Project: AirRAID
- Thread starter Arthalen
- Start date
Will do! As well as finishing off the case and sorting out the Motherboard, theres another part I'll be writing about too...
Thanks!
I'm mainly not bothering with watercooling because... well, I can't be bothered with it again
Last time I spent close to £250 'doing it properly' with a full custom loop in my old case, and you can easily spend more going the full hog with Bitspower fittings and EK Full Cover waterblocks ect ect ect ect ect......
The long term maintenance of a custom loop WC is also a pain. Draining a loop to refill. cleaning out blocks...
I just feel the thermalright solution is better for me personally. Very easy to maintain (even my Fans will 'un-clip' for easy cleaning), it will perform exceptionally and will look the absolute business in all that Nickel Plating.
Case probably weights about 8kg vs. 15+ kg of similar size steel case so you can easily afford couple extra kilograms of hardware with total weight still staying lot lower.
Just imagine if case itself weighted that much more...
Case probably weights about 8kg vs. 15+ kg of similar size steel case so you can easily afford couple extra kilograms of hardware with total weight still staying lot lower.
Just imagine if case itself weighted that much more...
Oh lol! Yep!
On another note, I've just had a text to say my VX Cooler has arrived...
Can't wait to get home from work now
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- Lancashire
really like the look of this.
Quick text only update ... fuller update later with photos...
Got the VX fitted last night, its mounting mechanism is the best I've encountered yet on any HSF. Oh and its an absolute Monster!!
My only quibble is that at the full 70lbs of pressure mounting, the heatsink can 'twist' ontop of the heatsink. Although its not going anywhere!
Also got the HR-05 IFX/SLI heatsink mounted on the Northbridge - space is extremely tight!
Rather dissapointingly after doing some test fitting, I definitly won't be able to get a fan mounted to the Northbridge cooler directly... although I have come up with an alternative solution thats pretty effective.... more later.
Oh initial test temperatures at BIOS Idling....
CPU: 27C
Mobo: 26C
Northbridge: 39C
Southbridge: 31C
Thats with a small overclock to (333x9) 3Ghz but with high voltages!
CPU voltage at 1.475v
NB is at 1.66v
CPU PLL voltage is at 1.7v
FSB Term is at 1.6v)
These are the kind of voltages I need for 400x9(3.6Ghz) Stable, so I've got more headroom for even further overclocking!
Full update later on with photos....
Got the VX fitted last night, its mounting mechanism is the best I've encountered yet on any HSF. Oh and its an absolute Monster!!
My only quibble is that at the full 70lbs of pressure mounting, the heatsink can 'twist' ontop of the heatsink. Although its not going anywhere!
Also got the HR-05 IFX/SLI heatsink mounted on the Northbridge - space is extremely tight!
Rather dissapointingly after doing some test fitting, I definitly won't be able to get a fan mounted to the Northbridge cooler directly... although I have come up with an alternative solution thats pretty effective.... more later.
Oh initial test temperatures at BIOS Idling....
CPU: 27C
Mobo: 26C
Northbridge: 39C
Southbridge: 31C
Thats with a small overclock to (333x9) 3Ghz but with high voltages!
CPU voltage at 1.475v
NB is at 1.66v
CPU PLL voltage is at 1.7v
FSB Term is at 1.6v)
These are the kind of voltages I need for 400x9(3.6Ghz) Stable, so I've got more headroom for even further overclocking!
Full update later on with photos....
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Motherboard Cooling - Thermalright Installation Part 2!
Ok, time for a proper update with Pics... I'm actually a bit 'further on' than this update shows, but it means I have some more pictures to post tomorrow for you
Here's some further pictures of the installs for the Southbridge and Mosfet coolers, close ups of themounting mechanisms:
These pushpins work really well for keeping the things on, and for the lateral pressure, but it can rock if pushed from side to side. It just means I have to be careful with things that might butt up against the heatsinks and push them off the mosfets underneath...
The Venomous X is going to take a lot of that spare room up....
Reverse shot of the Southbridge install. Its very deceiving the amount of space available here, when I've installed my three expansion cards (including the 5850) there is so little room left!
More pushpins - they work, but my least favourite mounting method.
So anyways, I got home Tuesday night to find my Venomous X waiting for me. I was truly gobsmacked at the sheer size of the thing.....
There it is, towering over the HR-05 IFX heatsinks I'm also using on the motherboard.
Yep, its horrifically large!!!
The mounting system is both very easy and surprising effective. This is the main bracket fitted (both below and above the motherboard). This time around it was mounted outside of the case, but it would be incredibly easy to mount with the board installed with a motherboard cutout (Hence the previous Mod).
The pressure system works very nicely too - I could easily pick the entire motherboard up by the VX if I wanted to without fear
And there she sits, alongside the Hr-05 IFX/SLI Installed on the Northbridge. the fan is a temporary one installed so the system is usable - it will be replaced with Enermax Cluster 120mm's on Payday
It's not been all roses however - I've encountered some issues along the way with installation of all this Thermalright kit along the way.
1. Venomous X / Thermalright Fan Clips
The fanclips themselves are fine - its a good system and the fans mount solidly against the anti-vibration strips that you install on your VX. The problem was with the mosfet cooler installed:
There's less than 2mm clearance between the VX and the Mosfet HR-09. So on this side, I've had to juryrig some zip ties to keep the Fan in place. Its not ideal, and it doesn't look the part, but it will do until I come up with something better (unlikely). The only thing I can do here is use white zipties with white fans to hide them.
2. HR-05 IFX/SLI Fan Mounting
For some bizarre reason, there is only mounting holes for one direction of mount on these heatsinks. You can only mount a Fan on the 'Inside' of the HR-05 IFX SLI variant. Gahh!
Why in gods name did they not put the mounting holes on both sides so the user could choose where to mount the fan??? Arrggghh!
This means I cant mount a Fan on the Southbridge with the normal Thermalright Fan clips....
3. Northbridge HR-05 & Fan Clearance
Very dissapointingly, there's absolutely no clearance to mount a fan directly to the Northbridge Heatsink
This was a fairly major downer, I was expecting to be able to do this so as to improve the cooling as much as possible on the northbridge. But there's not enough clearance between Video Card and NB HR-05 (imagine fanblades catching on the rearside resistors on the video card
) and there is no way in hell I was going to get the Fan on the rear side between the NB HR-05 and the VX.
After swearing a fair bit at my motherboard, I have come up with a solution but have no photo to show you so I'll save that tidbit for the next update...
Ok, time for a proper update with Pics... I'm actually a bit 'further on' than this update shows, but it means I have some more pictures to post tomorrow for you
Here's some further pictures of the installs for the Southbridge and Mosfet coolers, close ups of themounting mechanisms:
These pushpins work really well for keeping the things on, and for the lateral pressure, but it can rock if pushed from side to side. It just means I have to be careful with things that might butt up against the heatsinks and push them off the mosfets underneath...
The Venomous X is going to take a lot of that spare room up....
Reverse shot of the Southbridge install. Its very deceiving the amount of space available here, when I've installed my three expansion cards (including the 5850) there is so little room left!
More pushpins - they work, but my least favourite mounting method.
So anyways, I got home Tuesday night to find my Venomous X waiting for me. I was truly gobsmacked at the sheer size of the thing.....
There it is, towering over the HR-05 IFX heatsinks I'm also using on the motherboard.
Yep, its horrifically large!!!
The mounting system is both very easy and surprising effective. This is the main bracket fitted (both below and above the motherboard). This time around it was mounted outside of the case, but it would be incredibly easy to mount with the board installed with a motherboard cutout (Hence the previous Mod).
The pressure system works very nicely too - I could easily pick the entire motherboard up by the VX if I wanted to without fear
And there she sits, alongside the Hr-05 IFX/SLI Installed on the Northbridge. the fan is a temporary one installed so the system is usable - it will be replaced with Enermax Cluster 120mm's on Payday
It's not been all roses however - I've encountered some issues along the way with installation of all this Thermalright kit along the way.
1. Venomous X / Thermalright Fan Clips
The fanclips themselves are fine - its a good system and the fans mount solidly against the anti-vibration strips that you install on your VX. The problem was with the mosfet cooler installed:
There's less than 2mm clearance between the VX and the Mosfet HR-09. So on this side, I've had to juryrig some zip ties to keep the Fan in place. Its not ideal, and it doesn't look the part, but it will do until I come up with something better (unlikely). The only thing I can do here is use white zipties with white fans to hide them.
2. HR-05 IFX/SLI Fan Mounting
For some bizarre reason, there is only mounting holes for one direction of mount on these heatsinks. You can only mount a Fan on the 'Inside' of the HR-05 IFX SLI variant. Gahh!
Why in gods name did they not put the mounting holes on both sides so the user could choose where to mount the fan??? Arrggghh!
This means I cant mount a Fan on the Southbridge with the normal Thermalright Fan clips....
3. Northbridge HR-05 & Fan Clearance
Very dissapointingly, there's absolutely no clearance to mount a fan directly to the Northbridge Heatsink
This was a fairly major downer, I was expecting to be able to do this so as to improve the cooling as much as possible on the northbridge. But there's not enough clearance between Video Card and NB HR-05 (imagine fanblades catching on the rearside resistors on the video card
) and there is no way in hell I was going to get the Fan on the rear side between the NB HR-05 and the VX.After swearing a fair bit at my motherboard, I have come up with a solution but have no photo to show you so I'll save that tidbit for the next update...
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Cable Tidy Test 1 - And the Northbridge Fan...
Ok, I've put the PC back together so I could work out a solution to the airflow problem around my Northbridge, and also to see how cable tidying would go with the new motherboard cutouts.
That you have to admit, is 'tidy'
What I have done for the Northbridge is essentially mount a fan to draw or 'suck' the hot air away from the NB HR-05 Heatsink. Using nothing more than a trusty Lian Li PCI Blanking plate, I can mount the fan in the right place without any need for permanant fixing or modding the case further.
Grr, no idea why Imageshack insist on it being upside down.. anyways, you can see here the PCI Bracket I've simply bent out to actually hold the fan in place.
Clearer shot of the clearances in volved. I had to take into account the Mosfet heatsink, the VX, the Nothbridge, the GPU and the memory slots!!
Upside down again Anyways, just a simple nut and bolt fixing to keep it secure.
Nope, not much room there...
The NB Heatsink has been angled away from Flat as you can see, so that the air suction is pulling from the long edge of the heatsink instead of flat on to the heatsink. You can see here that I won't be installing anymore memory any time soon.
So, idle temperatures in windows? (Fires up PC PRobe)
Ambient: About 21C
CPU: 26C
MB: 29C
NB: 46C
SB: 33C
None of the heatsinks are warm to the touch except the Northbridge HR-05. Mosfets are really nice and cool too
So, does that fan actually do anything where it is? Well, I tested that out, I turned the fan off and then proceeded to watch the NB Temperature rise ... constantly...Kept going upto 60C, and looked to be still climbing so I turned the fan back on at the point.
Its not 100% an ideal solution, but it works and its effective. I'll throw on some Prime95 Blend torture for the NB in the future and see what kind of temps I get then!
Edit: Did a 15 Minute Prime95 Blend run before heading off to work, and looking at these temperatures:
CPU: 41C
NB: 53C
SB: 33C
MB: 30C
Thats frankly awesome, only a 6C rise on the Northbridge and loads of headroom on CPU side too. These tests are only being run with a small overclock to 3.0Ghz at present, but its a very good indication of the possibilities.
Next Update: Putting the RAID in AirRAID!!
Ok, I've put the PC back together so I could work out a solution to the airflow problem around my Northbridge, and also to see how cable tidying would go with the new motherboard cutouts.
That you have to admit, is 'tidy'
What I have done for the Northbridge is essentially mount a fan to draw or 'suck' the hot air away from the NB HR-05 Heatsink. Using nothing more than a trusty Lian Li PCI Blanking plate, I can mount the fan in the right place without any need for permanant fixing or modding the case further.
Grr, no idea why Imageshack insist on it being upside down.. anyways, you can see here the PCI Bracket I've simply bent out to actually hold the fan in place.
Clearer shot of the clearances in volved. I had to take into account the Mosfet heatsink, the VX, the Nothbridge, the GPU and the memory slots!!
Upside down again
Anyways, just a simple nut and bolt fixing to keep it secure.
Nope, not much room there...
The NB Heatsink has been angled away from Flat as you can see, so that the air suction is pulling from the long edge of the heatsink instead of flat on to the heatsink. You can see here that I won't be installing anymore memory any time soon.
So, idle temperatures in windows? (Fires up PC PRobe)
Ambient: About 21C
CPU: 26C
MB: 29C
NB: 46C
SB: 33C
None of the heatsinks are warm to the touch except the Northbridge HR-05. Mosfets are really nice and cool too
So, does that fan actually do anything where it is? Well, I tested that out, I turned the fan off and then proceeded to watch the NB Temperature rise ... constantly...Kept going upto 60C, and looked to be still climbing so I turned the fan back on at the point.
Its not 100% an ideal solution, but it works and its effective. I'll throw on some Prime95 Blend torture for the NB in the future and see what kind of temps I get then!
Edit: Did a 15 Minute Prime95 Blend run before heading off to work, and looking at these temperatures:
CPU: 41C
NB: 53C
SB: 33C
MB: 30C
Thats frankly awesome, only a 6C rise on the Northbridge and loads of headroom on CPU side too. These tests are only being run with a small overclock to 3.0Ghz at present, but its a very good indication of the possibilities.
Next Update: Putting the RAID in AirRAID!!
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Looking good! Wish I could indulge in going with a complete thermalright setup, it looks so sick!!
Quick question, what's the noise level like having that fan bolted to case?
Heh, secret little trick was I put a little rubber washer between the case and the PCI bracket to help absorb any noise
however, the real winner here is these Enermax fans. There rotational speed isn't significantly high, even on these 80mm versions, so they cause no real vibrations and are very very quiet - the Lian Li fans currently drown any noise the Enermax might make.
Despite having an open case at present and a 5850, this PC runs very quietly. I can't wait to get hold of some 120 mm Enermax's so I can go All out on these fans.
Thanks
The good news is these thermalright HR-05s are pretty universal, and they come with three different mounting mechanisms (Pushpin, Screws and Hooks) for different NB / SB styles.
The Hr-09 MOSFET coolers come in different varieties as well for diferent boards.
Check out the compatibilty link I posted earlier
Very cunning indeed!
I have seen/heard a lot of good stuff about Enermax fans but never really got around to trying one out. I have two Scythe Kaze 120mm, and they are fairly audible. Might get one or two just to see if they really do live up to all the hype!
I have seen/heard a lot of good stuff about Enermax fans but never really got around to trying one out. I have two Scythe Kaze 120mm, and they are fairly audible. Might get one or two just to see if they really do live up to all the hype!
Putting the RAID in AirRAID - Part 1
I've had this sitting on my desk for a while, so it's time to take a slight deviation away from the Thermalright side of things and tell you about the third major part of my Build.
I'm a fan of RAID. I've been using RAID in my home systems for a while now, always RAID 0 with my rationale being if my system ever died, who cares, I could always rebuild it onto a single disk. Well that rationale no longer holds for me. I run a lot of virtualisation, with multiple Disk Images ect. So I want my RAID back for performance but with some measure of redundancy.
Also, I thought hard and long about going the SSD route. For me, I can't afford the drives that afford the kind of capacity I need for my gaming and my work, I rather buy a couple of cheap 500GB or 1TB drives instead! So, I'll leave the SSDs for now, maybe another year before I take another look at the market and see whats on offer.
For now though, its time to draw on my enterprise experience and go the whole hog with a quality RAID setup. I knew I wanted a minimum of a RAID 5 setup, so thats 3 drives straight off the bat. I also wanted to minimise the expenditure on hard drives, so a set of £40 500GB drives seems the best option when purchasing multiples! I did some digging on Drives and speeds, and the Samsung F3 500GB give the best avergae read and write performances that I can see.
So that 4 Samsung drives in RAID 5 sorted.... but what about the controller?!
Power Edge Raid Controller aka Dell PERC Card
In my work I deal with a lot of servers, build servers, maintain them and generally do a lot of the hardware work. I play with RAID every day, set it up and occasionally, recover RAID setups when servers die ect. I've the good fortune to play with Dell PowerEdge servers for quite a while now, and we've seen some fairly impressive stuff with there PERC SAS Cards and 15K SAS disks.
In hindsight, my experiences with onboard desktop RAID solutions tend to be pretty hit-and-miss - can get decent Read performance with RAID 0 but really sucky Write performance, and RAID 5 performance is just not worth bothering with.
However, a hardware dedicated card can really make a big difference, and since a PERC 5/i card just has a regular PCI-Express connector on the bottom, I thought 'Why not?'. Although these cards are designed for SAS and SAS Drives in particular, they are capable of hosting SATA drives as well. You just need a proper adaptor that takes the PERC 5/i cards SFF-8484 multilane connector and turns into 4 SATA connectors. I managed to buy a PERC 5 card for £20 (including Battery unit!) and I also picked up a pair of the cables I needed for £10.
So, I have my card, my cables, and the drives will get ordered on Pay day... but the story doesnt end there....
Cooling the PERC Card
I got hold of a card to trial at the start of April, and the news so far has been all good. I dug around the internet looking for help in getting these cards working on a desktop PC, and came across the following threads:
http://www.overclock.net/raid-controllers-software/359025-perc-5-i-raid-card-tips.html
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=628456
The first thread pretty much told me everything I needed to know, so big salute to the guys on there
To keep things simple, I'll repeat some of the info here.
There are some issues with using the card straight off the bat. These cards are designed with tiny heatsinks and server based focused airflow in order to keep them cool. They have a dedicated ARM controller processor and an Intel IOPS XOR Engine processor on the card, and the Intel processor can really heat up!! Without the focussed airflow of a server case, a different solution was needed for the paltry heatsinks that came on the card.
Also, the card was never designed for desktop mounting, and has no PCI Bracket.
And lastly, if you plug one of these things into a Intel chipset based board, its likely the whole PC wont POST with it plugged in. to get around this, you need to stop the card trying to communicate on Intel's SMBus on the motherboard - and there's a really simple trick to getting around this
No update is complete without some extra photos, so here's the initial trials.....
Hmm, all that empty space at the bottom of the case.... below the RAID card... wonder what I can do with it?!
And this is the card, in all its naked glory. The central chip is the LSI ARM controller processor, and the big green chip on the right is the Intel IOPS processor. Thats the one that needs the cooling!
Yep, big aint it? Its a Xigmatek Porter Northbridge cooler, and it has hook mounts, perfect for the Card. I had this sitting around gathering dusts for years now, and its finally found a use. For a short while at least.....
Kerchunk! Mounted and Down! That should keep it nice and cool!
Whats not in this photo is that I also strapped a 60mm Coolermaster fan to the heatsink, so that it had airflow as ell as a giant cooler
I found an old Gigabyte E-Sata PCI bracket that I had no use for (I don't even know where it came from, I've never owned a Gigabyte board!). The metal backplate fitted to the holes on the PERC Card perfectly, and the gaps in the plate will help in letting air escape from the heatsinks fan.
As for the Intel SMBus issue - Micropore tape to the rescue. I'll detail this with a photo later on, but basically i wrapped a thin sliver of tape around pins 3 and 4 of the PCI-Express connector - this magically stops the card trying to talk on the Intel SMBus and allows the PC to Post!
And there we have it! A Sucessful POST and entry into the RAID Card BIOS. So thats the card working and atleast getting this far.......
Ah-ha! Drivers automatically installed!! Vista 64 automatically recognised the card and installed the drivers.
I was quite flushed with sucess at this point, but don't have the hard drives to hook up and test yet. Oh the cables...
There ya go - I bought two of these cables for future expansion, but each connector can host 4 SATA drives onto the card. Google SFF-8484 to SATA for links.
Performance numbers will come about hopefully by the end of next week, depending on when I get my new Drives! But rest assured I will post numbers.
Now your all probably thinking I bothered to use Thermalright all the way through on my motherboard, what the hell am I doing with the Xigmatek thingy?! Well, you'll see later
I've had this sitting on my desk for a while, so it's time to take a slight deviation away from the Thermalright side of things and tell you about the third major part of my Build.
I'm a fan of RAID. I've been using RAID in my home systems for a while now, always RAID 0 with my rationale being if my system ever died, who cares, I could always rebuild it onto a single disk. Well that rationale no longer holds for me. I run a lot of virtualisation, with multiple Disk Images ect. So I want my RAID back for performance but with some measure of redundancy.
Also, I thought hard and long about going the SSD route. For me, I can't afford the drives that afford the kind of capacity I need for my gaming and my work, I rather buy a couple of cheap 500GB or 1TB drives instead! So, I'll leave the SSDs for now, maybe another year before I take another look at the market and see whats on offer.
For now though, its time to draw on my enterprise experience and go the whole hog with a quality RAID setup. I knew I wanted a minimum of a RAID 5 setup, so thats 3 drives straight off the bat. I also wanted to minimise the expenditure on hard drives, so a set of £40 500GB drives seems the best option when purchasing multiples! I did some digging on Drives and speeds, and the Samsung F3 500GB give the best avergae read and write performances that I can see.
So that 4 Samsung drives in RAID 5 sorted.... but what about the controller?!
Power Edge Raid Controller aka Dell PERC Card
In my work I deal with a lot of servers, build servers, maintain them and generally do a lot of the hardware work. I play with RAID every day, set it up and occasionally, recover RAID setups when servers die ect. I've the good fortune to play with Dell PowerEdge servers for quite a while now, and we've seen some fairly impressive stuff with there PERC SAS Cards and 15K SAS disks.
In hindsight, my experiences with onboard desktop RAID solutions tend to be pretty hit-and-miss - can get decent Read performance with RAID 0 but really sucky Write performance, and RAID 5 performance is just not worth bothering with.
However, a hardware dedicated card can really make a big difference, and since a PERC 5/i card just has a regular PCI-Express connector on the bottom, I thought 'Why not?'. Although these cards are designed for SAS and SAS Drives in particular, they are capable of hosting SATA drives as well. You just need a proper adaptor that takes the PERC 5/i cards SFF-8484 multilane connector and turns into 4 SATA connectors. I managed to buy a PERC 5 card for £20 (including Battery unit!) and I also picked up a pair of the cables I needed for £10.
So, I have my card, my cables, and the drives will get ordered on Pay day... but the story doesnt end there....
Cooling the PERC Card
I got hold of a card to trial at the start of April, and the news so far has been all good. I dug around the internet looking for help in getting these cards working on a desktop PC, and came across the following threads:
http://www.overclock.net/raid-controllers-software/359025-perc-5-i-raid-card-tips.html
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=628456
The first thread pretty much told me everything I needed to know, so big salute to the guys on there
To keep things simple, I'll repeat some of the info here.
There are some issues with using the card straight off the bat. These cards are designed with tiny heatsinks and server based focused airflow in order to keep them cool. They have a dedicated ARM controller processor and an Intel IOPS XOR Engine processor on the card, and the Intel processor can really heat up!! Without the focussed airflow of a server case, a different solution was needed for the paltry heatsinks that came on the card.
Also, the card was never designed for desktop mounting, and has no PCI Bracket.
And lastly, if you plug one of these things into a Intel chipset based board, its likely the whole PC wont POST with it plugged in. to get around this, you need to stop the card trying to communicate on Intel's SMBus on the motherboard - and there's a really simple trick to getting around this
No update is complete without some extra photos, so here's the initial trials.....
Hmm, all that empty space at the bottom of the case.... below the RAID card... wonder what I can do with it?!
And this is the card, in all its naked glory. The central chip is the LSI ARM controller processor, and the big green chip on the right is the Intel IOPS processor. Thats the one that needs the cooling!
Yep, big aint it? Its a Xigmatek Porter Northbridge cooler, and it has hook mounts, perfect for the Card. I had this sitting around gathering dusts for years now, and its finally found a use. For a short while at least.....
Kerchunk! Mounted and Down! That should keep it nice and cool!
Whats not in this photo is that I also strapped a 60mm Coolermaster fan to the heatsink, so that it had airflow as ell as a giant cooler
I found an old Gigabyte E-Sata PCI bracket that I had no use for (I don't even know where it came from, I've never owned a Gigabyte board!). The metal backplate fitted to the holes on the PERC Card perfectly, and the gaps in the plate will help in letting air escape from the heatsinks fan.
As for the Intel SMBus issue - Micropore tape to the rescue. I'll detail this with a photo later on, but basically i wrapped a thin sliver of tape around pins 3 and 4 of the PCI-Express connector - this magically stops the card trying to talk on the Intel SMBus and allows the PC to Post!
And there we have it! A Sucessful POST and entry into the RAID Card BIOS. So thats the card working and atleast getting this far.......
Ah-ha! Drivers automatically installed!! Vista 64 automatically recognised the card and installed the drivers.
I was quite flushed with sucess at this point, but don't have the hard drives to hook up and test yet. Oh the cables...
There ya go - I bought two of these cables for future expansion, but each connector can host 4 SATA drives onto the card. Google SFF-8484 to SATA for links.
Performance numbers will come about hopefully by the end of next week, depending on when I get my new Drives! But rest assured I will post numbers.
Now your all probably thinking I bothered to use Thermalright all the way through on my motherboard, what the hell am I doing with the Xigmatek thingy?! Well, you'll see later
Putting the RAID in AirRAID - Part 2
Found some time to finish off the RAID Card last night.... with a Thermalright HeatSink and Enermax Cluster Fan
The blue heatsink is the Akasa aluminium chipset cooler you can gety from various places for aroud £4.
More Thermalright HR-05 IFX Goodness
Longshot .. easy to see the height of this thing here... makes use of all that space in the bottom of the case.
That's the original heatsink thats used to cool the Intel IOPS processor. Tiny little insignificant thing....
It wasn't all roses though!!!
When it came to test the installation, I found the Heatsink overhanged the card far too much towards its connector side. I had to twist the heatsink through almost 45 Degress to get it to fit, but doing so it now fits and the card still works perfectly
More updates to come at the weekend.... On the cards to come:
1) Strip down PC, clean up and polish the Case. Yes, after doiung the motherboard I now feel I have to go back and do the rest of the case
2) Order new 120mm Fans and Hard drives (Payday tomorrow!)
3) Refit PC components, fit new Cluster 120mm fans.
4) Flash RAID Card to LSI Firmware and test install the MegaRAID software.
5) Fit new Hard Drives and do test RAID setups for speed tests.
6) Re-install Windows on RAID setup, cable tidy.
7) Window Mod and fitting for finalising!
Found some time to finish off the RAID Card last night.... with a Thermalright HeatSink and Enermax Cluster Fan
The blue heatsink is the Akasa aluminium chipset cooler you can gety from various places for aroud £4.
More Thermalright HR-05 IFX Goodness
Longshot .. easy to see the height of this thing here... makes use of all that space in the bottom of the case.
That's the original heatsink thats used to cool the Intel IOPS processor. Tiny little insignificant thing....
It wasn't all roses though!!!
When it came to test the installation, I found the Heatsink overhanged the card far too much towards its connector side. I had to twist the heatsink through almost 45 Degress to get it to fit, but doing so it now fits and the card still works perfectly
More updates to come at the weekend.... On the cards to come:
1) Strip down PC, clean up and polish the Case. Yes, after doiung the motherboard I now feel I have to go back and do the rest of the case
2) Order new 120mm Fans and Hard drives (Payday tomorrow!)
3) Refit PC components, fit new Cluster 120mm fans.
4) Flash RAID Card to LSI Firmware and test install the MegaRAID software.
5) Fit new Hard Drives and do test RAID setups for speed tests.
6) Re-install Windows on RAID setup, cable tidy.
7) Window Mod and fitting for finalising!
Quick Update
Just a quick update to say its all steam ahead for this weekends work...
I ordered my set of Enermax 120mm Cluster fans on wednesday and received them last night - so new toys!
My Samsung F3 500GB hard drives are on there way too. Ordered today with Saturday delivery, so will really be able to toy around with my RAID setup over the next week too
Mmmmm, plenty of fan-nage Can see my PC in the background, been test runnign some bits and peices since the last lot of work to ensure everything is stable and good
Tested all the new 120mm fans, there looking blue here in the photo but they all produce a bright white effect!! The fan at the bottom right is an 80mm fan for comparison.
So, will be all ahead full tomorrow!
Just a quick update to say its all steam ahead for this weekends work...
I ordered my set of Enermax 120mm Cluster fans on wednesday and received them last night - so new toys!
My Samsung F3 500GB hard drives are on there way too. Ordered today with Saturday delivery, so will really be able to toy around with my RAID setup over the next week too
Mmmmm, plenty of fan-nage
Can see my PC in the background, been test runnign some bits and peices since the last lot of work to ensure everything is stable and good
Tested all the new 120mm fans, there looking blue here in the photo but they all produce a bright white effect!! The fan at the bottom right is an 80mm fan for comparison.
So, will be all ahead full tomorrow!
Quick update:
Hard Drives have arrived, Case got stripped down last night to bare metal, has been washed down, sanded to 800 Grit and been over with Rubbing Compound.
And thats as far as its going, the effort required to fully polish the case would be .... extreme. I must admit a simple 800 Grit Sand and one compound rub has given it a much better finish, so happy to leave it there.
Nipping out now to get a new DVD Writer, and will then begin the task of rebuilding the PC.
Pics to come later!
Hard Drives have arrived, Case got stripped down last night to bare metal, has been washed down, sanded to 800 Grit and been over with Rubbing Compound.
And thats as far as its going, the effort required to fully polish the case would be .... extreme. I must admit a simple 800 Grit Sand and one compound rub has given it a much better finish, so happy to leave it there.
Nipping out now to get a new DVD Writer, and will then begin the task of rebuilding the PC.
Pics to come later!
Case Build - Part 1
Ok, on with the build then, its been together now for around a week while I've been toying with RAID configurations and playing some games. But can't let the project thread die, so here's a whole bucketful of photos for you:
Case Tripped down and ready to go. Everything thats worthwhile removing has been done so, including the roof and the front button PCB ect.
I also treated myself to a shiny new SATA DVD-RW drive to accompany the build, as my old one has finally given up the ghost...
These Lian-Li Bezels are really nice, and match the case finish perfectly. Much better than the standard black plastic on the drive itself.
the first of the new shiny Samsung drives had to be fitted into a 5.25" bay using the Akasa brackets you can get. Thats because...
This is my Lian-Li EX-34HB Hot Swap drive cage. Without the Hotswap capability. I've removed the PCB and rear fan cage, as the PCB was killing hard drives plugged into it. Thing is, it looks really sweet and means I can fit HDs in the 5.25" bays
Nice and roomy for three hard drives in here. They not too squashed up so room for airflow.
Three hard drives go in....
... and there nicely accessible from the rear for cabling.
Fitted into the case below the first hard drive previously installed. The single HD had another Lian Li bezel fitted to the front, as with the hard drive brackets I couldn't fit a standard blanking plate
More to come....
Ok, on with the build then, its been together now for around a week while I've been toying with RAID configurations and playing some games. But can't let the project thread die, so here's a whole bucketful of photos for you:
Case Tripped down and ready to go. Everything thats worthwhile removing has been done so, including the roof and the front button PCB ect.
I also treated myself to a shiny new SATA DVD-RW drive to accompany the build, as my old one has finally given up the ghost...
These Lian-Li Bezels are really nice, and match the case finish perfectly. Much better than the standard black plastic on the drive itself.
the first of the new shiny Samsung drives had to be fitted into a 5.25" bay using the Akasa brackets you can get. Thats because...
This is my Lian-Li EX-34HB Hot Swap drive cage. Without the Hotswap capability. I've removed the PCB and rear fan cage, as the PCB was killing hard drives plugged into it. Thing is, it looks really sweet and means I can fit HDs in the 5.25" bays
Nice and roomy for three hard drives in here. They not too squashed up so room for airflow.
Three hard drives go in....
... and there nicely accessible from the rear for cabling.
Fitted into the case below the first hard drive previously installed. The single HD had another Lian Li bezel fitted to the front, as with the hard drive brackets I couldn't fit a standard blanking plate
More to come....