the KSC South Yard and came a little too close... For reference, I just have a flag planted ~2.5km from KSC to the south for placing things I don't want to lag the area. There's another one about 3.5km to the north with a small asteroid sitting there, labelled "Basketball" in the screenshots. Knocked two of the engines off but this thing has a fair amount of torque, enough to counteract one VTOL engine being shut off among other balance issues. I powered down and landed then circled around to see what I hit. It was my old asteroid truck. I mounted two more engines in SPH and tried again. This time I got some lift but the balance was off so I transferred some fuel. Success! Sort of... Not a whole lot of thrust. But on the bright side, it's pretty stable (vertically at least) because of how much throttle I have to give it to actually lift. Managed to get it on top of the VAB. I always go for that when I'm messing around with hover / VTOL stuff but I usually crash before I ever get there, or fall off it. This one I was able to set down gently to my surprise. Pretty useless exercise overall since this plane just isn't built for VTOL capabilities (uses WAY too much fuel to do very little), but it was fun to try and helped me learn to control them better

Finally took the Valkyrie V4T-B (Telemachus enabled, Bus edition) out from my space station to get my stuck Kerbals from Munar orbit. The whole reason I built that variant, in fact. Too lazy to bring it any closer... And I still keep forgetting how big this thing is compared to most other ships I putt around Kerbin's general area with. Overall things went well, but this was based on the model BEFORE I messed with some of the balance issues. I had to do my landing approach twice... The first time I was aiming for an anomaly I found where another Kerbal was waiting. I messed something up while balancing the tanks and when I engaged the engines for final approach I went into a flat spin and crashed Second landing I balanced correctly but came in way farther West and just landed it out in the grass because I didn't have the patience to fly that far. KSC was never the intended target for this landing, and after that last minute change of plans it was pretty much impossible... Or at least impractical, as it was almost on the other side of the planet.

Left handed, but I use the mouse / joystick with my right hand only. Well I take it back, I have occasionally used it with my left in situations like... If I have two computers side by side and I don't want both the mice together (because I will ALWAYS grab the wrong one), but it's awkward. In fact my mouse and joystick are right hand only anyway. Guess it's just the way I learned. For what it's worth, I throw with my left hand and shoot firearms with my right, although with a little mental rewiring I can shoot with my left but not as accurately. I tried to teach myself to write with my right hand but my fingers just won't do what I want them to and I can barely read the result. If I'm doing something repetitive like sanding, carving, drilling, sawing, etc I switch hands with no noticeable difference. Maybe I'm just weird.

Sorry for your loss. I haven't done that yet but usually if I launch some complicated ship or station part, I'll breathe a sigh of relief when done circularizing or docking then promptly hit revert flight instead of space center. Then I scream.

Right, that's actually the same article I was looking at. I couldn't tell any difference whatsoever except for example when I ran GIMP it would take a few seconds to pop up, but with RAPID it was almost instantaneous because it was already in memory from running it earlier. Useful but not really a godsend since I'd probably keep it guessing about what to store for quick access. Now if I could just get it to load up KSP textures at boot and keep them there that would be something. Although I could make a RAMdisk... Experiment time. After seeing those numbers verified I'm not too worried about RAPID anyway and I do value reliability because Murphy's Law. But more than double the sequential speeds and random is completely blown out of the water, I can live with that! Edit again: well I guess I know what I'm buying next - more RAM. At least I have control over that.

That cracked me up! Nice I found out that you can get a probe core and some soccer balls up to a pretty nice speed (and about 40km) with just one small SRB. *rolls eyes* It was a lithobraking test, which as someone else mentioned way before me, isn't half bad. Everything except the in-line battery on the bottom of the probe core survived. It was straight up and down though so I'm not sure how it would fare with any horizontal velocity, didn't get that far yet. I also had a couple of my guys fly over to the island while testing out some modifications to the Valkyrie (yes, I finally named it... I think). I brought the center of lift to the rear a bit in an effort to make it more stable during atmospheric flight. It's as stable as anyone could ask for going to orbit or coming back from orbit after moving some fuel, but if you hang around in the atmosphere for a while it starts to get a little wobbly and almost killed the crew while I was anomaly hunting with a BTDT unit. This test was mainly to make sure I could still get the nose off the ground before the end of the runway, and it worked just fine. It now also leaves the runway with the rearmost three bicoupler tanks at 0 Oxidizer (as opposed to the front two bicoupler tanks) with the hope that it'll keep the COM more stable during atmospheric flight. That thing in the cargo bay is... Well, probably a death trap. It looks like this, there's a probe core under the seat for SAS control. *points at Jeb* His idea

I see, I kind of figured that's how RAPID works but thought I'd try it. After reading up on it a bit more I see what you mean about the gain not being that much for most applications, although it did seem to speed up my frequently used programs even more. Kind of wish I could keep just the read cache. I was using Samsung Magician that came with the drive, it was convenient at the time. Since you asked that I'm kind of curious if they would fudge the numbers to make themselves look better. Seems a bit unnecessary though... Here's what CrystalDiskMark has to say. From left to right: SSD without RAPID, SSD with RAPID, WD Blue 1TB From left to right: WD MyBook 3TB USB3.0, Seagate Backup Plus 1TB USB3.0, Seagate Freeagent Go 320GB USB2.0 I might have too many hard drives.

Okay that's kind of what I expected, thanks. I pretty much have a tolerance system in my head for whether I do a fresh install or not when swapping out hardware (or any time really). It's a carefully balanced ratio of how much more difficult and time consuming it would be to set everything back up the way it needs to be versus the overall current performance of the system compared to what it should be. I say that tongue in cheek but it's pretty accurate... In this one's case the biggest bottleneck I've had since I upgraded graphics card was the hard drive itself (literally, see below) so I just opted to do a pretty direct swap. I'm very happy with it so far. Everything pretty much doubled after tweaks and enabling RAPID mode (above the "maximum" for sequential read/write?), but the random write and especially the read still look a bit sluggish to me. I think I know why some of that is though and will be looking into it soon. Before SSD: After SSD Read/Write speeds. dark blue = hard drive (WD Blue 1tb), light blue = SSD before optimization, green = SSD after optimization. Makes me want to benchmark a floppy drive just to make my hdd not look so bad Last benchmark, doesn't look right. Obviously I can't complain TOO much when looking at the comparison above but it's bugging me to see the random read speed significantly below advertised.

Would I expect the same sort of gains compared to my current configuration as I would from a fresh hdd install? I understand that an OS's performance degrades over time but I've tried to be gentle and keep up with the maintenance overall and I built the computer about 6 months ago. What I mean to say is, why is it better to fresh install on an SSD as opposed to migration of a relatively clean system? I don't think I've ever seen that answered in a good way.. Is it because of ahci issues, sequential vs random reads, or...? Sorry if that's a dumb question, I'm a nerd who finally got his first SSD. I do notice that it's performing under spec, but I hadn't finished setting up all the system tweaks before I ran the benchmark (and it was still quite impressive).

Lol, okay maybe I should have said portable? No? But still. probably just time for another mouse unless you can take it apart and fix it which may involve scavenging from another mouse. Just trying to suggest a worthy replacement if you go that route.

One of the "laptop" mice from the M300 series probably? I've had a few of those and I'm pretty sure they all had button problems after a while. If you've got a little cash pick up a G602, you'll never look back.

That was absolutely beautiful. One of mine, even though I may have downplayed it, was getting to Laythe for the first time. I couldn't even send my lander to the surface since I miscalculated a couple things but I sent a probe, and that almost made it even more intriguing. I had been wanting to visit there for a while and my Kerbals only recently laid eyes on it up close for the first time. Next trip is in the planning stages. Other than that I still take pride in my epic Duna rescue mission from my .23 save, it was the first time I went interplanetary and returned. I cut that one close on all accounts. Landed 1.4km away from the stranded Kerbal who had to walk and ran out of fuel rendezvousing the lander with the transfer ship because of attempted course correction during the landing. Made an unplanned stop at Ike and landed there, costing me just enough fuel that I was running on fumes as I approached Kerbin. I ran out of fuel during rendezvous with my refueling station back at Kerbin and coasted in on RCS. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. A trip like that is pretty much routine to me now unless something stupid happens, but then it was the most exciting thing I had done since my first Mun landing.

Okay, I think you're right. I went ahead and "assumed" (you know what that's good for) it was the VRAM because the error was graphics related. Although I swear I saw it say out of VRAM on one of the errors but I'm not seeing it now. Here's what I got after playing around with a few things including SCANSat. Loading up the big map increased both VRAM usage and RAM usage, most significantly the RAM. Both are at the highest that I observed during this particular run which lasted about 15 minutes or so in this screenshot. Although the max on my graph says 1253, I'm not sure whether that's since the last reboot or ever, but I would have been using active texture management since the last reboot. I'm thinking there's a memory leak somewhere. Both numbers kept slowly rising, and it never usually crashed until I was a couple hours into the game. However when I changed ships or went back to the KSC screen the VRAM seemed to be properly releasing what it didn't need while the RAM usage seemed to slowly grow, then release a tiny bit, then grow more than it released. I have 8gb RAM by the way, my usage goes up to around 75% or so when running KSP, a web browser with endless tabs, and a media player. Sigh, technology is a fickle mistress. I'm going to go hook up my SSD now and cry a little. lol ETA: got the SSD installed (250gb Samsung 840 Evo). I had to do some shrinking and moving and symbolic links to get it the way I wanted without reinstalling all my stuff completely, but it appears to all be in order now. Man, this thing is snappy. Not really seeing a big increase in KSP load times but it seems to run more smoothly and everything else has seen noticeable speed gains. Login, opening programs, clicking a bunch of stuff as soon as the desktop pops up... Where has this been all my life? No more defrag! Well actually that's a lie because I still have 3 HDDs, but it sounded good.