Ubermick's Build: i7 3770K//Z77X-UP5-TH //GTX 670 OC

[ubermick]

Thanks for the pic. God that thing is big! (that's what she said). I love Noctua products, but I'm really hesitant on this thing. I think I'll actually have much better clearance and fewer issues with a Corsair H100 water loop. I've never ventured into water cooling before, but it's about the same price as the Noctua and I won't have issues choosing between blocking the PCIe slot or blocking the DIMM slots. Thinking of doing what this guy did. If I do, I'll post pics.

No worries at all mate.

I was actually bouncing back and forth between the H100 (since everything else in there seems to be Corsair branded) and the Noctua, but I read a few reviews here and there on Newegg and elsewhere talking about how it leaked. While I'm sure it's a REALLY isolated incident, knowing my luck I'd be one of the 0.1% to have that happen, and didn't want to fry graphics cards or motherboards.

That Noctua is an absolute beast for sure, but it's doing the job nicely. I've overclocked the CPU to 4.3ghz and after an hour of Prime95's torture test, no temp had exceeded 69 degrees C so can probably ramp the overclock up a little higher. (I think I'll drop the fan speed down instead... one of the fans in that case, not sure which, is pretty loud, am guessing it's the Noctua ones since it's still there when I turn the 600T's fan controller down to low)

 

[Ciclismo]

Long time lurker, first time poster - wanted to say awesome looking rig, hope you don't mind if I copy you Except I am looking at putting everything in an NZXT Phantom 410.

I have to ask though, how is the windows performance? I'm wanting to configure a rig for editing under OSx, but want to play the odd FPS under Windows, in particular BF3.

 

[ubermick]

Long time lurker, first time poster - wanted to say awesome looking rig, hope you don't mind if I copy you Except I am looking at putting everything in an NZXT Phantom 410.

I have to ask though, how is the windows performance? I'm wanting to configure a rig for editing under OSx, but want to play the odd FPS under Windows, in particular BF3.

Hah! Considering I copied plenty of other folks, how can I possibly mind?!

Have to admit, I haven't really done a lot with Windows. I had an old crappy 40gb drive that I tossed in there and installed Windows 7 on just so I could run Prime95 (it JUST fit... I thought OSX had gotten bloated with a 2gb install, Windows is 38gb!!). Had no problems once it was installed, although it seemed slow. I did tried the "Windows Experience" thing, and it scored 7.8 on everything, except for the hard drive (understandably) which got a 4.1 or something.

I finally decommissioned my 24" iMac last night tho, and pulled the 256gb Agility SSD out of it for use with Windows. As soon as I know the Mac side of things is working fully and there's no data I need to pull off the SSD, I'll be formatting it and installing Win 7 over the weekend, and will let you know the result.

 

[ShamanGreeny]

Ubermick - I'm curious, is your video card working as expected? I think mine is only showing the VGA (passive) values, the text is not as clear as in Windows.

 

[ubermick]

That I couldn't tell you, Greeny. I did notice that the zeros in particular in the system profile weren't particularly crisp, but that was also on an ancient Dell monitor that I was using until my new 2410U got here. (Got here yesterday, haven't had time to set it up.)

Is it recognizing your card correctly in System Profiler?

 

[ShamanGreeny]

You hit it right on the head - it was the monitor that was causing issue. I plugged in an old monitor and the results were far, far better. I'll be heading out tomorrow to pick up a new one.

Other than that, this little build is working very nicely!

 

[ubermick]

You hit it right on the head - it was the monitor that was causing issue. I plugged in an old monitor and the results were far, far better. I'll be heading out tomorrow to pick up a new one.

Other than that, this little build is working very nicely!

Good to hear!

I got my first kernel panic today, rapidly followed by my second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. I'd adjusted the memory voltage in the BIOS to 1.5v instead of auto, since my istat toolbar was showing it at - wait for it - 2.7v (which should in theory fry the memory immediately, but...) and when I switched it back to auto, no more kernel panics.

Now I'm going through the pain of trying to install Windows 7. The version I bought is the 32-bit version, and of course I need a 64 bit one.

Once that's installed, then I gotta try and figure out how to set up Chimera so it'll let me choose my boot option. Baby steps, baby steps - but man, today was my first day at work using this beast, and it flat out FLIES compared to my ol' iMac!

 

[ubermick]

Ooh, and by the way....

 

[c0nartiste]

wicked!!! I want a geekbench score of 14,000 and above, are you going to overclock??

 

[ubermick]

wicked!!! I want a geekbench score of 14,000 and above, are you going to overclock??

Oh, it's overclocked. I've got it at 4.3ghz right now, which is enough. This is the 32 bit version of Geekbench too, it should be in or around 15,000 if I had the 64bit one.