Streacom FC7 or FC8 with i5 3570k?

Amp34

Amp34

Amp34

Caporegime
Joined
25 Jul 2005
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I think I've made a thread here before about an ITX build but I think I have narrowed down my case search to either the FC7 or the FC8 EVO. The FC7 is cheaper but then the cost of a CPU cooler and exhaust fan come in to it and remove that benefit which means it comes down to whether the FC8 EVO will take the 77W capacity of the i5. It says it will, with various cravats*.

If I did go with the active cooled case what 80mm fan should I go for and what CPU cooler would be the best bet for as quiet as possible running?

On the same vein, reading Bordens thread, vibration transferral appears to be an issue when mounting a 3.5" drive. I'm going to be using this to store a lot of photos so will probably end up with a 2TB drive in the machine and then an external drive attached for backup. One way to get around this (I may end up having the machine on 24/7) is to set the 3.5" drive to turn off when not in use and have everything I normally use on the SSD so it's not a major problem. However are there any other cases this sort of size and style that have a better 3.5" ability?

Lastly, what board would be best for me to put in it? It needs to have a display port or another ability to output 2560x1440 and have a decent wifi reception (need antenna for that?). I'm not looking to over clock so just a cool, stable board with the above two abilities would be good. The ASRock Z77E fits the bill I think but any cheaper boards recommended?

*No, not those things you put round your neck, the other one I can't remember how you spell...:p
 
Right... Decided to buy some of the bits (CPU, MB, RAM and SSD) and stick them in my current case then get the new case at some point in the future.

I've ordered the

ASRock Z77E
i5 3570k
16GB (2x8GB) Teamforce ram
128GB Corsair M4

Should be a nice system hopefully. Unfortunately OcUK put the FC8 on special offer last night... So I ended up buying that as well.. :D

Now I just need to wait for all that to arrive and start putting it together. However there is an important bit missing, the new PSU. Now sticking the system into this http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine suggests I need a 250w PSU, which I think is ****, is that correct? If so what PSU wattage should I go for, would the 120W Pico PSU be fine? Finally with the Pico PSU do I need to be careful about which one to buy or will any from the bay do?
 
Right, just bought a 160W Pico PSU so that should be fine. Hopefully all my goodies should have arrived by the weekend, then I just need to put it together and decide what storage HDD to put in there.
 
Yup! Forgot to update the thread.

I got it all on Wednesday, spent an age trying to work out how to put the heatsink together and what screws went where (instructions were small and in german...) but after that put the machine together easily. There still appears to be loads of space in the case which is a surprise. I realised I didn't buy any thermal paste while putting it together but found a couple of small tubs with a bit left from somewhere (no idea where they came from) but I think it was a little past it's best. The CPU temps seem a bit warm at the moment (idling at around 40+ and with about 25% usage around 50) but that may be a little to do with the poor thermal paste.

Ordered some new Arctic MX2 and it arrived on friday but haven't got round to changing the paste yet or testing the computer out fully as I have an issue with the DVI on the board, it died after a day or two and there appears to be no digital output (can still get SVGA from an adaptor). I'm also having trouble with the WIFI on the board, not sure if it's the board at fault or just a dead spot in the room, the board comes with an external arial as well.

For those who read the other streacom thread, I bought the Teamforce RAM and don't have any issue with the RAM being pushed sideways by the PicoPSU, it appears the heatsink is just small enough that there is a tiny gap between the PSU 20 pin and the RAM. Definitely worth thinking about getting the Teamforce stuff over something with a bigger heatsink.

I have a couple of pictures which I will upload at some point when I've finally got it all sorted.
 
I've now managed to sort out the DVI issue so took the heatsink off the CPU and replaced the thermal paste to the aforementioned Arctic MX2 and then ran PCmark to stress the machine a little and see what happened. I got a score of 7521 which I have no idea how good that is... However I was more interested in temperatures. The idle temps appear to be around 40 but when I put PCmark one or two of the cores hit 85 degrees**... I almost cancelled the test but they appeared to drop down to mid 60s pretty quickly (only a couple of seconds of 80+), whether that is throttling coming in to play or just the core temps not being too accurate I don't know. I'm definitely going to have to figure something out however, the cores weren't even being utilised at 100%!

So much for the suggestion the passive cooling of the EVO can take up to 95 watts (fairly cool room - although I guess it could if you were in an igloo with a draft...) :p I'm thinking of two options at the moment, either underclock the CPU a little, see how that affects performance and temperature OR looking at the insides there would be room to fit a thin profile low CFM fan where the second 2.5" HDD slot is (at the back - there is a hole just above the CPU) and have that come on when the temps start to go crazy.I'm not entirely sure how useful the fan would be though considering there are only four heatpipes in the chassis to blow air over.

**Using speed fan, the "CPU" temp reading varied from around 30-55 degrees, I'm guessing the "core" readings are going to be more accurate though?
 
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Right, been having another play tonight to try and get the temperatures down. I tried the fan idea by placing a Nexus 120mm fan in the case and running Prime 95. The temps got up to around 95 degrees before I decided enough was enough after 5 minutes and cancelled the tests...!

I then tried undervolting, I did a -0.15v offset and again tested prime95. The temps did appear a lot cooler but one of the cores gave up after 3 minutes and then I got a crash after about 15. Reduced the CPU clock to 95% (with -0.15v) and tried again. The temps appeared to level off at around 90 degrees but I again got a crash after about 15 minutes.

I'm thinking Prime 95 is a bit of a mental test anyway so tested PCMark 7 again and the temps didn't go above 70 degrees! A significant drop over the 85+ they were at stock. The thing is currently idling at around 40-45 degrees (depending on core) as well. The only negative is the PCMark score has gone from 7521 to 5389, a rather significant drop from a supposed 5% decrease in the CPU clock speed!

It's not prime stable but I don't plan on doing anything too intensive on it, although I have yet to see how it handles video encoding/HD video viewing. We'll have to see how it goes. Something I also did was put some thermal paste between the heat pipes and the case, would make sense that that may need some and if that is the case maybe a generous dollop in the little mechanism that holds the heat pipes to the cooler attached to the CPU?

Quddy, I think a CPU with 45W will be handled beautifully, 77W is probably a little too much, although I'm interested how it handled 65W. The motherboard lined up almost perfectly, I had to bend one or two of the pipes a little bit (couple of degrees) to avoid a small heatsink on the CPU but other than that that part was very painless. One thing about the board though, the WIFI really does appear to stink. Not sure if it's a common feature on this board or something wrong with my setup but I had the computer next to a wireless router and it only showed two bars, with the router downstairs not even being picked up.
 
It generally gets warm, however only got properly hot when I was running P95 so I assume most of the heat is going up the heat pipe. It may just be that it's getting swamped by the heat from a 77w processor.

I'm currently running it off a cable but did plug in an old USB wifi dongle and it got 3 bars instantly in the same location. To me that means either the antenna is **** or the wifi card is!

I haven't sorted out my storage options yet. I have several ideas but not sure which to go for yet. I have a lot of films and TV series as well as lots of photos (main job for this machine is photo processing) so need lots of storage, but I also want something basically silent. I currently just have the 128GB M4 in the machine and a 1TB Samsung conventional HDD in an arctic enclosure set to park after 3 minutes but am seriously short on space (before transferring a lot of rubbish form my other machine).

Current thinking is one of two/three options:

1. Get a 1TB Scorpio blue and bungie it like Borden did with his then get a 2TB 5400RPM drive and attach it externally permanently.

2. Get a 256GB SSD (the £100 Corsair), maybe adding a second in future and setting up a more advanced external storage solution like a Drobo. The 256GB SSD would hold my current photos and everything else (films, video, music and processed photos+backup) on something like a Drobo.

The latter is much more expensive though and I'm still umming and arring about getting a small portable drive externally so no extra cables.
 
It is, however I think both solutions I have above are pretty good for me (I prefer at least one external storage drive for safety reasons), just need to decide which to do. I'm currently erring towards getting a Icy Box IB-RD3219StU3-B 2-Bay RAID System and sticking 1-2 2TB green drives in then having either the 256GB SSD or the 1TB blue in the system. Just need to decide which is the best option for me!

I reset the CMOS basically, first used the jumpers (although there is a reset button on the back that didn't do anything) then took the battery out for abut 30 seconds. That seemed to work. So do you have the same problem then, i.e. nothing showing up at all over DVI (even the boot sequence before it gets to loading windows)?
 
I've now had a "brainwave" and am thinking about just getting the 1TB Blue inside the case for my photos and a simple dual disk NAS solution so I can use it as internet storage as well as backup and storage for all my videos! Too much choice, but at the moment I'm having issues shifting GB's of photos around to people so the NAS idea would help over dropbox/skydrive..
 
Borden said:
I've just upgraded from my i3 2130 to an i5 3570k and I'm having no problems at all with my 160W Pico PSU.

I've removed my dedicated graphics card and the temperature of the i5 is actually lower than the i3 now. This is down to the fact the graphics card was putting out a lot of heat and raising the cpu temp of the i3.
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what sort of temps are you getting? With every day use it's fine, hovering around 40-50*, however if I do something intensive that loads the CPU it gets to silly temperatures (100 degrees...). I might look into turning turboboost off and capping it at 3.4GHz as I can't work out how to underclock the system (i've undervolted it by two steps already).

As for whether the PSU handles it, fine. People go way over the top with Watt requirements IMO. those 1kW PSU's are just stupid, you could run an entire server room off a lot of them... 600W would do the bast majority of people, even with crossfire or SLI.

*Yeah high for a normal case but this is passive after all.

I'm also having sleep problems at the moment. When it gets put to sleep when it wakes up it tries to do it 3 times then just restarts and loads up normally. Aside from waking up constantly on its own which I can't work out why.

EDIT: Actually, if you don't have any of the above problems it would be great if you could show me what settings you use in the BIOS. :)
 
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vince1 said:
I loved the idea of this case but building it is a right pain, I gave up in the end. Anyone interested in buying the case message me.
Click to expand...

What problems are you having? It's a tight fit certainly but I currently have two SSDs and a full size 3.5"HDD in there (without a DVD/BD drive though). 15cm SATA cables are your friend!:D

Remember as well that you don't really need to think about airflow as there are no fans.
 
Borden said:
I did a quick test. The most intensive use my system gets is importing photos into Lightroom and rendering previews. Here's a screenshot of it doing that.

It seems to idle around 26-30 degrees. With the i3 and GPU it would idle at 40. The case is noticeably cooler to touch now than with the GPU.


With regard to the sleep issues, there always seems to be the tiniest of things which can cause problems here. I found that my Logitech wireless KB and mouse were intermittently talking to the USB receiver and that was triggering the system to wake. I disabled the ability to wake the PC from all devices in device manager with that option (go to properties and hit the power management tab).

For BIOS options, I've just got the standard S3 sleep option set and have all the gimicky Intel rapid start things disabled.

TBH I don't use sleep all that much because it boots fast enough with an SSD. I would use it more if there was an option to turn off that stupid blinking sleep LED! You can disable the LED but that also disables the regular power LED when the PC is on.
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How hot/cold is your room!? That seems significantly cooler than mine... Something not right somewhere then. :confused:
 
Borden said:
Well I'm a student and live in a house with other students, all of whom would rather wear extra layers than pay for heating :p However, I have a radiator in my room and I wouldn't say it's cold in here. I don't have a thermometer to check.

What program are you using to check temps?

PTSnake, you could take the top off a tray loading laptop drive and use that? Remove the button from the front to stop the tray trying to open and that should work. You'd also have that circular bit that you snap the discs on to in the middle.
Click to expand...

I'm using OHM as well and I never have the heating on in my room. I don't have a thermometer but it's around 20 in here max (in a fleece).
 
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