Pako
Staff Emeritus
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- NW Montana
- GTP-Pako
- GTP Pako
Finished Pics
Thanks to this wonderful forum and the enthuseastic members here, I have water cooled and overclocked just about everything I can get my hands on lately. Dude to a small series of unfortuneate events, my 780i FTW board is no longer functioning. Now at this point I can either replace that board or build a new system. What can I say, if I'm going through all the work for outfitting a new motherboard, it might as well be for a i7 system right?
What the final system will consist of is:
- Asus Rampage II mobo
- 965EE
- Corsair 1833 2x3gb Dominator Ram w/ fan.
- PC Power and Cooling 1200w Single 12v Rail PSU
- BFG GTX280 [Tri-SLI]
- 2x150g Raptor Drive SATA Raid0
- 500g WD storage Drive SATA
- Optical Drive
- Cosmos Customized Case
- Simple Fan controller for Rad's
Loop 2 - 120.3 Swiftech Rad + Swiftech GTZ block w/ Adapter, Koolance NB/SB block, MCP355 with Acrylic top. 1/2" Fittings
This thread has been hijacked by a water cooling build log as a result of the heat generated by 3-way SLI configuration.
Build log pictures HERE.
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Hanns·G HG-281DPB Black 28" 3ms Widescreen LCD HDMI Monitor 500 cd/m2 800:1 Built in Speakers
With VGA and HDMI, I have my computer and PS3 hooked up. I'll be getting a HDMI switch soon to make switching between the PC and the PS3 easier. At a full resolution of 1920x1200, this monitor looks fantastic. The only major complaint the is the LCD "X" that can be seen during darker sections of game play. This shouldn't surprise me as every LCD monitor I've owned seem to have this.
As a precursor to the monitor, I built a new gaming rig:
*Intel E6850 Core 2 Duo 3.0 GHZ 4mb Cache, 1333FSB
*2gb OCZ Reaper Ram, @1066ghz stable.
*150gb Raptor Drive
*eVGA 680i Mobo (supports 3 PCI-E 16x graphics cars
), 1333FSB supported.*Dual BFG OC 8800GTX 768mb Graphics cards in SLI
*1000w OZ PSU, support for up to 72 amps of delivered power!!!
*Vista Ultimate (DirectX 10 fully supported)
What can I say, this machine is a beast. By far the fast machine I've seen to date (then again, I don't get out much). In short, I'm running Crysis at 1920x1200 full everything averaging 25 FPS. Still waiting for EA to release the patch that is supposed to speed things up on this game. Booting takes seconds and seems to handle sleep mode the way it's supposed to (thanking Vista for that).
I built this machine as a hard core gaming rig, with plans on adding another Raptor drive in the near future. Cooling is an issue with this machine. The processor, ram, and especially the dual 8800 GTX video cards creates a tremendous amount of heat. Not that it's related, but I ended up frying a stick of ram a week after the build. Perhaps it was faulty, not sure....but it was covered and I have new ram installed now and it's running better than ever. We ran a benchmark yesterday for 6 hours without one crash. Added another fan to the case to try and suck some of that nasty heat out...., we'll see how effective it is. I may have to look to burnout on some suggestions for a liquid cooled system if I can't seem to get it to cool down. Right now nothing is over-clocked. Using nVidia's nTune software, I had the ram over 1200mhz, but have sense dropped it back down to 1066 stock. The Front Side Bus us running a stable 1333 and the video cards are also running stock clock speeds. My main reason for building this rig was for Crysis and Farcry 2. If the patch doesn't help, I may have to start tweaking to get it overclocked to help achieve an average of 45 fps which would be very nice for that game...., 60 would be ideal, but I could live with 45.
Just for a little fun, the case has built-in speakers that makes an engine starting sound when you first turn on the PC. It's a fun little novelty the first time or two turning it one, I have sense turned it down to not hear it.
Enabling and disabling SLI has also gotten easier. Back in the old days, you had to manually install or remove the SLI bridge for the different modes but it can now be changed using software, namely the nVidia display control panel.
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I know.... working on it.
