WOAH!! I got shipping notification just now; next-day air from their Tennessee warehouse! Sweet!
WOAH!! I got shipping notification just now; next-day air from their Tennessee warehouse! Sweet!
Well, it came in yesterday and it's working just fine. Through the final steps of this mod, I've dropped the ODD because it ran into some structural elements that I had forgotten about, and I've dropped the 3.5" HDD because when I designed the mount, I neglected to remember that there would be cables and tubing running through there. I'll post pics when I get back home and pull them off my camera, but what I ended up doing was using some of the mounting velcro that came with the res to mount the two SSDs onto the big flat side of the res. For storage outside of those SSDs, I'll be building up a nice fileserver as my next project (got most of the parts already) and I'll just access that over a gigabit LAN.
I finally got all my new hardware together and working last night (well, except for my old 18" LCD..I need to figure out a way to mount it on my desk before I can use all 3), and I have to say, I was not entirely prepared for the results.
Updated system specs:
Core 2 Q9450
DFI Lanparty Jr GF9400-T2RS
8BG (4x2GB) DDR2-1066 OCZ Platinum
2x 60GB OCZ Vertex SSD (RAID-0)
eVGA GeForce GTX260
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 550W
Asus Xonar DX
Running Windows 7 RC1 x64
I fired it up last night and got Windows/etc installed, and I have to say, I think this is about the fastest PC I have ever used. Seriously, I never realized before how much of my time on a computer is spent waiting for things to finish, even on this system before the SSDs. I think there are now two bottlenecks on my PC; my internet connection (10/2 FiOS) and...me. Ok, granted, the performance difference may have been a bit exaggerated by my spending a week using my old FX-55, but still...this thing is crazy fast.
Hmm, well, I haven't been able to find my USB cable, so no pics...
I thought I'd post some stuff about the performance, and my future plans.
I'm quite happy with my first foray into watercooling; I didn't get extreme cooling, but that's not really what I was going for. I'm getting around 60C at full load on my CPU and about 55C on my GPU, also at full load.
Oddly, I'm getting pretty different temps for cores 0 and 2 than I am for 1 and 3...not really sure why, I'm confident I applied the Arctic Silver correctly...maybe because of where the inlet/outlet are located on the block?
Ah well, even 69C is well within the operating temps of a Core 2 chip, and I have yet to see the temps go above what you see in the screenshot. The only temp I'm a little worried about is the GF9400 onboard, which is the GPU listed at 65C in the screenshot. I'm sure the reason for it being so hot is because it doesn't have much airflow around the block, but still...oh well, it won't be getting hit with much of a load anyways, just running a monitor or two with low-load stuff (like network meters and IM windows). One interesting thing about the watercooling setup is that even under load, my temps only drop about 10C from where they are at load; I know a little of this is the Arctic Silver needing time to set, but I'm guessing a lot of it is also just that the heat gets so evenly spread out that the overall temp stays similar. (BTW, anyone wondering, everything's at full load b/c I'm running BOINC, and I only have ~30 minutes of uptime b/c I just installed the CUDA drivers.)
As for future plans for this mod, I haven't done much of anything with the outer shell yet, so that's next on the list. Right now it's just kinda sitting there with the side open, but that should be fine for a while... I want to get my fileserver up and running soon, so that portion of this mod will probably get pushed back a bit. Hopefully I'll be able to get to it before the end of July though; I don't really want to move the thing lying open like that, and I'm hopefully gonna be getting my own place in August (free room/board is nice and all, but...well, you know).
As a side note; Verizon upped their FiOS speeds again!! w00tz! Hurrah for 15Mbps down/5Mbps up.
You should always get different temps on the 3rd and 4th core of a quad core, especially in Vista. Vista utilizes core 1 and 2 more than 3 and 4 so they will naturally be under more load, leading to the temp difference. Try core temp if you are worried about temps, has always worked well for me.
Project: Elegant-Li *NEW*
Project: Alpha FINISHED
Project: LEXA Revival FINISHED
Project: LEXA FINISHED Bit-Tech MOTM Nominee October 08
I've been using SpeedFan, but I'll fire up CoreTemp and see what it has to say. I feel like it wouldn't just be because Windows is using some cores more than others, because BOINC is pushing them all the 100%, and the temp differences are still there (Also, the temp pairings are 0-2 and 1-3, but that might be something weird with 7).
Ok, finally found my universal USB cable, so a couple pics of the current status:
closeup of SSDs mounted:
As I think I mentioned in previous posts, I ended up ditching the HDD and ODD, but honestly I don't think I'll really miss them that much. Once I get the new fileserver up and running, that'll have all the storage I'll need, at pretty nice speeds, and I recently realized that...honestly, there's not much reason to have internal ODDs in all my systems. I have a USB DVD+/-RW drive and a USB Blueray drive. That lets me switch between machines without any hassle, and frees up a lot of space inside the case.
I've got the case for the fileserver mod, and most of the hardware; I'm gonna start ordering HDDs tonight, I'm gonna get 3 new ones right away, so I figure I'll just order one every few days to mitigate the possibility of getting ones from the same manufacturing run.
I'll be starting a separate thread for it soon, but here's a preview of the case, with an of HDD for size reference:
Really is cramped in there isn't it lol.
Project: Elegant-Li *NEW*
Project: Alpha FINISHED
Project: LEXA Revival FINISHED
Project: LEXA FINISHED Bit-Tech MOTM Nominee October 08