Project Complete and Total Overkill

[phill9800]

I dont have a name for them yet, but I'm sure someone here might be able to help me! :lol:

Here's my two setups I'll be using:

I have a C0 and a D0.
I have 6Gb of Crucial ram and 6Gb Viper Patriot 2133Mhz stuff (although I'm having a few problems running that at its stock timings, even with the CPU at stock timings... Kinda weird, I hope the ram isnt broke )

Here's the boards up close and personal:

My 759 with Koolance block:

My 762 with EK block:

There's the case of the case too..

For starters it'll need to hold 2 triple rad's and then 8 hard drives, along with DVD-RW and possibly a floppy drive.
I've got two PSU's to use with each rig. I'll again grab some pics when I go back up
I'm also planning on a 2nd 30" Dell screen, so I have one for each PC

The 759 rig will be used as my daily gamer but will also be used for gaming when people come over. I'm hoping for a decent overclock as both motherboard and CPU will be cooled by water, so here's hoping

The 762 rig will be used as my Gaming rig and will be clocked to a minimum of 4.4Ghz. The Partiot Viper ram and the EK CPU water block will be used with this setup
I've also got a SAS/SATA adaptor card, the Adaptec 5805. This will be used with my 8 Seagate 73Gb 15k drives.

Both systems will be running Windows 7 64 Bit Ultimate, as we'll have Directx 11 cards I see no reason to use anything else.

If anyone has any suggestions or thoughts please let me know Oh here's a screen shot of my D0 running with the Aqua block installed on my 759 board It's sadly got HT turned off, but I hope you get the idea

Look forward to updating you all on this one

 

[phill9800]

Small update....

Here's a few cards I tried out during the build:

Since I had bought these a long time ago, they have now been replaced with something else

Here is where the PC's will be put...

Along with 3 screens, not 2.....

More to follow....

 

[phill9800]

Some of the hardware going into it:

Cooling power:

Here's a few more of them, some mounted:

Screen shot of it all working:

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A new setup for some speakers...

On to some more overclocking.....

 

[phill9800]

Those 5970's didnt half overclock well....

Sadly on air cooling, but it worked wonders!!
A few new goodies:

I've not added the case builds that took place as I decided to go down another route, but I'm glad I had a go at making one.. It didn't cost me any money, just time so it was useful in that way alone!!

More overclocking goodness:

As I was aiming for 4.4Ghz with this CPU, I was so very happy when I had managed to get to do it... More on this later

I had a bit of a tidy up and found I had a few more things than I really needed!!!

I really need to have a for sale thread after this!!

 

[phill9800]

PSU and hard drives....

After a bit of a PSU issue, I decided to grab a decent PSU, so I ended up with this:

Its been such a pleasure to own those, I couldnt recommend them enough Its just a shame I think I might need a bit more power for the 762 build as it'll have a few more hard drives and another GPU in it!!

A few more bits of hardware I added in, mainly for the gaming side of things..

Here's some pics of the drives I'll be using in the 762 build:

On to the 762's setup:

Here are a few tests with the 8 Seagate SAS drives:

I bought these a little bit before SSD's came out and stormed the market with their access speeds and as prices where still very high for not much room, I have kept these drives in hope they'll work for a long time before I need to worry about changing them out Even though they are disk based, I was very happy with the results

 

[phill9800]

Right now, as I mentioned before I had a lot of different case designs in my head and whilst I knew what I wanted, I couldn't get it to build... So I went another direction and did this instead.....

Well time for an update I think

Its not quite the update that I was hoping for but never mind, I think its about time for one

I wonder whats inside the box.....

This looks interesting....

And whats it looking like with something in there....

There's a lot more to come...

I'm just gonna see what you think

 

[phill9800]

Bit more of an update with the build....

Well here's a little more to things....

I did have a few issues when putting this case together.. It wasnt anything major but I was happy when it was all sorted!!

As you can see from the pic, the screws where too long for the holes so I had to drill through to make them big enough

Fortunately it really wasnt that much drilling to do as the screws werent anymore than 10mm longer than they should have been, so I was happy

When adding things into the case, everything fitted perfectly. This case was so simple to put together it was a dream to put together

Hard drives in place:

With the drives in place and in sort of position, I went to work on the rest of the bits I had laying about The radiators went in:

After everything was added into it that I could until some more bits get here, here's what we were left with
The reason for the neoprene on the back of the radiators were to not only space out the screws a little but to also help protect the case a little more too

Right now, here's the money shots I hope

I got two
I thought whilst I was getting one customised, I'd get another whilst I was at it
They now fit 10 hard drives and allow me to use 2 quad radiators and a triple radiators which is just perfect for what I was wanting to fit inside them

I'm just waiting on a few other things to come to finish these off and then its a case of waiting on my bits to come in and then I should finally have these things finished!!

I hope you guys are enjoying the build I've got a few more pictures of the older hardware and a few changes that have happened with those

I'll update again as soon as I can for you all and I hope its something that people are interested in seeing finally finished

 

[phill9800]

More cooling....

Well with all that in place, I needed some more cooling hardware, so I got a few bits and pieces....

And here's a bit more:

I'm hoping to get it leak tested very shortly, but I'm going to check the CPU block as before I had some higher than I should have temps, so I'm gonna check it out, just before I start filling the damn thing up

After a bit of leak testing....

I do apologise for the pics, some of them are better than others!! I'm learning, honest!!

I'll try and report back later with some screen shots of Windows 7!!

 

[phill9800]

It works, it bloody works!!

Well, here's where I tried turning it on.....


Testing it still works!!

Ambient temps:

Temps look ok to me for stock!

PC temps:

Its working!!

At this point I was still waiting on GPU's to turn up but I had some testing to do so I made the most of it with a lower powered GPU in there More to follow and I hope your enjoying the show so far!!

 

[phill9800]

CPU Overclocking....

Here's a few tests of various speeds:

4.2Ghz Stable (ish)

4.3Ghz Stable (ish)

4.4Ghz Stable (ish) @ 2:8 memory dividers

My aim was to get 4.5Ghz stable and I didn't rest until I had

Now, on to the GPU's.....

 

[phill9800]

GPU's...

I needed something a little different because of the gaming res I was wanting to use and since this is meant to be project overkill, here's what I went with...

And just incase I didnt think it worked

At default fan level the idle was around 40C, I've yet to check the load with it, but I've just found a nice happy medium when it came to the speed of the fan and the noise, which was around 66% and thats keeping it lovely and cool around 32C idle Time to go gaming and maybe run a few tests

A few Heaven 2.5 test results...


Right, default settings but 1920 x 1200 res:

Default settings but 2560 x 1600 res:

Default settings but 2560 x 1600 res and max settings:

Default settings but 2560 x 1600 res with SLI:

Default settings but 2560 x 1600 res and max settings with SLI:

I'm sooooo pleased with the results and I hadn't even tried overclocking the cards yet!!

Right.... Up next, the multi screen setup...

 

[phill9800]

3 screens and Dirt 2.... Interesting....

Right well as the whole point of having the screens was to use them together.. Here they are...

I'm just going to see how much memory Dirt 2 will go and use I'll run a few benchmarks as well just to see how well it compares to the 5970 I used to have

Now here's what it looked like in game...

Here's a few screen shots of Dirt 2 playing, I've included some of the benchmark results screens as well

The game ran smoothly and without slow down, I was so happy Before with the 5970 due to its ram limits, I couldnt use above Medium settings, now, Ultra Here's a few screen shots

 

[phill9800]

Project nearly completed....

Here's a few more pics of the hardware I have laying about the place.. I hope you guys have enjoyed the thread so far

Break down of what we have there

In the two Danger Den cases we have my i7 rigs

The two in the middle are my two AMD XP machines, they run both Windows 98 and XP. Mainly for older games and such.

The two on the outside are my two AMD 64 machines, they just run Windows XP at the moment and again are for the older games like GTA Vice City for example as it doesn't work right on Windows 7!!

I can put down the specifications if people want, but that's the general over view

 

[phill9800]

Thanks for the comments

I've had these i7 setups for over two years and I've only just managed to finish the one so far! The 762 build still isnt complete and I dont know how long it will be before it is but that said, I am planning on a small Sandy Bridge setup and I do have to get a few more graphics cards because the spare 580 I have is going in that!!

The 762 will have some newer models in there, even though the 580's are awesome, I think we might need a bit more power

As for the build length, I've had to wait so long as when I first bought the 759 setup, my relationship ended and I ended up moving in with my family, so when I finally found a house, I had to wait another 6 months before moving in as I had to completely gut it and start again!!
It was well worth it though with a 16 port Gigabit switch so I have everything networked, it made me so happy!!

Angst I'm not virgin but should I be?? :lol:

 

[phill9800]

Well I have to sell a load, so providing I can get some pictures taken today, I've got motherboards, CPU's, memory and I think some graphics cards to sell off. Mostly older things like Socket A and DDR1 but I think I have a 754 board and a 775 board as well that has to go as well as a 4870 X2 that's for some reason not working!! I'll see what I can do

But thank you for saying about all the hardware Its still not completed yet!!

 

[phill9800]

Thank you for the comment!!

 

[phill9800]

Thanks

 

[phill9800]

I didn't think that the extra fan would have made any difference really to the cooling performance. The fans I chose where thicker (38mm) and they push a massive 133CFM of air each and to be honest, even at the lower settings I have them set to, the cooling performance is amazing. Even when the room was hitting 27C my idle temps wheren't reaching 42C even with the 4.4Ghz overclock.

The rad's and blocks are doing a massively impressive job and when I do find the cash to spend on getting the two 580's I have installed currently onto water cooling, I'm sure I'll notice another massive drop with their temps as well.

Even though I never see the temps even touch 80C when gaming for a few hours, the idle's rarely go up past 40C even for the bottom card. I mean at the moment, the bottom card is only touching 26C and the top is at 31C. Now for air cooling at the temp of the room (23C at the moment) I'm very pleased with the cards.

I hope when I get the other system running, I can say that the CPU temps are even better because I have a newer block to put on it and I'm hoping for at least the same performance from that if not a little more

 

[phill9800]

Well I wish I hadn't spent as much as I did... I did have a check and last year I spent more on PC hardware than I did on my mortgage!!

Edited post Thanks for the comment too

 

[phill9800]

Thanks for the kind comments guys

I'm a lucky guy to have any of this hardware and I'm hoping that the girl friend wont kill me if I continue to spend more on it!! I'm very lucky to have her as it is!!

I am just working on the 762 build this evening, I'm hoping to get it all tubed up and the CPU water block installed whilst I'm watching a film and chilling for the evening

Hope your all enjoying the build so far Its definitely been a long time coming!!