Help me build a benching rig.

[Stan_Lite]

I am considering building a benching rig and would like some advice please.

The plan at the moment is to use a Vapochill lightspeed unit to cool the CPU and have dual watercooled gfx cards.

I have a DFI expert motherboard on one of my rigs just now and like it very much but I like ATI gfx cards. My question is, would the DFI crossfire board clock as well as the expert so I can go crossfire with 2 X1900s or would I be better with the expert board with 2 7900s in SLI?

Also, being a bit of a watercooling noob, I would like some advice on which components would be best for the gfx cards and Northbridge. I would prefer blocks which cover the ram chips as well as the GPU. Which pump, rad/fans, reservoir, blocks would be best?

Which PSU would be best for this rig? I need something which will give me adequate power and stability for benching at high clocks.

Also need advice on RAM. Which RAM would be best for this sort of job? I would imagine I would be better with RAM that can run with tight timings on a divider rather than high bandwidth (I will be using this particular rig for AMD chips with the possibility of making up a seperate mobo/RAM set up for Intel when the Conroe chips and boards come out).

I was intending mounting it on a table for easier access when changing stuff out and to help cooling, I was also going to point a deskfan at it to help keep the whole lot cool whilst in use. When not in use I will be covering the set up to keep out dust etc.

I will be using a 37Gb Raptor for storage and installing a trimmed down version of Windows (using nlite) and only installing benching software etc. Any advice on benching software etc.? or would I be better asking in the Overclocking forum?

Please only suggest items stocked by OcUK as I prefer to buy my stuff here (I have seen the lightspeed unit a fair bit cheaper elsewhere but I like dealing with these guys and can't be bothered ordering stuff from here, there and everywhere).

Don't be afraid to suggest pricey items as I would rather spend a few bob and get a really good system than compromise and have a good system at a reasonable price

Stan

 

[Stan_Lite]

I can see the attraction of the Quad sli rig but my intention was to oc and bench many different CPUs. As far as I can see, the above machine would be pointless if testing a 3500 Venice core or something like that.

What I need is a set up which will be able to test pretty much any CPU to as high as I can get them and compare benchmarks.

Any that I find which clock particularly well will be kept and built into a fairly high end system and either used or sold. Any "duds", as far as overclocking goes, will be sold on.

Basically I want to play with expensive toys and have some fun

Stan

 

[Stan_Lite]

I think I'll pass on the quad sli thing. It isn't really necessary and there are too many things about that splendid machine that I don't need/want i.e. FX60 (although I will get one eventually), case, optical drive, 2x150Gb raptors etc.
Also, I would prefer the DFI board - I had a look over in the motherboards section and there were a couple of people who said that the X-fire board was a good clocker so I think I may go down that road with the X1900 X-fire and X1900XTX.

I have Mushkin redline RAM in another machine and I also have some Corsair XMS3500LL that does 2-2-2-5 at 220MHz so I may use those for benching and get some other RAM for the 2 machines I take them from. I was thinking to do that anyway so I can bench with high bandwidth or low latencies. The Mushkin I have will do 270MHz at 3-3-3-8.

I still need some advice on watercooling for the gfx cards. If anyone can help then please suggest away, if not I will move it over to the overclocking section.

Stan

Edit: I won't need a monitor, I have enough lying around at the moment and I won't be doing anything exept benching with it most of the time. If I want to try out a game on it, I will take my gaming monitor to it.