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Showing posts with label cooling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cooling. Show all posts

5/4/12

RAID monster Redux


So the first build was a lot of work and shortcuts were made. Screws not fitted, no cable management, no extra cooling, etc.

The summer is coming and that means hotter indoor temperature. Better fit those extra fans now! It will surely extend the lifetime of both the disks and the computer.

I had a whole bunch of Akasa & Noctua voltage reducers to decrease the overall noise level of all the fans.

System seemd to average at around 26 degrees celsius according to Speccy. :D Room temperature is 25.1. So that's pretty decend. That machine runs 10 hardisks, a Phenom 960T, 4 GB of 1066Mhz RAM + 10 fans. It only runs a limited 64MB old Nvidia card at the moment. This rig draws about 197 watts, So the fitting of 10 fans increased the watt usage by about 10, even after ALL of then was fitted with voltage reducers.


Work in progres! 










80mm fan attached with softmounts, diagonally :)





Rear fans & PSU fan:

  1. 2x80mm rear exhausts and a stock Phenom fan
  2. 1x80mm internal intake
  3. 1x80mm external intake

Front intakes: (Both covered with dust filters.)

1x120mm Akasa (SYSFAN)
1x80mm Somethingsomething (power siphoned from molex)






Cable managemnet done!



Custom fitted 120 and 80 mm fans blwing on the
side of the lower 6 disks trough chassis holes


Finished ! With a 8mm green led outtake in front of the CPU fan.

4/9/12

My new gaming rig!

CoolerMaster HAF 922 bigtower with built in glass panel side


2x 120mm fans on top. I managed to break a blade on the original 200x200x3 fan! Have a spare fan you want to donate?! :D
Specs:
  • Gigabyte FXA990 UD7
  • Intel 80GB SSD disk for system
  • Samsung 160Gb SATA disk for data (I also moved all User directories to this drive to save space on the SSD. I can teach you how if you want!)
  • 16 Gb 1600 Mhz RAM
  • Phenom II X6 1100T CPU
  • 2x Sapphire Radeon 6790 in Crossfire
  • NXZT 5-fan controller
  • Kingston dual fan RAM cooler
  • Noctua SE CPU fan
  • Gbit Ethernet with 9K Jumbo frames
  • 24" BenQ HDMI LCD
  • Manually BIOS-overclocked to 220 FSB. (So RAM goes as 1740 and CPU at 3.3Ghz I think.
  • 2x 250GB Hitachi SATA 3.0Gbit in RAID0 on the Marvell ports
  • 1x 320GB Hitachi SATA Deskstar 3.0Gbit
  • 2x USB3 ports
  • 7.1 Surround
  • 6x USB2 ports with 2x power
  • ESATA connector
  • Corsair 750W V1 PSU

Front View

At the most, this monster draws about 500 Watts and seems to run smoothly.
One thing, the 6790 cards can be safely overclocked to 880 core speed, but do NOT mess with the Memory Speed clocks. That will get you BSODS. Also, I dont think it's completely stable on core speed 900Mhz.

A little note about the 6790 and CrossFire, it seems that you need to restart CrossFire before starting any games about half the time. Otherwise I get a flickering screen 50% of the time.

I am running Sapphire Trixx and enabled card syncing and disabled UPLS. That is supposed to do the trick. But not always it seems.

Also, if you happen to buy this motherboard and you have a Phenom II X4 960T, it will actually fit in the AM3 slot and works perfectly if your mobo has BIOS v7 or newer. (the 960T is the last of it's kind to do this. It has *both* DDR2 and DDR3 memory controllers.

I broke my 960T and had to get a new one, thats why I have a 1100T. But I fixed the broken pin on the 960T and put it back into it't proper AM2+ motherboard!