Project: Blue on Black

[Bolas]

I'm thinking maybe an odd cpu mult might work better, so I'm upping the cpu mult to 33x and dropping the BCLK. This will put me under the memory's rated frequency for sure, which is also helpful... but under by too much, which is annoying. Ah well.

BCLK VCore Result
127 1.375 OK
128 1.375 fail soft
128 1.3875 fail soft
128 1.39375 OK

Looks like we may have a winner for a stable overclock (4.224 GHz) with less than 1.4V VCore. This passed 20 loops of Linx with 512 memory size in 2m 27s total and SuperPi 32M in 9m 2.593s and I'll let it burn in overnight on Intel Burn Test with max memory settings and see if that works.

[Bolas]

Passed overnight Intel Burn Testing.



http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=1217969

Looks like 4.224 GHz is as fast as I am currently able to get this computer without going over 1.4V VCore and while having memory operating at close to normal specs.

I'll probably drop back to 4 GHz for 24/7 operation so that I don't burden the system with a high VCore voltage for an extended period of time, but it is nice to know how fast it can go when it needs to do so.

[xslix]

ESD smock and ground strap. lol y not a tin foil hat too lol funny people still us that ...like he building a time machine lol jking to funny lol

[malkiewicz]

Nice work... I've been thinking about using the Corsair 800D for an upcoming build....

[ShArKo]

Hi Bolas... First I want to say: congratulations for your rig Looks nice, but I don´t like to much what you did with the FANS on the top rad. It looks to me like a sandwich with the rad in the middle. jejeje (But is just my opinon).
My advice with the leak test is: you can use towel paper and plastic bags to cover all critical hardware. I better than paper only

One´s again... congratulations for your rig

[Bolas]

ESD smock and ground strap. lol y not a tin foil hat too lol funny people still us that ...like he building a time machine lol jking to funny lol

I already had that stuff so it didn't cost me anything to use them. I didn't want to blow up a cpu, motherboard, or memory chip with ESD, and my basement is carpeted and dry, so I figure it wouldn't hurt to use them.

Tin foil hat, eh? I'll use that for my next build.

[Bolas]

Hi Bolas... First I want to say: congratulations for your rig Looks nice, but I don´t like to much what you did with the FANS on the top rad. It looks to me like a sandwich with the rad in the middle. jejeje (But is just my opinon).
My advice with the leak test is: you can use towel paper and plastic bags to cover all critical hardware. I better than paper only

One´s again... congratulations for your rig

I have limited space for radiators in the case without doing extensive modifications that are a bit beyond my skill level and available tooling (a screwdriver and a hammer... no fancy lathes or mills or anything useful). So to make the most of the radiator, I set up the fans in a push/pull configuration. Looks like it worked, I have cool temperatures. With a 4GHz overclock, the temps are in the low 50's under load and hit mid 50's during extended burn in. I've never gotten any core over 64 Celcius, no matter what I've tried. So it was worth it. Yes, it's a sandwich, but it works and it hides the ugly Swiftech radiator with the nice looking Noiseblocker fans, so I'm happy.

I just got my adapter in the mail today for my 3rd display, so now I have to clear off the clutter on my desk from the build and see if my desk can support the weight of three monitors or not. Looking forward to some 12 megapixel gaming soon!!

[Bolas]

Ok so... the adapter worked for about an hour... and then when I tried to swap from 3 displays in portrait to three displays in landscape, it crapped out. BLEAH.

[Major]

Hey Bolas! you having fun yet?

Congrats man, looks great! what was your final OC?

[Bolas]

Ok, eyefinity is back in my good graces. I think a cable just worked loose or the adapter had a tough time dealing with rotating from portrait to landscape without being reconnected. I'll know next time.

I ended up deciding on this for my 24/7 operation:

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=1210431

And I saved this for my best stable OC (20 passes of Linx with max memory selected using Intel burn test):

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=1217969

I tested out a bunch of different games in 3x1 portrait Eyefinity.

The one that impressed me most was Civlization IV. The details just POP out at you at that resolution, it was strange.

Spore was a let down. It worked, but everything was grainy.

Warcraft III wouldn't let me change resolutions -- it crashed whenever I tried -- and the default resolution was kind of lame. It was tough to play in 3x1 portrait eyefinity.

Starcraft II Beta wouldn't let me change resolutions but at least it didn't crash. That one was kind of fun to play in Eyefinity.

Sins of a Solar Empire would let me pick the resolution, but it didn't seem to work, so I went on to something else.

Dirt 2 worked, but I don't have a good controller for that, and trying to steer left or right by pressing arrow keys, combined with accelerate by pressing arrow keys = not so fun.

Team Fortress 2 worked good, but I think that one will be much better in landscape. That and I still stink at first person shooter games.

I just switched over to 3x1 landscape eyefinity and I'm checking out 7680 x 1600 wallpapers. I've got a couple from the web using google search and they are nice. Good nature scenes. I'm about to test out games in 3x1 landscape eyefinity. I think that might be my favorite resolution. That way, for the games that are great in eyefinity, it's already in portrait, and for the ones that aren't, I can just do mirrored desktops on each of three displays, or use the center display for the game and leave the other two monitors on the desktop.

[Bolas]

After a few crashes and some learning opportunities, Eyefinity seems to be working great. I think I like the "extended desktop" setup the best, but I also have saved "mirrored" and "eyefinity landscape" and "eyefinity portrait" profiles. Extended desktop makes the center display my main display as if I'm using just one 2560 x 1600 monitor, but I can also drag windows either left or right when I want additional space. I can play old games on the center monitor only as if I have just one display, but for the newer games I can switch to "eyefinity landscape" profile and the nice monitor surround is ready to go. I'm liking this. Pics soon of the triple display setup.

[Bolas]

I'm now getting the itch to re-do my loop and replace the blue tubing and distilled water with clear tubing and feser one uv blue fluid. I've realized that for how I use my computer, my temps stay pretty icy and I don't really have much to worry about with degradation of the fluid due to heat damage over time. Plus I like the look. I'll probably hold off a while because I want to see what the current loop looks like once I get the lighting completely finished. I might not want to change it after, after all.

[Bolas]

Finished some tweaks to make it boot up faster. Loaded the script below to check how fast it can completely shut down and start up again. Got it down to 54 seconds to completely shut down and start back up again. Yay, under a minute!

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...tart-time.html

[Bolas]

Bought a few more parts.

Spare 1TB hard drive, same as the previous one. Decided I'm going to figure out RAID-1 and have an automatic redundant backup of my data drive so that I don't have to worry about a single hard drive failure munching my data.

X-Box 360 controller for windows. Thought that might be a fun way to play video games on the laptop while walking on the treadmill, and it's supposed to be a good controller.

Zalman clip-on microphone, to attach to my headset for when I want to do VOIP chat during games.

Logitech 5.1 surround sound speakers. Got a good deal on them on www.midnightbox.com recenlty. Or was it woot.com? I don't remember. But for $36 plus shipping for some 70W speakers, I figured they would be good for those times when I don't want to use headphones -- mainly when I'm listening for my daughter to wake up from her nap.

Sound card finally arrived, but hasn't been installed yet. Still need to finish up the last of the wiring and the lighting. Can't seem to find where I put some of the velcro strips to hold the UV cold cathode lights in place.

I'm thinking that maybe I should have gone with white cold cathode tubes instead of UV, but I'll try this out first and see how it looks before I spend any more on additional hardware. Sorry no pics recently, still need to upload the photos of the various eyefinity setups.

I also bought some cheap older games to try out. Bioshock, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Assassin's Creed. Contemplating another half dozen games as well.

Mostly playing Starcraft II Beta and League of Legends these days.

[Bolas]

I've now installed the sound card, the headphones, the game controller, and the 5.1 surround speakers. Still need to finish the lighting and wiring. Considering redoing the sleeving on the fans (was sleeved by the company that sold me the fans) so that they use the premium MDPC-X sleeving. You really can tell a difference in the quality of the sleeving between the other guy's sleeving and the MDPC-X stuff. It's night and day.

More pics to follow when I get a chance.

[jadawgis732]

Just read the first post, but man this is going to be epic. You just made my afternoon!

[Bolas]

I have now upgraded the... DESK. The desk was sagging in the middle under the weight of all the hardware. I added another support beam under the middle and also along the right side to fix the problems, and now the monitors line up much better.

Hoping to do some more work on the system on Saturday night, if so, I'll try to post some pics on Sunday.

[Bolas]

Well, I've decided that I'm going to either add back in the memory fan or buy a water block for the memory. It seems that EK has now made a water block to cool Corsair dominator memory and it is reasonably priced compared to the other options that I saw, so it's tempting.

http://www.performance-pcs.com/catal...ducts_id=30103

I'm also tempted to switch to clear tubing with colored fluid. The temps I'm running are not so high that I'm worried about damaging the fluid with excessive heat, typically my temps on the cpu are 30 degrees Celsius or less at idle, and 40 or less under typical load.

http://www.performance-pcs.com/catal...ducts_id=23363

http://www.performance-pcs.com/catal...ducts_id=22685

I would then switch to white lighting, either a cold cathode tube or a row of white LED's. Or both.

http://www.performance-pcs.com/catal...ducts_id=29391

http://www.performance-pcs.com/catal...f61cbd203b1233

However, I want to finish the current setup of UV blue cold cathode lights and some blue LED's and give that a fair try before I think about switching... which means that I need to finish the current build.

I don't have enough fan power connectors to wire all the case fans that I want to wire, I'm about two short, so not sure what to do there other than buy a second fan power splitter. This would also make the wiring a bit easier, because I could then have fan wire connections at two different places inside the case instead of just one. Unfortunately, they are currently on back order, it seems, so this will have to wait.

http://www.performance-pcs.com/catal...oducts_id=4420

I'm not sure if I can finish the wiring and lighting completely with what I have at the moment. I need a better way to get the fan power where I want it, and I'm out of fan power ports with two fans left still to power, the one for the memory and the one for the spare hard drive bay. Neither is crucial, but I would prefer to have both of them running before I finalize the build. So maybe I can work on the lighting some today.

One of the LED lights apparently has burned out. I think it was one that came with something else I bought, so I'm not sure how to replace that one. Bummer. Maybe I can just buy some new LED's and solder them on myself? I have a soldering iron somewhere, that I had intended to use to repair my Joust arcade game.

I also wanted to put some sleeving over the two long water cooling tubes that take water from the radiator to the cpu and from the gpu back to the reservoir. That way, the UV blue glow would only come from the four tubes in the area right around the cpu and not have wild glows everywhere looking cluttery.

Originally, I intended to remove a strand or two from the sleeving so that the blue tube would show through slightly beneath the sleeving, but the sleeving I got is such high quality and so tightly knit that it's not really possible to do so that I can see. Maybe I'll give it a shot and see what happens.

[Bolas]

Finally bought a new keyboard, mouse, and mousepad. Huge improvement!!

Razer Maurader Starcraft II keyboard
Razer Spectre Starcraft II mouse
Razer Goliathus control mousepad

[Bolas]

New best stable OC!

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=1835513

Turns out I did need to enable load line calibration to slightly tweak the vdroop.

[Bolas]

I just bought a new Solid State Drive. Corsair Force GT 240GB SATA III (6GB/s).

I used Acronis True Image Home to copy all the data on my Intel X25-M G2 160GB SSD over to the new drive, and it works great.

I realized, though, that I had it plugged into the wrong SATA port, so I've moved it to one of the SATA 6GB/s ports now. Still seems a bit slow, so I'm updating the motherboard BIOS (the update isn't working, currently) and updating the SSD firmware (if necessary) and then trying again.

[Bolas]

OK, two ROM flashes successful!

I flashed the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 rev 1.0 motherboard from firmware F6 to F7. This restored my load screen to the Gigabyte one (which I wanted back anyways) and gave me improved BIOS configuration menus, so I am very glad I did it.

Then, after some trials and tribulations, I also managed to flash the firmware for the Corsair Force GT SSD from version 1.3 to version 1.3.3.

Loaded ATTO and checked how the new SSD is working. Seems pretty good!!



Still not getting as high of a score as Corsair claims is possible, so maybe I still have some tweaking to do or something *shrug*

[Bolas]

Getting BSOD's due to the new SSD. Showing f4 as the type, which is the SSD drive.

Working on fixing it now.

[Bolas]

Ok, the second time I did a complete re-install, the SSD is now working properly. That's the good news.

The bad news? A different drive bay was not working and I wasn't sure why. My wife is like, "Maybe your water cooling system sprang a leak?". I'm all, "No way. I would have seen the water."

Lo and behold... she was right. Today, in the middle of a League of Legends match, my computer completely lost power and refused to boot properly. I see some red lights on the motherboard that should not normally be lit. I try again, and it doesn't post properly. Then I see the water, and pull the plug on the back of the system. I've moved the monitors off the desk and drained the loop. Now I need to do some troubleshooting.

It looks like the pump possibly sprung a leak. Ewwwww. I'm planning on spending a bunch of time this weekend working on it. We'll see if I fried anything or not. Hopefully not. It's possible that the pump stopped working completely so no cooling so overheat caused the crash. Hopefully I didn't burn up anything expensive, but I did smell something burning. I've pulled all the drives out from below the reservoir, they look ok as far as I can tell. None of the circuit boards got water on them directly, but it's quiet likely that they overheated at least a bit.

Well, now I've got an excuse to finally finish the build, I suppose.

[Bolas]

My old pump is dead, as far as I can tell. Apparently, one of the connectors to the reservoir was twisted in the opposite direction of the torque used to fasten the compression fitting, and the fitting worked loose eventually. This dripped water into the pump body, which shorted out the electronics in the pump, which caused the pump to fail, which caused the whole system to overheat.

I've ordered a new pump, a new EK water block for the RAM with matching fittings, some clear tubing, and some new lighting and wiring accessories.

1 x Sunbeam Multi-Fan Power Port
12 x PrimoFlex Pro LRT Clear Tubing -3/8in. ID X 5/8in. OD
2 x Bitspower Premium G1/4" Shiny Silver High Flow 3/8" (5/8") Compression Fitting
1 x Danger Den/Laing DDC 3.25 -12V 18 Watt Version
1 x Bitspower UV Reactive O-rings for Fittings - UV Blue
1 x Bitspower Laing DDC Series Pump Replacement O-Ring (DDC Series /Alphacool/ MCP350/355) - UV Blue
1 x Logisys True-Color CCFL Light Bar - 20" - White, Cable: Crimp pins, add connectors
1 x NZXT Sleeved LED Cable Kit - 1M - White
1 x Lamptron Inverterless Cathode Spectral Bar - UV
1 x EK-RAM Dominator - Water Block for Corsair Dominator Ram - EN (Nickel)
2 x ModMyToys 4-Pin Power Distribution PCB - 8-Way Block

I wanted a 2M NZXT Sleeved LED cable kit, but they were out. I'll try out the 1M and see how I like it and maybe order a 2M cable later.

I'm not sure if I will like the Sunbeam Multi-Fan power port better or the ModMyToys 4-Pin Power Distribution PCB, so this will give me some options to try out.

I want to try a build with blue fluid, clear tubing, and white light to see if I like that better than clear fluid, blue tubing, and UV light. So I plan to get some Feser One UV Blue (or UV Black?!?) fluid at some point.

I probably didn't need the pump O-Ring, I should still have a spare one somewhere, but I couldn't find it. The current one has some kind of white residue on it, so I was going to replace the O-Ring.

Hopefully, nothing was damaged when the water stopped flowing. The system overheated a bit, but I think I powered it down in time and I don't think any water got anywhere critical. I'll replace the pump, fill the loop, and test it to make sure. No point in doing a ton of wiring and lighting for a system that won't start, after all.

After I confirm it still works, I'll drain the loop, add in the RAM water block, remember to sleeve some of the water cooling tubing in the huge black sleeve, wire up some lights, route the cables, and check it out.

I also need to do some cleaning on the system. Too much dust!

I'll see if I can take some pics of everything and post them as I go.