So a week or so ago I asked a few of you to rate the rig I was formulating in my head and offer any suggestions you could think of. Firstly, I'd like to say thanks to everybody who contributed and helped me shave off some excess bulk and add some lean power to the build.
My goal was to build a rig that was unconstrained by budget, in a sense but that wasn't crazy complicated with several independent water cooling loops and peltiers galore. In the past I've restricted myself to an £800 budget, but this time I wanted to go balls-to-the-wall.
It also marks the first PC I have owned in over a decade that didn't have an AMD CPU. True story: the last Intel PC I owned was a 386 with a proper floppy drive (none of that 3 1/2 inch ********, mine was 5 1/4 inches
) back in '96. Naturally, I was interested to see if Intel's CPUs had improved at all since then.
Having booked a few days off work to firstly build this monster then overclock it to high hell and finally break it in with some heavy gaming, I placed my order:
Now, some of the more eagle-eyed amongst you may note that this rig totalled £2678 rather than £2500. And you'd be right. However, as I said earlier, this was a rig unconstrained by budget and, more saliently, I'm an idiot.
So when the doorbell rang I hurtled down the stairs to sign off with DPD and get my mitts on the plethora of enormous boxes that arrived. After a little bit of unpacking, this is what lay before me:
...aaaand...
Without further ado, I eagerly got to work, starting by assembling the core components on the motherboard before fitting it to the case. Initially I had opted to go for a high end Asus board for their renowned overclocking feature set, but in the end I stuck with what I new and got myself a high end Gigabyte instead. I've always used them for my AMD builds and they've been fantastically reliable for me in the past, even when I get a bit enthusiastic with the voltages. Hopefully, this one will remain as sturdy. Truth be told, it looks brilliant - the black heatsinks have a stealthy look that look excellent when paired with the RAM and when placed inside the 650D. And no, there will be no interior lighting a la Vauxhall Nova in this build.
Slipped in the CPU (the components around the board are the mounting bits for the Corsair H100. Brilliantly, there was no need to remove the stock Intel bracket, which always feels like such a chore when you're on the AMD route. Less dollar, more fiddling.
and then slotted in the four sticks of 4GB 2133Mhz RAM. Excellent looking X-shaped heatspreaders on these bad boys.
Once those simple tasks were completed (honestly, I was expecting a load of faff - removing Intel's bracket to fit the H100 bracket, etc) I moved on to assembling the core parts of the case - PSU and drives, then motherboard and H100.
I just love the cavernous interiors of the Corsair cases that, for me, have set the benchmark in terms of working with cases. Not only do they look great all blacked out, but Corsair have made sure nearly every possible annoyance has been taken care of. Brilliant stuff. Airflow isn't as good as other cases out there, granted, but I'll take a sturdy unit with as little plastic gimmickry any day of the week. If only they still manufactured my beloved Akasa Eclipse...
I decided to mount four Akasa Vipers to the H100 in a push-pull configuration. They have a decent CFM rating to force that air through the radiator and can spin up to some pretty decent speeds for when summer comes
Next, I mounted the heatsink/pump of the H100 which was very simple and easily doable with minimum spreading of the pre-applied thermal paste.
Then came the true beast of this rig. The Radeon 7970. It. Is. Enormous. Having previously owned the 5850, which I was very pleased with, I had high expectations of the 7970. Not least due to its size.
Admittedly, I was daunted by the prospect of fitting an aftermarket cooler to the GPU. A few years back on my first proper gaming rig I had a Radeon 9700 that I attempted to fit an aftermarket cooler to. Turns out I might not have seated the thing properly at that tender age of 14 because after booting up Wolfenstein for a fragging the card literally started smoking. That was the end of that.
Regardless, I reminded myself that I have had much more experience in tinkering since those days and pressed on with this hulking monstrosity of East German-esque engineering:
The Alpenfohn Peter. After opening the box I was confonted by what can only be described as a bag of mosfet heatsinks, as if they were going out of fashion. Now, I shall say that at this point I was very confused. Having ordered the 79XX model of this cooler, I found it odd that a bag of circa 30 heatsinks should be included with a specific version. I was further perplexed by the fact that the main heatsink didn't appear to fit snugly in line with the shape of my reference 7970.
Despite my confusion, I started taking the reference leaf blower apart...
Then, for the first time in many years I picked up the instruction book for the Alpenfohn and noticed the following:
And that was it for me. For a cooler specifically branded as being for a 79XX card it didn't even mentioned the generation in the compatibility list. Add to that the sack of mosfets, the multitude of different adjustable brackets and so on and I think OcUK may have accidentally sent me the generic GPU model of the cooler. Either that, or Alpenfohn need to get their act together for such a ridiculously expensive cooler.
I should also point out that once fully assembled with the either 2x 140mm fans (as I had planned) or the 4x 120mm fans Crossfire is very unlikely to happen. This thing takes up an extra 1-2 PCI-e bays with ease.
Unperturbed by this little setback, I carried on by fitting the 7970 into my rig with the stock cooler attached and set about the business of tidying up the unholy mess of wires that was beginning to form around the back of the Corsair's motherboard tray and hooking up the fan controller to the four Vipers attached to the H100.
And hey presto! A fully assembled machine! It even powers up!
Next, I set about getting the monitor situation sorted. The Dell 30" monitor to me was the only option I could consider with this rig. It represents my bonkers budget and is clearly head and shoulders above the competition. I've no interest in 3D and the whopping size means I can play my more casual games from the comfort of a chair way back and watch Blu Ray films at a very comfortable size.
It's enormous and it's heavy.
and comes with a calibration report from Dell's factory. I don't actually have a clue what any of this stuff means, but I assume to Photoshop nerds this equates to some kind of General Certificate of Awesomeness Squared.
Wall mounting the monitor to my existing VESA mount was a breeze, although let it be noted you will require a Torx screwdriver to remove the stand. A T10 should suffice.
I opted to hook the display up over the DisplayPort channel. Whilst it does seem to have a longer latency in receiving a signal from the GPU on boot (or when Windows pops up a UAC message) I wasn't so keen on using ancient DVI.
And voila - it lives!
After a swift Windows 7 installation thanks to the nippy Corsair SSD, I christened my machine Malgus, in keeping with my tradition of naming rigs after people or places in Star Wars lore (something that originated from my old Star Wars Galaxies days and has continued thanks to my love of Star Wars: The Old Republic). Previous rigs have been named Kenobi, Ossus, Vader and Revan and here is the namesake of this behemoth (collectors edition ***):
Thankfully, Gigabyte's software hasn't changed over the years and this mess of pidgin-English and Windows XP-esque plasticky interface greeted me from the driver installation disk. Unfortunately, I caught a glance of the motherboard's box whilst looking at the screen and suffered a mild seizure from the colours and general LSD-induced design ethic. Thankfully, when I came to the installation had completed.
After then installing the latest drivers for each of the components, I set about downloading my trusty toolkit of destruction, i.e. IntelBurnTest, Prime95, SuperPi, CPU-Z, GPU-Z, MSI Afterburner, AMD Overdrive and Heaven. For some reason, AMD Overdrive caused a massive problem, causing Windows to BSOD at every boot. The AOD****.sys file was the root cause of this issue and I have no idea why, but a prompt dose of GTFO my system soon sorted out that little problem.
Overclocking was brilliantly simple with the 2500K. To start with I jacked the multiplier up to 45x, sprinkled on 1.420v and waited for it to boot - no problem. From there I dialled down the voltage as low as I could get it stable and then began increasing the multiplier and voltage as required. After reaching 4.9Ghz the temperatures got a bit high for my liking and were requiring a lot of fan speed for even minor tasks. Right now I've settled on a healthy 4.7GHz overclock at 1.39v that idles between 25'c and 32'c with the H100 fans switched off, making it gloriously silent.
The RAM was not so keen to play ball. First I tried using the XMP profile that should have given me the magic 2133Mhz with some juicy 9-9-11-24 timings all within the 1.5v limits. But no dice, the machine refused to POST and reverted right back to a measly 1333Mhz. I couldn't even get 1833Mhz to POST, so I have since settled on a rather meagre 1600Mhz. I'm not overjoyed about this, mainly because my last AMD 965BE rig was able to run it's RAM faster. As far as I can tell the memory is fine, giving no errors and it is designed to overclock. Even when ramping the RAM voltage up to 1.65v it was having none of it. I will probably come back to look at it in the future, but for now it isn't exactly holding the machine back.
Next was the graphics overclock. Having read so much about the overclockability of the 7950s, I had great expectations and I was not disappointed. Without a hiccough the card soon found itself limited by MSI afterburner rather than itself. From stock 925/1375Mhz I was able to up the speeds on the core and memory by 200Mhz each on stock voltage levels (1125/1575). However, MSI Afterburner won't allow me to save any settings I dial in after switching it to unsupported mode. AMD Overdrive's tantrums have rendered that particular gem unusable as well. So more work to be done there...
EDIT: Since my first overclock I went back to the RAM because I was really peeved about it. After fiddling around with timings a little and Gigabyte's own RAM overclocking tools in the BIOS, which I had initially shunned, I got the RAM to run fine at 1833MHz, which is just dandy with me (for now). I'm more interested in eking another 100MHz+ out of the graphics card. I also dialled back the voltage on the CPU and turned down the LLC a level or two as the board was massively overvolting as a factory default configuration - 1.8v for 3.3Ghz when it runs comfortably closer to 1.3v at that speed.
But let's look at some temps from these overclocks. First, I began to thrash the related components to within an inch of their lives; Furmark to burn the graphics and IBT to burn the CPU:
(the desktop is my mutt, Lena. 6 month old Wheaten Terrier
)
Already some pleasing results! Whilst the H100 has yet to properly bed, I think it is reasonable to expect a few more degrees to fall off the CPU temp and with VGA cooler replacement in the future I should be able to knock a few degrees off the GPU and reach even more stellar clockspeeds.
At this point I put in a few hours of Star Wars: The Old Republic before handing the machine over to Prime95 for the rest of the day (and night) to make sure everything was stable so I could do some meaningful benchmarks the following day.
Benchmark results to follow...
My goal was to build a rig that was unconstrained by budget, in a sense but that wasn't crazy complicated with several independent water cooling loops and peltiers galore. In the past I've restricted myself to an £800 budget, but this time I wanted to go balls-to-the-wall.
It also marks the first PC I have owned in over a decade that didn't have an AMD CPU. True story: the last Intel PC I owned was a 386 with a proper floppy drive (none of that 3 1/2 inch ********, mine was 5 1/4 inches
) back in '96. Naturally, I was interested to see if Intel's CPUs had improved at all since then.Having booked a few days off work to firstly build this monster then overclock it to high hell and finally break it in with some heavy gaming, I placed my order:
- Dell Ultrasharp U3011 30" Widescreen LCD Monitor
- Powercolor ATI Radeon HD 7970 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card
- Corsair Force Series 3 240GB SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive
- Corsair Professional Series AX850 High Performance 850W Modular '80 Plus Gold' Power Supply
- Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor
- Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD4 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard
- Corsair Obsidian 650D Gaming Midi Tower
- Team Xtreem 16GB (4x4GB) DDR3 PC3-17000C9 2133MHz Dual/Quad Channel Kit
- Corsair Hydro H100 Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
- Samsung SH-B123L/RSBP 12x BluRay ROM / DVDRW DL & RAM Lightscribe SATA-II Optical Drive
- Alpenföhn Peter - Radeon 79XX Edition High-End VGA Cooler
- Akasa FC. SIX Channel Fan Controller - Brushed aluminium - AK-FC-08BK
- 2x Akasa AK-FN063 140mm Ultra Quiet Viper Cool Fan - 3/4 Pin
- 4x Akasa AK-FN059 120mm Ultra Quiet Venom Viper Cool Fan - 3/4 Pin
Now, some of the more eagle-eyed amongst you may note that this rig totalled £2678 rather than £2500. And you'd be right. However, as I said earlier, this was a rig unconstrained by budget and, more saliently, I'm an idiot.
So when the doorbell rang I hurtled down the stairs to sign off with DPD and get my mitts on the plethora of enormous boxes that arrived. After a little bit of unpacking, this is what lay before me:
...aaaand...
Without further ado, I eagerly got to work, starting by assembling the core components on the motherboard before fitting it to the case. Initially I had opted to go for a high end Asus board for their renowned overclocking feature set, but in the end I stuck with what I new and got myself a high end Gigabyte instead. I've always used them for my AMD builds and they've been fantastically reliable for me in the past, even when I get a bit enthusiastic with the voltages. Hopefully, this one will remain as sturdy. Truth be told, it looks brilliant - the black heatsinks have a stealthy look that look excellent when paired with the RAM and when placed inside the 650D. And no, there will be no interior lighting a la Vauxhall Nova in this build.
Slipped in the CPU (the components around the board are the mounting bits for the Corsair H100. Brilliantly, there was no need to remove the stock Intel bracket, which always feels like such a chore when you're on the AMD route. Less dollar, more fiddling.
and then slotted in the four sticks of 4GB 2133Mhz RAM. Excellent looking X-shaped heatspreaders on these bad boys.
Once those simple tasks were completed (honestly, I was expecting a load of faff - removing Intel's bracket to fit the H100 bracket, etc) I moved on to assembling the core parts of the case - PSU and drives, then motherboard and H100.
I just love the cavernous interiors of the Corsair cases that, for me, have set the benchmark in terms of working with cases. Not only do they look great all blacked out, but Corsair have made sure nearly every possible annoyance has been taken care of. Brilliant stuff. Airflow isn't as good as other cases out there, granted, but I'll take a sturdy unit with as little plastic gimmickry any day of the week. If only they still manufactured my beloved Akasa Eclipse...
I decided to mount four Akasa Vipers to the H100 in a push-pull configuration. They have a decent CFM rating to force that air through the radiator and can spin up to some pretty decent speeds for when summer comes
Next, I mounted the heatsink/pump of the H100 which was very simple and easily doable with minimum spreading of the pre-applied thermal paste.
Then came the true beast of this rig. The Radeon 7970. It. Is. Enormous. Having previously owned the 5850, which I was very pleased with, I had high expectations of the 7970. Not least due to its size.
Admittedly, I was daunted by the prospect of fitting an aftermarket cooler to the GPU. A few years back on my first proper gaming rig I had a Radeon 9700 that I attempted to fit an aftermarket cooler to. Turns out I might not have seated the thing properly at that tender age of 14 because after booting up Wolfenstein for a fragging the card literally started smoking. That was the end of that.
Regardless, I reminded myself that I have had much more experience in tinkering since those days and pressed on with this hulking monstrosity of East German-esque engineering:
The Alpenfohn Peter. After opening the box I was confonted by what can only be described as a bag of mosfet heatsinks, as if they were going out of fashion. Now, I shall say that at this point I was very confused. Having ordered the 79XX model of this cooler, I found it odd that a bag of circa 30 heatsinks should be included with a specific version. I was further perplexed by the fact that the main heatsink didn't appear to fit snugly in line with the shape of my reference 7970.
Despite my confusion, I started taking the reference leaf blower apart...
Then, for the first time in many years I picked up the instruction book for the Alpenfohn and noticed the following:
And that was it for me. For a cooler specifically branded as being for a 79XX card it didn't even mentioned the generation in the compatibility list. Add to that the sack of mosfets, the multitude of different adjustable brackets and so on and I think OcUK may have accidentally sent me the generic GPU model of the cooler. Either that, or Alpenfohn need to get their act together for such a ridiculously expensive cooler.
I should also point out that once fully assembled with the either 2x 140mm fans (as I had planned) or the 4x 120mm fans Crossfire is very unlikely to happen. This thing takes up an extra 1-2 PCI-e bays with ease.
Unperturbed by this little setback, I carried on by fitting the 7970 into my rig with the stock cooler attached and set about the business of tidying up the unholy mess of wires that was beginning to form around the back of the Corsair's motherboard tray and hooking up the fan controller to the four Vipers attached to the H100.
And hey presto! A fully assembled machine! It even powers up!
Next, I set about getting the monitor situation sorted. The Dell 30" monitor to me was the only option I could consider with this rig. It represents my bonkers budget and is clearly head and shoulders above the competition. I've no interest in 3D and the whopping size means I can play my more casual games from the comfort of a chair way back and watch Blu Ray films at a very comfortable size.
It's enormous and it's heavy.
and comes with a calibration report from Dell's factory. I don't actually have a clue what any of this stuff means, but I assume to Photoshop nerds this equates to some kind of General Certificate of Awesomeness Squared.
Wall mounting the monitor to my existing VESA mount was a breeze, although let it be noted you will require a Torx screwdriver to remove the stand. A T10 should suffice.
I opted to hook the display up over the DisplayPort channel. Whilst it does seem to have a longer latency in receiving a signal from the GPU on boot (or when Windows pops up a UAC message) I wasn't so keen on using ancient DVI.
And voila - it lives!
After a swift Windows 7 installation thanks to the nippy Corsair SSD, I christened my machine Malgus, in keeping with my tradition of naming rigs after people or places in Star Wars lore (something that originated from my old Star Wars Galaxies days and has continued thanks to my love of Star Wars: The Old Republic). Previous rigs have been named Kenobi, Ossus, Vader and Revan and here is the namesake of this behemoth (collectors edition ***):
Thankfully, Gigabyte's software hasn't changed over the years and this mess of pidgin-English and Windows XP-esque plasticky interface greeted me from the driver installation disk. Unfortunately, I caught a glance of the motherboard's box whilst looking at the screen and suffered a mild seizure from the colours and general LSD-induced design ethic. Thankfully, when I came to the installation had completed.
After then installing the latest drivers for each of the components, I set about downloading my trusty toolkit of destruction, i.e. IntelBurnTest, Prime95, SuperPi, CPU-Z, GPU-Z, MSI Afterburner, AMD Overdrive and Heaven. For some reason, AMD Overdrive caused a massive problem, causing Windows to BSOD at every boot. The AOD****.sys file was the root cause of this issue and I have no idea why, but a prompt dose of GTFO my system soon sorted out that little problem.
Overclocking was brilliantly simple with the 2500K. To start with I jacked the multiplier up to 45x, sprinkled on 1.420v and waited for it to boot - no problem. From there I dialled down the voltage as low as I could get it stable and then began increasing the multiplier and voltage as required. After reaching 4.9Ghz the temperatures got a bit high for my liking and were requiring a lot of fan speed for even minor tasks. Right now I've settled on a healthy 4.7GHz overclock at 1.39v that idles between 25'c and 32'c with the H100 fans switched off, making it gloriously silent.
The RAM was not so keen to play ball. First I tried using the XMP profile that should have given me the magic 2133Mhz with some juicy 9-9-11-24 timings all within the 1.5v limits. But no dice, the machine refused to POST and reverted right back to a measly 1333Mhz. I couldn't even get 1833Mhz to POST, so I have since settled on a rather meagre 1600Mhz. I'm not overjoyed about this, mainly because my last AMD 965BE rig was able to run it's RAM faster. As far as I can tell the memory is fine, giving no errors and it is designed to overclock. Even when ramping the RAM voltage up to 1.65v it was having none of it. I will probably come back to look at it in the future, but for now it isn't exactly holding the machine back.
Next was the graphics overclock. Having read so much about the overclockability of the 7950s, I had great expectations and I was not disappointed. Without a hiccough the card soon found itself limited by MSI afterburner rather than itself. From stock 925/1375Mhz I was able to up the speeds on the core and memory by 200Mhz each on stock voltage levels (1125/1575). However, MSI Afterburner won't allow me to save any settings I dial in after switching it to unsupported mode. AMD Overdrive's tantrums have rendered that particular gem unusable as well. So more work to be done there...
EDIT: Since my first overclock I went back to the RAM because I was really peeved about it. After fiddling around with timings a little and Gigabyte's own RAM overclocking tools in the BIOS, which I had initially shunned, I got the RAM to run fine at 1833MHz, which is just dandy with me (for now). I'm more interested in eking another 100MHz+ out of the graphics card. I also dialled back the voltage on the CPU and turned down the LLC a level or two as the board was massively overvolting as a factory default configuration - 1.8v for 3.3Ghz when it runs comfortably closer to 1.3v at that speed.
But let's look at some temps from these overclocks. First, I began to thrash the related components to within an inch of their lives; Furmark to burn the graphics and IBT to burn the CPU:
(the desktop is my mutt, Lena. 6 month old Wheaten Terrier
)
Already some pleasing results! Whilst the H100 has yet to properly bed, I think it is reasonable to expect a few more degrees to fall off the CPU temp and with VGA cooler replacement in the future I should be able to knock a few degrees off the GPU and reach even more stellar clockspeeds.
At this point I put in a few hours of Star Wars: The Old Republic before handing the machine over to Prime95 for the rest of the day (and night) to make sure everything was stable so I could do some meaningful benchmarks the following day.
Benchmark results to follow...
