m8530f desktop PC with a m2n78-la mother board doesn't see my drives

[BurningFury]

After being able to fix my pc I want to upgrade the Psu and graphic card.
On the e9120y Model the Psu is only 300w

I hear that's rather low, so lookin online ppl recommend at least 600w to power up a decent graphics card.

Any good Psu or graphics card u can recommend? Mainly want turn my pc into a gaming rig and be able to use it casually as well. Thanks

[T-n-T]

Yeah I have the p6210y, it came with a stock 300W PS too... It mainly depends on what you consider a decent graphic card... Here's a list for reference, it's a bit outdated but gives you a general idea of what goes where:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-performance-radeon-geforce,2997-7.html

As you can see the Radeon HD 4850 (Windows Experience Index gives a rating of 7.3 to it while it rated the RAM and CPU at 7.1, doesn't really mean much but just another point of reference) I picked up is behind 7 other tiers of video cards, yet when I run Skyrim and it scans my system it wants to run everything on "high" with 4x AA and 8x AF. I use pretty much the same settings with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, although there's a slight lag there as the "recommended" specs to run that game is actually higher than Skyrim, go figure. Skyrim "recommends" a "GTX 260/Radeon 4890 or higher" and Deus Ex "recommends" a "GTX 465 or AMD Radeon HD 5850" now those are the recommended specs, not the required specs. Anyways I find Skyrim runs smoothly on my system, same as Deus Ex with the except of a slight lag here and there, turning down AA or AF should help although it hasn't bothered me to that point.

AMD does a really good job of telling you the required power right on their site, haven't really looked at Nvidia but I'm assuming it's the same. To power the HD 4850, AMD recommends at least a 450W PS, a HD 6850 at least a 500W PS. Looking at that list, I'd say both of those cards are **bleep** decent considering what you can do on a stock HD 4850... and I picked it up from Craigslist for $30, so really can't go wrong there.

To sum it all up and answer your question, I'd recommend getting a 600W PS to give yourself some wiggle room as far as the requirements goes, and also give your self room to upgrade later. As for brand I'd stick with the big names like Antec, Corsair, Thermaltake, OCZ, etc. For a graphics card I'd say anything above a HD 4850 is decent, so anywhere from that card up. Hope that answers your question and good luck, these rigs can be turned into a decent gaming machine with just a video card and RAM upgrade, you could even go as far as upgrading the motherboard and getting a decent one that lets you OC.

[maple-canada]

In reply to a previous post stating a dedicated video card can get problem fixed, that's a real YMMV.

The so called North Bridge nvidia chip is actually a combined chip. It has North bridge, GPU and South bridge in there.

Based on how lucky you are, the portion got damaged on it could vary. If it's GPU related portion having problem (freezing up or dropping frames on video diaplay), adding a decicated video card may be able to delay the PC's totaly freezing up. But it is just delayed.

And most of the people on this forum are having SATA issues, which is the SATA controller (North Bridge) portion of the chip (actually it's the connection between the die and sustrate to be specific), adding a video card wouldn't do a thing. I tried that already, didn't help at all. In my case an extra SATA card fixed the problem.

And if you are lucky enough, more portions are affected, a new mother board may be a only fix.

So actually there are a lot of useful informations in this long thread. Every one just needs to find the useful information for his own case.

[T-n-T]

It does depend on how damaged your chip is, and I did describe in detail what causes my system to freeze, I didn't say it would work for everybody. The NB is the combined NB/SB on this motherboard, the GPU generates a lot of heat so putting in a dedicated video card to take the strain off of the NB would also cause temp to go down. You're talking about a damaged chip already, not knowing what components are afffected. I too was getting the Bio2HD error or whatever it was, how did you think I found this thread? Is my system dead? Far from it, I'm actually playing Skyrim right now as we speak. So let me repeat myself one more time, what I wrote was an answer to the people with a semi-functioning NB, as I've written in bold on that post... If their system still yet functions but they're getting freezes from the GPU overheating (use CPUID's Hardware Monitor or Speedfan to see the temp of your GPU) and in turn causing the entire NB to overheat and shutdown their system, if they're wondering would adding in a dedicated video card bypass the overheating NB, then that's what my post is for. Just because you're getting a Bio2HD error or none of your drives are being recognized doesn't automatically mean your NB is dead or some part of it is dead, it also depends on when you get it. If it's from a cold boot, then yes chances are the SATA controller on your NB might be dead, but if it's itermittent or only happens after a crash, then lowering the temp of the NB might help you.

So read carefully what I wrote, don't take what I say out of context.

[ccslmcc]

Wow, 31 pages and still running! I found this thread when investigating a SATA failure on one of these boards.

I also note that HP haven't commented at all on this thread, shame on HP!!

I run my own computer services company in the UK and am beginning to see failures of these boards due to the overheating nVidia chip. I've tracked my sales and have identified in excess of 30 systems which use this board. Yesterday I persuaded a client with one system showing symptoms to pay me to fit 50mm cooling fans to all 6 systems he had bought from me as a precaution. "Speedfan" did show a significant improvement in chip temps with fans installed, so I can only hope this allows the systems to last the 5 years that my customers typically expect a business PC to last (minimum).

I have exclusively recommended HP and resold HP PC's for the past 4 years. No more. If HP can't respond to a 31 page thread with some comment then they are not the engineering-led company with high standards that I thought they were. 

I think it's important to keep this thread running so people have a chance to report their experience with these boards. Hugely disappointed customer.

[Rankontop]

And another Victim

Almost looks like its time for a class action lawsuite, lol.

6 hours of my time @$50.00 an hour messing with this fricken paperwieght. I only charged the customer $50.00.

I should use my skills as an online marketer to warn people, but its a waist of time, all companies are going cheap and were paying 2x what we should be.

Well I hope its not the wave of the future.

Tags# HP Pavilion p6210y problems,HP Pavilion p6210y hard drive, HP Pavilion p6210y  upgrade bios,

HP Pavilion p6210y help, HP Pavilion p6210y reviews.
ny545AA#aba

[Rankontop]

hard drive, lockups, frozen, freezes, wontstart, locks up, hangs

[Rankontop]

dont use this pc for that. get a different brand

[Rankontop]

so is it worth it to just trash the system and pull the cpu and memory for another system?
Thanks for your info.

[BurningFury]

That's what I did.
I bought a Mobo that could fit my case and used all the stock parts that came with my pc.

In the end I didn't spend too much to fix it,
And being a total noob about this stuff it turned
out alright.

But after this experience I don't think I'd buy
from HP again.

HP needs to be behind its products and its costumers, and clearly they are behind neither.