Yesterday i went out and purchased all the parts i needed for his rig and spent the whole day building it. I used the Corsair 500r Carbide series case in white to hold all the guts of the system. Internals consister of:
MSI Z77A-G45 motherboard coupled with a new Ivybridge 3570K which i immediately overclocked to test its grunt to 4.2ghz@ 1.13v. Primed all last night and the thing is solid stable.
Also coupled with it is a EVGA 550ti Superclocked which he'll be using for all his bluray material and light gaming (there was no point getting anything more expensive or high end)
Drives i decided on a Samsung 830 SSD 64GB unit with the norton ghost CD included. Top little drive, it's my first time playing with an SSD and damn it's first! Makes me want to upgrade mine now haha! For storage he's using a 2TB seagate Barracuda green 6gb/s which i've partitioned into 2 drives.
To Power this system i opted for the Corsair TX650 Enthusiasts series power supply which is half modular even though it says modular... however it was no problem fitting it all behind the side panel of the 500R case.
For Cooling we decided on watercooling it but not the cheapo all in one units! Because i have a lot of spares left over from my last rebuild i used my old compression fittings for his system so all we needed was a new radiator and tubing along with a new cpu block. I know how much i ranted on about how ugly and crappy looking the new EK blocks were HOWEVER.. after using one and seeing one upclose, it's actually nicer than it looks! It's a fair bit bigger than the old block aswel in my opinion. I got the Acetal full copper block (still don't trust nickel blocks) and it performs great with the correct jet plate. Also a XSPC EX240 Radiator.. this was a tight fit.. i mean to the point where i had to squeeze it just above the top heatsink of the motherboard... If anyone is thinking of getting this combination, get a slimmer rad as i had to bend the top mounts of the case slightly to fit this.
Performance wise his temps are 30 idle and 57 on prime95 for a few hours at clock speed of 4.2ghz.
A few pictures:
My only annoyance with this build is the graphics card.. im not sure if it's meant to be like this but the EVGA card seems to have a clicky fan.. i.e. when theres no load it's fairly quiet however when i start running benchmarks like heaven or 3dmark and the fan ramps up, i can hear it clicking quite loudly! Has anyone else experienced this problem??
WHAT NEXT?! i want to upgrade... i really do lol after seeing the performance of the new ivybridge chips compared to my phenom II, i feel outdated
Time to save up i think
MSI Z77A-G45 motherboard coupled with a new Ivybridge 3570K which i immediately overclocked to test its grunt to 4.2ghz@ 1.13v. Primed all last night and the thing is solid stable.
Also coupled with it is a EVGA 550ti Superclocked which he'll be using for all his bluray material and light gaming (there was no point getting anything more expensive or high end)
Drives i decided on a Samsung 830 SSD 64GB unit with the norton ghost CD included. Top little drive, it's my first time playing with an SSD and damn it's first! Makes me want to upgrade mine now haha! For storage he's using a 2TB seagate Barracuda green 6gb/s which i've partitioned into 2 drives.
To Power this system i opted for the Corsair TX650 Enthusiasts series power supply which is half modular even though it says modular... however it was no problem fitting it all behind the side panel of the 500R case.
For Cooling we decided on watercooling it but not the cheapo all in one units! Because i have a lot of spares left over from my last rebuild i used my old compression fittings for his system so all we needed was a new radiator and tubing along with a new cpu block. I know how much i ranted on about how ugly and crappy looking the new EK blocks were HOWEVER.. after using one and seeing one upclose, it's actually nicer than it looks! It's a fair bit bigger than the old block aswel in my opinion. I got the Acetal full copper block (still don't trust nickel blocks) and it performs great with the correct jet plate. Also a XSPC EX240 Radiator.. this was a tight fit.. i mean to the point where i had to squeeze it just above the top heatsink of the motherboard... If anyone is thinking of getting this combination, get a slimmer rad as i had to bend the top mounts of the case slightly to fit this.
Performance wise his temps are 30 idle and 57 on prime95 for a few hours at clock speed of 4.2ghz.
A few pictures:
My only annoyance with this build is the graphics card.. im not sure if it's meant to be like this but the EVGA card seems to have a clicky fan.. i.e. when theres no load it's fairly quiet however when i start running benchmarks like heaven or 3dmark and the fan ramps up, i can hear it clicking quite loudly! Has anyone else experienced this problem??
WHAT NEXT?! i want to upgrade... i really do lol after seeing the performance of the new ivybridge chips compared to my phenom II, i feel outdated

Time to save up i think

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