I'm not.
Compared to just a few years ago, tolerances for both temperature and voltage fluctuations have been greatly reduced by the sheer increases in the GHz game that's played today. Various components inside a system have become far more sensitive to fluctuations and (slight) incompatibilities.
Most systems are designed, build and tested for office duty, meaning a simple, static desktop and a word processor. Noone, save the odd exception to the rule, bothers to stress test systems to filter out the incompatibilities or other problems like amps usage and temperatures. And those are precisely the areas you stress in any PC when you play games with hardware accelleration (like through DirectX).
The days that you could put any brand RAM into any brand motherbord and combine it with any brand video board are long gone. Today you have to be very knowledgeable about many aspects of any PC in order to build a reliable PC. And this includes which brand RAM will not work with which brand motherboard, and which brand AGP board will overload the power regulators on which brand motherboard. Or take that infamous infinite loop with all it's possible causes.
For example, what most people, including system builders, fail to realise is the importance a good quality PSU these days. Look in the tech data sheets
of both AMD and Intel, and you'll see the same thing. The PSU, together with the power regulators on the motherboard (those vertically placed chips with the big metal cooling plates behind them) must be able to deliver 20 amps combined on the 3.3 and 5 volt rails to ensure reliable operation. Notice that I said combined. Thats not the same as adding up the amps ratings for the 3.3 and 5 volt listings of your PSU. Only the top A-brand manufacturers report that combined amps rating. And those units will cost you roughly around $120 - $150 US. It's a shame, really, that PSU's don't enter into the equation if a person goes after a gaming PC. A lot of money gets spend on the video board, processor and RAM, but the casing with power supply must go on the cheap.
EDIT: And you can safely bet it will become worse. Just check the specs and requirements for NVidia's latest GPU, weighing in at 222 milion transistors with heat dissipation to match. It has 2(!) extra power connections on the edges of the board, and the requirement that a minimum of 480 W PSU must be used, together with the requirement that those two power connectors must come directly from the PSU on individual leads that have no branched off connections to other devices. I don't know about you guys, but the only PSU's to date that fulfill such a requirement are the big, expensive (like > $200) PSU's in big tower casings, that were designed for large drive arrays. Most noname PSU have two individual power cord branches at best, and everything, including the mobo, gets it's power from those.
Jan Peter
