O/T: Aries offline due to game eating GPU

WanderingAries · October 15, 2011, 02:03:51 AM

Or more accurately, the GPU finally decided to melt as it has shown signs here and there over the last year.

Luckly I found one or two ebay options that'll be good replacements and use the same replacement parts I have for spare, but they have ATI GPUs.

TonyV · October 15, 2011, 05:18:47 AM

I might have a card you can use if you want it. Its not top-of-the-line, but it can handle ultra mode at least at medium settings. PM me if you're interested.

WanderingAries · October 16, 2011, 04:53:50 AM

normally I would, but considering I forgot to mention that this was an onboard laptop GPU, then I was kinda fubared anyway. The good thing is that I've ordered a slightly upgraded version (couple years newer) of the same series laptop. It doesn't come with an LCD screen, but since it's the same series, then I can use the one on my old laptop. It even has the dual HDD design so now I'll have two More drives to add to my stack. I think that makes like 6-2.5in SATA drives now. :-p

EDIT: I still gotta wait a week for the shipping though :-/. Either way $170 (inc $20 ship) was a right in my limited price range.

WanderingAries · October 23, 2011, 12:29:38 AM

In case anyone was curious:

Good News: Major computer replacement parts are in.

Bad News: It's going to take all night to do the surgery, migrate data and generally get rid of Vista from the new drives that happened to come with it.

LKN-351 · October 23, 2011, 04:52:04 AM

get to work, slacker. :-)

WanderingAries · October 23, 2011, 08:30:20 PM

heh, I'll slack all I want after spending 7 bloody hours trying to diagnose why a simple installation turned into a "fake boot" issue. I was about THIS close to throwing it out the window because I know there's an issue with the hinge trigger, but it's not a windows thing.

WanderingAries · October 28, 2011, 04:11:59 AM

So I finally got this thing to start working and I'm at the point where I'm installing drivers and baseline software before my standard "Baseline Restore" image. My big question now is what to do about city/titan because there have been some Major system changes at this point.

The first change was that the bios doesn't support pre-Vista OS (and I'm too tired to figure out how to get my 10+ y/o Mac to burn cd's) so I ended up throwing Windows 7 x64 on it. I did x64 because the new specs include double the RAM so I'm up to 4Gb! I manually install All of my software (unless there's no custom option) so my applications will go into a 2nd partition separate from the OS (d:\Program Files\APPNAME). My documents, videos, music, etc are on the 2nd physical drive (4th linear partition drive label wise). The GPU is an nVidia GeForce 8600M GS (256Mb RAM baseline, shared upto 2Gb) and is using the latest drivers directly from their website as HP only supports drivers for this model through Vista x64 (and they wouldn't work :-/). The CPU is a little higher than the older by 10% so I'm upto 2.2Ghz now. :-p

Everything else is basically the same, but I'm going to spend tomorrow getting drivers, settings, etc setup for the backup process. I'm crossing my fingers on my older games though as I'm not sure how they'll like being three OS generations behind. Again, too busy/lazy right now to search. O:)

WanderingAries · April 17, 2012, 05:18:59 AM

Why yes, I do feel entitled enough to necro my own thread!
Needless to say whatever fix they did on the GPU has failed. Sucks because my lovely new cellphone apparantly has a bad radio as well so I gotta get that replaced this week too. Grrr. I'm not sure I'll attempt running CoX on this machine or not even though it does have the same nVidia copper fix on it.