This has been a long road. I've been trying to build a computer to replace my old 3Ghz HT socket 478 system since the middle of 2007!
I started gathering information on the i7 before the new year, and ordering parts soon after. Everything was at my house in mid February, and it took 2 weeks to get to this point. Several days of that were prep on the case. Don't forget to sand and primer, folks, or else you'll have to start over from scratch (after removing all that flaky old paint)! There's just some detail work left, now. The CFCLs aren't working yet, one works but there is a short in the cable, the other isn't working at all. I have new ones ready to install, but am waiting for the DOA hard disk to get back so I don't have to disassemble twice. I also need to remove and re-lap the TRUE in my quest for 4Ghz 24/7 stable. Plus 2 of the Kaze Master's thermal probes are dead.
- CoolerMaster Centurion 590
- Asus P6T Green (plain P6T)
- Intel i7 920 2.66Ghz @ 3.6Ghz (Currently)
- Corsair Dominator 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 1600 @ 1440
- XFX GTX285 1GB Black Edition
- 4x WD Caviar Black 7200RPM 640GB in RAID10
- LG SATA 22x DVDRW
- Corsair HX620 Modular PSU
- Kaze Master Fan Controller
- 2x Scythe Kaze Maru 140mm High-Speed Fans
- 1x Scythe Slip Stream 120mm Ultra-Speed Fan
- 2x Yate Loon 120mm Medium Speed Fans
- 2x Xigmatek 120mm White LED Fans
- 1x Hiper Thin 80x15mm Fan
- Thermalright TRUE Black Edition
Current temps are decent, although I think I can get better with a better attempt at lapping than what I have. I have this suspicion that I did it wrong. I'm currently idling at 39,38,40,38 and at full load in Prime95 with 8 threads, 72,72,71,75. Not horrible, but I don't want to raise the voltage for more clocks until I can get it down a wee bit more. I'm running right now at 180BCLK, which gives me 3600Mhz on the CPU, at stock voltage. This is a 24/7 stable temperature with no issues, but 3.8Ghz at stock volts crashes after a few hours of Prime95 and in 3DMark Vantage. I think the CPU is capable of 4Ghz without a huge bump in power. Currently the RAM is at 1440Mhz DDR (720x2). It can do more, it runs great at 1600Mhz, but at 180BCLK the next jump up is more than that. Once I get the CPU stable at either 3.8Ghz or 4.0Ghz, I'll fiddle with the RAM to eek out a little more.
My RAID10 array is degraded, one of the four drives showed up DOA, so I'm hoping to get better performance once the new drive shows up. If not, I may pick up a Perc 5/i and play with RAID5 using 4 drives.
I'd originally planned to make a custom front panel using modders mesh and place two additional 140mm Kaze Maru's on the front panel. This would take up the 5 unused bays, but the first attempt was a dismal failure. It fit worse than the Scythe Kama Bays that are currently installed. I'll try again sometime in the future.
Anyway, now for some hardware pron. I'm quite happy with how it turned out, I was surprised how small the case actually gets once you start installing hardware. It seemed big until things started going in!
And a few screen grabs. They are reduced down from 1680x1050, so since they are a little hard to read: 14493 3DMarks in Vantage, GPU score is 11738 and CPU is 48989. Respectable, but not ground breaking in any way. The only tweaking here is the 180Mhz BCLK on the CPU, GPU is stock. The other screenshot has some HDD benchs for my degraded array, and CPUZ shots. The HDD benchmarks are actually worse than they were, I was over 200 sequential read, I think I need to defrag.
Now I just need to man up and cut the side panel for the window...
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