I built this premium 5820k machine for my Dad back in ~2014 when DDR4 was new and premium. It started life with a 7950 and he had that matched with a 2560*1600 30" LCD. He was gaming less and I asked him about it, he said it was getting slow and sometimes it rebooted in new games. So we popped in a 5700 he got for $300 shipped from Best Buy right after launch (remember those days of wretched excess?!?) and realized we needed a new monitor because no DVI on the GPU and we weren't paying for an active adapter. Cue an awesome new Dell 32" and everything was great. When it ran. I was pretty certain it was not the GPU because I test drove it for weeks in my rig with zero issues.
Finally, after a power supply replacement, a new UPS, bios updates (a new bios for this thing dropped in 2018!), retuning, a NVME drive fresh Windows 10 install, this video card we finally just pulled the trigger on a whole new everything but the NVME drive and GPU. And it's worked great for a week. Yay.
I've brought the old rig home, blew out the dust bunnies and installed a GTX 970. If I can figure out why it wasn't stable, I need to sell it now while the market is wonky. So I reset all the power connections, hooked up the supposedly optional 4 pin molex by the CPU socket, zeroed out the modest OC, installed W10 on old SSD and checked out HW info to see if there was any weird readings. Turns out there was.
I HAD BEEN USING THE PCIE 2.0 4X ELECTRICAL/16x PHYSICAL SLOT FOR THE GPU THE ENTIRE TIME. ALMOST 7 YEARS OF DUMB.
I moved the GTX 970 down one slot, which was a claimed PCEI 3 16x/16x slot. HW info is telling me it is a x8 slot. A even more careful review of the manual reveals an asterisk that only with a richer, better, and handsomer 40 PCIe lane CPU does this really become a x16 slot. I am loathe to use the actual x16 slot because it covers the NVME drive slot and makes that 4 pin power connector a really tight fit. I figure the x8 PCIE3 slot is a lot better than a x4 PCIE 2 slot and I am done with that for now. I'll let you do the math.
So it's up and running again. W10 activated, drivers installed and Novabench stable (ha, that's a joke.)
TL;DR: What stress tests do you think are reasonable for it to pass to feel OK about reselling it on FB/Craigslist?
Mainly it would have issues gaming, but also at times I guess it would buckle under running Chrome. It did have 1 & 2 core turbo set to 4.0, all core to 3.6 for the last few months, but that was after I had it for a weekend, flashed the bios, ran the MS memory test utility overnight and felt that other tuning tweaks left it in a good state. It didn't have any issues while I had it of course, or during the just-before-covid BL3 LAN weekend we had. I thought I had cured it then.
I want to feel confident that the reset and minor changes made have squashed whatever gremlins plagued this thing. I don't want to have to put a big asterisk on it "probably a POS!" If it comes to that, I'll just sell the CPU alone (eBay maybe $100) and use that to get a big portion of some Microcenter deal.
Finally, after a power supply replacement, a new UPS, bios updates (a new bios for this thing dropped in 2018!), retuning, a NVME drive fresh Windows 10 install, this video card we finally just pulled the trigger on a whole new everything but the NVME drive and GPU. And it's worked great for a week. Yay.
I've brought the old rig home, blew out the dust bunnies and installed a GTX 970. If I can figure out why it wasn't stable, I need to sell it now while the market is wonky. So I reset all the power connections, hooked up the supposedly optional 4 pin molex by the CPU socket, zeroed out the modest OC, installed W10 on old SSD and checked out HW info to see if there was any weird readings. Turns out there was.
I HAD BEEN USING THE PCIE 2.0 4X ELECTRICAL/16x PHYSICAL SLOT FOR THE GPU THE ENTIRE TIME. ALMOST 7 YEARS OF DUMB.
I moved the GTX 970 down one slot, which was a claimed PCEI 3 16x/16x slot. HW info is telling me it is a x8 slot. A even more careful review of the manual reveals an asterisk that only with a richer, better, and handsomer 40 PCIe lane CPU does this really become a x16 slot. I am loathe to use the actual x16 slot because it covers the NVME drive slot and makes that 4 pin power connector a really tight fit. I figure the x8 PCIE3 slot is a lot better than a x4 PCIE 2 slot and I am done with that for now. I'll let you do the math.
So it's up and running again. W10 activated, drivers installed and Novabench stable (ha, that's a joke.)
TL;DR: What stress tests do you think are reasonable for it to pass to feel OK about reselling it on FB/Craigslist?
Mainly it would have issues gaming, but also at times I guess it would buckle under running Chrome. It did have 1 & 2 core turbo set to 4.0, all core to 3.6 for the last few months, but that was after I had it for a weekend, flashed the bios, ran the MS memory test utility overnight and felt that other tuning tweaks left it in a good state. It didn't have any issues while I had it of course, or during the just-before-covid BL3 LAN weekend we had. I thought I had cured it then.
I want to feel confident that the reset and minor changes made have squashed whatever gremlins plagued this thing. I don't want to have to put a big asterisk on it "probably a POS!" If it comes to that, I'll just sell the CPU alone (eBay maybe $100) and use that to get a big portion of some Microcenter deal.
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