next build around X79 + FT02B + 540mm RAD

[Psi*]

I am thinking about the next build around the new gen CPUs coming out. I stumbled across this build thread & think it very interesting.

He solves a few problems I have had such as mounting the rad air filters with magnets. And that is a huge rad in the bottom of that case. Definitely a cleaner build than my 2 re-used beige cases. I'll go for a case version w/o a window & not sure about the necessity of the 120 mm rad in the top. I'll probably also exhaust the air out the bottom of the case ... just seems like a better approach to me than to push all that warm air into the case.

As soon as I have confidence in something like the ASUS P9X79 PRO and see some (just 1) reviews about the Magicool 180 Slim Radiator I'll probably start on this. I am also investigating WC-ing 2 Tesla M2090 GPGPUs which will add a bit more load to the water loop. For those who don't know me, I do a lot of number crunching on both the CPU & with GPGPUs.

As usual I am always interested in comments/thoughts.

 

[RainMotorsports]

Yeah that looks good. On first glance you probably wouldn't know where the rad is if it wasn't for the 120. It shouldn't be needed but some people like to separate the cpu and gpu cooling.

Id like to water cool my GTX 570 so i could fold without worrying. I run it undervolted (.850) at 650mhz core with an aggressive fan profile for folding and the max temp it reaches is 52C. With water I could do stock clocks and still a bit under that i believe.

 

[Rob Williams]

I am in relative awe of that build... it is so clean and aesthetically-pleasing. The water-cooled tri-SLI GTX 580s sure don't hurt either. Are you sure you'd want to build something like this and go windowless? Of course if it had a window, you might not be able to stop looking at the inside.

I am in the process of reviewing the P9X79 PRO but I am not sure I'll be looking at it from the angle you are looking for. Up to this point I haven't overclocked it, but it's supposed to be quite good for it. Any specific tests you need done?

If your build is anything like that one, I think it'd be amazing for what you are doing with it. I am not sure if a dual-rad is truly necessary, but it's not the worst of ideas.

 

[Psi*]

Because I have the M2090s I no longer feel the need for maximum smoke OC-ed CPUs. I won't need the i7-3960X @ >$1K in other words. It would be nice to get an idea how the i7-3930K can be OC-ed. I have discovered that certain combinations of OC-ing the i7-920 actually slows the PCIe bus down & is why the 6 GB/s SATA SSDs do not run at 6 GB/s in that machine. This does not happen with the i7-990X.

I also have 2 sets of Corsair Dominator triple channel ram sets; 2 each 3x2GB sticks in other words. With this board having quad channel, I'll have to figure out how to get a reliable 24 GB RAM ... 24 GB is the sweet spot for the software I use combined with the Teslas. Might be simpler to just sell this RAM just to avoid potential mystery issues & get the appropriate RAM sets. I haven't thought thru that very much tho

What to test for? I haven't had a chance to study X79 tech very much. I am assuming that you will test the SATA 6 GB channels with equivalent SSDs.

I don't think we ever got a consensus or agreement about the older i7 memory controller limiting total memory bandwidth when combined with hexacore processors much less a test method. So I would be curious about anything that might test that out in any way.

 

[Rob Williams]

Because I have the M2090s I no longer feel the need for maximum smoke OC-ed CPUs. I won't need the i7-3960X @ >$1K in other words. It would be nice to get an idea how the i7-3930K can be OC-ed.

I'll admit that I'm not much of an overclocker (personal PC is stock even), but I'll see what I can do with both the 3960X and 3930K soon. I find it rather exciting that you've been able to shift most of your workload over to the GPUs; you are the type of person NVIDIA is talking about whenever it talks about GPGPU. There seems to be much more use for that on the business side than the consumer side.

I also have 2 sets of Corsair Dominator triple channel ram sets; 2 each 3x2GB sticks in other words. With this board having quad channel, I'll have to figure out how to get a reliable 24 GB RAM ... 24 GB is the sweet spot for the software I use combined with the Teslas. Might be simpler to just sell this RAM just to avoid potential mystery issues & get the appropriate RAM sets. I haven't thought thru that very much tho

The RAM should work just fine, but for the sake of filling eight RAM slots it might be best to consider a tuned 8x4GB kit, for a total of 32GB. Typical speeds at this point are DDR3-1600 C9. Anything faster than that, or with tighter timings, will cost you.

What to test for? I haven't had a chance to study X79 tech very much. I am assuming that you will test the SATA 6 GB channels with equivalent SSDs.

That's a given. I secure erase our Kingston SATA 6Gbit/s SSD before testing with HD Tune and Iometer, so we can show the best performance there. I might add in a third storage benchmark though, or remove HD Tune... I'm just not sure. HD Tune hasn't been best tuned for SSDs, although version 5 just came out so it might give different results.

I don't think we ever got a consensus or agreement about the older i7 memory controller limiting total memory bandwidth when combined with hexacore processors much less a test method. So I would be curious about anything that might test that out in any way.

Hmm, this doesn't sound familiar to me. I am not sure about it limiting total memory bandwidth ebcause for a time, the X58 platform offered unparalleled bandwidth. Could you refresh my memory (no pun I swear)?

 

[Psi*]

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Hmm, this doesn't sound familiar to me. I am not sure about it limiting total memory bandwidth ebcause for a time, the X58 platform offered unparalleled bandwidth. Could you refresh my memory (no pun I swear)?

In this previous build thread Tharic-Nar made some useful comments in #49 about the IMC. It was/is beyond my means to test as suggested tho.

I had another discussion with kougar, I think, before that when my software guys 1st told me that more than 4 cores (i7-920 - i7-990X) might not scale very well at all. According to them the multi-threaded thu put is limited by the IMC. This meant that hyper-threading was definitely no benefit. This includes hexa-core vs quad-core versions with hyper-threading turned off. The latter I have since experienced as I have both i7-920 & a i7-990X e/w identical memory & the hexacore is no faster.

 

[Psi*]

I am trying to get out of my Lian Li mindset. Checking out Silverstone's web site is pretty interesting. There is a lot of detail plus manuals with greater detail.

I am even warming up to the notion of the positive pressure in the case with the 180 mm fans pushing air in ... thru the radiator. This goes against my intuition of exhausting warm air nearest the source. The argument they make of positive pressure with filtered air trumps that intuition (maybe).

Wondering why the RV02 is less expensive than the FT02. Must be more plastic in the RV02. I am liking these Silverstone models e/w 180mm fans over any Lian Li case.

This is the great thing of company web sites, reviews, plus user build logs in the past few years, much of the mystery & layout problems are solved before ordering any parts. It is so easy to find information ... just search the case model number with "review" or "log" and you're off. Of course I am willing to wait a bit until at least 1 or 2 reviews show up before I make the leap.

 

[DarkStarr]

Wow..... I think you should have no trouble OCing only thing is, it your trying to cool a pair of teslas.... your gonna have a REALLY hard time finding blocks, if you take images of the blank pcb you could see if your gonna need a GPU only or if a 580 block will fit etc. (You could probably have a pair of custom blocks made though)

The FT02 is much heavier (so as such is much more solid), positive pressure is always better also, the rad air isn't very hot unless your doing something wrong. The rule is 120 of thick rad per component so a decent 180 would be more than enough but if you go thin you WILL need 2 rads to get decent (well, they wont be horrible but it would be much lower and better) temps.

Memory wise, you would be best off selling the current ram and buy a kit OR if not a full kit make it as close as possible to each other. The main thing is due to the fact it may be hard to find a kit that works with your kits because of memory ICs.

I had 2 sets of Corsair XMS3 that worked perfect together, I got a identical size pair of Corsair Vengeance and because of memory ICs they wouldn't run with the first set of XMS3 (well, it ran but hat errors and crashes) now with the second set however it works PERFECTLY and I mean perfectly since the ram slots are like this: |||| and the channels are the first two and last two butt because of looks I have the XMS3 in the 1st and last slots with the Vengeance in the middle two, even in that config it runs Dual Channel fine and has no issues.

Also, just heard/read memory prices will be rising after the beginning of the year so buy any ram you need now.