Introducing my system

[MarkJones 0]

Hello chaps! This is just a few pics of my main rig that I use for gaming and FS.

Specs are:

Intel i7 2600k @ 4500mhz 1.288v

ATi Radeon HD 6970

Asus P8Z68-V Pro

Corsair XMS3 4gb DDR3 x2

Samsung Spinpoint F3 1tb & F1 1tb

HDA X-Mystique sound card

Samsung SH-S203P DVD ROM/RW

Tagan Piperock II 680w PSU

Cosair Graphite 600T SE case.

The cooling system consists of an XPSC Rasa Acetal CPU block, X20 750 pump/res unit and an RS240 radiator c/w twin Akasa Apache PWM 120mm fans.

(This pic taken before upgrade)

Thanks for looking!

This has been my first forray into water cooling and so far I'm very happy with the results. CPU is 32'c at idle and reaches a maximum of 58'c after a few hours of Prime95 stress tesing. Under normal gaming conditions the cpu never goes over 48'c Not bad for 4.5ghz!

[SEATAC 400]

That's a very nice rig you have. 4.5ghz! Wow! I've never tried a water cooled setup.

[ddavid 149]

How many radiators do you run off it, Mark? Good for the cold winter nights, eh?!?

4.5 GHz - sch-yeah! Thanks for sharing.

Hwyl - Dai.

[MartinW 0]

Mark, can you tell me what the total cost of your water cooling was?

And what make is that hard drive dock?

How much maintenance is required for your water cooling. Is it just drain and refill once a year?

Awesome system!

[IcedUpPitotTube 0]

Mark, get ready for a burglar tomorrow night.

JKJK

But that comp is AWESOME!

[MarkJones 0]

Mark, can you tell me what the total cost of your water cooling was?

And what make is that hard drive dock?

How much maintenance is required for your water cooling. Is it just drain and refill once a year?

Awesome system!

Total cost of the kit was £130 plus another £8 for coolant. As for maintenance I plan on draining and flushing the system every six months or maybe annually depending on how it looks then. Most people use distilled water and a small coil of silver or a tiny bit of biocide to prevent the growth of any microbes ect. I'm using a pre mixed coolant that allegedly needs no other additives so we'll see.

It will probably cost another £100 to add another smaller radiator and a full-cover GPU block to the loop.

The HDD dock was purchased from Maplin a while ago. It's a Winstars Communicator C2

[aeromax 10]

Breathless System ! :001_th_smiles76:

Max.

[MarkJones 0]

I'm not finished tinkering yet. I'm using only 1.288 volts to reach a totally stable 4.5ghz overclock, there is a bit of headroom remaining. These Sandybridge chips have been known to hit 5! :wootmesalia:

Cores 1, 3 and 4 will quite happily run 4.5ghz at only 1.25 volts but core 2 will always thrown up errors in Prime95 unless it's fed more voltage.

[mutley 4,498]

Good luck Mark, if only I understood what you were talking about!?

Be careful out there mate!

[MartinW 0]

Mark, can you tell me what the total cost of your water cooling was?

And what make is that hard drive dock?

How much maintenance is required for your water cooling. Is it just drain and refill once a year?

Awesome system!

Total cost of the kit was £130 plus another £8 for coolant. As for maintenance I plan on draining and flushing the system every six months or maybe annually depending on how it looks then. Most people use distilled water and a small coil of silver or a tiny bit of biocide to prevent the growth of any microbes ect. I'm using a pre mixed coolant that allegedly needs no other additives so we'll see.

It will probably cost another £100 to add another smaller radiator and a full-cover GPU block to the loop.

The HDD dock was purchased from Maplin a while ago. It's a Winstars Communicator C2

Thanks mark, that's a damn good price for water cooling. I've just been looking at the XPSC kit with a triple fan radiator. Can't afford it at the moment, but who knows perhaps in time.

Why people are spending such a lot of money on an Corsair H100, when they can buy a kit like yours and get better, quieter cooling god only knows.

[MarkJones 0]

Well I did have a Corsair H100 on pre-order but after it was delayed for ages I went for a proper kit instead. The reason why I (and everybody else) was going for it was the fact that it was a closed self-contained system with no maintenance and no chance for leakage. The few cases where a Corsair Hydro has leaked, Corsair replaced everything that was damaged by it! Looking at the reviews it performs a bit better then the best high-end air coolers. I'm glad I went this route though as when I next get paid I'm going to stick that graphics card in the loop... the stock cooler on that thing sounds like a Rolls-Royce Dart winding up!

[MartinW 0]

Looking at the reviews it performs a bit better then the best high-end air coolers

Actually it doesn't mark.

Or more accurately, it would if you put your fingers in your ears to block out the din.

I have an NH-D14. The H100 is about two degrees cooler, at full load, overclocked. However... it's very noisy.

the NH-D14 has a 120 fan and a 140 fan at 1300 RPM. The H100 has a couple of 2000 RPM fans.

Put the same fans on the NHD-14, and it would beat the H100.

My graphics card is quiet. EVGA GTX 580

[MarkJones 0]

Fair enough, I should have put "tiny bit" instead

For the Lol's.

Starts off at the lowest setting of 20%. Then 38% that is the maximum it will spin up to by itself and then 50% and 100% for comedy... Referance designs for the lose.

[MartinW 0]

Straight out of the box, with the fans provided, yes the H100 is "a bit" cooler. But it's a con really.

It's not a fair comparison, it's not comparing like for like. Any cooler with very high rpm fans will cool better. Minus fans, looking at the heat sink efficiency, the Noctua is still way ahead. With the same 2000 rpm fans on both the Noctua is better.

Noctua also have two new coolers arriving with 20% greater surface area than the NH-D14.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/05/31/noctua-shows-new-cpu-coolers/1

Two of them are bigger versions of the D14, and one is a twin 120 fan down draft cooler to cool the CPU plus motherboard.

I think zero maintenance water cooling will continue to improve, but for now, they still aren't beating the greater surface area of the best air cooler.

That has to be the loudest graphics card I've ever heard.

As I type, I have an old 7900gtx on the desk beside me. It's fitted with a Thermalright cooler. I had the same issue as you, the stock BFG cooler was like a jet engine taking off. Apparently, BFG locked the fan speed to max because it was overclocked.

It was totally unacceptable, utterly deafening. Hence my purchase of the Thermalright. With the Theramlright it was super quiet and cooler.

[MarkJones 0]

R6970 added to the loop

Ahhhh! It's so quiet now! GPU Idles at 30'c and never goes above 44'c under load

With the old turbojet cooler on it used to idle at 48'c and reach a full load temperature of 87'c :icon_yikes:

[mutley 4,498]

Looks bigger than the radiator on my wife's car!

Very impressive Mark :icon_bowdown:

[MartinW 0]

Great stuff mark.

MartinW approves.

And I see you've gone for black tubing, very smart.

Great CPU temps, great GPU temps... but how's the system temp now, with the rad's in place. Is the case warmer.

[MarkJones 0]

It's a bit cooler too as any heat generated by the CPU & GPU is immediately expelled outside by the radiators.

[MartinW 0]

Well done, you've given me a very powerful urge to cool with water.

I bet you any money, that in a few months you'll have the urge to cool your northbridge with the wet stuff too. :bb:

[MarkJones 0]

There really isn't any point with Sandybridge as the baseclock has been locked to 100mhz. The only way you can overclock these chips is via the multiplier.

Could be worth watercooling the MOSFET's and VRM's but they don't get that hot atm.

[M31 0]

Hi Mark your system looks great ... I've just joined the site after having my eye here for a while so hope you don't mind me chiming in on what is after all your thread on just my second post!

I've recently splashed out on a new system for Flight Sim too, much the same as yours in many ways, your photography beats mine hands down though

I'd already built an I7 920 @ 4GHz rig for FSX that ran at this speed for the best part of two years ... I really wanted to wait for Intels Ivy Bridge but it looks like this has been delayed again, just over a month ago I pumped for a Sandy Bridge I7 2600K 8 GB system ... I've always liked Gigabyte boards since we lost Abit so went for their new Z68 UD7 B3 model, went for Win 7 HP 64 on a new OCz Sata 3 60 GB SSD with a their 240 GB SSd just for FSX.

Its running sweet as you like at 4.8GHz, recently tried it at 5 GHz but backed off ... I'm only running SLI GTX 570's because I'm soon going to use triple monitors for wide vision in FSX BTW.

This is my new build ...

Cheers.

[MarkJones 0]

That's a fine looking rig, I almost went for that case, 800D? Probably would have been better as I could have went with thicker radiators but I never intended to go the WC route. That case looks MASSIVE, I thought my 600T was roomy... :icon_thumbup:

I need to find out just what this CPU can do. Just out of interest what voltage are you feeding your chip at 4.8?

Pics updated*

[M31 0]

Hi Mark.

The very specific guide I used to get my UD7 to 4.8GHz is this one from OcUK,take a few minutes to read through this guys guide, he knows what he is doing.

I'm actually using exact same motherboard and most of his assorts to get to 4.8GHz.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18279474

Read his whole article, this guy knows his stuff ... so do we, but its nice to see .. not just our results, but solid well known tweakers doing the the same thing too.

[MarkJones 0]

Just had a little read, looks like I should well be able to hit 5 if I only need 1.28v to hit 4.5 fully stable. I did think I could get away with 1.25 v but after several hours of Prime one of the core's wasn't having it.

Seems that your board still has a proper bios. This has been the first UEFI board that I've used and it took me a while to like it tbh.

[M31 0]

Hi Mark, yes the touch BIOS feature of my new board is nice and I actually used it the other night to update the BIOS to latest version (F8 I think it was) but I'm a bit of a purist and prefer to do overclocking and tweaking in the pre OS BIOS screen to be sure ... one things for sure it would almost be a sin not to overclock the current Intel SB range of K processors.

About the only thing that can decrease the normal usefulness of a current Intel CPU's life span is heat and over volting it, my previous Intel I7 920 still runs at 4 GHz and I still use it to this day, for that build I actually chose and paid a little more for a pre- overclocked cherry picked bundle of board, CPU and ram from OcUK (pic of it below) and even after doing my own way of overclocking I found this example of 920 needed less voltage than a friends to get to the same speed and remain stable, after reading reviews of the current SB range (and of course noting the B3 fix) I decided it was worth a gamble to purchase and look for at least 4.5 GHz ... I got to 4.8 GHz pretty easy ... I was going to wait for Intel Ivy Bridge but that looks like at least early 2012 now before it comes mainstream, also my Z68 board I'm told should let an IB CPU drop in with nothing more than a BIOS flash ... I'll be looking at a similarly well performing six core CPU as a minimum before I do that though ... other benefits of the forthcoming IB Intel boards are PCI-E 3.0 (or is it 2.1?) or something, but even current GPU's cant saturate the bandwidth of PCI-e 2.0.

But for anyone wondering about overclocking, its not quite the dark art it used to be, this is my second rig (pic below)and I upgraded to an ATI HD 6970 when putting the GTX 570's in my new comp, its a more main use computer and leaving my new SB 2600K build as a flight sim only rig, this I7 920 has been running at 4 GHz for just over two years now ... I've another PC ... an Intel E8400 dual core that runs at 4 GHz for even longer ... but that's another story This I7 920 6 GB build runs a second gen Vertex SSD for Win 7 OS and Velociraptor for flight sim and games... its still quick but my SB 2600K build leaves it behind in everything.

Oh yeah, the current build is indeed the Corsair Obsidian 800 case, yep its big but its design means putting a PC together was an absolute pleasure ... no hot swapping drive bays unlike its predecessor or a fancy window, but I don't miss those features.

Cheers.