PC Teardown and Rebuild - some pics

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Battle Pope

Well-Known Member
Yesterday night I did the teardown and rebuild resulting from my parts discussion thread last week. Here are some pics from various stages of the process.

This is how things looked when I started:
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I removed everything down to the motherboard, then removed and replaced it with the new one. The new one is a Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3. You'll note the mounting hardware for the Prolimatech Megahalems, which is the next component installed.
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Here is the Megahalems installed on the motherboard.
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Power supply installed at the bottom of the case, and cable management started. PSU is a Corsair TX-750.
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Memory and primary cooling fan installed. The heat spreaders on the memory barely clear the edge of the fan. Memory is 2x2gb G.Skill Ripjaws 1600mhz. Fan is a high-volume silverstone.
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Here, everything is connected and ready to power-on for the initial Windows installation. Once windows was installed and configured I installed the rest of the hard drives and the process is complete.
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Shot of the case, buttoned up with new case badges affixed.
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At some point going forward I am planning on putting another 120mm intake fan on the front, behind the upper 5.25" bay covers. The metal panels on the empty bays have mounting holes for fans.
 
thats pretty bad ass.

not a fan of the PSU on the bottom but you cleaned that one up quite nicely.
 
Yep, a nice 1200rpm would be ideal, probably a Scythe SilentTyphoon.

And originally I wasn't sure how I'd feel about the PSU being at the bottom, but the cool part is that with it down there the airflow is a closed system. There are standoffs at the bottom and a fan grill so the PSU pulls it's own air in from outside and exhausts it immediately out the back, so the internals aren't using pre-warmed air. Eventually I want to switch it out for one of the newer modular Corsairs. Considering mine isn't modular I think I did pretty well on cable management. Fortunately the case has holes at the top and bottom of the mobo tray (you can see them in the pics) for the upper cabling to be fed through, so you can run most of it behind the mobo tray. There are ziptie loops back there too.

Next step, probably within the next few days, is to stretch this thing's legs a little bit and overclock. Goal is 200x20, which should put my memory right at 1600mhz like it's supposed to be.
 
good shit.

i remember reading that promegalitech (sp) recommends wrapping the end of the fan clip with electric tape or something in case it touches graphics card.

and it looks like quiet a few of us have the same cm690 case. to hide cables more i routed all my psu wires behind the mobo tray and zipped tied/taped them. also stuffed a whole bunch on top along the rails. xtremesystems.org has a thread on some of them are super clean and give great ideas.

all in all, good stuff.
 
Decided to get the overclock on last night so prime95 could run while I was sleeping.

Hit 200x20 with only a bit of Vtt and Vcore nudging. Final settings were 1.33 Vtt and 1.38 Vcore. System ran Prime95 stable for 9 hrs at average 60c core temps.

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wow, those are awesome numbers! too bad you couldnt pick up the fry's combo with the same cpu+board =(

did you run 3dmark06 or vantage yet? just curious too see the difference between the old amd x2 6000+ vs core i5.

btw, not to thread jack but fry's "president's day sale" was MIA. that is so lame; have to wait till May to get killer deals now or pray for a really good weekend sale.
 
I never actually ran any benchmarks on my old system, actually, but I can run them on this.

I'll get back to ya.
 
System locks up randomly while playing Fallout 3, not sure if it's system instability or a mod crashing the game. I'll have to disable all my mods and check again. I bumped the vcore a little more to see if it helps, since my temps are well within safe range, and will play some more tomorrow to see if it continues crashing. :\

Edit: 24758 3DMark06, 21915 3DMark Vantage. Not super high but respectable.
 
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lol if it makes you feel better, my 3dmark06 default with 9600gso, 2gb ddr1 and amd x2 @2.6ghz gives me around 9000.

A couple of tips if it turns out its unstable.
-First i recommend try running a pass of OCCT. Its a very cool tool that lets you run stability tests in a hour and gives you a read out of voltages and temps and a couple of other things. It checks the PSU, memory and CPU.
-Second, it could be your video card overheating or not liking your settings if youre overclocking that as well. MSI Burner is very good for that since its made by same guy who does RivaTuner. just possibility as you said the rig ran 9+hrs of prime 95 stable.
-Third, it could be your ram timing or divider you are using. If your RAM is stock, check the timings just in case its too tight. As mentioned, it can be divider too. Sometimes the cpu just doesnt like the divider and gives weird problems. a solution would be to drop the multiplier and up the blck to match the RAM speed or overclock the RAM speed itself with a higher divider.
-Fourth, it could be just that youre completely stable but that particular game or watever just doesnt like your combo. Ive read where 24hr prime but cant even run SuperPi 1mb or a game. But if those apps arent used, never crashes.

have fun.
 
That's weird... I'm pushing 18k+ on Vantage- with your hardware (Pope) you should be a LOT higher.
 
Videocard isn't overclocked at all, so I'm pretty sure it's not that.

I'm going to futz with my load order and if it still crashes I'll disable all mods and then if it still crashes I'll look into what else it could be.

RAM is set to the speed and timings on the package, 7-8-7-24-2T 1.6v
 
I'm running SLI 8800GTSs (G92) on a stock clock Q6600 though- you should outrun that even without an overclock on your hardware. Granted, the SLI setup is about equivalent to 2/3 of the way between a GTX275 and 285, but you still have a lot more video card and CPU than I do.
 
what setting/resolution are you guys running the vantage test at? if you run it at a higher resolution you will get a lower score, and a higher score on lower resolution..

for example,
on High, my score is H10555
on Performance, my score is P16512
 
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Mine defaulted to 1280x1024 on both benchmarks, forgot to add that. I've noticed that most people run it at 1024x768 but the trial versions won't let me change it.
 
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