Rome was not built in one day !!

Build Night 3 continued

GFX card in

GFXin.jpg


OMG what the hell is the heatsink made of Uranium it weighs a ton. I Marvelled at its size and then though how in gods name am I going to be able to see the PCIe slot to fit this badboy in. Much to my suprise it fits with room to spare, there is a good 4 cm + clearance to the HDD cage and the card just droped right in almost as if it wanted to get itself in there.

OMG SHE'S BREATHING !!!!!!!!!

shesbreathing.jpg


Its Alive Scotty !!!!!! but not fully.

The fan controller has a somewhat 80's retor look about. I like it

fancontroller.jpg


The CPU is idling at 25, but this is not a true reading. I need to get into the BIOS and set this badboy to maximum overclock :)
 
Thats's looking really good. Cable management doesn't look to bad. You can always have a tidy up once she's up and running with no problems.

I would use the HD Audio.

AC'97
AC'97 (short for Audio Codec '97) is the audio codec standard developed by the Intel Architecture Labs in 1997. It is used mainly in motherboards, modems, sound cards and chassis front panel audio solutions. AC'97 supports 96 kHz in 20-bit stereo resolution and 48 kHz in 20-bit stereo for multichannel recording and playback. In 2004, AC'97 was superseded by Intel® High Definition Audio (HD Audio).

HD Audio
Intel® High Definition Audio refers to the specification released by Intel in 2004 for delivering high-definition audio that is capable of playing back more channels at higher quality than previous integrated audio Codecs like AC'97. Hardware based on HD Audio is capable of delivering 192 kHz/32 bit quality for two and 96 kHz/32
bit for up to eight channels.

I rather like the fan controller. Makes me think I should get one.:)
 
The build looks great, the case is awesome.

My cable management is worse than yours, been struggling with the 850Tx... should have gone for a modular to be honest.
 
Build Night 4

no photos for this one as there is nothing to take pictures :( so its just a quick report

Well the build is now finished. Case panels all back on. Win 7 installed, MSI drivers + utils installed, ATi catalyst drivers and overclocking tools installed.

I checked temps using the MSi tools. The CPU is running at 1.6ghz (I guess speedstep throtles it back when its got nothing to do ? ) Core temps were as follows
I set the voltage to 1.195 for now untill I start ocing

core 1 = 27°C
Core 2 = 29°C
Core 3 = 30°C
Core 4 = 25°C

GFX card was showing GPU speed 915 GDDR 4200, Idle temp was siting on 42°C.

Even though this card is the ASUS OC 6870 I reckon i can squeeze more out of it. The airflow through the case seems ok. Sys temps according to my sensors for the Aerocool were 22°C in the center.

The spinpoint F3 sounds healthy not making any dodgy grinding noises.

RAM is OCZ Platinum low voltage running a 1.35 with 9,9,9,24 timings.



Which utils should I get for benching Graphics Card 3dmark2006 ? I am well out of touch with this now.

I am going to run prime to see how it is underload before I start overclocking. Shouyld i disable the speed step when I oc ? If so I am not sure what this is called in the MSi bios as i can;t see anthing called speedstep in there

lastly thanks to OCUK forum buffs for all the advice over last 2 months regarding parts, and thanks to OCUK for having great gear that went to making my new Sandybridge beast
 
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For benchmarks, try 3DMark 2011 and Heaven.

Speedstep you may as well leave on unless you have stability issues when overclocking.
 
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