In MSI Afterburner, look over on the left side—you’ll see this little button with a "K" on it. That kicks off the MSI Kombustor. Just let it run and keep a close eye on your graphics card temperatures; you should probably let it churn for at least half an hour... honestly, just forget about that AMD Overdrive thing and its pathetic 10-second test. 🙂 In there, you really just need to "unlock" the OC so the driver doesn't crash on you. As for those clock speeds—well, you're going to have to judge for yourself whether they're actually stable or not. Your card might handle way more than that, or maybe significantly less; there isn't some magical, universal number that works for every single card out there. Regarding the fan... just watch the card temps and you'll figure out if you actually need to crank it up to 100%.
1. You totally can. 2. It’s actually worth the effort. 3. Just head into the NVIDIA control panel to enable overclocking—then you handle the actual heavy lifting, like bumping up the graphics card clock speeds and memory, using MSI Afterburner. 4. As long as your temps stay within a reasonable range, you won't run into any issues.
By the way, while you're messing around with MSI Afterburner, you should definitely set up some profiles—it makes life easier when you can just hit an "OC" button to jump into your gaming settings, then switch back to the default profile for everyday tasks so you aren't running your card harder than necessary for no reason. And since you’re already heading over to the MSI website to grab Afterburner, you might as well download MSI Kombustor too. It’s a great little utility for stress-testing the card, which is basically mandatory if you want to make sure your overclock is actually stable. If things start crashing or freezing on you—which happens—just dial the settings back until everything runs smoothly again.
Man, I dealt with something pretty similar once—honestly, you’d probably just be better off doing a clean reinstall. In the end, I just ditched HomeGroup entirely and went back to old-school file sharing. To actually kill off HomeGroup, you have to go in and stop both the HomeGroup Listener and the HomeGroup Provider services.
Go ahead and head over to the C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Roaming\PeerNetworking folder and just wipe out the idstore.sst file—once that’s gone, give it another shot to see if you can actually view or change the password.
Also, just a heads-up—you really need to make sure the clocks on both computers are perfectly synced if you want any hope of accessing the HomeGroup. If there's even a few seconds of drift between them, the system is just going to act up and tell you the password is wrong.
Go ahead and open up the Task Scheduler via your Administrative Tools—then navigate through the Task Scheduler Library > Microsoft > Windows > time Synchronization. Once you're there, just double-click on the Synchronize time task. On the General tab, you'll see a "Change user or Group" button; right next to it, it should say—by default—that the task runs as a NETWORK service. If that’s what you see, go ahead and hit that button, type "LOCAL SERVICE" into the text box in the new window, and close it out. After that, just right-click the task, select Run, and let me know if it throws any errors at you.
The main thing is the L3 cache—the Athlon doesn't have it, whereas the Phenom does. But honestly? That’s just the biggest, slowest chunk of cache you've got. You probably won't even notice a difference because, for a standard home PC setup, that much cache is basically useless—it might actually matter if you were running some massive server environment, but not here. If you want to nerd out on how cache actually works, check out this deep dive: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...ache,2416.html
The AM3+ boards actually support those Bulldozer chips, while Intel's next move—that Ivy Bridge lineup—is just going to stick with the current 1155 socket. As for what happens after that... honestly, who knows? It's anyone's guess at this point. 😁 Either go with what Smartic suggested back in post #2, or see if that friend of yours can snag you some decent i5 processors for a bit less cash—maybe then you could actually swing the whole setup within your budget using the plan I laid out in post #9.
I mean, you totally could—but honestly, since it’s such a budget board, it only has three power phases and zero heatsinks to speak of... which isn't great. As for that B60 chip, if you're looking at the C3 stepping, we're talking a 125W TDP, whereas the C2 version jumps up to 140W. My advice? Just downclock it to 3 GHz and drop the Vcore to the bare minimum, then run some tests to see if it actually holds up. Just because you managed to unlock it doesn't mean it'll be stable—those cores might just be fundamentally broken.
I'm having a total headache trying to fix my system time after an installation...
In the Control Panel under the synchronization tab, it just says: An error occurred while windows was synchronizing with time.windows.com. This operation returned because the timeout period expired.
The clock was most recently synchronized on 10.8.2011. at 21:22. (which I guess is just whenever I last manually set the time, right?)
I've installed Windows XP more times than I can count and this thing has never happened to me—first time in a whole week... A "timeout period"? What am I supposed to do about that?
Try switching the server to time.nist.gov—maybe the Microsoft server was just down.
Look, you could... I mean, Best Buy definitely carries beefier cards, but I’m honestly not sure if your power supply could even handle the draw—plus they're a bit pricey—but even this 3450 is a massive step up from what you've been running until now.
Look, all this hype about the Bulldozer is basically just noise—nobody actually knows what the real-world performance looks like until it hits the shelves. And honestly? An 8-core processor isn't going to be your magic bullet anyway, since most of those cores will just be sitting there idling most of the time... so, while we're at it, tell me what kind of power supply you're running right now.
If you decide to pull the trigger on that 2600, here is what you’re looking at:
Asrock P67 Pro - $230 2x2 GB Kingmax, 1333MHz - $70 Sapphire HD 6850 - $393
Plus, you might need a new PSU if your current one is a total lightweight: XFX Core edition 80 - $122
Don't bother trying to skimp on the RAM since it's dirt cheap—you might save a couple of bucks, but it's hardly worth the headache.$33
And why exactly do you need a beefier GPU? Is something actually stuttering on you, or is this just a "want" rather than a "need"? Also—what kind of monitor are we talking about here?
Alexander Moore67 said:How old do you think he is?
Doesn't really matter—it's not like his power bill is going to skyrocket because of this. Both cards pull their juice straight from the AGP slot anyway.
An 8-core FX be beast should run you about $320—roughly what you'd pay for an Intel i7-2600K—which puts it way outside your budget range. Besides, even if you did shell out the cash, you probably wouldn't even tap into 10% of its actual horsepower, so honestly, don't even waste your breath thinking about it.