A few years has passed since I built my previous machine and now it is a good time for an overhaul.  I’ve been itching to play the latest games like it is meant to be played, at the highest quality.  After much research and shopping I am set on these components:

• DFI BloodIron P35-T2RL LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard


• Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz


• Crucial Ballistix Tracer 2GB (2 x 1GB) PC2 6400 – BL2KIT12864AL804


• Coolmax CU-600T 600W Power Supply


• Western Digital 74GB 7200 RPM SATA (Boot drive)


• Western Digital Caviar RE 160GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA


• MSI NX8800GT-T2D512E OC Geforce 8800 GT 512MB

The gaming experience is awesome!  Love the Ballistix Tracer RAMs, the LEDs that light up are pretty psychedelic when it’s busy.  I’m never really a big fan of using RAID in my game machines, I like to keep it simple.  A 10,000 RPM drive would be nice but it is almost 3 times more expensive, I’ll keep the money saved to buy games with.

I’ve also heard there are issues with the fan’s auto setting in the 8800GTs, the speed doesn’t increase when you’re playing a game and it’s true so keep an eye on the temperature.  Many have reported games freezing and/or crashing when playing for more than 30 minutes because of overheating.  You’re best to download nTune and manually set the fan speed for now until an update have been released.  Also the latest NVIDIA driver didn’t cause a BSOD on Vista as I mentioned in my previous blog so I’m relieved.

The power supply is decently quiet and it has a weird smell coming out of it.  Kind of like that new car smell except not quite as good.  The SATA power cables is way too short even though I have a mid tower.

So far so good and everything is running smoothly as expected.  Another fine machine built without breaking the bank. 

If you’re a NVIDIA user and have encountered such error message with Windows Vista you’re not alone.  This all of a sudden happened to me when I reinstalled my HTPC which did not occurred before.  I am currently using version 7.15.11.6369 (9/11/2007) on my GeForce 6800GT.

Solution -  Use the driver from Windows update or roll back to previous stable version.

I got a BSOD when I was trying to watch TV with Windows Media Center (#&^$ I said when it happened).  Then I recall that it was working fine before I updated to the driver I downloaded from NVIDIA (169.25).  The next thing I did was to uninstall the NVIDIA driver and go back to the Microsoft driver, but I received an uninstall failure and after a reboot Vista couldn’t re-install the driver automatically.  I cussed a bit then proceed to download and install the NVIDIA package again.  After it installed followed by a reboot, I launched WMC and proceed to try it again.  It BSOD again!  So I knew something is wrong with the latest NVIDIA drivers and I went back to the control panel to uninstall it again but this time I choose to removed all the NVIDIA drivers I previously installed.  That includes the chipset drivers and rebooted.  When Windows started it successfully installed the drivers automatically and after a reboot I was able to watch TV again.

There is definately something wrong with the driver from NVIDIA’s website.  I did some Google search and it seems like quite a few people have ran into this issue where nvlddmkm.sys have caused their PCs to BSOD when playing a game.  But they had earlier versions of the driver and it’s possible that some versions are not stable.  Other people have suggested that it was hardware related or a weak power supply (it’s possible) but the BSOD message clearly says that it was one of the driver files.  I would also suggest trying previous versions from NVIDIA’s website to see which one is stable.

I can’t exactly say that this solution will work for everyone out there but it worked for me.  I hope this will help in some way.