Frank's 2011 Upgrade

Well it is time for Frank to grow up. 2011 brings some exciting power to Frank's build as he continues to morph into the beast he was built to be. I willl update this thread as we go through the upgrade this weekend. Several good things are planned to be installed and seet up on Frank - then the benchmarking and performance testing will begin.

For now, here are some images of the parts going into Frank this weekend.

Here is the list of the parts actually going into Frank this weekend...............

1 x ASUS MOTHERBOARD ACCESSORY OC STATION OVERCLOCKING (Fits in two 5.25 bays)
1 x Razer Naga Special Edition
1 x Saitek Cyborg Keyboard
2 x OCZ Technology 60 GB Vertex 2 SATA II 3.0 GB SSD’s
2 x PNY XLR8 GTX 580 1536 MB GDDR5 PCI-Express HDMI Graphics Card VCGGTX580XPB
1 x Sparkle GTX 580 1536MB GDDR5 PCI-Express HDMI Graphics Card
4 x Fluid XP+ EXT (Extreme Performance) Coolant - Blood Red
2 x Bitspower Multi-Transfer Base (Coupler) - Set of 2
10 x PrimoFlex Pro LRT UV Red Tubing -1/2in. ID X 3/4in. OD
3 x Koolance Coolant Temperature Sensor Plug, G 1/4
20 x Koolance Nozzle Single, G 1/4" Compression [ID: 13mm (1/2"); OD: 19mm (3/4")]
2 x Bitspower Black Sparkle Y-Block Fitting With Triple G1/4" Ports
2 x Bitspower G1/4 Black Sparkle Triple Rotary 90-Degree Compression Fitting-ID 1/2" OD 3/4"
4 x Enzotech Rotary Fitting G 1/4 Thread - Male to Male
3 x Watercool HEATKILLER® GPU-X³ GTX570/580 "Hole Edition" for Reference Design GTX570/580
1 x Antec Formula 7 Nano Diamond Thermal Compound
1 x Koolance MB-ASR3E (ASUS Rampage III Extreme Water Block) [no nozzles]

This will be installed into the existing system I now call "Frank" that houses a Asus Rampage III Extreme moherboard I installed a a few weeks ago. Frank is housed in a Corsair 800D case that has a Stealth 360 radiator hidden up top with three Push and three pull 120mm fans. We are already equiped with an internal MCP655 12v pump inside Frank, and the ERM-2K3UCU external cooling system also employs a MCP 655 but the 24 volt version.

With the 1500W Silverstone PSU, we should be fine powering these GTX 580's slated to be installed this weekend as it used to handle all four GTX 285's well. I will be keeping one GTX 285 installed in Frank as his dedicated PhysX card allowing the GTX 580's to focus on their GPU tasks and the Intel Core i7 975 EE processor to do its thing as well.

The dual WD 300GB VelociRaptors in RAID 0 will be removed and replaced with the Callisto 60GB SSD's in RAID 0 for program loading
The OCZ Vertex 2 SSD's will become the new OS/BOOT drives in RAID 0
I have on order two 2TB SATA III 6GB WD Caviar Black on the way which will replace the two existing 1TB drives for storage and give me faster access speeds to that stored data

That is the plan........................

Good God, lol very awesome but can it play minecraft? cant wait till its done, i want to see some bench marks.

Nice but got hit with fake av pop up when I click on one of the pictures

Droolssssss..

Very Very excited to see the outcome! You inspire me to keep going with my monster of a gaming rig!

Build log below.............

Edit

It was time to upgrade Frank N. Stein for 2011 with all the goodies that was ordered, from the water cooling parts to the hardware that will increase Frank's abilities, it was all being laid out. Because the current water cooling parts have been in use for about a year, it was time to also de-scale and do a full system flush. So out to the garage I went to begin the weekend of upgrading Frank.


I began by taking all the parts I had ordered, all my miscellaneous parts boxes, tools, and the likes and staging them in the garage. I would feel much better about sloshing around large bins of water in here than in the house. So I went to work putting up the work station where the upgrade was to take place, getting all the necessary items together so I could begin the upgrade on Frank.


Once I had the tables and desk set up, files moved to safe hard drives I was not formatting and things in place, it was time to begin the upgrade process. First order of business was to flush Frank.

After two gallons of Vinegar and many gallons of very hot water later, Frank was flushed. IT was amazing to see the amount of tiny particles that was extracted during this flushing process. I stopped the pumps a couple times to let the vinegar water simply sit in the loops, then fired the pumps back up to flush out the scaling and particles that were still in the loops. This took almost two hours before clean particle free water was freely pumping from the tubing into the exit side. I was running between the kitchen and the garage with buckets of hot water - one filling while I was taking the other to the "input" tub of water where I kept adding vinegar to the mix. Then I had to time it so I could grab buckets of water out of the "exit" tub and throw them outside on the lawn - an advantage of doing this in the garage, outside was close by.

Then it came time to strip Frank down. I had to remove the motherboard in order to attach the Koolance water block for the Asus Rampage III. I also had a vision on how I was going to do the loop routing and knew it was easier to use the time outside the case to make a proper bend going from the CPU to the Mosfet/NB/SB Koolance block. So first things first was to get everything out of Frank and get to the motherboard so I could uninstall it.


As builds generally go for me, I get distracted or I decide I want to put something in as opposed to taking something out, so before I actually finished the removal of the mother board, I decided I really wanted to take out the fan controllers at top, install the Asus OC Station and see how it was going to fit. When I did I realized that it was not going to fit at top where the other two fan controllers used to exist. I was going to have to shuffle things around a bit because the OC Stations back end was too deep to fit with the tubing coming down from the 360 Stealth Radiator inside and at the top of Frank. So I have to move my 5.25" bay devices around to allow for them all to fit. I finally found the Card reader was the best choice to go up top, then the OC Station, then the Blu Ray/DVD drives. Each one also had to be considered as to length because of the tubing coming from the Stealth 360 radiator. After much effort, 4 beers, and some picture time, I finally got the Asus OC Station installed.


Again, being side tracked I really wanted to install the OCZ Vertex 2's as well in the case. I removed the front two bays that used to house the Western Digital 300GB VelociRaptors that I had in RAID 0 for programs and changed them out for the OCZ Drives that I put back in.

One thing that always bothered me about the Corsair Obsidian 800D was the "Hot Swap" bays. They never really worked for me, the OS didn't care for them, and I always wondered if the circuitry was causing me any slowdowns. It is an understood fact that the more different connection points you have in a circuit, the more likely you will have faults or a degradation of performance in some way. Well I felt that this was one of those instances that I did not care for this added connection points in my circuits, so I removed all the PCB's and ran the SATA wiring direct to the SSD's. I wanted to make sure that the SSD's had direct communication as possible with the Motherboard and did not want to chance the Corsair PCB's here as being a potential point of failure or degradation of performance. So out they went and direction connections made.


Once I finally got re-focused, I was able to pull the motherboard from the case and water block it with the Koolance water block. At that time I also went and put the connections between the CPU water block and the mother board water block by adding the two Bitspower rotary 90 degree compression connectors and the minimal tubing needed to make the connection.


Now that the motherboard was out of the case, I was able to then take various pictures of angles and close up's. The theme for Frank has always been red, so the Mushkin Redline's not only were purchased for performance, but they also clearly stated my favorite color - RED. So Frank runs Redline for now, though 12GB of Mushkin Blackline is now on order to upgrade Frank with. So for now, Frank runs Redline.

Then I had to get some really good shots of the water cooling parts installed on the mother board. I have seen others images that have inspired me to build cleaner and prettier PC's and the shots some people take of the hardware is simply amazing. I have always tried to find the angles and look that some people achieved with the photography of their systems components, connectors, and anything related to their builds. Here are a few shots at what I think are comparable to these kinds of angles and shots I have loved so much. There is a certain beauty IMO with Red/Black/and Chrome colors. Water cooling hardware just has a certain appeal when combined with the complexity of the circuit board, resistors, and other elements within the images. So consider this the "artistic" portion of the build as I flex my photography skills or lack thereof in the attempt to give you the viewer a bit of electronics eye candy to admire as I do each time I look at them myself.

Some of these images makes me wish I had thought of grabbing a water dropper and placing some strategic dropletts on the water blocks for effect.

More tomorrow...............................................

Looks awesome so far!

While the board was out, I just had to stick all three GTX 580's on the board before I took off the stock fan shrouds and installed the water block on the GTX 580's. That is just a lot of GPU power sitting there.



It was time to begin putting the water blocks on, so the first thing was to remove the fan shrouds



Once the fan shrouds were removed, the thermal paste cleaned, and the new thermal tape and paste applied, it was time to drop the blocks on the cards and get them ready to install once the mother board is installed back into the case.



Now that the Sparkle card was done, I went and finished up the PNY GTX 580's then set them on the mother board to take a couple shots to show them before they get installed in the case.

Now that the GTX 580's were blocked, it was time to put the Rampage III back in the case and get things hooked up. Once I got the Asus Rampage III Extreme mother board installed, I started getting the tubing in for the water cooling. I have run Frank in single and dual loops many times in many configurations over the year and have found little to no difference in dedicated loops, what gets the coolest water first and so on, so when deciding on this routing I was mainly looking at ways to make things flow smoothly without sharp turns and feed the components with as much water flow as the system is capable of.



When installing the top tubing portion of the loop, I felt that it was best to split the flow from the MCP655 pump inside and feed the GPU and CPU at the same time, then find a way to "Y" the returns before they exit the case.



It really looked like it was going to work out. However as I progressed I came to realize that it was going to turn into massive tubing issues again, almost hearkening back to the first days of Franks tubing fiasco's.

After carefully looking over the system, the first thing to go was the "Y" coming from the pump. This allows a direct feed into the CPU from the pump.



When done, I realized that the water was flowing from the pump to the CPU, then into the Mofset/NB/SB water block, then out the bottom of the board. I realized then I could use the water block to feed the coolant down, then back up through the GPU's and use this as the exit tubing that would connect to the tubing that is exiting the case.



Another challenge I faced was to have three temp probes in the loop at various points to know what my entrance, mid, and exit temps are. I achieved this initially by placing a temp probe in a "T" block before the pump inside the case, then as it exits the Koolance Rampage III Water block, I was able to capture the mid point temps by placing a "T" between the mother board and the GPU's.



As it exits the GPU's and connects through to the exit tubing I was able to place a "T" there as well and pick up that exit temp.



So what I thought was my best option at routing was complete, I stepped back to marvel at the beastliness of Frank. Another change I made to the loop was to remove the "T" block where I was picking up the "In" temp right before the internal pump and replace it with the "Y". I was hoping that this would provide smoother flow for the liquid as opposed to the hard 90 degree turn it was going to take with the "T" block. So the block was replaced with the "Y" I removed from the split and I inserted the temp probe in the other end of the "Y" so the incoming water was going to certainly hit it and I was going to get a good incoming temp reading at this point in the loop. The fact that this is directly above the pump sucking the water down, I was hoping that this would not be a reduction point and that the suction from the MCP655 would level out hit the flow takes by having that temp probe where it is.


Actually I will never be done with an upgrade, but this one still has some changes to go..............

I started tidying up the cables on the back side of Frank, cleaning up the cable routing and tie wraps that needed to be snipped off, etc. Once done I installed the side panels and stepped back again for a photo shoot..............

That Corsair 800D Case just looked beastly sitting there housing all that power yet to be unleashed. I have worked with many cases over the past 10+ years of building and this one is a roomy case and there is a reason many people started grabbing it from the start. You can fit so much in this case and be able to make it look good. More class than flash, the Corsair 800D was one of the best cases I have had the pleasure of working in,



I carried Frank back inside and upstairs to my office - he seemed to gain weight as I was going up the stairs. By the time I reached the office I was happy to set his heavy arse down. Frank put on some pounds in the upgrade I think and its not like I want him to go on a diet or anything, he was just right. So I went back down, got the Koolance ERM unit and brought it up as well, set it in the rack, measured and adjusted the entrance and ext tubing between Frank and the ERM unit, then did the leak test thing. After an hour of pumps at full max in both Frank (MCP655 @ 12v) and the ERM unit (MCP655 @ 24v), it was time to install Windows 7 Ultimate 64.

I spent the next hour loading the OS, drivers, updates, programs and so on without an issue. Once I got things installed I decided to open up CPUID Hardware Monitor to find the IOH VCore was freaking smokin hot compared to the rest of the system. As I was digging around for different tools to see what was up, the system BSOD'd, said I had an excessive IOH VCore temp and the system shut down to prevent damage - OH #$%^&*()!!!

I proceeded to drain Frank again, rip everything out of Frank to get the motherboard out. Something was not allowing the Koolance water block to cool that North Bridge chip, which made no sense. The Mofset and the South Bridge was at 30c or less, so why in the middle of the same block did the North Bridge decide it was going to not stay cool?

Once I got the board off and took a closer look, I found the culprit. I had missed the four screws around the North Bridge portion of the water block and it was not being pressed against the chip to keep it cool. Once fixed, I had to reinstall everything - again.

During the re-install I realized I could do a much cleaner loop by taking the exit water from the CPU and run it directly into the GPU. This way the GPU's would feed the water down to the bottom section of the Koolance Rampage III water block and then where it exits from the water block, I could then tie it into the exit tubing and make things much cleaner and minimize even more tubing needs..

Frank was complete. I got everything back together, did another leak test, then got the water flowing back through the loop and things worked wonderfully.



So it was picture time and happy time as Frank was complete with his upgrade for now. One thing we wanted to show was the Razer Naga mouse that was part of this years upgrade - what a fast mouse that thing is. It is so awesome how the versatile this mouse is and it may be touted for RPG games and the likes, but for a die hard FPS gamer like Frank and I, we happen to love the many uses we can get out of the customizable buttons on this mouse. In short - best mouse upgrade ever!



Then we had to take a gander at the Asus ROG OC Station. That thing is a nice item to have, it looks cool on the front of Frank where we had removed the toggle switches for fan controls as this unit also does fan control. We were able to see many things about the system through this panel as well as set up a slide show when not using it. This is a really neat toy to have though not as necessary as the rest of the system to the upgrade, it was the "excess" buy of the build. Granted you can do everything this can do in BIOS, but it is nice to be able to tweak things in BIOS in real time even when Windows is running. So this will come in handy when I start Overclocking Frank.



Now for a view of what Frank is pushing - those three 24" Asus monitors do well and provide a desktop resolution of 5980x1080 that I work on daily. When gaming though it is cool to do three screens but single screen is really the best. I have this arranged so GPU #1 is actually my center screen. This way when going to a single monitor resolution (1920x1080) in a game, it automatically fires it off on the center monitor without me having to change anything. The custom keyboard/mouse tray I made works well to keep keyboard and mouse at the same level as the chairs arm rests. This allows me extended time at the computer because my arms do not tire nor do I have wrist strain because everything is at a relaxed level and there is no uncomfortable placements of the arms or wrists to operate keyboard or mouse. This came from years of working 10+ hours a day and 7 days a week at the computer, I had to find a way to reduce strain and maximize performance.

One of the many reasons for this upgrade was the anticipation of the release of Crysis 2 on March 25th. Frank and I have waited to play Crysis 2 and since the GTX 285's were not DX 11 capable, it was a necessary upgrade. I have played the original Crysis campaign for several years now and love it each time I upgrade its like a new game. Even though I was able to play 40+ FPS at 1920x1080 and 16xQ AA, I was missing some things I never saw before I played it with these GTX 580's - amazing is simply not descriptive enough.



So we fired up the Crysis Benchmarking program to find out what Frank can do with the original Crysis:



So when we saw what Frank could do with the Crysis Benchmarking results, it was time to fire up Futuremark 3DVANTAGE and see what score we could do. Before the upgrade the best score Frank was ever able to do was a 38k overclocked to 4.6Ghz and the four GTX 285's installed on a EVGA Classified board.

So we were excited to see what Frank can do now with the same benchmarking software running this Asus Rampage III Extreme with the three GTX 580's at stock settings. Keeping in mind that the CPU was slightly OC'd to 3.7Ghz. Frank runs the Core i7 975 Extreme processor, so he has the power to feed these GPU's, well aside from the 980x, not much more out there could feed these GTX 580's like the 975E can, especially overclocked. I am sure the performance will increase substantially once I hit the 4.5Ghz range when I get to overclocking Frank. This was also with the GPU's at stock 775Mhz clock speeds - no overclocking yet has been done to the GPU's either and not sure I really need to with three GTX 580's. This was another reason for the RAM upgrade to 12GB was to ensure I had enough room for data to flow unrestricted as these GTX 580's will take just about anything the rest of the system can push on them as fast as it can push on them.



Frank was very fast in starting, very fast in shutting down and running these tests so I had to see the speeds the RAID 0 OCZ Vertex 2 60GB SSD drives were running. I fired up the ATTO Disk testing program to see how well these Vertex 2 drives were doing - FREAKING AWESOME!

They were smoking fast in both Read and Write speeds - what was very surprising is that many times the Write times were faster than the read. These drives in RAID 0 were essentially doubling the R/W speeds of a single SSD. I was seriously impressed with the performance of these drives.



In the end, Frank has become the beast I hoped he would. Now with the new Mushkin RAM on the way, I feel certain we can get some good solid Overclocking numbers put up. That is what the future holds for Frank (aside from tearing up Crysis 2 and working as hard as I do). There is hope that we can push Frank farther than he has gone before and reach some terrific numbers. Only time will tell.

And one last view of the SLI Bridge mod I did. Actually it was simply taking an image of the Razer naga mouse I have, adjusting it to fit within the correct size and adding some touches to it and printing it on photo paper. Then a little glue and we have a much better looking SLI bridge than the original Asus one IMO.

Tell Frank I said "Very nice". And tell him that I wanna take him home also :-O lol

ty will do - it was a fun build and Frank just keeps getting better. I have already re-run the loop a different way hoping to get a little more cooling out of it. Will post some updates once I am done with the rest.

Cav,

What type of psu is that?

Also, I found pictures of your setup from waaaaaaaaaaay back from the Halo days!! Speaking of which, do you guys just have one server on there?

That PSU is a Silverstone SST-ST1500, its a modular 1500w PSU power hog.

LMAO - I bet that was the SLI 7980 GT's SLI'd on an Asus A8N32 SLI Deluxe board with an AMD X2 Processor and Patriot DDR RAM. With the big Zalman copper CPU blood letting cooler and the GPU Zalman coolers to match - right? One messy ass case w/ wires everywhere huh?

I have not played Halo now for about 6 months. I have no idea what OU is doing now that I turned the clan over to him.

Yep, you are right about that system. Do you still have those pictures?

Also, as for the Silverstone SST-ST1500, did you mod the cables??

Wow, you really go all out. I took one look at your pc being flushed and my jaw just dropped. I don't know if everyone on this forum does this(as you can tell I'm real new) but wow that's a lot of work. It must be worth it in the end when everyone is drooling(myself included) over such an awesome looking rig.

I feel like I have enough invested in the cooling system that I want to keep it maintained. This was the reason for the flush, it is inevitable that particles begin forming, scaling, etc so that was a great flush to Franks system. In the end I do feel it was worth it. Frank not only is flexing his techno might but he is keeping his cool as well.

I ran Prime95 & Load Tester for an hour with Frank sitting at 4.223MHz (4.2Ghz) and he sat on average around 59c. It may have taken some effort to get the systems flushed out and then doing the upgrade but these temps are fantastic IMO.

With the new Blackline installed it was time to OC and see what Frank could do.

Here he is at 4.5Ghz after running 8 hours of Prime95/CPU Load Tester solid, I ran VANTAGE to see what the Frankster could produce.

such an awesome build man!

WHoa Frank is definitely one happy punk. Awesome setup!

DisrupTer911 said:

such an awesome build man!

Click to expand...

kyodai said:

WHoa Frank is definitely one happy punk. Awesome setup!

Click to expand...

Thanks for checking out Frank, yeah he is one beastly machine and I am really enjoying everything from building, maintaining, operating and oc/benchmarking him. I am sure there will be many months of fun Frank will produce - before his next upgrade of course (which is always around the corner w/me).

Well the Mushkin RAM was great, really good RAM, but the speed of this RAM was not what I was looking for to put in Frank. The Redline was 2000Mhz RAM, this set may be able to get 1600 or 1700 out of it. If I am going to OC< I need something with a bit more headroom when I have to get into OC'ing the ram. So the Blackline was more of an impulse buy than a calculated one. I went searching and picked up two kits of the Corsair Dominator GT 6 GB PC3-16000 2000Mhz Triple Channel Core i3, i5, i7 DDR3 Memory Kit CMT6GX3M3A2000C8, it will be here Friday. So I will post an updated pic once that RAM is installed.

NICE!

I have returned the Mushkin 12GB only because it did not have fast enough FSB speeds and the fact it was 6 sticks versus getting three sticks of RAM. Becuase I using Triple Channel RAM, it is better to populate the three primary DIMM's to get full speed potential from the RAM modules.

Today the following is scheduled to arrive:

Corsair Memory Dominator GT 12 GB (3 x 4GB) Memory Kit for Intel Core i7 12 Triple Channel Kit 2000MHz (PC3 16000) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM CMT12GX3M3A2000C9



Frank is all about power and speed, but never passes at a chance for some cool bling, so we also have this coming to work with the RAM and give us a few more bouncing lights - that actually serve a purpose.

Corsair Airflow PRO LED Memory Activity and Temperature Monitor CMXAFPRO

The1stCAV said:

Corsair Airflow PRO LED Memory Activity and Temperature Monitor CMXAFPRO

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I want one of these!!

I wish there was an easier way for me to flush my PC, right now I have to hold mine upside down and let it drain from the res, I made my tubing way too tight :/ Should've left some slack and a put a drain valve or something.

I was able to get the keyboard installed and working today, so the older Saitek Eclipse has been retired to the WHS in the rack and the new KB has been installed.

One thing I can say about this Cyborg v.7 I hated instantly was the fact that whomever designed the wrist rest was specifically aiming at gamers because the center section of the wrist rest was a cut out, not allowing your wrists or your hands to have anything to rest on, making the keyboard suck for anything but gaming. It is not like you could comfortably rest your hands on the keyboard and type.

Fortunately the old Saitek Eclipse wrist rest actually snapped into place on this new Cyborg v.7 and gave me the solid wrist rest I needed without that stupid cut out. I did order a red gel wrist rest though, so hopefully that will do the trick as a more permanent solution. Considering Frank is also a work computer, I needed to be able to type and use it as a business machine as well as a gaming machine, so the supplied wrist rest was not a good solution. Luckily I was able to find a different solution that worked.

I always love looking at your posts of your rig. Looks great.

Can't wait to see what is in store for it later this year > keep up the good work!