HDD Corruption - Videocard OC the cause?

[jamesbond007]

Hey fellas! A friend of mine has a nice Athlon X2 3800+ system with a couple harddisks, DVDRW, 2GB RAM, and a 6800GT AGP. The PSU is an Ultra 500W modular blue model.

Anywho, we've recently been overclocking our videocards. However, his system has been acting 'weird' since the OC. Particularly, decreasing 3dmark scores, sluggish performance, and tonight while playing some BF2, his system hardlocked and upon reboot, Windows stated that it was missing the Windows\System directory!

He and I weren't sure of the cause at first since we are newbie overclockers. However, after thinking about it, is it possible the videocard pulled too much power when it was OCed and the Ultra couldn't handle it, so it sucked power from other components, ultimately causing data corruption on the harddisk?

We ran the HDD through some basic diagnostics and it came out fine. We managed to hook it up to another computer and pull the needed files off of it before formatting and reinstalling.

Does this sound like the culprit at hand? (videocard OC)

Thanks!

EDIT: Are any of you familiar with Ultra-brand PSUs? How are they? I've personally never used one before and figured it's a no-name brand. What are your takes on them?

 

[Ricemarine]

AFAIK... It could've been that the power supply could've not given enough power to the video card, and crashed, taking along several neccesary files with em.

Course, some people might say the psu is not to blame... But oh well..

 

[GalvanizedYankee]

I try NOT to remember the POS PSUs.

Yes it could have corruped the HDD. Really bad PSUs can kill RAM, CPUs, HDDs and
mainboards. Some PSU have very little protection built in.

The early Ultras were being givin away at Fry's for just entering the store for <$6 😀

The most recent Ultras could be considered a step or two below Fortron, at best by me.

The more bling on the outside, the less goodness on the inside, or so it seems. Everyday
there are several posts about PSU problems and very rarely is a known decent PSU
causing problems.


...Galvanized

 

[Jiggz]

I'll try not to be sarcastic about this but, if the sytem works great prior to OC'ing the video and then started "acting" after OC'ing the video, can anybody tell me what is the best way to find out what could be causing the "acting"? Personally, I will reset the OC'ing of the video card and see if the system will restore its stability. And if the "acting" problem is still there after resetting the video to its default, then you can start looking on other things like RAM's and PSU.

 

[jamesbond007]

Originally posted by: Jiggz
I'll try not to be sarcastic about this but, if the sytem works great prior to OC'ing the video and then started "acting" after OC'ing the video, can anybody tell me what is the best way to find out what could be causing the "acting"? Personally, I will reset the OC'ing of the video card and see if the system will restore its stability. And if the "acting" problem is still there after resetting the video to its default, then you can start looking on other things like RAM's and PSU.

Haha yeah...well he never said anything to me until a week or two later, so I'm assuming fine it ran for that time in between. I should have been more clarified. We played some BF2 last night after the eternity it took to get his crap back going and he wasn't having problems, so I guess it's case-closed. 😛

 

[tjpark1111]

i think the timing might just be coincidence and it could be a virus or spyware, and it sure sounds like my old experiences.

 

[acole1]

How do you have an X2 and AGP? What motherboard is this? 😕

 

[fire400]

Originally posted by: acole1
How do you have an X2 and AGP? What motherboard is this? 😕

939 socket mobo's are existant with AGP/PCI-Express combined, or one or the other.

I'd say it it works before hand and you OC it, obviously you need to check if your system is stable enough with new settings "adjusted" to undergo such an overclock. Tweak out the settings in your BIOS to achieve flawless performance if your new OC setup isn't working after a working-system.

 

[acole1]

Oh yeah! I was having a mental blank.

 

[jamesbond007]

Yeah, I think it's a MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum...

Even after reinstalling, he seems to be having some issues. Today he had a random moment when perusing the My Docs folder, the window became froze and he had to CTRL+ALT+DEL the process. =/ Also, the jerkiness in games is back. It seems like he's lagging in BF2. There's no graphical artifacting - it just looks like he's playing on a very laggy online server when in reality, he's playing it in single player mode. (1.21 update, nVIDIA 84.21 official, latest drivers for his mobo, latest BIOS)

Could his PSU simply be dying? I think he's got an Antec 430W to try out. Just looking at the Ultra PSU he's got makes me cringe - it's too tacky looking and it looks very cheap internally. Definitely not up to par with my 500W+ Antec and Enermax PSUs I've got.

 

[Shmalls]

I got the PSU because its modular so the cables are nice, it cost about $120, the only problem i can see is i bought it from Tiger Direct!!!! <OPPS!>