If you can't find out the reason (no dust on the cooler, CPU fan working, case exhaust fan working and pointing out), it might just be a faulty temperature sensor...

Ok, it turns out that one of the spring loaded plastic pins that hold on the Stock CPU Cooler is busted and not holding it tightly to the CPU.  So I ordered an after market CPU cooler, should be here tomorrow.

So if I can get a job as quickly as possible when i turn 16 in May I was thinking of buying and building my own gaming computer, if anyone here can help me out i want to make sure all of these parts are 100% compatible together.

Motherboard -

Intel® - Media Series ATX Motherboard 1066/1333MHz (Socket 1155)

CPU -

Intel® - Core™ i7-2600 Quad-Core 3.4GHz Processor

GPU -

PNY - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 1.25GB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 Graphics Card

HD -

Western Digital - 320GB Internal Hard Drive for Desktops

DVD -

HP - 24x Internal Double-Layer DVD±RW/CD-RW Drive

Ram -

Corsair - 4GB XMS CL 9 DDR3 DIMM Desktop Memory

Power Supply -

Corsair - 4GB XMS CL 9 DDR3 DIMM Desktop Memory

Wireless Card -

Visiontek - Bigfoot Networks Killer 2100 Gaming Network Card

I dont know what the hell to look for in a wifi card but oh well picked that one just for now.

With case and monitor the computer comes out to about $1600 with tax so thats not too bad since alienwares with similar specs are like $2000 with no tax so fuck prebuilts.

If you have any recommendations on anything to replace because either im getting ripped off or just not looking hard enough then please reply to me and help out.

Where are you located? You should be able to build a good i7 rig for less than $1600 if you go through Newegg.  Also, you have listed your power supply as RAM. I would recommend the corsair 650W unless you plan on getting a second graphics card, in which case get the 750W.

Why a 320 gig HDD? Cost? A 1TB WD Caviar black is around $90, seems like a better way to go for a gaming rig thats probably going to have numerous installs on it.

Not sure about the specs on that mobo, looks like it only supports RAM speeds of up to 1333 MHz which matches the ram you have listed.  I'm sure you should be abel to find cheaper 1333 MHz RAM as well, but you may want to look into getting a mobo that will support 1600 MHz RAM for future upgrading.

Everything else looks good, that processor is probably overkill for a gaming rig tho.  I think a sandy bridge i5 would perform just as well for $100 less.

Whoops, yeah i was going to put a 700watt corsair for the power supply and about newegg i can't buy stuff online since my parents are the paranoid type credit card users so thats never going to happen. Best buy doesn't have the sandy bridge in the title for the CPUs but is this what your talking about ?

Intel® - Core™ i5-2500K Quad-Core 3.3GHz Processor

Im also having a hard time finding a socket 1155 mobo with higher speed since all intel quad cores are 1155 so thats giving me some trouble.

WOW great thread!!! Really informative and comprehensive well done!!!! :D

I was just on Vgchartz when i saw this thread, and after recently buying my new gpu and being rather dissapointed with the performance...i needed some advice. And then i came across this thread, so much people here who know so much :) Heres my problem...

About 3 years ago i bought a completely new pc and built it up myself, i spent quite alot of money on it and i wasnt that knowledgeable about parts, prices, performances or when to buy a part or when to wait for a newer version. I ended up buying this:

Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q9400 @ 2.66Ghz

4gb of DDR2 800mhz ram

9500gt gpu

480watt powersupply (not sure on the brand might be a no name brand :/ !!!)

The motherboard im not sure on the exact name but the cd says ASUS P5N-D Nvidia 750iSLI

So i chose those those parts and built it up on the minimal knowledge i had at the time. Soon after that the i7 came out along with the newer mobo socket LGA1156. Immediately i felt stupid! However apart from the 9500gt which i, had to settle on due to budget, knew was the low end product in the 9000 series. I felt i had built i pretty decent gaming machine at the time. Considering I was playing most my games at 1400 X 900 res and i was getting okay performance i felt good about that. However i always knew id have to upgrade my gpu eventually to a a proper mid range or higher end gpu.

Begining of this year i bought a new LED LCD SAMSUNG 23" screen capable of full hd res, so my poor 9500gt simply couldnt deal with the increase in res, it already struggled at hd ready resolutions. This forced me to look into a new gpu and with nvidias new 500 series of gpu's and great dx11 performance i went and bought me a MSI gtx560ti  :) cost me quite a bit!

So i installed the card and evetually got it too work. However to my dissapointment i havnt gotten the performance gains i wanted. Im capable of playing games at full hd resolutions but most games drop below 30fps...crysis, far cry 2, even res evil 5 sumtyms dips below 30.However i must say that all the games ive been playing have been playable. I recently ran the 3dmark11 benchmark on my pc, and heres where i got worried and realised my pc is bottlenecked some where, i got a very low score of just under P3000!(performance test) thats about -1000 less than the average for my setup! So what i want to know is, is this the type of performance i should be getting? Or is there a problem somewhere? Should i do another full upgrade??? Or can i replace single components? Where can i go from here?

Other information i think is important is that im running windows 7 32bit, therefore only utilising 3gs of ram. And im running my OS on a old IDE hdd, however i usually install  games and programs to my SATA 250gb hdd.

Any advice or help will be greatly appreaciated :)

Are you running the cpu at stock speed 2.66ghz? If so, then I would imagine that's where the bottleneck would be.

Is it possible for you to overclock it? My old system with a Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.4ghz) would easily run over 3ghz. I'm not sure about overclocking on that nforce 750i sli board though, my old one had a P35 chipset.

I had an idea it was the cpu :( Im getting 1-4 fps in the cpu test on 3dmark11...well below the average fps. From your experience would overclocking it to 3ghz make a substantial difference in performance? I dont know much about overclocking apart from moving a few sliding bars up and down in a utility program :/ Il look into overclocking though...Im also planning on upgrading to windows 7 64bit and adding an additional 1gb ram...and im gona do away with the IDE hdd although from the research ive done that shoudnt make a big difference.

Thanx for the advise smbu2000 :)

The IDE hdd is probably just slowing all everything down(windows, etc.) I hope you don't have the game(s) installed on it?

Increasing the clock speed will definitely help, especially when games require more cpu power (e.g. GTAIV), but as you increase the resolution/effects, it puts it more on the gpu and less on the cpu.

Some games are still demanding on current hardware. For example, Crysis: Warhead ( http://www.guru3d.com/article/geforce-gtx-560-ti-review/14 ) still puts a hurt on modern gpu's especially running on Enthusiast settings.

My games are installed on my SATA hdd, however my OS is installed on the IDE. Il be fixing this soon though, as in tomoro!

I had a look into overclocking and aparently overclocking to 3ghz is quite easily acheived on the q9400 cpu, so i went ahead and tried it. It actually worked, and i didnt have to change vcore settings left it on auto.. i got a minor increase in performance. However i was noticing games stalling so i decided to overclock it too 2.8ghz.  The thing with overclocking though is that if u have a stock cpu cooler then overclocking is not recommended so im gona leave it at that. For me investing in a cpu cooler is not worth it especially if my performance gains will be minimal and overclocking is not a sure thing.

Crysis(not warhead) is running okay i guess....however in medium settings i dont really get a big increase in performance(it stays between 25-50 in intensive gameplay) on very high settings in intensive gameplay it becomes just barely playable otherwise its round about 30.

Im thinking i assumed wrongly that id get great performance from my pc just by upgrading my gpu. So ive decided to just leave my pc as is for now(apart from the minor changes il be making hdd, OS, 1gbram) and play my games at settings that are comfortably playable. After that il look to upgrade my pc again hopefully through out the rest of this year. Atleast now i already have a good gpu to get me started :)