Log for a new o/c build, 3930/16gb/SSD+1Tb raid10

Popoutman

First proper PC build/upgrade in a few years..

History:
I used to do a lot of overclocking and PC building a decade ago, with such achievements as running a P3-650 at 1.05Ghz regularly, with 2 scsi and 2 ide disks, a pair of graphics cards (one AGP and one PCI), in a great modded case with UV lights, uv-reactive internal sheathing and EL cable outlining the case features. As the years went on, I upgarded to an Athlon, then to a dual-core athlon. When that PC was nicked in 2003, I kind of lost my drive to overclock and case mod after that.

In the years since, I picked up a Lidl pc in ~2006 (athlon 2ghz/1Gb ram) and used that as my desktop. I upgraded the graphics card, motherboard and cpu 3 years ago, getting a dual-core Athlon 5000 Black and a basic motherboard, and that's my current desktop. The motherboard died on me so I got a replacement, picking up 4 1tb disks and a few gig more of RAM. This is my current PC, and it does the job, with a 5770 radeon it is reasonable for gaming as well. The case I picked up in PCWorld as an end of line product without a box, for €25 - a bargain given how well it has worked for me.

As I'm currently studying a taught full-time Masters, I've not been playing too much in the way of gaming. However, I've to build a cloud and a real network for my Thesis, so I'm taking the opportunity to get myself a nice shiny PC that'll do me for all of my gaming, astro-image and astrovideo processing and college work for the next few years.

I've just ordered an I7-3930 kit from Dabs, with 16Gb (4x4gb) G-Skill ram, on an Asus P9X79-PRO motherboard. Storage will use my current 4 1tb sata drives, but rebuilding the raid array as 1+0 on the Intel storage. There will be a 120gb Intel 520 SSD providing a home for the OS and a cache for the raid array. Cooling will be using a Corsair H80 closed loop watercooler. My current PSU should be good enough - though I'll have to get an 8-pin cpu power adapter for the board.

I'll allocate ~20gb of the SSD for the caching, another ~20gb for a Gentoo partition, and the last 75gb for Win7 again. The caching should allow me to mount the raid array as my home directory under c:\users with a big performance increase. I'll probably allocate ~100gb for the other Linux partitions on the raid array.

As this new motherboard has no PCI slots, and no parallel ATA or floppy connectors, I've also had to order a new sata-connected dvdrw. I'll probably get a pcie-pata card at some point to reuse my current optical drives in the future, as other wise they will go to waste. My pc currently uses a pci 802.11g network card - I'll have to change that for either a pcie or a usb device instead. I have a spare usb .11g device that I'll use until the .11n device arrives. I'll use the use of my tv capture card for this PC - but I might reuse the upgraded guts to build an improved security camera capture pc for monitoring the yard.

I'm not going to change the graphics card yet, the MSI Hawk 5770 is good enough for what I want. No point in my upgrading until I upgrade from my current 1600x1200 lcd screen, and when I do it'll most likely be for another single ~€200 radeon. I've no need to be spending €500 or more on a graphics card as I'm just not that much of a gamer to benefit (I've spent more money on GoG than in Game over the past 2 years, zero-DRM is a winner for me!). If there are more applications that can use the GPU for processing then that could make a difference and an upgrade for that reason would be good for me.

I have astronomy databases that reach about the 300gb size, hence the need for the raid array in the first place. I've got these backed up onto a spare drive, and they will be going back onto the new machine. The image processing I do uses up to 100 full-size .cr2 files from the 600d, and registers and stacks them, multithreaded and 64-bit. The new hardware should make a real difference to those workflows!

It'll be interesting to see how GNS3 and VirtualBox run on the new hardware compared to my core I5 4gb laptop from work - hopefully I can run 15+ VMs and the supporting network! I didn't want to spend my cash on my computer this year, but the thesis practical has forced the upgrade on me, at least I do have uses for that level of horsepower after the thesis practical has been demonstrated.

So, this newthread is somewhere that I can post up any pictures that I take of the build, and anything unusual that I find with the upgrade, and the overclocking that I'm going to try once I have an installed and stable system.

Any questions or comments?

Popoutman

The case I have is a Xigmatek Midgard - after checking the sticker on the bottom. I didn't get a box with that case so it was bought without my knowing what brand it was. All I needed to see was the build and how it felt to use in the shop before I then found out it was heavily discounted.

All the bits arrived, so I assembled yesterday and today, taking a few pics as well with the build. Those pics are still on the camera, but I'll get them off later tonight/tomorrow and up somewhere that I can link to here.

The old bits came out cleanly, and I now have a spare board and chip with large cooler on it that I'll probably donate/sell cheap to a mate who could do with getting a desktop back on the road again.

All the assembly went well, the CPU went in easily enough into the LGA2011 socket even though it's obvious that the socket puts quite a lot of force on the chip pushing onto the pins. Still, it's a very well engineered and well implemented socket, and it appears to have a good enough mechanical holding on the CPU.

It was a bit interesting putting the Corsair H80 on the PSU as it wasn't obvious where the least strain on the piping would be so I took a few min to check out the best orientation. I kept the waterblock thermal goop in place, it's sufficient for its purpose at this point - if the temps appear silly I may disassemble and use an alternative thermal interface material.

I ran into a bit of a problem with the PSU, as the 4-pin 12v CPU power connector wouldn't reach the 8-pin socket at the top of the board. So I went to the local Maplins to see if there were any 4-pin to 8-pin adapter cables, and a 24-pin extension as well. On sale for €70 was an XFX 80 bronze 580w PSU, with 9 SATA power sockets, enough PCI-E power connectors, and nice black sheathing on all of the power cables. One quick burn of the Laser card later and I walked out with that as well as a tiny 802.11N usb device for networking.

The PSU was installed this morning, and a lot of time was spent on cable routing to try to go behind the motherboard tray if possible and to keep the main area as clean from cables as possible. Thankfully the 8-pin cable was long enough that it reached from the case bottom to the top of the motherboard behind the board, and it looks really tidy. All of the other cables were routable behind or underneath and everything was powered without one cable crossing the motherboard. Took a lot of effort though but I think it's worth it now. Everything was installed, and everything was connected up and cables were all routed as tidily as I could.

It booted! On the first boot I got a fright as it said that there was nothing attached to the 6gb Intel sockets (the SSD was supposed to be there) and that there was only 8gb of memory. A quick look, and the power cable had been moved out of the SSD when I was closing that side of the case, and two memory sticks weren't seated properly in the Q-Dimms. Both of these problems were quickly rectified and a minor heart attack was avoided..

Installation of Win7 Ultimate proceeded without a problem. I had the Intel drivers previously extracted to USB in preparation for the raid drivers. The Asus install-all was used to put all of the drivers in place and all of the utilities in place as well.

A quick overclock up to 4500 was attempted, and it appears stable for the moment but I haven't yet properly burned it in as I had to head to the office for work. I kept all of the power saving functionality in place and enabled, including cool'n'quiet, as this is a machine that will be used for normal desktop functions as well as for the heavy lifting purposes so there's no point in having the fans screaming and the power usage being sky-high all of the time.

The Windows "user experience index" was 7.4, with 7.9 for memory and for disk, 7.8 for the processor while working at 4500, and the graphics was the low point with the 5770 hitting 'only' 7.4.

Sometime over the next week or two, I'll start a proper burn-in and testing to get a stable lower-voltage overclock, one that will give me lower temps and a low overall power usage as well.

The SSD and hibernating? It's one of the reasons why I went with the more expensive Intel 520 - there are intel-specific fixes for the Sandforce controller, and a 5-year guarantee. If there are problems, I'll be shipping that drive back to the supplier for replacement, but I'm not expecting to get any problems with it, and I haven't seen any problems in the forums about BSODs with the 520s. As it is, I'm happy that the sleep function operates correctly, witha power draw while asleep of <10w. It comes back out of sleep correctly too (unlike the previous motherboard)

My overall first impressions? It's hard to do a tidy case with 5 harddrives and a few other bits inside it, but it's worth the effort in aesthetics alone, and should be good for case airflow as well.. Having an SSD onboard is an unbelievable difference in boot time and overall responsiveness. It's amusing to see 12 graphs in Process Explorer!

Now, college end-of-term exams are calling for my time, so the playing with the shiny and expensive toy will have to wait a little bit...

Bacon and Cabbage

Holy mother of god

Popoutman

A little bit of overclocking yesterday, and I can run perfectly stable at 1.275v, at 4.5GHz and temperatures not going over 75 after 15 mins of prime95.

I reached this at the desktop, but prime95 is unhappy with it:
http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=2351172

I'm keeping an eye on the power usage / performance ratio, so I've backtracked a bit to here: http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=2351214. Now I'm trying to figure out how to get the voltage down to 1.25 at this frequency in the bios, and still have it at a proper voltage at idle and still have all the power management and power saving available.

At the moment, at desktop idle the machine takes the same 180w including speakers, UPS and monitor, as the previous dual athlon did. Peak power usage at full cpu overclock was at 510w and that's a bit high hence my reduction in the overclock, and at the current overclock it's taking under 400w at full load and the cpu temps are hitting 73 on one core and ~65 on the rest. That's a result for me.

Tea_Bag

Increase the PLL to level 4, or whatever it might be called on your motherboard. it should smooth the voltage so you'll get better idle volts.

I'm sure with your background in OCing you know that 15min of prime is nowhere near enough for a valid OC. also, prime isn't very good this generation anyway. Intel burn test, or another linx variant is much better. 25 runs on IBT on maximum settings, and playing a very intensive game for a few hours. if it gets through that if should be good to go. or you can prime for 15 hours, but that's no fun.

1.25v is nothing to be sniffed at anyway.

Popoutman

Now working at a nice and not-so-power-hungry 4.3GHz, @ 1.25v, 43x100.
About 180w idle at the desktop, web browsing and general downloading, as I've got all the powersaving on. Temps in the mid 20s to low 30s there.
Half an hour very stable with intel burntest with all threads and all ram, temps averaging at about 73-76 degrees per core (stable temps at that after less than 5 min, not a lot of liquid to heat in the Corsair H80) and a power draw total of about 430W. No bluescreens at this setup. Temps are ~1-2 degrees higher with Prime95, but the stability is better tested with the Intel burntest tool - I've had BS at 4.5@1.265v but prime completes without an issue. CPU temps drop ~30 degrees instantly when the test stops amd ramps slowly down to normal.

I figured out what I needed to in the bios with the voltage, it was in the offset on cpu voltage. I had to set it to "negative" and a value of something like 0.0040. This gave me 1.24-1.26v depending on whether I trust the Asus tool or CPU-Z application. I could probably go with 4.4Ghz at this voltage happily enough, but I don't see the need too much at this point. Stability and low power usage if possible are the more important aims, but it's nice to know that I can run at 4.8 if I want to use well over 500W to do it.

Pics are in the works, but will be up over the weekend I hope. Haven't installed the Canon tools yet.

Now to install Gentoo if I get a chance over the weekend and see what 12 threads of compilation in 16gb can do to build me an OS..

Popoutman

Pics!
More here

A few new shiny bits:


Into this:


Makes this:


Proper PSU in, and all cables routed:


All put together and done:


I've no pics of it working yet. but it's screaming fast and quiet as well. I'll get two Noctua fans for the H80 later in the summer as the Corsair fans are a tad noisy when at full speed, but otherwise it's fantastic. Once I get a PCIE-PATA controller, I'll put in another dvdrw into the space between the multi-bay and the dvdrw, it just was the most convenient way to do it for the moment..

Popoutman

Final stable config is 44x100 for 4.4GHz, at 1.24v, with temps staying below 72 degrees after 25 min of IBT, with a power draw at that point of 410W. I can't ask for better really

FlyingIrishMan

Why do you need more than one DVD drive?

Popoutman

Pretty much as I have done a bit of disc to disc copying, and for pure convenience when playing multi-disc games. No need to swap a dvd mid-session.

Though most of my games are either Steam or GOG and don't use the DVD.
I also have a few astronomy catalogues on dvd and using them is a bit easier when I have two dvds to read from.

Another reason is because I can