It’s totally standard for performance to dip toward the end of a benchmark test. That second 320GB Western Digital drive should be fine—has the health status shown up as okay on the diagnostic tab?
Joseph Allen71 - you really should have run that benchmark tab in HD Tune. Look, like I said before, just try installing Windows onto that other hard drive; it's highly unlikely that both drives are failing at the exact same time.
Ashley Chase92 said:Is it actually worth fixing if the hard drive dies? I have the exact same issue with my laptop, but mine is already 8 years old.
You don't repair a hard drive; you simply swap it out for a new one, which isn't a huge expense. However, if the motherboard has fried—which might be the case for the OP—things get a bit more complicated, and usually, it's just not worth the investment.
If you’ve got two drives, I assume you’ve already tried installing an OS on both? If you have, then I seriously doubt both disks died at once. It’s much more likely that your motherboard kicked the bucket. That’s the only reason I’d even consider replacing this entire setup. Finding reliable parts for these older platforms is like searching for a needle in a haystack, and honestly, dumping money into used, vintage motherboards from who-knows-when is just bad business.
If the shop is based in Chicago and they don't offer online installment plans, then you're out of luck. Lynx is pretty decent if you need to pay in installments, though their selection can be a bit hit-or-miss. Just let me know which card you're using and how many monthly payments you're looking at, and we'll figure it out.
BTW, I'm going to move this into its own dedicated thread under the desktop PCs section.
Regarding the LC-CC-120, I’m looking at an Arctic freezer 33. By the way, if you're aiming for that kind of 3.8GHz turbo on all cores, you'll definitely need a motherboard that supports that specific overclocking profile—though I'm fairly certain any Z370 board should handle it just fine.
That’s looking much better. Are you planning to pay upfront or put it on a credit card? If you're paying cash, let us build the rig for you. You get free assembly and shipping anyway, so there’s really no point in buying a pre-built system—it's actually smarter for you when it comes to handling warranties later on.
In my opinion, it’s just not worth it. That’s especially true if you're looking at a used unit. For that kind of money, you could easily put together a solid build featuring a Ryzen 3 1200 and a GTX 1060 3 GB instead.
That resolution is roughly 20-25% more demanding than standard 1080p. So, if you don't mind seeing a drop in your FPS—or if you're willing to dial back a few settings to maintain the same frame rate—then it's totally fine.
Think about it—you could grab a more powerful graphics card (that i5 can actually handle much beefier GPUs), or go for a full overhaul: swap in an i7, a better GPU, and 8GB of DDR3.
shadowwolf15 said:From what I understand, overclocking hits a wall eventually—but if you’ve got decent cooling, everything should run stable. Any further clocking requires bumping up the voltage and all that other junk that just heats the CPU right up. Obviously, your thermal headroom and specific cooler type dictate how high you can push the clock. And at the end of the day, the whole thing needs to stay rock-solid under load. Overclocking exists because the multipliers are unlocked, but Intel doesn't guarantee longevity or stability when you start messing with it. That's my take, anyway. Thermal stress and those constant spikes in workload are definitely going to shorten a processor's lifespan—especially if someone tries to pull max performance using some pathetic, cheap aftermarket cooler.
It's fine; my whole family uses this PC and since I'm not home all the time, I'm not risking much with OC. My CPU stays on the ASUS default turbo mode, and I'm using more than enough cooling for that. My plan is to pick the fastest possible CPU compatible with my board and maybe try a little turbo OC, staying within that near 100% safety zone.
Ugh, I haven't visited the ASUS pages in years. Update BIOS Version 3603(Only for WinXP & Vista) 2012/11/2717.52 MBytes
My BIOS is 0902 from Sep/2011.
So what now? This BIOS version isn't meant for Windows 10 64-bit.
So, your logic follows the idea that "thermal stress" supposedly shortens the component's lifespan. While there isn't a single relevant scientific paper that empirically proves that specific claim, let's just play along with the theory for a moment. The catch here is how long that "lifespan" actually is from a human perspective. For example, a heavily overclocked chip might have a lifespan of, say—let's call it—24, 47, or 89 years, whereas a non-overclocked one might last 24 years and 8 months, 49 years, or 92 years. But let's be real: nobody is going to be using a computer for that many decades anyway.
It’s the same deal as when kids start a thread saying "my processor is burning," only to find out their i3 is sitting at a perfectly fine 49°C under load. 😁 Just because 49°C is hot for a human doesn't mean it's hot for a processor. The same applies to this whole "shortened lifespan" argument regarding thermal stress, electron migration, and whatever else. In my opinion, it's much better for someone to tell you, "Hey, it's stable at this clock and this voltage," which saves you hours of testing, rather than lying and claiming it was "never overclocked." It reminds me of an acquaintance of mine with that i7 4770 I mentioned earlier; I was grabbing a beer with him when he got a call from some guy on Craigslist. He told the guy, "It's never been overclocked, it just ran on its Turbo Boost," while he was actually selling a K-series CPU equipped with an aftermarket cooler. 🤣
Well, it might make a difference depending on what you're playing. A buddy of mine who runs a GTX 1070 actually swapped out his overclocked i5 4670K for an i7 4770K, and the jump was pretty noticeable. He mentioned that entering Novigrad in The Witcher 3—you know, that specific scene the guys over at Digital Foundry are always benchmarking—used to cause major stuttering and frame drops below 60 fps, but with the i7, he’s seeing minimums north of 70 fps.
Before that upgrade, he switched his RAM from an 8GB 1600MHz kit to a 16GB 2400MHz DDR3 kit, and he saw a boost there too. He even looked at some benchmarks from Eurogamer to confirm. It seems like everything scales much better with more RAM if you've got a high-end GPU driving the bus.
It certainly works that way too, but the whole point here is to unlock that hyperthreading. Moving away from quad-core architecture is key. Plus, you end up with the most powerful CPU available for that socket, which gives you some peace of mind. IMO, that frees up enough budget for him to grab a solid GPU upgrade, maybe something in the GTX 1070 or 1080 range.
shadowwolf15 said:You guys are all right—I'm already scouting out which i7 to grab. My current setup has an i7 2600 3.4 and I'm ready to $333. But now you've got me second-guessing things with this i7 3770k talk... will that even fit my motherboard? Honestly, spending $200 isn't really a $100 dealbreaker if I know the chip is solid and hasn't been absolutely trashed by overclocking. One of your suggestions included liquid cooling, which implies that thing was running at some seriously high clock speeds. I get that it's a gamble, but I'd love to drop that i7 into my rig specifically because everything else in it is top-tier. I love PCs—I've built every single one of them myself using parts picked from magazines and forums—but lately, life's just been too busy and I've lost my footing. I thought it was time for an upgrade once Coffee Lake CPU arrived, but I didn't realize how expensive it had become; maybe I'm wrong and my components were actually more affordable back then? Also, this platform is six years old now. This is my third SSD—first it was a Vortex 80GB, then an OCZ 125, and now it's a Samsung 850 Pro series. Windows took off the second I swapped out the HDD. I usually swap GPUs every three years, so I wouldn't bother changing this one yet since I only need $1000 a tiny boost for a better upgrade.
What does that even have to do with anything? The "K" series CPUs are literally designed for overclocking. All this talk about "lifespan" is nonsense; a CPU is the one component that almost never wears out. If someone actually manages to kill a CPU—which happens maybe once in a million cases—it’s almost certainly due to a defective unit rather than overclocking itself.
Bottom line: grab the i7 3770k if you can get it for $367. If the choice is between an i7 2600 at $333 and this other one at $500, obviously the first option is the winner.
The i7 3770k works on the motherboard with BIOS version 3203 here, but if you're updating the BIOS, just make sure you install the latest version available.
I also ran into some sluggishness issues with the 2018 version. What eventually sorted everything out for me was nuking the AAMUpdater folder and the OOBE folder located in C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Local\Adobe. You might hit a snag trying to delete the AAMUpdater folder entirely because AAM is active in the background. In my case, I ended up triggering a reinstall of AAM—since it was already there, I just wiped parts of it, and the system offered a repair option, which I took. I can't quite put my finger on why that did the trick, but it worked.
Either way, if there's an actual issue here, it isn't a hardware failure within the processor itself. It’s clearly a software-side problem that should be addressed via a patch or a future update.