![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Friday , April 06, 2007
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Rebuilding the Beast
A quick write-up outlining my personal system upgrade that has been a long time coming. Stepping up to a Core 2 Duo and an 8800 just in time for STALKER!
Welcome to Hell
I woke up yesterday morning to a computer that would not boot. Most of us have been there. The Windows XP OS had been on this box for 15 months….I knew “the time” was coming. I was however able to boot up in safe mode with networking, so I plugged in a 400GB drive to a system on the test bench and started moving all my precious data over to it. Yeah, I like to have a “latest and greatest” backup along with the others if I can pull it off. Anyway… It was time for a fresh OS install and a new core system as well. I had been putting off a hardware upgrade since November. Damn that Vista for making me wait.
Stack O’boards
Looking at an 8 foot tall stack of recently reviewed motherboards here in my office; I finally picked out an ASUS Commando. I knew I wanted a Core 2 Duo machine to replace my dual core AMD 4800+ that had previously replaced a Pentium 4 with HyperThreading. I do a fair amount of video encoding and know the Core 2 Duo will give me some quicker encodes. I am not expecting a better gaming experience due to the Core 2 Duo as I am not using top-end SLI so I will likely be GPU-bound using a single BFGTech 8800 GTX Water Cooled Edition. Had I been a SupCom junkie like some of my buddies, I would have surely put in a Core 2 Quad…but I did not have an available C2Q lying around that was not being used for testing. The QX6700 costs around $950 and that is still a bit rich for my blood.
I have said in the past that a new nForce 680i motherboard would be going in my system. Well, I changed my mind, for several reasons. First and foremost, I think I just feel more comfortable putting an Intel chipset in my box when I am using an Intel processor. I have run an nForce 4 SLI board for over a year and it has done me well and never left me in a situation that was catastrophic, but given some of the hurdles that NVIDIA had with the 680i after its launch, I just lost a bit of the confidence I had previously in the 680i boards. I also decided that I wanted to run a single 8800 GTX instead of two in SLI. I already have to fight 90F office temperatures here in the Summer when testing, and 150 less watts is 150 less watts. So with that decision made I did not need an SLI motherboard, which of course opens up a lot of choices. Now all that said, I had unboxed an EVGA 680i motherboard to put in my system. I was waffling on my decision a couple times a minute. I tell you this to illustrate that I do think the 680i is a great solution. And here I am about to install one even though I know I feel a bit more comfortable with the Intel solution. I went back and started reading [H] motherboard reviews to freshen my memory of past boards. The feature that finally pushed me over the edge was PCI slots. After a couple of hours of indecision and looking at my mammoth stack O’boards, I looked at the ASUS Commando and it has 4 PCI slots and two PCIe slots. This allowed me to put in my PCI RAID card with room to spare as I had run out of PCI slots on my previous motherboard leaving unpopulated PCIe slots. Maybe I will regret that decision later this year, but I don’t see a huge bunch of PCIe devices on their way to market for desktop. The Commando is set up to handle CrossFire, but I used the second x16 PCIe slot to stick in a BFGTech 6600 GT OC that will allow me to use a quad DVI monitor setup. This motherboard will also allow me to use CrossFire configured ATI R600 video cards should I want to in the future. Of course I will have to upgrade my Seasonic 600w power supply to do that, and possibly invest in a couple more tons of AC capacity upstairs as well as a new fire prevention system. I think the R600 is going to be ATI’s very own 5800, but that is a story for another time.
Easy OCing
I decided on a Core 2 Duo E6700 that I had lapped a good while ago. It had already proven itself to be an overclocking screamer at 3.5GHz, but I was just shooting for a mild and super-stable OC of about 3GHz which it did easily on the ASUS Commando. I fortified the system with two 1GB Corsair Dominator 8888 DIMMs at 900MHz and the system booted up and ran fine with the cards I was going to use so I put it all in my CoolerMaster Stacker II case.
It’s All Wet
I have been a fan of water cooling setups for many years now and Koolance has always been near and dear to my heart (yeah, I am a wuss and like to do it the easy way), but after our review of the Corsair Nautilus 500 it seemed time to give it a shot in my own box. The Corsair Nautilus install was super-easy. Adding the BFGTech 8800 GTX Water Cooled Edition card into the loop was very simple to do. From what I can tell so far, the Nautilus is doing a super job of keeping both the overclocked E6700 cool at 106F/41C and the 8800 at 135F/58C at idle. At load the temperatures are looking to stay around 142F/61C for the CPU and 162F/72C for the GPU. Keep in mind these are with the GPU, CPU, and RAM simultaneously 100% loaded after 30 minutes. Switching the flow so that the CPU was first in the loop (opposite from above) we saw 137F/58C CPU and 169F/76C GPU. The trade off in terms seem to point to the radiator being the bottleneck in the system, but the Nautilus is still doing a very sufficient job for a good price.
Update 04-09-07: Worth mentioning as well is that these temperatures above were taken with an ambient air temperature of 80F/27C. Doing some gaming testing over the weekend when the ambient temperature in my office was 70F/21C, we saw temperatures of 115F/46C for CPU and 160F/71C for GPU during STALKER gaming sessions.
Power Play
I have seen a lot of talk about power supplies lately and as you might know, we have started reviewing PSUs. The legacy unit in my tower is a Seasonic 600w unit and should be strong enough for my configuration…keeping in mind that the tower also has 8 hard drives in it, and an “extra” video card for the 4 monitor support. Once again under full CPU, GPU, and RAM loads, the computer was pulling 410 watts at the wall. Considering the efficiency drop you will see with any PSU, our Seasonic 600w seems to have more than enough juice. Through our load testing, the PSU exhaust temp stayed reasonably cool.
I personally use a “75% Rule” when it comes to power supplies. To use a cliché car analogy, you do not want to run your car’s engine at red line all day long. Power supplies are the same. You do not want your PSU red lined while it is being used for hours. My personal rule is to take the rating of your power supply (if it is good power supply truly up to the rating to begin with) and multiply it by 0.75. If the number you get is above what your system is going to pull at full load, then I say go for it. Your rules and mileage may vary.
Vista Schmista
To Vista or not to Vista, that is the question. I was fairly excited about Vista…until it was launched. It seems as though I am not alone. If you read through the thread attached to the linked article you will see that plenty of people are doing just fine with Vista, but rest assured many are not. My initial reason for not installing Vista in my new build was that my RAID card and my scanner did not have Vista drivers, but as of yesterday’s install they did. Did having all the Visa drivers I needed change my mind? No. I have played around with Vista here, and I have yet to see a compelling argument as to why I should use it. I have two copies of Ultimate on my desk, but until I see SP1 or some concrete reason that I should upgrade, I think I am going to stay with XP. Hopefully DX10 native games will bring about a reason to upgrade one day soon. My XP install went flawlessly as was expected.
The Bottom Line
So there you have it, my new system build. I am excited about it even if it turned out not to be all that exciting. The ASUS Commando and Intel Core 2 Duo overclocked to 3GHz will provide me with more than enough gaming and video encoding horsepower till I feel like taking the quad-core leap. By that time though, I will bet AMD’s Barcelona quad-core will be upon us and the Core 2 Quad will finally be seeing some competition. Corsair’s Nautilus proved to be a worthy cooling system for the price tag and the Seasonic 600w PSU proved to be more than enough solid wattage to pull my new hardware all under full load. Here’s to hoping your next upgrade goes as smooth as mine did. Cheers!
Discuss
Should you wish to chastise any of my hardware choices and tell me how stupid I am, please do so in this thread. I will get back to your comments when I am done with STALKER. ;)