how 2 IMPROVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE, ONE STEP AT A TIME
NO START? NO PROBLEM!
I am a first-time PC builder and started my project a
year ago after I purchased your guide to building a
dream PC. I have been collecting my parts over the
past year and finally got a chance to piece them all
together. The problem? My computer won’t start! I
get a green LED on the motherboard when I turn on
the power supply, but nothing happens when I push
the case’s power button. Nothing starts: no case
fans, no power-supply fan, no CPU, no videocards.
What’s going on?
—AdamIt’s great that you’re building your own rig, but
you made a classic mistake. The warranty on
components tends to be rather short, so you
should always test your parts immediately. The
Doctor understands that your situation didn’t letyou test your gear right away, but keep this in
mind for next time.
Now to your problem. The Doctor’s first sug-
gestion, especially for rookies, is to ensure that
you’ve connected the power switch correctly. Get
out your motherboard manual and double-check
that the wires for the switch are connected to the
corresponding pins on the mobo. If the machine
still doesn’t start, try directly shorting the two pins
to POST the board—use the tip of a screwdriver
to temporarily bridge the two. This will eliminate a
bad power switch or wire on the case as a culprit.
Also, make sure that the ATX12V and 24-pin main
power connector are firmly inserted.
If you still don’t have any luck, try remov-
ing devices from the board one by one (make
sure you power down the PSU first). After each
removal, try restarting the machine. You might
even have to unplug the hard-drive power cables
from the board. Sometimes a pin in the powerconnector will get shorted against another, which
can cause the PSU to immediately turn off.30FPS SUX
When running two 7900 GS cards in SLI, an AMD
4200+ CPU, a gig of RAM, and a Western Digital Raptor
drive on a Foxconn NF4SK8AA motherboard, I should
get jaw-dropping performance, right? I’m getting only
30fps in Need for Speed: Carbon with visual qualities
set to high at a resolution of 1440x900. That doesn’t
seem right! Lowering the qualities to low nets me
200-plus frame rates; medium gets me 50fps to 70fps.
And at maximum? The car teleports. What’s going on?
—Eric ChenGetting “only” 30 frames per second with
the rig at the resolution you describe doesn’t
sound all that unusual. The 7900 GS was
introduced more than 18
months ago, and the Doctor
has never known SLI (or
CrossFire either, for that
matter) to double any PC’s
performance.
Having said that, you
should make sure you’re
using the latest drivers and
that the GeForce SLI profile
is set to use SLI (one of the
options is to use a single
GPU even when you have an
SLI config). You might also
experiment with the render-
ing options in the profile to
see if one delivers better performance than
the others.ONE SLI, TWO DIFFERENT CARDS?
Several months ago you were good enough to
publish my question about SLI compatibility with-
out actually answering the question, so let me
rephrase. Whenever you talk about an SLI setup,
you always describe a pair of identical cards in a
fairly pricey system, which is certainly interest-
ing to most readers of Maximum PC. But darker
forces lurk in the readership—we’re cheap. Sure,
we’ll build an SLI system but by starting with one
card and adding a less-expensive card later. The
cards will be compatible,
but probably not identical.
This will give us a perfor-
mance hit, so my question
is: How much of a hit?
—Edward CotterYour question has the Doc scratching his head,
Edward, but he’ll attempt to answer it—or at
least what he thinks is your question. First, when
you buy a videocard for the SLI rig you’re build-
ing, buy the best single card you can afford at the
time—it’s better to get good performance today
and better performance tomorrow than to leave
yourself without an affordable upgrade path. As
for your comment that you’ll buy a “compatible
but probably not identical” card later, it doesn’t
matter what brand the two cards are, as long as
they both use the same GPU.
Remember, you can’t harness an 8800 GT
to an 8800 GTS, if that’s what you’re inferring.
And if you buy a second card that has a lower
clock speed than your original, both cards
(when SLI’d together) will run at the lower
clock speed. That said, it’s in your best inter-
est to pick a second card that’s identical to the
first, and if not, at least go for one that shares
the same specifications as the first.GEEK SQUAD GENERALITIES
The last time I went to Best Buy, I was looking to pur-
chase a new laptop. I asked a salesperson if I could
split my hard drive and put XP on it. She talked to the
Geek Squad and they said that it would be almost
impossible to do that. The Toshiba laptop I was ask-
ing about was a top-end model. She also said that
most laptops were like that and, thus, couldn’t run
XP without a lot of trouble. Are they right?
—Ken PayneThe Doctor gets really annoyed with people who
provide answers without even the simplest of
explanations. The Geek Squad’s assessment is
most likely correct, but they should have told you
why. It’s highly probable that Toshiba doesn’t pro-
vide a Windows XP display driver for the notebook
in question, and it won’t allow the GPU manufac-
turer (AMD or Nvidia, most likely) to do so, either.
The reasoning behind this restriction is that
notebook manufacturers typically customize
the display driver to support hot-key functions,
power-management features, and suspend/
resume behavior. The reference drivers that
Nvidia and AMD develop don’t support these
features, so they’re incompatible.Front-panel connectors are often mislabeled or don’t
color-match the appropriate wire, so refer to your mother-
board manual to determine which connector is which.Ask the Doctor
Diagnosing and curing your PC problems
68 MAXIMUMPC | MAR 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
Nope. Nothing. You get nothing this month—no witty banter, no allusion to
literature or songs. Zilch. The winter season has sapped the Doctor of his
creativity, but thankfully, it hasn’t destroyed his resolve for answering your
computer-related questions. Shoot those over to [email protected].