Guess who bought an Asus P5K3 DDR3 board

[Roz_P_89]

Well, i cant rememeber if i did post anything about what i'm doing with my rig. I have bought a much nicer case now (i would've preferred something bigger but i am a little restricted when it comes to space!) -

Lian Li PC-A16B Aluminium Full-Tower - Black

I have also acquired some watercooling kit (Swiftech), and a Coolit TEC with no pump, hence we have another pump and plan to use this in the loop.

I gave my bf my 8800 card in exchange for his 7950 GX2 as he was using vista and has a bigger monitor than me, so he is able to utilise it better than me. The original plan was to use a spacer kit and watercool the GX2 as i didn't want to pull off the custom EVGA ACS cooler from the 8800. However, i may be able to get hold of one of the new ATi/AMD cards - the 2900 XT. Not as great as the 8800 as far as i have heard, but alot easier to sort the cooling out, and i would have a dx10 capable card.

Finally, on a whim, we decided to buy an Asus P5K3 DDR3 board -

Asus P5K3 Deluxe WiFi Intel P35 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard

a friend of ours mite have us some DDR3 in a couple of weeks, if not we'll buy a couple of sticks of this -

Kingston 512mb Ddr3 1066mhz Memory Non-ecc Cl7 Dimm

until we have enough capital to buy Some of the Corsiar DDR 3 with the DHX heatsinks (as i have the Dominator fan module) -

Corsair 2GB DDR3 DHX 1333C9DHX TwinX (2x1GB)

Oh, and i changed my CPU from an E6400 to an E6320, lower core speed but it is a Conroe with the bigger Cache rather than the Allendale with the smaller cache. It should clock to about the same with the watercooling in place.

O yeah, bought my third raptor too :-)

Comments guys :P

Roz

[syphus]

Looks good. Your choice of CPU is pretty good, in terms of assessing the L2 cache amount.

I think twice about the Radeon HD 2900 XT though. True, it's difficult to get good cooling for the GeForce 7950 GX2 because of the way the processors are stacked (a kludge if ever I saw one), but it's overpriced, power hungry, hot and imbalanced. Better off getting GeForce 8800-series if you don't want to be stuck with the GX2.

[Roz_P_89]

Yeah i kno, i would go for the 8800, but basically it's a swap for the 2900 XT with the GX2, so i'm not really bothered bout tht one for now :-P

Just about to buy the 2gig kit of Corsair DDR3 1033 (with no DHX spreaders tho) off scan.co.uk - 2GB (2x1GB) CorsairTwinX XMS3, DDR3 240 Pin, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 7-1-1-21


Roz

[Roz_P_89]

Regarding my post http://www.itsallpc.co.uk/central-pr...-new-post.html
My E6850 turned up yesterday :-P

Also bought some koolance mosfet blocks and bits and pieces, and an additional rad. I think the idea is that it will split into 2 loops. The First loop is reservoir - pump - Coolit TEC - CPU - Northbridge - Reservoir.
and the second loop is something like Reservoir - Pump - (both from the same pump and res) - Radiator - Southbridge - GPU - Mosfets - Reservoir

Hopefully the Pump will take it, It's a Swiftech MCP655™ series 12 VDC Pump, and we're using 8mm bore tubing i think, apart from on the mosfets we're using their smaller stuff with sum Y blocks to our bigger stuff.

We're just waiting for a few bits from the states to turn up, like the GX2 Spacer kits. We'll probably just use the GX2 until we know if we're getting the 2900 XT.

Does anyone know if there are any 8600's that beat the 2900XT? Or any reviews of this? Coz i kno the the 2900XT is really meant to be competeing with the 8800GTS, which made me wonder about the 8600...

Comments Plz :P

Roz

[syphus]

8600 doesn't approach the 8800 GTX/2900 XT class.

Check link here.

The 8600 GTS is usually a little over half the speed of the 8800 GTS. This would make it lag pretty significantly behind the 2900 XT as well.

[Roz_P_89]

Update on the Project:

The loop is all there now, we are just waiting for the 2900XT and the adaptor plate for the waterblock. Once this is sorted, we can fill it up and test the loop. Then i will have my pc back lol.

Can i post pics on this forum, or do they have to be links to somewhere for the pic, e.g. photobucket?

Roz

[Roz_P_89]

The 2900XT has arrived! The Waterblock is now attached, we didn't need to use the adapter plate tho as it was too big :-S (it's the G80 adapter, but apparantly you're meant to use it on the 2900XT cards too...). memory heatsinks are all attached, just waiting on some more mosfet cooling sinks for the card which should turn up tomorrow, so we can start testing the loop then.

Roz

[Roz_P_89]

Attached the Mosfet cooling sinks to the mosfets on the Graphics card, but they weren't really sticking, ended up using soem epoxy.

We started filling it last week and found a small leak between one of the barbs (the adaptor ends of the block) and the block on the southbridge, wasn't very tight, so we've taken it all apart to make sure everything is tightened. Also got an adaptor for the coolit outlets as it uses 1/8 " fittings, whereas most of the setup uses 1/4 " fittings and tubing. It was holding fine with the jubilee clips, but thought it would be best to use an adaptor in the end.

Just putting it all back together now.

Then we can do the loop test with the pump on this time :-P

We were having problems getting the fluid to fill the radiator and the coolit, as it is the same height as the reservoir. Does anyone have any idea whether just switching the pump on for a few seconds to get it round properly would do any harm or not?

Roz

[Roz_P_89]

Loop is complete and pumping. 1 litre of coolant wasn't quite enough to fill the reservoir completely though as it's such a big loop, but there is enough to run it until we get some more.

[Roz_P_89]

Going to put the rest of my hardware in later today and boot it up. Better work lol.

R

[nath2008uk]

Nice pc!!!! how does it work tho? plastic tank with cold water.Never knew it was possible.Im a average pc guy in primary school(hurry) but i never spend 5 hours a day with my saw cutting it donw to customize it.

edit:

Could you upload some more pics.Upclose so i can get a proper look thx

[Roz_P_89]

Nath, i have those pics in a bigger res so i will crop them and load them up soon.

Installed Vista Ultimate on it last nite, and graphics drivers etc, didn't do much else as my bf's net was downloading stuff at bout 10kb/s.

With no overclocking yet, the Vista rating thing is 5.9 for every component except the CPU which is at 5.6 lol. Not sure if the overclocking later will up my rating?

Temps with the coolit on idle with no overclocking are 31C in the CPU and GPU, and the Board sensor says 36C (anyone know where this sensor is?). Without the Coolit on it jumps to 46C at Idle.

Hottest item in the machine would be the RAM sinks on the Graphics card, is reporting 50C, which is a tad better than swiftech's example one at 55C, although i'm not sure what sort of margin for reading error i should give.

Will run some 3d mark and pc mark benchmarks before i start trying to overclock bits.

Roz

[Roz_P_89]

Basically Nath, this isn't your average watercooling system with a few bog standard radiators hanging off the back with some fans.

The loop is in a way divided into two, but it cools the same throughout the loop, hence why the cpu and gpu have the same temps.

The coolit box Freezone CPU Cooler - CoolIT Systems cools one part of the loop - the cpu and mosfets and i think the northbridge. This goes back to a Y splitter into one to go back to the reservoir which is the clear plastic box you can see at the front.

The second half of the loop goes thru the black radiator at the back with a fan on it, and tht half of the loop goes through the graphics and the southbridge. Which then returns to the Y splitter as before into one and on to the Reservoir.

Make sense? Lol

Roz

[Roz_P_89]

And what are you on about in your post, I didn't hack up any part of my case (well actually coz the stand off at the back between the coolit and the back of the case gets in the way we're going to get a friend to cut a chunk out of the side panel so we can get it back on lol).

Roz

[Roz_P_89]

Ok update guys. The system was running fine, but we found that it wouldn't run 3dmark for some reason. Then, when trying to display 3d images on ATI Tool, i was getting some really bad graphical errors, and it then started doing this even before windows loads up and randomly within windows. Tried it with XP and got the same results. In short, the card is fudged. The m8 we got it from thought it may have been driver problems when it happened to him and the idea was tht we wud ty it with the new drivers and keep it if it worked. It's been sent of for RMA today, so hopefully we will have a replacement within a week or 2. If they wont replace it for some reason i will probably be spending the last of my pennies on an 8800GTS 320mb or 640mb depending on how much i have left, and maybe the Swiftech Stealth block, which covers everything including the ram chips and mosfets.
Hoping it doesn't come to that tho.

Roz

[Roz_P_89]

New card (an OEM 2900xt), all modded and everything working, has been for a while now. I will post benchmarks and pictures soon...

Just two things to do now, cut down the fan to 7v coz it's so loud (v.high rpm - tornado 92mm fan on the coolit), and a slight modification to the side panel so it will fit on lol.

I have tried overclocking, it's running at 3.5Ghz now, have managed to get it to 3.8Ghz, think i need better ram, but other than that it's fine. Cannot overclock the gpu without it crashing as it needs the 8pin power and a 6pin to do so, rather than just two 6 pins which suffice for normal useage.

Roz

[Roz_P_89]

UV glow, woop woop :-)