My Dual Harper - Asus Z7S WS living review *56K warning*

[cbienlein]

my 5430s are at 3.2 right now...good to know the temps arent too bad. id still like to bring them down some

[shanems3]

my 5430s are at 3.2 right now...good to know the temps arent too bad. id still like to bring them down some

http://cgi.ebay.com/New-8-000-BTU-Po...d=p3286.c0.m14

get that.. lol, duct it into ur pc

[Jaco]

My E5450's at 3.96Ghz gives me low 60's (running WCG ).
Running prime is another matter , more like 75°C !
But I don't run prime every day, it's just for stability testing

[sgmunson]

Here's the pics I promised - as attachments because they're not hosted on a URL. The process of building this system has been surprisingly easy, save two things:

1.) The room in this case isn't quite what I thought it would be, so if there's a next time, I won't choose to go cheap on the case. I found that the cabling was having trouble with the closing up of thr right hand side of the case and the hard drives and video card. Without even realizing it, I managed to bust off a piece of the plastic on one of the SATA power cables, such that you can see the pins from one side, in the process of just closing the right side of the case. This case has both sides capable of being folded down from the top.

2.) I appear to have misplugged a USB cable that goes to the front of the case, and I burned up two different SATA card readers before I realized I had it wrong. Sure wish I had known that was a possible outcome ahead of time. I had the cable plugged in backwards from what I could tell, but I'm not entirely sure, as I ended up letting go of the cable right after removing it from the pins on the mobo, and another possibility is that I only had half of it plugged in, but who knows which half. I can't even be sure I have it right at this point, but I won't be using those anytime soon. I guess I'll have to find a real cheap USB device to test it again later.

Next step is the install of Vista Ultimate 64-bit, followed by SQL Server Developer's Edition 2005 AND 2008, so that I have both versions available. Then I get a copy of the multi-processor version of Fritz (chess playing program) - perhaps for Christmas...

Anyway, if anyone has any guidance based on this post of the pics, please feel free to respond. Thanks!

Steve
(aka sgmunson)

[sgmunson]

Limit of 5 pics per post, so here's the next group of pics...

Steve
(aka sgmunson)

[D_A]

I take it you've sorted that cable management issue?

[sgmunson]

I have it dealt with by virtue of having realized I was going to have to move the hard drives entirely into the part of the case that was designed to house them, which is a movable casing at the bottom. I had initially tried to put one of the four up inside the area normally occupied by floppy drives or other similar devices (and below where the external capable section of that part was), but the tail end of the video card was just too close for that. Unfortunately, I had busted the cable before I realized I had a problem. Sometimes, ya just learn the hard way...

Now that all 4 drives are down below, the issue is resolved, and the cables, while still unwieldy, are at least capable of being managed without disconnecting themselves or getting broken. There's still not a lot of extra space there, but it will have to do for now.

Dang!!! Almost forgot - any recommendations for freebie performance testing software? Also, given I have the Q9550 cpu on the Asus P5Q3 Deluxe WiFi AP @n mobo, any chance for viable overclocking? If not, no big deal, as I'll probably be drooling over the performance of a 2.83GHz quad-core as compared to my existing single core P4 at 2.66GHz.

Steve
(aka sgmunson)

I take it you've sorted that cable management issue?

[sgmunson]

Here's the final pic with the CPU indicated.

Again, any feedback at all will be appreciated, especially with regard to the boo-boos I made. Thanks again, everyone.

Steve
(aka sgmunson)