May belong in the mobo section

[MurphyEF]

Friend is giving me his old i7 2600k along with an ASUS p8z68-v mobo, but was having issues with data not posting between the graphics card and the cpu. I wonder if it may be something simple, and if not, which mobo I should go with. I have heard good things about the Rock Extreme 4, but don't have a whole lot of Intel experience. I don't need anything super fancy. I'm not planning on running anything on max graphics, but something running better than my current AMD Athlon x2 3800+ at 2.6 GHZ would be lovely. I'm currently away from home, so I can't pull up my other hardware info until I get off of work, but the GPU is a smigde better than a 550ti, but Radeon based (r67**?) DDR3 ram in a drawer from his old build, as well. Vengeance something or other with blue coolers on it. Have a 120GB SSD in the package waiting for it to get here.

 

[MurphyEF]

side note, I do not have any BSOD error numbers for you, he can't remember them. He did, however, say that the screen would freeze and eventually BSOD would appear. He had not OC'd it yet.

 

[trents]

Murphy, download and install the free program, "Who Crashed". It will interpret the mini dump files that accrue with a BSOD incident.

 

[MurphyEF]

No problem. I imagine that's something I'm going to have to do when I actually receive the MOBO and CPU and get them started up. He has already replaced them and is up and running in his new build, mine are waiting to be sent.

 

[trents]

That motherboard has 16 power phase and should be a great overclocker. The first thing I would do would be to remove the CMOS battery for several hours in order to do a deep reset of the bios to stock settings. Then, I would do a from scratch reinstall of the OS and download all the latest drivers for the motherboard chipset and the video card. If you are still having problems, try another video card. And also start removing and swapping out RAM modules to explore that as an issue.

If overclocking, make sure you get a good aftermarket CPU cooler.

 

[MurphyEF]

I had planned on asking him to ship it with the battery removed. Also have my SSD to put in, which I had planned on already doing a fresh install of Windows 7 onto. With that, I have a trout that I can put in, as I'm currently running the graphics card he had when the issue started (I get a lot of pass downs from him). Its also coming with a self contained liquid cooler, as he had replaced his. I plan on doing some minor overclocking, but nothing extreme.

 

[trents]

I've got that same CPU and almost the same motherboard. Mine overclocks easily to 4.6. I have a 360mm radiator liquid cooler which is a bit of overkill for just cooling the CPU but I run this 24/7. I love the Sandybridge I7 CPUs as they were the best overclockers Intel has put out. The Ivy Bridge and Haswell lines which came later suffer from heat issues when overclocking.