Well here’s my real upcoming Nehalem build. My last post about it was a bit of a joke. I’m not really good at taking night shots so this one is a little bit overexposed, which is most evident in the tubing. I’m very happy with the results of this setup though. Looking forward to getting a CPU to pop in there.

The ES 965 I’ve been playing with had to go back to the person who owns it.

Well I had a chance to play with an engineering sample Core i7 with a Gigabyte EX58-EXTREME motherboard and 12GB of Aeneon DDR3-1333 C8 memory for an upcoming NCIX Tech Tips, and I’m actually very impressed with the platform.

I’ve mellowed out in the last couple years going from balls to the walls overclocking (think E6600 @ 4.0GHz 24/7 with a custom -25C chiller under my tower) to being more concerned with overall platform stability and maturity (while also loving speed).

On another note, I have a confession to make. My name is Linus and I have a memory addiction. I don’t need lots of memory. Frequently with 8GB in my system I was looking at up to 7GB of “cached” memory under Vista only being used to store frequently used programs. That didn’t stop me from salivating when I saw that high end X58 motherboards were going to feature 6 RAM slots. Naturally the first thing I did was load each slot up with 2GB of RAM.

Here’s a shot of the test bench I used including the less-than-stellar stock heatsink from Intel (got an APOGEE GTZ hold down en route from Swiftech), a 6800GT that has served me well over the years, and my ghetto sleeved OCZ GameXSTream 600W (also present in the top picture with my chiller). I will be doing a complete overclocking walk through for Nehalem on NCIX Tech Tips, but I wanted to share my initial impressions with a dog CPU, all 6 RAM slots loaded up (far more stress on the memory controller), and terrible stock cooling:

- 200x base clock multiplier without much fuss
- 1480MHz C8 @ 1.66V on this random set of 3 dual channel kits of memory primed for 12 passes overnight.
- QPI speed of over 1700Mhz without much trouble
- 3.7GHz on the CPU before running into what I think was a combination of a thermal limitation (80+C under load) and having a less than steller overclocking chip

For a terrific beginner’s guide on overclocking see this thread on www.xtremesystems.org

HAI GUISE,

ALMOST FINISH I7 UPGRADE LULZ XD I CAN USE MY OLD CPU FOR GAMEING?

SEEMS WONT FIT SO I HELPED TO UPDATE THE BOTTOM HALF

I WILL HAVE CPU BOTTLENECK NOW?!?!?!

Well I decided to do some follow up performance numbers that include more drives as well as RAID-0 results with the Seagate 7200.2 drives, and the long and short of it is that I will be replacing my Samsung F1 with a pair of Seagate 7200.2s when I do my next reformat.

The performance difference is not staggering, but when combined with the reduced noise, reduced power consumption and reduced footprint (I”ll be sticking the 2.5″ drives to the back of my motherboard with industrial velcro), it’s an easy decision to make.

Here are some comparisons to some other drives that I found interesting. The mobile drive’s performance looks quite disappointing in direct comparison to the F1 750GB, but when compared to a more equivalent drive (Seagate 7200.10 160GB) it’s a closer fight.

My quest for a suitable X58 platform began with the requirement for SLI compatibility. All of the high end X58 boards I’ve seen so far have that checkbox filled. The next big requirement was slot layout. Currently I’m using two dual slot water cooled graphics cards (no desire to go full cover at this time), a PCI sound card (that can go as I’m only using it for mic in with an optical connection to my Onkyo TX-SR605), a PCIe 1x Intel gigabit NIC, and I’d really like to upgrade to a PCIe 8x RAID card in the near future.

Gigabyte really FUBARed the slot layout of the EX58-EXTREME with that weird heatsink that attaches to the northbridge… It blocks the top PCIe 1x and the PCIe 4x slot… But at least you can remove it. Boards like the Foxconn Blood Rage and the ASUS P6T, although appealing, simply won’t accommodate my expansion needs. The P6T Deluxe layout I just don’t understand… Why put the two bottom PCIe 16x slots next to each other?

The Gigabyte board has everything I need: Dual PCIe 16x physical with another that is electrically only 8x for a RAID card (3Ware tech I was talking to today says a lot of consumer boards will not properly work with an 8x card in a 16x electrical slot…). It also has a very robust cooling solution. Above you can see the naked board as well as a shot of how it’s attached to the board from the underside.

Here you can see the integrated water cooling solution with 3/8″ ID 5/8″ OD Primochill tubing on it. It fits great and these barbs are surprisingly good quality for an integrated affair. Gigabyte recommends 1/2″ OD tubing though and you can see the reason for it. With the Extreme Heatpipe dealie installed, 5/8″ OD tubing is a tight fit.

I was a little disappointed with the overall fit and finish of the water cooling solution. It does appear to be ALL copper (kudos to Gigabyte), and the base appears very flat and shiny, but the finish on the actual northbridge heatpipe assembly is VERY rough and not flat at all. I can’t imagine it will make very good contact, especially without thermal compound over the whole thing. That said, it’s good enough for my purposes and I’m not looking to set any world records.

I’ve got a post upcoming about my most recent water cooling adventure, but I thought I’d do a segment on one of the more interesting parts of this build: Making the MCW60 work with D-TEK’s Uni-Sink for the GTX 260 (and 280 if you have more money than I do…)

So here you can see the Uni-Sink in all its glory, along with my ghetto-fabulous method of removing my GPU blocks without actually draining my loop. The third picture is what the whole setup will theoretically look like when I’m done.

From talking to Danny at D-TEK I knew I was going to have to drill out the threaded holes that are set up for the FuZion GFX. The pictures above show me setting up for drilling by using saran wrap to keep the thermal pads from getting covered in aluminum shavings. The third picture shows why that doesn’t work very well… On the second attempt (SLI) I just peeled all the pads off ahead of time. It worked much better.

What I didn’t know is that there’s quite a bit more modification that needs to be done….. There are about 20-25 pins that need to be cut off in order for the MCW60 hold down plate to fit. Back to the dremel and then we’re done.

Haha. That was a good one! The baseplate of the MCW60 is not the same shape as the baseplate of the FuZion GFX… Talk about a round peg and a square hole. I was able to make it fit with a reinforced cutting disc and my dremel, but I really wouldn’t recommend this method…. I made a bit of a mess of things.

Nothing a little bit of nailpolish can’t fix I guess. Rather than leave the bare aluminum showing, I painted the exposed stuff with some black nailpolish. Never leave home without it.

After that I was finally able to mount the Uni-Sinks to the cards. My overheating problems are now a thing of the past (folding away on my GPU as we speak) and it’s nice to not have to worry about little junk falling off the VRMs. Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to use safety goggles.

Edit: Yeah… It occurs to me now that this thread is missing temp readings. I’m using GPU-Z to take temps and I’m just kinda eyeballing it because quite frankly I don’t care. I water cool for looks/silence, not for extreme overclocking.

Idle GPU0: GPU-36/GPU-28/PCB-39
Idle GPU1: GPU-36/GPU-28/PCB-34 (this one gets only a little bit more airflow over the uni-sink)
Folding GPU0: GPU-40/GPU-33/PCB-42
Folding GPU1: GPU-42/GPU-33/PCB-37

Read the rest of this entry »

Well as I mentioned on the NCIX forum a week or so ago I’ve been using a Pentium 4 3.0GHz CPU and a 9700pro in my work system since I started at the company. I did get a RAM upgrade about 8 months ago and that was kewl, but it’s time for an overhaul. Here are the before shots:

So I requested some hardware for my upgrade, and let’s just say it came through. Here are some of the highlights:

I had to promise I wouldn’t spend too much time gaming on this machine though :p

The initial plan was to use an Intel box heatsink and my old Enermax power supply, but as you can see in my before picture, the PSU I had in my system before isn’t enough to handle a quad core (Q6600) and crossfire system. The PSU had to go. I ended up changing a couple other things along the way such as the CPU heatsink (grabbed one from a Core 2 Extreme Q9650) and hard drive (now using SATA! W00t), but here’s the final result in boy light and dark.

Now that it’s done I’m going to get it up and running for the NCIX Folding Team as soon as possible. I fold under the name Closet Gamer.

A couple weeks ago, right before I went on vacation, I decided it was finally time to upgrade my Klipsch Promedia Ultra 5.1 set that I bought ages ago. I’ve used a number of sets of high end computer speakers from the Monsoon M2000 4.1, then to the Logitech Z-680 5.1, then to the Klipsches that I was using until last week. Actually, while I still owned the Klipsches, I picked up a used set of Creative S700s to see how well they held up against the Klipsches. They were close, but not quite there.

I have used digital output with the Logitech Z-680s running off the onboard “SoundStorm” audio on my nForce2 motherboard back when that was what all the cool kids were doing.

That’s not the only audio solution I’ve used though. Since then I’ve tried the Chaintech AV-710, Auzentech X-Mystique, Creative Audigy 2 ZS, Creative X-fi XtremeMusic, and Creative X-fi XtremeGamer since switching back to analogue outputs.

So why talk about all of this? Sound in music and games is a very subjective thing, and unless the writer has had experience with a variety of different solutions, then his or her experience can’t be taken seriously. I could say my $1 store headphones are the best thing ever, and if they were the only thing I had ever used, then I would not be wrong necessarily, I would simply be inexperienced.

Well, right before I left on my vacation I picked up (on sale of course) this Onkyo recevier and this set of KEF speakers. The difference is stunning. I find myself in a situation where I have enough experience listening to computer audio equipment to know that this is a whole other ballgame, but I lack the technical expertise to properly explain it. I’ll do my best to put it in layman’s terms.

Compared to my Klipsches, the sound is not “louder, but it is more “full”. The bass, instead of being easily distinguishable from the rest of my music like “oh that’s the bass” is just “present”. Everything works together much better. I wasn’t even aware of how much separation the channels could have when listening to a music CD. I’ve heard talk of a “sound stage”, but never actually had a set up that properly created one before.

I have to confess that I’m living in a smallish place right now and I am running in stereo surround with the surround channels sitting next to the front channels, but I will report on the gaming performance once I have chance to try things out a little more.

Basically the point I want to make here is that there are a few different major steps in terms of music & movie listening quality at your computer. There’s onboard. People will argue night and day about good onboard versus bad onboard, with “HD” onboard in there somewhere. Whatever. It’s all completely inadequate. Any time someone tells you that you need “$500 worth of speakers to tell the difference”, ask them how many sound cards they’ve ever owned because 95/100 times the answer will be “zero”. I can tell the difference with my low quality MP3s between a $30 sound card and onboard sound with $1 store ear buds, and I’m no audiophile.

The next step is obviously a dedicated sound card. It’s not about CPU utilization or 3D effects anymore to be perfectly honest. Much of that can be done in software and we’ve got quad core CPUs! What can a lowly sound processing chip do compared to a Q6600? It’s about the fact that when you get down to it audio is an analogue thing. Speakers are analogue devices. The file you’re playing or the CD you’re listening to are digital mediums. You need to convert that digital signal to an analogue one for speaker output. Analogue devices are ALWAYS affected by cleaner PCB layouts, higher quality components (DACs, capacitors, etc), and anything else that can reduce electrical noise. The difference is night and day, even between a dedicated sound card and motherboards that come with sound riser card.

The next step is moving to a receiver. That means I can take a purely digital signal from my computer (in my case the optical output from my onboard sound - not affected by digital to analogue conversion, since it’s not doing it.) and run it to an AV receiver, then out to my speakers. You can’t really compare a $30 sound card to a $500+ piece of video/sound processing equipment until you start to step up to something like an Auzentech X-fi Prelude (which I will move to once I have some cash again so that I can take advantage of EAX being encoded via DDL (theoretically) and sent to the receiver), so for me it’s like taking that step from onboard up to a dedicated sound card all over again. Also, I may switch over to analogue outputs again once I have a Prelude and the receiver will run amplifying/video switching duty for my Wii/Computer.

You might be reading this with a skeptical eyebrow raised, so I want to share a story from when I was working as a sales rep at the NCIX Langley location. I had a customer come in who was deaf in one ear and had very little hearing in the other. He wanted to buy a computer, and I said “grab a dedicated sound card and some great speakers, it’s a part of the experience that really doesn’t get talked about enough, despite how VERY important it is”.

He said, “It’s all fine and good for you to talk about it, but this is my money”

The conversation continued from there, but in the end he bought a sound card and a set of speakers totaling about $500.

The point of this story is not my sales prowess, but rather what he said to me after the sale when he came in a couple weeks later to pick up some blank media.

“You were absolutely right. I LOVE the speakers. It makes a HUGE difference in my games”. He didn’t have any feedback for me as far as music was concerned. He didn’t listen to a lot of music, but he just wanted to let me know how much better it was for games (which I personally have a harder time telling the difference in to be perfectly honest) it made to use some good quality sound equipment instead of onboard with cheap speakers.