I thought I wasn't on the Bleeding Edge!

The last few weeks I've been working on building a new desktop computer with enough horsepower to run Flight Simulator with as much detail as the machine is capable of. I never buy leading edge because it's just not worth the markup put on the best stuff. Last week I spent a few hours shopping and figuring out what I wanted. I ended up purchased an AMD Phenom II X4, motherboard, 4 GB memory, a pair of Radeon graphics boards I configured in CrossfireX mode, and a couple of drives to configure in RAID zero for read performance. I gutted one of my existing cases, ordered a new 24" LCD monitor, then waited for the UPS guy to deliver it all.

Four days later the adventure begins. Assembly went very smooth, everything actually fit in the case and I had all the parts I needed to finish the build. Usually the tense moment is when you flip the power switch and you look for smoke. There is nothing more exciting than to watch your brand new creation power up for the first time knowing the warranty doesn't cover the smokey and melted parts that you would try to return. This time it came to life and threw me into the BIOS where I prepared it for the Operating System install.

Ok, I'm going to install XP, since the new happy word and snappy reliable Seven isn't out until next month. When you install XP on a RAID configured machine you must install a driver first so XP can see your hard drives. Ya, right, hit F8 and put your floppy containing the driver in your floppy drive........floppy drive?????...what floppy drive???? This motherboard doesn't even have a connector for one. But, have no fear, you can stick it on a USB flashdrive and get it to work. There is even a supplied utility to create this for you. Well, maybe not. It didn't work. There is still one more thing to try: the BIOS has a feature to fool the install into believing the USB drive is a floppy. No, that didn't work either. After a couple hours of playing around I decided I didn't need a RAID configuration anyway since this install is only for a month, until that snappy happy OS comes out.

Home free, the Operating System install is complete with drivers loaded, Flight Simulator installed, and ready to fly. Fired up Flight Sim, picked my plane, 'fly now'. Up, Up, and away, man, this is beautiful, bank toward the high res Chicago skyline...Oh Oh, what are all these words plastered on the blue sky, where's my plane! OHHH NOOO, it's a Blue Screen of Death!!

After repeating the above scenario a half dozen more times to eliminate any feeling of disbelief, I narrow the problem down to the sound driver. OK, now it gets ugly. Find out the two graphics cards I installed have sound chips to handle sound for the HDMI interface. These babies are capable of delivering HDMI HD movie signals, including sound, to whatever I want to attach to them. Well, I wasn't using that interface anyway, so after fooling around for a few more hours I reinstalled XP from scratch, disabled the sound devices on the video cards, installed my sound drivers and I'm set for take off one again. Up Up and away, flying for a few hours without a problem. Fantastic.

Then the next day, I fire it all up again only this time pick a different plane. Taxi this thing out of the gate and POW! Blue screen visits me once again. After again repeating this several times, to purge the disbelief from my system, I start the troubleshooting process. Sound driver, same error.

This is where I find out this motherboard was finalized the end of July. With only two months of history, I had all the latest drivers on the included CD. After more hours swearing at the beast, I again went out to the motherboard manufacturer's web site and low and behold, a new set of sound drivers put on the website yesterday. Guess what? The new drivers fixed the problem as of yesterday.

I'm flying high now!