The Ultimate Dream Computer

water cooling is for an extreme system with OC(ing)

 

oh yes i forgot bout the oc...they ova heat quicker wen oc...but dont the water heat up...

 

Yes the water does heat up, that's why the system pumps water through a radiator, where the air cools the water down.

It may be worth doing some basic reading.

These will point out the basics.

http://www.devhardware.com/c/a/Hardware-Guides/Water-Cooling-Basics/

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/buildpcs/chapter/ch03.pdf

 

all my parts are now in, will update everyone that is interested on the eVGA 680i mobo and it's overclocking prowess once the holidays are over...LOL (gotta spend SOME time w/ the family and take some time away from building)

happy holidays everyone.

docTY

 

mines done and is up and running , upgraded the PS to a Antec true-power 750 watts ,new case Antec Nine Hunderd , and my CPU Opteron 185 i OC(ed) it to 2.87 gig with the Asus utilitys in the Bios, seems to be running great. temps are running 35c CPU ,System is 28c and the Mobo is 28c lots lower that the Lian Li case

 

Great cooling I expected. How quiet is it?

 

Sam its not as quite as the Lian Li of course but is still pretty quite . the 200mm fan on top is very quite and the 2 front 120mm fans are the ones you here some but not over bearing at all .i have them set on med. on high there to loud. the back and side fans you don't here at all.

and the Opteron 185 is blazing fast . i can def tell a difference between the Opteron 175 and this one!!

 

Quick question...building this rig:

Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case $124.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16811129021

eVGA 8800GTS 640MB Video Card $399.99 rebate $369.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16814130071

OCZ GameXStream OCZ850GXSSLI 850Watts P/S $214.99 rebate $189.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16817341003

OCZ Platinum Revision 2 2GB 240-Pin DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) $245.99 rebate $213.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16820227139

EVGA 122-CK-NF68-AR LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard $249.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16813188009

ZALMAN 9700 LED 110mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler $59.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?item=N82E16835118019

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor - Retail $318.00
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819115003R

Looking for a good, fast hard drive. Any suggestions on brand and specs to look for?

 

I built a computer for a friend using the case you are getting. It's a real nice case, but if you put your hands inside while the fans are running watch out for the big top fan. It's very easy to get your hands into it and it is a real knuckle remover. I am speaking from experience here.

Dave

 

@ForknDave

LOL. Thanks for the advice. I dont think I will be sticking my hand in any fans too soon. Are the fans cheap?

 

150GB WD Raptor (SATA of course), 2 in RAID would be even better. Then get a large WD or other good model for storage.

 

Thanks man. I've heard of the Raptor. Heard it was good for fast windows loading. Is that true?

 

I forgot, The Raptors are 10,000 RPM and top of the line. Not exactly cheap, but you can't beat them for speed. At least the last time I checked no one had.

 

They do a lot more than load Windows fast. With your programing on the Raptor most everything will run faster. Test showed they're faster than some systems in RAID and in RAID they're awesome.

 

Although they're very expensive, if you're looking for the fastest hard drive that isn't insane (I'm thinking 15k rpm Atlas here LOL) then the 150GB raptor is ideal, most "ultimate" pc systems are built with one, or two in RAID. If you want a bit more storage for your money, go with a Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB or its equivalents, they're particularly fast, and also very quiet.

Lol@forkndave, a friend of mine met a 5000rpm 60mm heatsink fan once, that wasn't nice, but a 200mm fan could do some serious damage.
to shuboy: nice choice of components, I'm looking to upgrade to that power supply (or the 700W model), i'd be interested to hear your thoughts of it when your system's up and running. With regard to are the fans cheap, are what fans cheap? Fans come with cases usually, and if you want to replace them you can go with cheap crummy ones that are noisy, or expensive near-silent ones like I have. Fans can cost anywhere from $1 to $20 each.

 

@Sammorris, I think I am going to check out the WD 500GB Caviar. And I was asking about the fans that come in the Antec Nine Hundred Case stock. Are they cheap? What 120mm fans would you recommend getting?

 

I always use WD over other makes.
Look for SATA 2 with he 16MB Cache, size is up to you, but for speed, I would use a RAID.
With that board you can easily set up 0+1

 

The fans in the Antec are probably OKish, being Antec rather than stock with any old cheap case, but they won't be ultra-silent models, if that's what you're after then you may want to look at aftermarket fans from the likes of Nexus, Scythe, Coollink and Noctua. As for the 200mm fan, you may just have to run it at low speed if you want it silent, I don't know many aftermarket fans that size. If you want high speed, high airflow fans, the Thermaltake Thunderblades aren't bad for noise, they're still what I'd pronounce quite loud, but for the air they push they're acceptable.
With regard to the disk drive, make sure you get the SE16 series. They have a 16MB cache, use S-ATA 2 and are as quiet and as fast as they come.

 

I'm with BigDK, WD is a proven name. I like the big drives for storage. Since we're talking dream machine here, you want both storage and speed. I'd go with Raptors in RAID 0 for speed and use a large storage drive for storing things like video files. A single Raptor is plenty fast by itself though. If you want to go the budget route, get a couple of big drives in RAID 0. I don't usually keep much mission critical data, so I don't use mirrored drives.

BigDK
I don't know how many drives you put in the 0+1 configuration, but if you're using multiple sets, you may want to consider 1+0. Mathmatically it's a more reliable setup. A normal user wouldn't need to worry, but a power user with a lot of drives might want to check into it. I read a small article on it not long ago that explains it fairly well. I'm not that good at math myself. LOL

Heres a small quote from the article: "The difference is that the chance of system failure with two drive failures in a RAID 0+1 system with two sets of drives is (n/2)/(n - 1) where n is the total number of drives in the system. The chance of system failure in a RAID 1+0 system with two drives per mirror is 1/(n - 1). Using an 8 drive system, the chance that losing a second drive would bring down the RAID system is 4/7 with a RAID 0+1 system and 1/7 with a RAID 1+0 system."
http://aput.net/~jheiss/raid10/