Fixing the fastest

It started with a customer wanting his modern but exotic Cyberpower PC being configured to boot Windows from the Crucial m4 SSD (after upgrading the firmware) instead of using it as a disk cache. I then spent twelve hours, excluding food and football, trying to get it to boot from that SSD.

I started by removing the large nVidia GTX590 video card so that I could get to the SATA ports. The temporary replacement card allowed me better access but the screen refused to show the UEFI BIOS. I tried a DVI/VGA adaptor and another card and was finally only able to see it when attached directly to the monitor with VGA. The the mouse and keyboard worked in the UEFI screens but when I started to install Windows 7 they ceased to function. I tried another keyboard and mouse, there was no PS/2 socket and it wasn't until I noticed a couple of USB 2 sockets hidden high on the I/O panel that the problem was solved.

However, Windows install didn't recognise the SSD drive. It tried it in another computer and it worked fine, detected and formatted. Still not available for Windows install in the Cyberpower, either in SATA 3GBps or 6GBps. I substituted a spare HDD and was able to install easily onto that, plus added all the necessary drivers. I thought that I could clone the HDD onto the SSD on my data recovery system but though three programs showed the SSD to copy from, they all apart for True Image 2013 Trial (costs £40) would not let me copy to the SSD. I started looking at partitioning, reducing the size of the HDD partition to match. I noticed that the HDD was GPT partitioned whilst the SSD was MBR. I reformatted the SSD as GPT but still the cloning wouldn't work.

Replacing both drives back into the Cyberpower, the Windows install finally saw the SSD but would not allow me to select it giving an error (0x80300024). Research on this error showed that it won't install if there is another device with Windows already installed on it present. Removing the HDD solved this and finally after twelve hours, I was able to install and boot the system into Windows from the SSD. Completing the installation with updates and programs was easy.

I the decided to benchmark the system which has an Intel i7-3960X processor, initially the fastest Sandy Bridge E CPU at 3.3GHz. With 16GB DDR3 memory the performance was incredible. I was then able to overclock the system to what I thought was a safe 4.2GHz. The PCmark 7 of 6,104 was over twice my gaming system at 2,588. I respected this system as the fastest PC in the world, but a real pain to configure. It is big, bright, noisy and fast but way too expensive and fragile.