I’m still having a bit of trouble with the new system, and primarily with the video card. The first problem is that I have to reboot every day or the drivers start ‘wigging out’, constantly issuing a stream of timeout and recovery errors and making the system unusable. This apparently happens after the system has been running for 36 hours, and there are a lot of complaints about it on NVIDIA’s forum and moderators have posted that it’s under investigation, so hopefully a fix isn’t too far away. At least rebooting is super-fast, though I’d be a lot more annoyed if I was currently doing development on this system and had to close and reopen everything every day.
The second problem was that I started getting spontaneous reboots in the middle of games. After checking the temperatures and seeing them get way too high, I cracked open the case and saw that a bundle of loose cables had drooped down into the video card fans, stopping one of them from spinning. There wasn’t really anything I could easily tie them to, but they were going underneath another cable that’s much stiffer, so it seemed like it would suffice to have them rest on top of it instead. Unfortunately that meant rerouting that other cable, which is the USB3 front panel cable that caused me grief before, so I had to pull the 3.5″ drive bay out again to put the USB3 plug back in.
And then in the course of doing that, I somehow yanked out two of those looser cables from the motherboard. They were just the front panel power LED pins, but if I didn’t do anything about them, then those would droop down into the video card fans. Unfortunately those pins are in a very narrow little region between the power supply and the video card, too narrow to reach with the kind of finger-pinching needed to guide the plugs properly. The one time in my life I actually specifically needed needle-nose pliers, and I discover I don’t have any…
So, I had to move the video card out of the way to give me more room to work in, and that meant moving some other cables that ran past the video card, and removing the ‘cage’ on the back of the case to get at some screws, and… In the end I wound up damn near disassembling and reassembling the whole system, just to put one cable on top of another. There’s probably a lesson here about doing proper cabling up front, but who knows if I’ll remember it by the next time I have to assemble a system…