The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

I agree.... get dem YELLER thangs out of there!!

ddp... you gonna let him get away with that in open forum??

It does look nice Robert... smart build and easy on da eyes.

 

Omega: Better get your groove on, if all goes well my i5 gear will be with me tomorrow, and I won't be wasting much time on installing it I don't think

 

Will,
It would be nice, but those particular cables in your pic have given me much grief in the past. I finally changed them all for the Orange ones that come with GigaByte Boards. Kind of an ugly color, but they do have locks on them and haven't given me any problems at all! I found the red ones started acting up, very quickly. Usually after a couple of burns. A burn would finish but fail, and you couldn't access or open the drive so you had to shut down and switch the two drives, and they would work again. The problem remained with the cable, not the drive, so I changed them all. Same drives, and they are still working fine on my Quad. The new AD-7240s was installed on the same data cable as the AD-7220s, I removed.

I also have some new Red ones I found that are much lighter, have a narrower thinner cable, and are pretty flexible. I think they came from BioStar or maybe Foxconn as I've had them a while. They also have locks, but they are internal and snap on and off, and only pressure installs or removes them. Should remain very tight! The brand is Comax. I'm going to try it tomorrow as I have an AD-7240s to install in the morning. If they work reliably, I'll let everyone know. The Orange ones look positively look fat next to these! LOL!!

Russ

 

Personally I find S-ATA cables to be too much of an unknown quantity. I've had cheap tacky red ones go bad, I've had Gigabyte yellow ones go bad, I've had expensive ACRyan UV ones go bad. It's really a case of use the one that suits you, and if it happens to break, oh well, unlucky, replace it. Annoying but that seems to be the way it goes with S-ATA.

 

Wow. It's unreal how many people have had trouble with Sata cables. And yet, I have over a dozen, of mixed varieties, and never once had a problem. And to think I DON'T think I'm lucky LOL! I have an odd blue one, that's yielded one of my best burn scans I think I prefer my yellow ones from Gigabyte. I don't know why, they just feel right...

Sam, I get my equipment in the morning Possibly the afternoon. between 12-18 hrs. That's right, it's a countdown buddy LOL!!!

Anybody ever use "Video Capture" software? What would you recommend? I've used nero, but it's just not that good...

 

Oh man everyone is jumping to i5. My poor poor Phenom II

I only use the Gigabyte orange cables. They lock better, made of tougher stuff, etc. Most of the bad ones I've had came from ASUS. Yes the red ones you get with their motherboards. They suck. 3 bad ones.

Currently using 5 of the Gigabyte cables I think. Plus both of my Lite-On DVD-RWs are IDE with round cables. In fact, the same round black IDE cables I got with my XFX 680i board. Plus an extra set of powered USB plugs in my server.

 

i5 can dream on. I have virtually zero interest. Thats how bad intel has screwed up with me. AMD has never failed me, where intel has every time. Says a lot if you ask me...
One day, I will give them yet another shot. But not yet. Perhaps when I have a great deal of money

If their performance becomes double amds best, THEN I'll have no choice but to bow to Intel Thats no joke.

 

I've used a few of these in different builds.. NO ISSUES at all.

green sata cable

blue sata cable

red sata cable

I have some purple ones too but couldn't find the link for those.

 

Have 2 of the very same blue ones floating around here somewhere. Never had a blacklight though. A lot of the stuff in my cases is fluorescent though because I use 2 x 12" blue cold cathodes in both cases.

 

You may just beat me sam My build, or should I say transfer, is quite complex/time consuming. I have to transfer everything in my current build to another tower, as well as a capture card(which I'm not sure of its whereabouts), and of course the new components going in my HAF 932. I guess I can imagine it all being done in a fairly short time(less than an hour), But I don't like rushing things LOL! I do robot work for a living, so speeding through things is in my nature. In fact every job i've had is robot like work LOL! The big part though, is babying my precious solid state disk. I wanna be sure its firmware is good, and that requires my current build to accomplish(or my HTPC I suppose), and don't wanna brick the 300$ S.O.B. I also wanna do more reading about optimizing the SSD. I wanna be sure I'm getting the most out of it

And then there's the arrival time. My brother is working in ONE of the trailers that it COULD be going through. So I could have it as early as 9am. If he doesn't see it, depending on the driver, they'll deliver it at his house between 10-11am. If not, I'll see it around 3-4pm at my house. If I don't get it til early evening, I may not be putting it together til the weekend. Which is fine. I like taking my time with my babies And this one is gonna be phenomenal if everything goes according to plan

 

Made an interesting discovery last night. I've been having motherboard temperature problems. I removed the nice blue cover from the Northbridge heat sink, as I felt it was hurting the cooling rather than helping it. The temp has dropped 4C under full load. I want to remove the cover on the rear cooler so the air that's directed at the VRMs can get some air over the heatsink instead of just the cover. I was able to lower the Northbridge voltage, the Northbridge VID voltage and the CPU voltage and it's not giving me any more trouble.

I also installed EasyTune so I could adjust the CPU cooler's airflow to better adjust to the CPU's temperature. Now when I'm encoding, the CPU only hits 36C, while the MB hangs right around 42-43C. I suspect that when I remove the rear cooler's cover, the temps will go even lower. I also put the lower side cover fan back to an intake to blow some air over the video card and the Northbridge, which gives a slight positive pressure to the case. I'll find out tomorrow how well things work when I remove the rear decorative cover. Both are held on with some sort of thermal tape that does almost nothing to aid cooling, as so little of the tape contacts the heatsink fins. I'm betting right now that it will overclock better too! I know the CPU temperature was never an issue, and anytime it reset, the MB was always at about 46-47C. Now it idles at 35C instead of 40C and gets to a high of 42-43 running Orthos for hours. I know the CPU can run at 62C without issue as that's what it used to reach when encoding. Now it stays in the mid 30s to low 40s regardless of the room temperature. I've got the CPU cooler's speed perfectly matched over the temperature range so it never get's hot enough to exceed 1600 rpm. I also discovered that too much airflow is just as bad, if not worse than not enough! You reach a point where the airflow through the CPU cooler can go so fast it lacks enough time to pick up sufficient heat to cool properly. I noticed that if I raised the speed of the CPU fan past 1600, the temperature of the CPU and the MB temps went up. it's amazing that you can turn the wick all the way up to 2400 and it will run at least 10C hotter than at 1600 RPM. it's 23C in here at the moment, and the CPU temp is 26c and the MB is 35C. It's been on for about 13 hours now and is running great.

Stay tuned!

Russ

 

damn double dog DAMN... i love this board.
http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=1012346

all auto settings to other than me taking the mch up just a smidge to 1.16 up from 1.10.
if you look at the vcore though it shows 1.392v now did the board do that on its own in auto? that makes sense but it didnt do that on the other board?





the vcore on this is when IBT was actually running.im gonna go back in and drop the vcore and see what i get.

getting ready to run occt and see how it does.

all i can say is WOW!!!

 

Well I got up extremely late from a late night out last night to find no stuff, and no card. I got worried, checked the tracking page, saw it had been delivered, signed for by a name I didn't recognise. Trying to keep my composure, I hoped that it was just a neighbour that I hadn't seen the surname of before, and for some reason they didn't get an answer from me (this was 9:06am and I was sound asleep at the time, but the doorbell usually wakes me). Rang them up and after being put on hold for a couple of minutes was told they'd delivered to number 69 across the road. Off I went, and I now have my i5 goodies
I much prefer the Gigabyte Yellow S-ATA cables to the standard red ones as they always have latches. However, I use more S-ATA cables than I have ever received with Gigabyte motherboards I've kept (remembering that I sold the P35C-DS3R with most of the cables it came with, and the X48-DS5 was a return) meaning I have only four yellow S-ATA cables in use, since one broke and some I appear to have lost. I must have around 15 red ones from various things I've bought (handily, the PCIe S-ATA cards I bought came with S-ATA cables), enough that I use 11 of them in my server, gave 2 as spares to a friend, and still have at least 2 or 3 left, I can see 2 of them next to me.
The red ones seem the flimsiest, and while I can hardly say it's Asus' fault they're bad, Asus ship you the cheap tacky red ones, whereas the much stronger yellow ones come from Gigabyte. Yet that said, I have broken at least one yellow cable, and had far fewer of them, so their percentage failure rate is no better
As I use IDE devices so rarely I'm still on the pair of ACRyan UV Reactive round cables I bought in late 2006, back in my early 'careful modding' stage - I decided to start working on my unblemished 'baby' with the easy stuff first, petrified I'd damage anything. Of course, 2-3 months later, after I'd replaced all the peripherals (speakers (Hifi to Z-2300), monitor (2407 to 3007), keyboard (logitech media to saitek eclipse 2) and mouse (MS intellimouse to the Razer Diamondback I am still using now), I set on replacing the fans and cables, and finally, in went the E4300 (loved that CPU, still using it), 2GB of new RAM, the Toughpower 750W PSU and the dreaded P5N-E SLI. The board is a distant memory of bad ideas, the PSU has been running in a friend's system who is more tolerant of noise than me, and the RAM and CPU are stil paired in my EP31-DS3L waiting to be turned into my 'absolute silence' system. They'll be inheriting the Nexus 430W PSU for that purpose, but staying in the Black Lexa, since all the infrastructure's in place apart from the HDD and PSU. I will need to find another Ultra-120 to make it silent though, the stock Intel cooler is very noisy, and the pushpins are becoming a bit dodgy.
Omega: As much as I stick to the Intel side for spec'ing PC systems on performance/value etc, AMD have never done me wrong, neither have Intel. If I pereceive AMD CPUs as being better than Intel CPUs for performance, then I'll jump ship. AMD are still a great company in my books. They do business better than Intel that's for sure, and I have been very happy with the two AMD CPUs I've owned, the XP 3000+ and X2 4200+ 939. They were let down by chipsets back then though, the ATI ones were the only high-spec ones you could truly trust. Now they followed the ATI chipsets into an in-house chipset business, their boards have the same competitive appeal as Intel's, for that reason.
I still have a blacklight around somewhere for that purpose. I seem to have a habit of periodically snapping cold cathodes though. I'm down to one white, and Shaff nicked half of the working ones off me
As for the build time I agree, it's not something to take lightly with my gaming PC, and it is a time-consuming process, especially due to the 'three hands' job of fitting a CPU cooler backplate to a HAF. The CPU socket hole has its advantages as you don't need to change the motherboard to change the cooler, but when you want to do the opposite, keep the cooler, change the board, it's an absolute farse, since as I'm sure you can appreciate, it's not possible to hold onto a cooler backplate one side of a case, then reach round with your other hand and both position and insert the screw. I'm not looking forward to that bit (Needless to say, I haven't started work on the i5 bits yet, waiting until I'm nice and awake first).
Russ: You know, that doesn't surprise me an awful lot, I always thought that the label covers to the heatsinks would impede the heat dissipation, as it would get stuck between the fins and that top, rather than using what fins were designed for, excessive surface area to emit heat. I much preferred Gigabyte's old northbridge coolers like these for heat conduction:

Happily though, by comparison, the heatsink for the X38-DS4 and X48-DS4 is vast, so it gets the job done reasonably well, at stock MCH volts, temps are around the 40C mark. Using the +0.2V setting for auto-overclocking, it's around 50. +0.25 for the high FSBs around 440 ish and it's around 55, 60 if all the fans are turned down. Didn't seem problematic, but I thought that was a bit much. I assume a lot of it has to do with all the heat the X2s are producing directly beneath it.
For what it's worth, 46-47C is a very low temperature to cause stability problems for an overclock, but is it a real 46-47C, or an nvidia 46-47C? With an nvidia chipset, 42C was 70C and 46C was 90C...
I can't believe 2400rpm raises the CPU temperature by as much as 10C. If it were the northbridge, I'd consider maybe 6-7C< but the CPU? Seems unlikely unless there's an electric fire sitting next to it!

 

just passed a hours run of OCCT. temps got up to 61c well thats on OCCT temps in real temp it only got up to 56c i think i can take the vcore down even more, but im going to wait until i can go into all settings and tweak them. then we'll see about 4.26+, or as Buzz lightyears say's "to infinity and beyond!!!!!"
lol

its kinda funny. you know when your OC'ing and it pass's all test but it just feels sluggish so to say. right now this isnt like that.. everything is so quick and snappy. love it.

 

I think it has something to do with the chipset performance. When the FSB you're using is a little too high for the chipset to cope with (or at least at the given voltage), I swear there's an intermediary point between normal performance and crashing that results in things taking longer. Errors in processing I suppose.

 

Important info for future Gigabyte Core i5 builders
I'd set up the hardware for my system and went to power on and was presented with continuous short (10-12 a second) beeps. Looked this up in the manualand it says 'power error'. I checked and rechecked the connections, took one of the graphics cards out, checked the memory and so on, tried booting with no memory, no luck. I was on the verge of giving up when I happened across a review of the UD4P stating "poor manual - using memory in wrong slot caused a "power error"'. Sure enough, when I moved the memory to the white slots rather than the blue ones, POST came up. Take note of that to save yourself the frustration!

 

DANG cheap Gigabyte mobos!!! hehehee.

Thanks Sammy... duly noted.

 

Well...thanks for the reminder about that. I've actually read about similar occurrences on amd boards. I thought it was unusual that slots 3 and 4 needed to be occupied. I believe that was merely for Oc'ing to/beyond 1866Mhz though...

 

This being an issue at all is likely the result of the Core i5 CPU memory controller, perhaps there is a series link that means the memory slots must be filled in a certain order, or something like that. It's just that Gigabyte's documentation of it is rather poor. The UD6 has a dual-7segment that will indicate 'memory error' if this is done, but the UD4 does not. Not being that rich right now, the UD4 will have to do
It's a nice board though, liking the ports on the back. Got it running, opened Left 4 Dead 2, it played relatively well. Tried to run sandra but was met with a BSOD. It's a strange one though, so I'm guessing it's software-related. After all, Sandra is just a copy-paste job from an old install. I'll try getting an up to date version later on.

 

Sam,
I get the feeling that this is the "point of diminishing returns", Sophocles talks about.

The CPU never got that hot to begin with, with a max of 62-63C being the highest I've ever seen while running OCCT. Last night I encoded two long movies, and the CPU temp never got over 36C, and the motherboard temp didn't exceed 42C. With the fan turned up to it's maximum speed of 2400 rpm, with the same settings, the CPU goes to 46C. In itself, that's not very high for being stressed so much. Dry air also contributes a lot to a lack of cooling because the moisture in the air is responsible for absorbing a lot of the heat the cooler picks up from the CPU. The fan on the Freezer 64 can move 40 cfm, and at 2400 rpm moves way to fast through the cooler, to collect a lot of heat as it passes. That's why the CPU temp goes up 10C. The air coming out of the cooler is much hotter at 1600, compared to almost cool at 2400, with a 10C increase in temperature.

I'm going to pull that other cover off of the rear VRM cooler part, and see what it does after that. The air coming from the bottom 3 or 4 fins of the cooler, just blows over the cover itself. If it blows over and through the fins on the heatsink, I'm betting the temps will go down even more.

Russ