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I mentioned to some people I'd do a write up of the build so they could see more about things like the case etc.
Old system
AMD X2 4400+
Artic Cooling Freezer 7 64
3gb DDR400
AMD HD4870
ASRock dual sata2 939
Samsung F1 1TB
XClio 480W (CWT unit)
Creative SB Audigy 2ZS
Coolermaster Centurion 5
Sony DVDRW
Windows 7 Pro x64
New system
Intel i7 950
Corsair A50
Corsair 6gb DDR3 1600 7-8-7-20
AMD HD4870 (retained)
Gigabyte X58A UD3R
Samsung F1 1TB (retained)
XFX Pro 650W
Asus Xonar Xense
Coolermaster HAF912
Samsung DVDRW
Windows 7 Pro x64 (retained)
There wasn't anything wrong with the 5 year old system, and it still kept up for the most part.. but I was running out of card slots on the motherboard and when the 950 halved in price my decision was made for me pretty easily(Okay, someone needed my old computer as well).
So out of the box.. the case size compared to my old computer. A little larger in all dimensions, but not by a lot. (excuse the mess!)
And from the top it looks like this:
Which is well and good, but you want to see the inside!
And you can already see quite a few nice touches - black interior, partly toolless design etc.
So onto the building. PSU in first - took a bit of a gamble with XFX, but the reviews for the pro series are looking good, and it has enough power and connectors should I ever win that Ares card Hexus had in competition.. Lack of modular cables is a bit annoying but modular supplies were out of budget. Cable length is good, but only just enough for the 4+4pin EPS at the top of the board. Don't think it would make it in a larger tower case. You can also see I've removed the other side panel, revealing the cut outs for CPU backmount and cable routing.
Added more components for the next shot. While it's well and good having cable routing options, it gives you a bit of a headache trying to work out the optimal placements for the cables and which order to add things in - sorting out a plan for the cables before the motherboard went in was a good idea, but there was still the nightmare of front panel connectors and other PSU cables to sort..
Then..
Ow. Actually I didn't notice it at first, but was a bit of a pourer.. It wasn't the case, which I can report has no sharp edges, but infact the fins of the A50. I'd had to take the fan off the front and rotate it 180 to get the fan cable to reach. Ah well - the build was properly christened at least..
Finally, get fed up of cable routing and just sort of plonk everything else in, vowing to sort it all out next time I replace a component..
And observant people will notice I've swapped some of the drive bays around - it was getting fiddly to plug in the graphics card power so you can quite easily remove extra bays, and then I also moved the 2.5" bays from infront of the PSU to ontop of the remaining 3.5" bays. This flexbility was another reason I went for this case.
In terms of build quality the case is absolutely solid - even with all the sides off you could pick it up by any surface and it remained absolutely rigid. Very impressive.
Amazingly it all fired up first time. The only change I made in Bios was to select XMP profile for the RAM and it was good to go at full speed and perfect dividers. I've ranted about the front panel connectors elsewhere so I won't do it again here. Likewise the case instructions were poor, however the motherboard instructions from Gigabyte were very good.
It was also a lot louder than my old computer, which was disappointing. A large portion of that is the A50 CPU cooler fan. I've now used the supplied resistor to lower the speed and it's bearable now, but I'm not impressed for the money.
Temperatures seem good - I've been loading all 8 threads for a while and the max reported with RealTemp is 68C on one core. Gigabytes dynamic energy saver software also works a treat, undervolting the CPU a tiny amount.
I had a quick play with some BIOS settings to see how it would react, and it seems as if the auto settings are quite quick to change things to maintain absolute stability. For example, increasing BCLK by more than 5mhz or so caused the default CPU voltage to increase to 1.28 (from a normal 1.24, or 1.21 with DES) and disable the more aggressive down volting on idle. Likewise increasing memory frequency instantly caused timings to relax massively. Switching some of the settings to 'normal' rather than 'auto' soon cured this and and voltages are back down to 1.21 under load, and 0.something small on idle, and manually specifying memory timings has locked things down there as well. Interestingly, it jumps to the turbo mutliplier even when all threads are fully loaded, so it's basically running x24 any time it's loaded so even quite small increases in BCLK result in fairly large speed increases.
I can't remember the exact benchmark figures, maybe I'll add them to this thread later, but rough tests indicated that superpi (which I think is single threaded?) is almost 3x faster, and the CPU portion of 3dMark Vantage is 5.5x faster (definitely multi-threaded). GPU score on High preset is up a little, but not a lot (<10%), so I wasn't hugely CPU limited before and I don't expect game performance to have increased massively, however for photo work and toolset usage I think it's going to be a beast!
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Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH
SCAN 3XS Systems Support
