Vega's *Heavyweight* display and computer; edition 2012

[Vega]

Hitting VRAM limit and PCI-E 2.0 vs 3.0 battle video tests. Make sure to watch in 480P instead of lower (I forgot to set the camera back to 720P and I don't feel like recording everything all over again lol). Sorry about the video quality but it is still view-able.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0-x...DvjVQa1PpcFOpwHlB70YlOHjBhzZ8mtcWAKgkFdz3LBo=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkZz...DvjVQa1PpcFOpwHlB70YlOALsTk3pZxTxt4tbGt5H9Yk=

 

[Vega]

Nice, glad to see someone else backing up my tests. Although the difference isn't as dramatic as mine due to a lower resolutions and card count, they are still very impressive differences. :thumb:

From user: psikeiro.

 

[Vega]

I forgot how much work it is to get these large water setups done properly. :thumb:

Assembly line done.

X79 chip-set, RAM and MOSFET/VRM blocks installed.

Setting up GPU's.

One of the GPU's temperature is a lot higher than the other three. It is quite strange as I assembled all blocks exactly the same, with the same TIM and quantity. So far the good ones are idling at 25-27C and under load around high 30's C. Not looking forward to draining and re-doing card #2. Hopefully I don't have a bad block.

 

[Vega]

It was a stand-off that wasn't fully seated from factory on the high temp GPU. Corrected and now all GPU's idle 21-25 C and full overclock load 33-38 C. All button up and ready to roar:

 

[Vega]

Amazing temps

Always love reading this thread!

I've had success getting a custom resolution and frequency working in Surround! Running 3600x1877 @ 95Hz. That corrects for a perfect GW900 aspect ratio for each screen, increases the Hz a nice bit above stock settings and the whole display setup us almost a 2:1 width/height ratio which is just about perfect.

I am running these settings right now and they seem to be doing pretty well:

3960X @ 5 GHz @ 1.47v.
105 MHz Base-clock for a little more PCI-E "oomph".
2240 MHz @ 9-11-11-28 on the 16GB RAM. May try and get those timing a bit lower in the future.

Idle @ 28 C and game load 45-55 C. Prime95 full load temps are ~57 C. I also purchased the Intel overclock warranty for $35, small price I think for some piece of mind and they cross ship if you let them put a reserve amount on your credit card.

 

[Vega]

Just curious, what Camera are you using? The pictures look pretty good to me.
And Nice priject you have going for you there... Seems the box (well... at least motherboard and whatever to run the computer, what will you put all this in?) is working fine, now you "just" need all of the rest going ;P
I'm looking foreward to follow your building.

It's actually kind of a crappy camera. I've been wanting to upgrade this thing to 1080P video for a long time, just never got around to it. It's a Sanyo Xacti 720p/10-mega pixel.

On another note:

On my 4-way GTX 680 setup using EVGA reference cards with EK water blocks, my stable overclock is 1202 MHz core and 3534 MHz memory. Pretty much spent all day testing those clocks using Heaven 3.0, BF3, Crysis 2, Metro 2033 and Skyrim with some mods and HD texture pack would crash at the lowest frequency. So modded Skyrim set my ceiling. I found though that performance scales linearly with increased memory clocks and there is no "sweet spot". Get that memory frequency as high as it can go!

Those number are still pretty good considering 4-Way SLI is usually a bit harder to highly overclock. 4-way 680 just destroys Skyrim in Surround:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvSh...DvjVQa1PpcFOpwHlB70YlOALsTk3pZxTxt4tbGt5H9Yk=

I am just astounded by how smooth the GTX 680 handles Surround using PCI-E 3.0 slots. There is no micro-stuttering, pauses or jitters. I don't think I could tell the difference between a single GPU running a single monitor and this 4-Way SLI Surround setup. Combine that with the CRT's and this is by far the smoothest and best Surround/Eyefinity setup of mine to date.

It will be interesting to see if any of these new EVGA non-reference cards will allow the voltage to rise above software 1.175 (I think really the only way to get more clocks out of these and just not more power phases).

 

[Vega]

My god man, you must have the most understanding other half ever. If I spent half of the cash you must have to create such a work of genius my partner would beat me senseless.

lol



The great news is that with driver 301.25 I no longer have the Surround setup not working on cold boot-up problem. Everything is working great now in Surround mode.

I've noticed that Witcher 2 has a problem when I load up the game, instead of it filling the screen, it's just a narrow landscape type view into the world. Anyone familiar with Surround/Eyefinity in Witcher 2 know how to fix that?

 

[Vega]

It has U-channel construction. Basically underneath the stainless steel surface is a whole bunch of I-beams made from steel. It's super strong.

 

[Vega]

Just rotate the mounts. All I did with these is remove the four VESA screws, turn the screen 90 degrees and remount. It will be monitor dependent and if the stand is tall enough to clear. Otherwise you can just get a custom mount.

 

[Vega]

Disable eyefinity, rotate all displays to portrait, then re-enable eyefinity.

 

[Vega]

@ Vega

If you're considering the offer: Jaffa Cakes

MMMMM jaffa cakesssss cant pass that one by vega

LOL


Ordered this to test out:

http://store.sony.com/webapp/wcs/st...nd-computer-edition-2012/480#overview/theater

Cross-talk, ghosting and glasses flicker is what has always turned me off with 3D. This supposedly eliminates all three of those problems. I thought it would be cool to test out. Plus it will be cool to see .7 inch OLED screens.

The thing that could kill it for me though is the 1280x720 resolution in each eye and if there is any input lag. We shall see.

 

[Vega]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsX7ogE8Nhg

Make sure to view in 720P.

Guild Wars 2 is as good as I thought it would be, and one of the main reasons I created this unique NVIDIA Surround setup.

Sorry about the black borders between the screens, I do not have a wide-angle video camera lens to accurately capture the seam-less image of the lenses at this time. To see that effect in action, please view the Fresnel Lens video in my channel. In a normal playing/seating position, the three images come together to create one "world" image and the Fresnel lenses add a slight depth effect. It is like looking through a large window out into the world and makes for one amazing gaming experience.

As you can see in the video, SLI is not working properly (developers are working on fix). It is only using around one GTX 680's worth of processing power, but it will read around 3x 33% as it has to send the frames to three different cards in this Surround setup.

My 4th EVGA GTX 680 malfunctioned and I have a replacement on the way. Amazingly, as you can see in the video it runs pretty darn smooth.

I do a quick tour of Divinity's Reach, the most impressive city I've ever seen in any MMORPG. Then I head out to the World vs World vs World area called the "Mists". Here you get bumped up to level 80 but you can see my Ranger still has noob clothes and skills. You still need to level up to properly play WvWvW. I chase some player down and they go hide in the fort as we try and smash the door down. Those doors are pretty strong and take a good while to destroy so I switch over to a PvP "mini-game".

Now in the PvP mini-games, you get leveled to 80 but you also get 80 PvP armor and skills. Here you can see some of the cool effects. I was playing off to the side craning my neck so the camera had a good view. Don't laugh at my playing skill because of this!

The PvP mini-game plays very well and I think I even managed a kill in there somewhere. I am glad I pre-purchased the collectors edition. GW2 is shaping up to be quite the game.