New Build...pretty pictures within!

hopeful

Thought I would share my new build...I am prepared for criticism

Components:

Akasa Mirage case (with window panel so as to see the loveliness within)
Gigabyte 965P-DS3P (rev 3.3) mainboard
Intel Core2Duo 6320
2gb G-Skill PC2-6400 RAM
ATI X1950Pro 256mb
Scythe Ninja (Rev b) Heatsink
Tagan Easycon 530watt PSU
Hitachi 400gb SATAII HD
Western Digital 500gb SATAII HD
Lite-On SATA DVD-RW

This has been running at stock speeds for the last week but I am just starting to clock it up today. Currently running at 2100mhz (1860 stock) but these chips seem to be readily clocked to 2800 without major problems. Super Pi times down from 27.5secs to 24.1secs at current speeds. Load temperatures for the two cores remain under 40c.
FYI the Scythe cooler took 10c off the idle temps compared to the stock Intel cooler.

Anyhoo...some pics...

Intel 6320 in al it's naked glory


A quick polish of the bottom of the Scythe heatsink...shiny goodness!


The Scythe is just a tad bigger then the Intel cooler :eek:


And a couple of general shots of the interior to finish




I'll update when i get the final stable overclock...or when it has caught fire

awhir

nice 1 very tiddy i will throw mine up when i get me ram

was gutted that i couldent do anythnig this weekend because of it .

also did you pressure mount ur infinty and whats ur cpu stepping (you can find it on tthe box)

Anti

Very nice build, very clean and tidy. Did you lap the cooler btw?

hopeful

awhir wrote:

also did you pressure mount ur infinty and whats ur cpu stepping (you can find it on tthe box)

pressure mount Do you mean bolting it through the board rather than using the push-pins? If so...nope...going to see how it runs with the standard mount for a while.

Call me thick...but which number on the box is the stepping? (AMD fanboy for many years....first Intel cpu in a good while)

Anti wrote:

Did you lap the cooler btw?

Nope...measured pretty flat so just gave it a quick polish job.

awhir

hopeful wrote:

pressure mount Do you mean bolting it through the board rather than using the push-pins? If so...nope...going to see how it runs with the standard mount for a while.

Call me thick...but which number on the box is the stepping? (AMD fanboy for many years....first Intel cpu in a good while)



Nope...measured pretty flat so just gave it a quick polish job.

number with FPO before it.

dazftw

I should really invest in some more cable ties..

Very nice and tidy black looks nice and shiny

hopeful

Thanks DeafVision...I'm very happy with the wiring on this one...so much easier than the P180 I had before though.

awhir wrote:

number with FPO before it.

That would be the same number that's on the first photo that took me about 30 shots to get visible and clear yeah?



L652B285 <-- no idea what it all means!

awhir

lol forgote to look at the chip omg lol.

well its a B chip which are mena be pritty good.:D

i got a C chip but theres hardly no info on them

hopeful

awhir wrote:

lol forgote to look at the chip omg lol.

well its a B chip which are mena be pritty good.:D

Best I go BIOS diving and crank it up a notch so :eek:

Fanny Cradock

Very tidy. There are wires all over the place in mine. For the most part they are held together with bits of elastic band I've cut in half

hopeful

Fanny Cradock wrote:

Very tidy. There are wires all over the place in mine. For the most part they are held together with bits of elastic band I've cut in half

I think we'd all like to see some pictures of that

papu

i wannna!!

TonyM.

looking for two of those spring loaders to mount an extra fan on the ninja.
BTW it sits right on the memory.

awhir

i think i have seen people cabel tigh them on.

hopeful

TonyM. wrote:

BTW it sits right on the memory.

Its close all right...about 2mm between the clips and the RAM. I'm considering moving the fan to the other side of the heatsink..anyone know if this would effect performance?

awhir

well loglicaly it would be bad,i would keep it the way it is as if you pull you will not pull as much air as you push.

hopeful

awhir wrote:

well loglicaly it would be bad,i would keep it the way it is as if you pull you will not pull as much air as you push.

Thanks for that...will save me fannying around for half an hour this afternoon.

BTW...have a shedload of watercooling gear that will go up on Adverts later today. Just need to get the dust off it and take some pictures.
Should be some good deals to be had

awhir

why dont you use it man ....................

go on i was see water cooling in that case.:D

christophicus

Any chance of a pic of the case from the outside?

hopeful

Quick overview shot...plus sneak peak of watercooling bits

sebastianlieken

i like that window....that is a nice window...............seein as everyone is throwin in requests for photos....give us a dark room lit up one!!!:D

hopeful

sebastianlieken wrote:

i like that window....that is a nice window...............seein as everyone is throwin in requests for photos....give us a dark room lit up one!!!:D

I'm so good to you

Apologies for the poor quality but I couldn't find my tripod and it's a sod trying to hold my camera steady for a long exposure! I'll try to get a better one at some point.

christophicus

LOl thats a deadly pic man.

sebastianlieken

very nice.... i like the blue! nice open window aswell. very nice!

im having a dilema with colour scheme. initially, i taut i would go for sumthin different from my last blue led pc, i went for green...now im regrettin it and im tryin to get it back to blue....alas my resources are limited. but that just shows that blue is better. cheers

DanGerMus

Hey how many HDs can you RAID on the ds3p any chance you can do four? Or is it just two?

Anti

yes you can do 4 on the sceond sata chanel.

DanGerMus

Brilliant. Am toyin with idea of 4 HD raid 0. already have two barracudas7200.10 might add two more. Well only if i think it will speed up load time and general use. anyone? and by how much?
Any ways i think i'm buyin that board regardless. Where did you get it. Dabs seem to have the best price but i'm not sure if it's the REV3.3 the have and neither are they, i asked. OCUK are a good bit more expensive.

Anti

Raid really isnt worth it these days, hdds are fast enough on their own.

hopeful

I used to use RAID...but as Anti says the speed difference is not worth the hassle, and as long as you have a sensible backup strategy the mirroring features are a bit pointless.

hopeful

Just to keep up to date...

The 6320 is now running nice and stable at 2.45ghz (stock speed is 1.86). Going up carefully and running 2 Folding @Home clients for 24 hours in between increases. The chip is undervolted by 0.3volt at the moment and is running at 42-45c at full load.
Anyone any idea what 'safe' temperatures are for these chips? I'm guessing mid 50's should be safe enough.
SuperPi 1m times are down from 28 secs at stock speeds to 20.7 currently.

Is sad to say, after being an AMD fanboy for so long, that these Intel chip are pretty good

christophicus

is the 6320 a new chip?? It wasnt part of the initial core 2 duo lineup was it?

hopeful

christophicus wrote:

is the 6320 a new chip?? It wasnt part of the initial core 2 duo lineup was it?

It's fairly recent addition. Basically its a 6300 with 4mg cache rather than 2mb on the 6300.

christophicus

deadly so whereas the 6600 used to be teh cheapest chip that was teh exact same as the very top end (6800?) aside form clock . teh 6320 is now the cheapest that is the exact saem as the top end aside from clock??

SwampThing

hopeful wrote:

I used to use RAID...but as Anti says the speed difference is not worth the hassle, and as long as you have a sensible backup strategy the mirroring features are a bit pointless.

Anti wrote:

Raid really isnt worth it these days, hdds are fast enough on their own.

absolute pants to both!

hopeful

SwampThing wrote:

absolute pants to both!

An excellent technical summary

SwampThing

hopeful wrote:

An excellent technical summary

It's infinitely more informed than yours and Anti's 'don't use RAID - it's worthless/pointless' nuggets of wisdom. Obviously based on extensive experience

And given your own in-depth explanation for not using raid, I thought it a 'bit pointless' to elaborate.

hopeful

I for one would be interested to hear your own experiences with the technology...I was merely sharing my own views.

For me...and I stress the 'me' part...the speed increase using RAID was not worth the increased cost/heat. But then I wouldn't use very disc-intensive apps or be bothered if loading times were shaved by a second or two. I have an adequate backup policy that, thus far, has not let me down.

On a totally unrelated matter I try to remain polite and pleasant when making comments within threads....or I say nothing at all.

SwampThing

hopeful wrote:

....or I say nothing at all.

A piece of advice which should be applied, in spades, to posts about which little or nothing is known - and this is not wholly directed at you hopeful. I happen to agree with you entirely!

Seeing as you started this thread, I see little point in having a pissing contest regarding raid -you don't see the merit and I don't see the point in trying to change your mind.

If my 'pants' comment upset you...

hopeful

SwampThing wrote:

A piece of advice which should be applied, in spades, to posts about which little or nothing is known - and this is not wholly directed at you hopeful. I happen to agree with you entirely!

Seeing as you started this thread, I see little point in having a pissing contest regarding raid -you don't see the merit and I don't see the point in trying to change your mind.

If my 'pants' comment upset you...

I don't get upset at anything these days...life is too short.

I am genuinely interested in your own experiences of RAID setups though...I can always learn something new that may be to my advantage. 'Tis a couple of years since I messed about with RAID and things may well have changed.

BlackWizard

I used to have a Raptor on my old PC before I sold it. It was quite hard to come to terms with selling it because I loved it that much. I never used a single application that used really high bandwidth , but I used a few different applications at once and loading/switching times on them all improved. Even little things like opening Firefox or iTunes was that bit faster. Costly investment though.

I've never had RAID before. What sort of raid setup do you use SwampThing?
And would RAID come near to matching what a Raptor can do?

Sorry if this is like a thread hijack or what ever its called. I'm just curious about what SwampThings raid setup is like. He seems to really like it.

hopeful

BlackWizard wrote:

Sorry if this is like a thread hijack or what ever its called. I'm just curious about what SwampThings raid setup is like. He seems to really like it.

Feel free to take this thread where ever it may wander

I'll update info on my rig as we go along.

DanGerMus

Well i have 2 seagates 250gb 7200.10 in RAID 0.when i set it up i noticed quite a difference in even day to day use. just opening apps and browsing files. but most noticable was installing downloaded apps they absolutly fly. Like the BF patches which before i RAIDed were slower. And downloaded movies which often took a bit of time to load up. Any way before i did it i researched it a bit and lots of people said it was difficult and not worth the risk. But that was before. I had zero experience and found it very simple, once i found a guide that is. That and HDs are much more reliable nowadays and as long as you have a sensible back up in place it's not really a risk. If you are doin anything important you should always back up RAID or not.
I mean its really quite easy to do. Dowload RAID drivers>>put on floppy>> Turn on PC>> enable RAID in BIOS>Restart PC with Windows Disk. Follow on screen instructions. and away you go.
I forgot Connect drives to appropriate Slots. LOL

BlackWizard

I thought most motherboards have some sort of RAID driver already on them?
So now if I want to make a RAID setup, I'd have to get a floppy drive? Off to the local museum then

Since you are using two harddrives, then I guess the probability of there being a failure almost doubles.
I've never had a harddrive failure that wasn't intentionally caused. Plus I make backups of all of my Football Manager save games , so no worries there

RAID is looking pretty sexy if it's as easy to setup as you say. The extortionate prices of a large Raptor is turning me off getting another.

SwampThing

Currently I've two 250GB drives (happen to be the same as cheeryfrodo's) in RAID 0 and two WD Caviar 320GB drives in RAID 1.

The performance increase, while not earth shattering, is significant enough to make you want to use RAID.

The benefit of RAID 0 is obviously performance over reliability. Processing large files is when it really shines - video encoding, loading games, large application installations etc.

Fundamental to a good RAID setup of course is the RAID controller. Most on-board (what I'm currently using) do a perfectly adequate job but to get the most from it, a dedicated top-end controller will make a considerable difference - as will the drives obviously.

As with standard direct attached drives, smaller capacity drives with bigger caches generally tend to perform better. As a benchmark - for outright performance, three or four 74GB Raptors in RAID 0 would be ideal.

I'm thinking about possibly trying 4 x 320GB or 4 X 500GB drives in a RAID 0+1 in my new rig to see how it behaves and performs. For this setup, the controller would be key but I'll start with the onboard controller (will be a Striker Extreme mobo) and see what happens.

BlackWizard, I'd hazard a guess that a couple good, small SATA II drives in RAID 0 would compete with a Raptor easily, particularly the 150GB Raptor.
and to answer your question about the floppy drive, generally, RAID drivers are loaded during the OS installation as you need to be able to a) access the raidsets and b) set the RAID controller as the boot device.

DanGerMus

Actually the mother board drivers are already there in the BIOS the drivers on the floppy are for windows. c'mon on now how hard would it be to get your hands on a floppy drive? i dont know if there is another way to do it but you need the drivers for windows. The actual bios and setup you do before installing your OS is done first in your regular BIOS by simply setting to "enable" beside the thing that says RAID. Then you set up the "RAID set" in the RAID bios that comes up after your regular BIOS once it's enabled. Again it's as simple as following the on screen instructions. Then during OS installation it prompts you to press F8 (i think its F8 anyway). After you do windows looks at the floppy you select the driver windows installs it then you carry on installation as usual.
What stripeing are you using Swampthing? mine is at max 1024 i think. whats optimum?

hopeful

happygandalf wrote:

Then during OS installation it prompts you to press F8 (i think its F8 anyway)

F6 AFAIK

DanGerMus

F6 sounds good to me. Either way it tells you what to do. FTOSI

BlackWizard

Would it be possible to use a USB disk instead of a floppy?

hopeful

I have a feeling that some boards with allow this...I'm sure I read it somewhere.

Perhaps the best method is to slipstream the drivers onto an XP install disc using Nlite. No floppy needed at all then.

christophicus

Yes there is a way to make a bootable usb stick, I think the utility is on the HP website. They had a guid in custom pc ages ago about how to do it.

christophicus

try this.

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/files/serveroptions/us/download/23839.html