Well, it's about time...

[madmat]

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.

No, the GPU's are still rocking the air coolers. I'm going to plumb the loop after I settle on a motherboard. Right now I'm running the H100i on the CPU and that's the only liquid cooling going on but I FINALLY have all the parts on hand for the custom loop. Here in a bit I'm going to shut my system down, swap out the mobo and start on the road to a fresh install of 7 on a SSD. I've even got another 7 home premium key so I can have two fully functional systems when the dust settles.

One will live in my HAF XB EVO with the SLI 760's and the other will live in the TJ10 with the GTX 470 and be relegated to mule duties.

Oh, and I'm just running 1080p, my monitor only goes up to that. Although I can tinker with the DSR where it runs games at higher resolutions then scales them back to the monitor's native 1920X1080. I tried it with one 760 and it was a slide show at times.

 

[Rob Williams]

I think dual 760s are like one 780? I haven't benched so I'm not certain, but it seems to ring a bell. Nonetheless, DSR is going to be a selectively useful thing, I think. It seems to have more potential when MOBA games, or anything isometric with a ton of small details in a scene. Either way, if you ever decide to upgrade the display, those GPUs won't shy away from it.

Any plans for the smaller rig? Going to use it as a server or something like that? Maybe you could LAN party with yourself

 

[madmat]

They bench above a 780. In between a 980 and a 780ti.

The secondary system is going to be strictly backup. just in case my main box goes down or I'm gutting it for some reason, I won't be out of touch.

 

[madmat]

Last night after work I got to feeling a bit froggy and I plumbed my loop.



Of course, I had been looking at this since Thursday night when I pulled the H100i out and the GPU's so I could fit them with waterblocks and VRM heatsinks. Surprisingly, that setup was considerably quieter than it had been with the H100i and the GTX 760's. Granted, I was running the CPU at stock clocks and default volts to better cope with the minimalist cooling.

At any rate, the loop is now plumbed, filled, leak checked and the system is up and functional. My idle temps are as follows: CPU (@ 1.396V and 4.4Ghz) 47c, GPU 1 - 45c and GPU 2 - 44c. Under a gaming load I get mid 60's all the way around. That's a great improvement over the stock GPU cooling with it hitting ~75c and ~77c on the GPU's. The CPU has picked up a few degrees over the H100i (about 8c) under load but I'm also running 100Mhz faster than I'd screwed up the courage to try with the H100i.

From a sound perspective, the improvement is negligible at idle. It's actually a touch louder than it had been but to put it in perspective, the system is sitting 2 feet from my head and it's quieter than the mini fridge sitting 8 feet behind me. At full load, running a game through my 5.1 HT system which consists of a Yamaha HTR-5650 6.1 receiver, a set of Klipsch Quintet sats and a Pinnacle SubSonic subwoofer, I can't hear the PC at all. Previously, under a full gaming load, I could hear the fans in the EVGA ACX coolers on the 760's quite well and distinctly. I'm still using the Cougar CF V12HP 120mm PWM fans on the 240 rad that I'd replaced the stock H100i screamers with although I am using one of the Corsair fans on the single 120mm rad in the back along with a non-PWM version of the Cougar fans for some push/pull action. That's just a stop-gap measure as I ordered three of the HP fans in black which I'll be using in place of the two orange fans on the front rad and as the pusher fan on the 120 rear rad. The Corsair fan is the fan I mainly hear as the system idles.

All said, was the money spent on the custom loop (approx $400 with some stuff used versus new) worth it? Very much so. The system is much quieter when gaming and I shaved close to 10c off the GPU's at load. The CPU runs a tad warmer at load but it's a trade-off I'm willing to make. At present my fans and the PWM for the pump are working entirely off the motherboard using software. In the future I'm looking to expand on things with a Corsair Commander mini which will allow me to set curves for each fan individually along with the pump based on certain temps. And you can set fully custom curves with five points that are variable rather than plotting a curve that's made up of two or three points (which begs the question, how can a triangle be considered a curve? But I digress) for much more precise control.

At any rate, that's where I'm at at present. I'll get a few pics of the system finished later but for now I'm off to celebrate.

 

[madmat]

the AMD rig is now my backup. It's running on air with the GTX470 as the GPU. Now I've made the move to an i5 4690K and damn, I kind of regret throwing all the money I did at the AMD rig although I now have a very capable secondary rig in the even something catastrophic happens to my main.

 

[Psi*]

I relate to throwing money at a system, but keeping other components which are perfectly fine. Beware of keeping beige cases tho. You will be ridiculed. To wit, the recent 5960X build cost ~$2400. I will up build the other 990X to a very similar system in the couple of weeks for less.

The 5960X is no less than twice as fast as the 990X systems. I am usually happy with just a 50% improvement from one generation to the latest.

 

[madmat]

The 4690K isn't "faster" on a pure multi-cored benchmark, indeed, it's a tad slower. Where it counts, in gaming and in applications that don't leverage more than 1-4 cores at a whack, it kicks the stuffing out of the AMD.

I never felt a big difference between the 955 BE and the 8320E, I can surely feel the difference between the 8320E and the 4690K. I wish I had the money to throw at a 5960X but when the motherboard, ram and CPU would set me back more than I have invested in my entire system now... yeah I can't afford that.