New Project: Water-cooled Corsair 700D i7-980X build!

[Fraz]

Well, I've waited four full working days now for a response from Gigabyte concerning my motherboard problem, and they've not even read my request yet. No idea when they are likely to either. Feeling pretty underwhelmed with Gigabyte right now. Motherboard doesn't support 6-core 32nm CPUs, as it is advertised to:



and no support response after nearly a week.

So, if they don't get back to me by tomorrow, I'm think I'm going to return to the motherboard and choose one of their competitors' products. I'm pretty sick of watching my kit get old without even being switched on.

[nibbler]

How's it going fraz, getting a bit miserable when I see this thread with no response after that post

[Fraz]

Managed to get things moving again over the weekend. Got sick of waiting for a response from Gigabyte. I did eventually get one, but it wasn't particularly helpful. So, I just bought an i7 920 and flashed the BIOS to the latest version, and then everything was fine when I replaced it with the 980x.

I'll post up some pictures tonight. Managed to get it to 4 GHz already. The easiest bit of overclocking ever - I just raised the multiplier from 25 to 30 and added a dash more voltage and it was rock solid. I'll have a go at pushing it up towards 4.5 GHz tonight.

So, I'll have a i7 920 for sale at a good price in a few days when I'm certain I don't need it anymore.. If anyone is interested, let me know. I'll be posting up a proper for sale thread eventually.

[nibbler]

Pretty shocking that you had to buy a new processor to get the motherboard to run...

[Fraz]

Pretty shocking that you had to buy a new processor to get the motherboard to run...

Yeah, I was less than impressed with the support response. They listed a few things to check (have I plugged the RAM in correctly, etc), and then said you can send it back to Gigabyte UK for the bios flash. There was no indication in the message of how to actually do this, and I was damned if I was going to wait another five working days for them to tell me. Then it'd would have been another week or so for the RMA procedure, coupled with the fact that I've been abroad for a week which would have complicated delivery/pickup. Blah blah blah.

Still, it's working now. I'll sell the i7 for not much less than I bought it, I expect. Only been used for 20 minutes!

[nibbler]

Nice one, let's have some benchies when it's ready

[GoNz0]

Still, it's working now. I'll sell the i7 for not much less than I bought it, I expect. Only been used for 20 minutes!

dibs !

i have a m8 after one so i may well offer to take that off your hands to see if it clocks better than mine

[Sem]

looking good

[bobfoc]

Quick question to 700D owners out there...

Can you remove the bottom drive cage in the PSU bay? (When I mean remove, I mean without the need for drills, dremels, acetylene cutting torches)

Thinking of getting one, but ideally be installing a triple and a double rad in this bad boy

Cheers,

Bob

[Bugbait]

Can you remove the bottom drive cage in the PSU bay? (When I mean remove, I mean without the need for drills, dremels, acetylene cutting torches

Not easily, it's held in by rivets. Then again, it's not too bad looking at some guides on the web.

[Fraz]

Annoyingly most of the guides on the web are for the 800D, and the drive cage at the bottom is different between the 700D and 800D, although if anything I think the 700D drive cage is probably the easier to remove.

Pretty certain it involves power tools though!

These are the instructions on the Corsair Support Forum for the 800D: http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=81698

That forum is probably the best place to ask (i.e. this one: http://forum.corsair.com/v3/forumdisplay.php?f=189)

[bobfoc]

Thanks for your help with this guys.

Waiting to see updated pics of this build for inspiration as I've been following it quite closely.

Hope you get some time to take some pics and get some benches up soon mate.

Bob

[watercooled]

How's it going, any pics of the completed system?

[Fraz]

How's it going, any pics of the completed system?

Weird, I wasn't getting notified in my thread subscriptions for responses to this anymore. Plus been busy with moving house and holidaying and things.

Anyway, the computer is currently borked, much to my annoyance. Both Seagate disks I bought for it failed after about a month of usage. So I've had to install everything on it twice now, only for it to fail twice. Seriously reduced my respect for Seagate, who have previously had a perfect record as far as I'm concerned. I've been meaning to bring over the SSD from my other machine for ages (which was always the plan), but just haven't had time to sort it out. I suspect I'll just get a new SSD (maybe a Gen 3 Intel one, when they arrive) for this machine, which will mitigate the work involved in bringing across the SSD from my other box.

I've def been pretty slack at posting up pictures... Here is a finished pic of the interior from a while back:



And this is what it looks like from the front, although I've since added some LEDs to the back of the XSPC tank:



It certainly crunches well! (when it's working...) if you're a World Community Grid user, this box gets about 55,000 points per day when it's running at 4.5 GHz, which is about 3 times the score my Q6600 box gets (which is overclocked to 3.4 GHz). So essentially this machine is roughly equivalent to three Q6600 CPUs running at 3.4 GHz. Not bad, not bad at all

[watercooled]

Nice work, it looks really neat and tidy inside, the motherboard looks tiny in that case though. About the HDDs failing, maybe they were just dropped somewhere along the line. Have you done any overclocking at all?

[Fraz]

Have you done any overclocking at all?

Yeah, see the edit I just added.

Regarding hard disks - yeah, it's possible that they were dropped. Although it certainly wasn't during the delivery stage. SCAN had wrapped up those things in so much bubble wrap it took me a good few minutes with a sharp knife to release them.