Well, it's about time...

[madmat]

After four years of rocking the M4N82 DLX I'm on the path to an upgrade. Today I picked up my new motherboard, a Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5 Rev. 3.0. Soon I'll be picking up some DDR3-1866 CL-8 to go in it and then I'll be moving up from my measly Phenom II X4 940BE to my new powerhouse, an X4 955BE... no, I'm not remotely kidding. That's going to allow me to get Windows situated, drivers installed and the BIOS updated to the latest beta so when I order my FX9590 it'll be all set to accept it.

Yeah, that's right, 4.7Ghz of romping, stomping AMD power will be finding its way into my next build. After that it's time for a new video card (GTX 760 or GTX 770) and a 256GB SSD.

See? I said it's going to be epic.

 

[madmat]

I just did a wish list over at Newegg with all the upcoming parts, ram, CPU, SSD and GPU and it's $646 and change. This is going to be spread out over some months but I'm sure looking forward to it.

 

[Rob Williams]

Well, I am glad someone's showing AMD some mad love!

If you're looking to go the long-haul again, I'd recommend going with the GTX 770 if you're able to find it at a good price. That's still such a wicked card... I ran it in my rig for a while and got a lot of 1440p gaming goodness from it.

Grats on the new build man, even if it's going to take some time to come to fruition.

 

[madmat]

I was originally going to go with the new i5 Devil's Canyon CPU but then I got the 955 from a friend and got to looking at the AMD offerings and decided, what the heck, I could do a build in stages. First stage, get a mobo. Second, get some ram. Migrate over to the new mobo and ram with the 955 since it supports DDR3 and (hopefully) get my windows to work with the new chipset, install drivers and utilities and update to the BIOS that supports the new CPU. Third stage is the CPU. Fourth would be ghosting my OS to the SSD and the final stage would be the new GPU.

I might go a bit out of order and get the GPU before the CPU, I know where I might pick up a 770 for $100 less than new which puts it in the 760 price bracket but I'm not 100% certain the guy still has it since his ad has been dormant for a few weeks.

I'm also trying to decide if I want to move from the H100i back to an enthusiast grade water cooling loop. The AIO thing is okay but it's a mixed metal loop which, based on past experiences, I'm really not a fan of and the pump they use is a bit under powered for the type of water block they've implemented. I know I don't want to go back to the MCP355 I've been using since 2010 because it's effing loud but the new MCP35x with its PWM control would let me use the motherboard's CPU fan control to scale the pump speed to the CPU temp. That way it's only getting into the noisy mode when I'm gaming and have background noise to mask it.

Anyway, with this new case, I've kind of gotten bitten by the PC enthusiast bug again. That and breaking the first knuckle on the index finger of my fretting hand so I'll probably quit playing guitar for good now. Gotta have a hobby of some sort, right?

 

[madmat]

I ended up picking up a GTX 760 for a buck twenty yesterday (used) but I figure, what the heck, if I run across another at (close to) that price I can SLI them and get 780'ish performance for less than a GTX 770.

 

[madmat]

I got some ram for Christmas...

so this happened.

 

[madmat]

Last night I was able to get the 955 up to 3.5Ghz with no issue. Today I updated the BIOS and now the 955 won't OC in the BIOS at all. I can manually set the multiplier to 17.5 but when it POSTs the BIOS shows it at 16 and when it makes it into windows, yep, still at 16. Hopefully the BIOS will play nice with an FX and not be a naughty nellie. If so I'll be returning this motherboard and going with the ASUS M5A99fx Pro R2.0

 

[madmat]

The past couple of days have been an adventure. Sunday, in anticipation of getting a new CPU (something else is in the works) that requires the latest bios I updated to what I thought was the latest beta bios. It wasn't, it was something they'd put out that was buggy. I no longer had core temp reporting and my multiplier would no longer change. I could adjust it but it wouldn't take.

I flashed back to the original bios and the core temp reporting was still gone. Everything else worked as it should though but without the core temp I wasn't too happy since I set a custom fan profile on my H100i and use the core temp as the basis of my fan speeds.

I downloaded the latest beta bios (made sure it wasn't what I'd already tried) and flashed to it. I went into reboot loop hell. The board would power on, off, on, off, etc and after a few minutes would occasionally boot into windows. Other times it would say that the bios failed and prompt me to load defaults and try again upon which it would fail and fail again. At least core temp reporting was back.

I finally got it flashed back to the original bios and now it's stable, my core temp is back and everything is fine but here's the problem, I HAVE to use the latest bios for the CPU that's going into it. I called Gigabyte and told the tech support guy what I'd gone through and asked "So, am I going to be going through the same thing with the new FX-xxxx on that bios or is it a case of it not playing nice with my 955 B.E.?" His answer? And I quote "You bought your board where? Okay, what's the return period?" That does not bode well.

 

[madmat]

So, today I pulled the GA-990FXA-UD5 out of my PC, bundled it back up in its box and returned it to Micro Center. I exchanged it for the ASUS M5A99FX Pro Rev 2.0 and installed it this afternoon.

The system is nice and stable, the board has the requisite BIOS installed to support all the latest AM3+ processors and it still plays well with the Phenom II 955 B.E. I've got on hand. I'm of a mixed mind about the change. I was able to pull a stable 3.755Ghz out of the 955 with the UD5 and with the Pro 2.0 the best I can achieve is 3.5Ghz but on the upside, in Passmark, the 955 walks all over the scores I pulled with the UD5 running at 3755Mhz. The ram is faster, the CPU scores better and in every other test the scores are within the margin of error of about 1% with the exception of storage. I'm looking forward to tossing an FX series Vishera in here and seeing how she fares.

 

[Rob Williams]

This system is going to rock once it gets the FX in there. It's really too bad you've had to deal with so many damned issues though to get to this point =/

 

[madmat]

Well, you know the old saying, if it ain't roaches it's spiders. At least it runs and hasn't let out the magic blue smoke.

 

[madmat]

Next week I'm getting a second GTX 760 for some SLI action. Since I'm migrating back to a custom loop I'll have to pick up another GPU water block.

 

[madmat]

Today I picked up the second 760 (used, online) and ordered $100 worth of WC goodies. 2015 should be epic.

 

[madmat]

So far, today, I've spent close to $400 on PC stuff. The GTX 760 was $135 (used), I also got a used Swiftech Apogee Drive II for AM2/3/3+ for $95, a used MCW82 for $25, a bunch of 3/8" fittings, clamps, tubing and other sundries from Sidewinder for $73 and some mounts for the 760's, a PWM 8-way splitter, a few more fittings and clamps and a MCW80 to MCW82 conversion top from Swiftech for $67.

Not that it looks like anyone cares but at least I've got a log of what's going on.

 

[Rob Williams]

There's not too much I can add or ask, but I'm glad to see that the build is coming along so nice. Since I can read your mind, I know you have some more kit en route, so that thing is going to be rocking once it's done.

I was going to say that while dual 760 is a great move, it sucks to have to splurge on another block, but, it's impossible to complain about $25. Of course you're making up for it with the conversion top, but tis the joys of DIYing ;-)

 

[madmat]

There's not too much I can add or ask, but I'm glad to see that the build is coming along so nice. Since I can read your mind, I know you have some more kit en route, so that thing is going to be rocking once it's done.

I was going to say that while dual 760 is a great move, it sucks to have to splurge on another block, but, it's impossible to complain about $25. Of course you're making up for it with the conversion top, but tis the joys of DIYing ;-)

The conversion top is for the MCW80 I currently have. I'm going to run the GPU blocks in parallel which lowers the restriction compared to series by 75% but requires both blocks to have the same flow characteristics. The MCW80 I have already is a much more restrictive block than the 82 I bought but, happily, the only difference between them is the top. Once I swap out the top on the block I've got, I'm golden and will get much better flow than if I'd kept the 80 stock and went in series.

If I'd tried the parallel setup with the 80/82 it would've shunted most of the flow through the 82 and caused the card with the 80 to run way hotter, probably worse than if I were to leave the stock air cooler on them.

 

[madmat]

The second 760 arrived today. I got it setup and enabled SLI. The scaling on these is fantastic. My frame rates in Furmark and 3DMark went up by 80%. So far I've only played BL TPS but in spots where it would start to lag (recently it's gotten laggy after switching from the regular 5.1 outputs to optical SPDIF out) it's now much smoother although I'm starting to feel the bottleneck that the CPU is becoming.

 

[madmat]

A few more parts and my custom loop will be set to go in. It'll consist of an Apogee Drive II, a Feser X-Changer 240, a pair of MCW82 gpu blocks and a Black Ice X-flow 120 rad. It's only 360mm of area to cool the cpu and both gpu's but the Feser is a free flowing low FPI 60mm thick rad that'll give me as much air to water area as a 30mm thick 480 rad. It should do the trick nicely.

 

[madmat]

 

[Rob Williams]

Damn, lots of progress Those are some good 3DMark scores. You running 1080p? You can definitely handle 1440p nicely.

Just to make sure, the GPUs are not part of the loop yet, right? Would be interested in seeing temperature data for that whenever the time comes.