Marvin

After coming under not-so-intense pressure, I’ve finally gotten down to writing a post about Marvin, my not-so-new computer.

For the uninitiated, my previous PC was christened Dick for reasons best known to me. It had teething problems when it was brand new. The display used to conk off at random boots. The motherboard fan stopped working a year and a half after purchase. The graphics card, an XFX 6600GT with 256MB GDDR3 RAM had to be replaced under warranty once twice thrice before I got really mad, and screamed my head off  a bit at the dudes at the RMA office.

RMA or Return Materials Authorisation i.e. the mind-bogglingly slow process of getting an ignoramus sitting in a dingy office to understand the simple fact that the hardware (point frantically at graphics card), has stopped working (replicate Hiroshima with hand gestures), and is still under warranty (point frantically at bill, and sticker on back of graphics card). In the very likely outcome that the ignoramus concerned stares blankly, I simply feel like hooting, flashing a rather different hand gesture, and running off.

Nevertheless I was persistent, and managed to endure this agony thrice, and in the end an nVidia dude who was passing by took pity on me, and arranged an XFX 8600GT with 256 MB GDDR3. Not a bad thing, especially since I didn’t spend a single penny.

Things went well since then, sort of. One little niggling problem was the fact that the graphics card regularly touched 80 degrees Celsius under load. Not really good news for the overall life of that card. Plus, at the time, my Asus A8N-E had not integrated graphics solution.

Then stuff slowly started to fall apart again. My motherboard’s SATA chipset started acting up.

SATA stands for Serial Advanced Technology Attachment. If anyone of you has bothered to open your PCs (you must be brave), you might have red cables running from your hard drives to that big flat piece of hardware bolted onto the side of your PC (motherboard). DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING! (unless you know what you’re doing)

Another irritating fact is the propensity of the stupid SATA cables to simply break, thus making life just a little bit tougher.

My motherboard resolutely refused to detect my hard drives. Which was a real bummer. Several fixes for this ensued, only one of which actually worked. Weirdly, I had to yank my ROM chip out, and put it back in. That’s not a typo, not the long RAM modules, just the small ROM chip. With a screwdriver. Somehow, that worked.

Another interesting story is that of my monitor. When I bought Dick in 2006, I bought a 17″ LG CRT monitor. It worked fine, till I changed resolutions one day, and it simple gave a faint ‘ping’ and died. Since it was out of warranty by then, I simply used the 15″ monitor from my old Compaq Presario. That thing, although nearing a decade, age wise, is still working flawlessly, but doesn’t support resolutions over 1024×768.

But after that, things just kept getting progressively worse, till I simply gave up on my PC in August. I simply took the thing apart and kept everything away, simply to resist the temptation of going and wasting some more time on the wretched thing…

Then followed a long, lonely period of cyber-isolation. My mobile served as a not-so-great substitute, plus there’s only so much you can do with a GPRS connection. With limited balance.

Then finally, after a lot of persuasion, I managed to get Dad to buy a new PC in November. This one, I managed to keep around 30,000 bucks, mainly because I just needed to replace the core components. By now, AMD had released the Phenom II with the AM3 socket, so that seemed the natural choice. And this meant I’d need a motherboard with an AM3 socket, which was nice, because there were several motherboards which now had the support for upcoming DDR3 RAM modules. Which meant I’d get DDR3 RAM as well:

So my purchases added up something like this:

• AMD Phenom X4 945 + MSI NF98-G65 —18,269.27
• 2x2GB G-Skill DDR3 RAM (1333 Mhz: Timings – 9-9-9-24) — 5,576.92
• 500 GB Seagate Hard Drive — 2,307.69
• DVD Writer from HP — 1,250
• CoolerMaster Extreme Power 500W SMPS — 3,125
• Total – 31,750

The reason I bought a DVD writer, is because my old one was ruined because it kept banging against the cabinet door when Nero or iTunes autoejected the stupid thing.

This was after we spent some time haggling in the ground-floor shop of SMC International. These guys, according to me, give the fairest prices, and the best after-sales support, handling all your RMAs for you. I realised, only now, that I was a real retard for getting my stuff RMAed myself, when I could’ve just brought it here.

Then the whole lot was carted to be set up in the second floor assembly office. Stuff went well, till he hooked everything up and tried to start the thing. Truth be told, at this time, I had decided on an Asus motherboard with AM3 and DDR3. But it didn’t work. No display. At all. And this was a problem, because this was the last piece they had in stock. So as a last minute decision, I decided to go for the MSI board. Took that one up, and they set it up, and it ran fine.

Till I got it home.

Possibly the worst start of my relationship with my new PC – it wouldn’t boot. Fans would whirr, hard disks would whine, lights would flash, but no display. No error beep either. I thought at first this was because of the power supply not being connected properly. So I reconnected that, but no luck. Then after a couple of failed reboots, suddenly, all was well.

But this was not so, the next time I tried to start the PC the next day, the very same problem occurred. And no amount of PC reassembly was helping me. So, naturally, I came up with my piece of jugaad. Start the PC, leave it on for some time, then switch off the PC from the power supply and reboot. This had a 60% success rate, which was fine, because I would take it for RMA soon.

This time, I was smart, and went straight to the SMC dudes. They tested the power supply, and that was fine. They tried replacing the RAM, and for some reason that worked. I knew it was because they had left the PC on for a while, which was my jugaad solution for the problem. But they told me they’d RMA the RAM. Not completely convinced, I went home with the RAM-less PC. But then I tried booting the thing and I got no error message, which is not normal. If s**t is happening, the motherboard is supposed to at least give an error code through the PC speaker i.e. the annoying little beeper that you feel like smashing into oblivion when you’re trying to boot your PC at midnight without your mom knowing…

So, the next day, I took the PC back, and this time after 45 minutes of trial-and-error, they were convinced that it was my motherboard which was the culprit. Another RMA later, I realised what deep trouble I was already getting into, with a brand new PC.

I likened myself to Midas. For those of you who remain blissfully ignorant of the story, it was about King Midas, who was granted a wish that anything he touched would turn into gold. Unfortunately, this was applicable to his food, water and own daughter. So, presumably, he died alone, hungry and thirsty. (The last bit is generally not included in most books) But the point was that any electronic thing I encountered, seemed to spontaneously blow-up somewhere along the time.

Oh, and I had to get my RAM back, but apparently, it had already been sent, so I ended up getting a brand new pair of RAM sticks as well, and I’m not complaining. Also, they accidentally gave me a new power supply as well, because they forgot to replace the new one they tested on my PC to check if the power supply was causing the problem or not.

Anyway, a few days later, during the course of which, I irritated the RMA in-charge at SMC and a poor guy at the MSI service centre half to death, my motherboard was ready. Apparently, they couldn’t fix the problem, so they were simply giving me a replacement. Which was good news, since all that restarting required to get the old motherboard going probably damaged it in some way or another.

So, sometime after Christmas, I was reunited with Marvin. All was well. I also had to buy some CoolerMaster thermal paste for my processor, because you need to apply a new layer of paste each time you take your processor off your motherboard.

After that, all is well, with the exception of the graphics card, which still runs uncomfortably hot.

The CPU runs at 3.0 Ghz per core, which is more than enough. In the few months since I bought it, never once has it hit 100% CPU usage, apart from the time I was using it to render videos in multi-core mode. The thing also runs relatively cool with no extra cooling solutions, topping out at around 45-50 degrees.

The motherboard is a pretty solid piece of kit. Has support for 3 graphics card, has an integrated 8400, which although not groundbreaking in terms of performance, is a good fallback in case my 8600 goes up in flames. Which it probably will if I play Burnout once more. The motherboard has cooling pipes instead of a fan, which is important, because as a thumb rule, fans on motherboards are bound to sputter to a stop after a while. It has integrated Realtek 8.1 HD sound, which is pretty much enough for any semi-audiophile.

The RAM is superb. I’m sorry if I doubted the RAM caused all my problems. The guy at SMC even overclocked it to 1600Mhz, but that caused a few crashes, to I just kept it running at 1333 Mhz. I’m yet to run out of RAM when doing anything, at all. 4GB, trust me, is quite a lot.

My monitor only supports a maximum resolution of 1024×768. Which is fine, because ‘ye olde graphics card’, the8600GT, while not amazing, is a decent little card and can pump out almost any game at that resolution at decent framerates. Burnout generally doesn’t drop below 50, which is nice.

I guess that pretty much sums up my PC. Are you happy now Pulkit?