Rebuilding the Beast

Meh thats about the same system I've been making all my friends build this spring. Though one decided to go with dual 7950 512mbs since he's just playing WoW on a 60" plasma most of the time... 1080P gaming is fun, and rewarding.

Anyhow, good stuffs.

Back to work so I can afford to finnish my quadcore.


And if you're going Vista make sure you get 2gb of RAM, it brings it to life, other then that your hardware should fly through desktop/multi-core apps with ease. Not all games are ready yet but I'm playing WoW, CS:S, WC3/TFT (DotA), and CNC3 just fine...about to try UT2004 tonight.

Peace,
Gabe
 
From the article:

I think the R600 is going to be ATI’s very own 5800, but that is a story for another time.
Click to expand...

Is this an educated guess, or do you have some hands on info at this time? Either way, wouldn't mind hearing your thoughts on the subject.
 
That's a really nice build. I've put together a similar spec. system a few months ago, except that I did go with the eVGA 680i board. I did have to RMA my 680i because the PS/2 ports were buggered. Thankfully, the new board seems to be 100% functional, I would say that 680i has ultimately been a success, although it got off to a rocky start. Believe me, there were times I wished I had gone with an Intel 975X board... but it turned out alright in the end. My other choices were similar to yours:

CPU: E6600 @ 3 GHz (it probably can go higher, but this is enough for now !!)
graphics: eVGA 8800 GTX (yes, it kicks ass)
memory: 2 x 1 GB Corsair Dominator C4D (I run it at 800 : 4-4-4-12)
HS/fan: Zalman CNPS9700NT (it does an OK job, there are better coolers)
case: CM stacker 832 (highly recommend CM stacker cases!!)

I also agree about sticking with XP for now. I have Vista Ultimate installed, but most of the time I use XP (dual boot). Basically I'm keeping an eye on Vista, and when I think it's safe, I'll switch entirely over to Vista. That time is not now -- mainly because of driver issues. In particular, the 8800 drivers for Vista are not very good yet.

Anyway thanks for taking the time to share your experience with the build, and your thought process for it. I think your result is very good.

Best regards,

-prof
 
Chris_B said:
OMG UR DOOPID :p


What size of a monitor do you use? Seen all the other parts just not the main display.

Was gonna suggest you give vista a try over dual boot but its a pain in the ass to set up, doesn't seem to give the "Older os or vista" option on the bootup so i have to select different first boot drives in the bios depending on what os i want to run. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

30" Dell - 20" Dell - 2X 20" Sony

Yeah, I will likely dump Vista on one of my other drives to give it a whirl.
 
NMR Guy said:
From the article:



Is this an educated guess, or do you have some hands on info at this time? Either way, wouldn't mind hearing your thoughts on the subject.
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That is an educated guess.
 
Chris_B said:
1 other thing, clean those bloody cables up. :eek: :eek:
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Hey bro, you try running 8 drives in there and keeping it spotless. I was very happy with how it all turned out actually. ;)
 
NMR Guy said:
From the article:



Is this an educated guess, or do you have some hands on info at this time? Either way, wouldn't mind hearing your thoughts on the subject.
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He's not the only one who thinks that, a lot of guys are starting to say that. ;)
 
a ;) caries alot more weight when theres an NDA involved:D
 
InorganicMatter said:
He's not the only one who thinks that, a lot of guys are starting to say that. ;)
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Well it was like when nvidia brought out that laughable fx series, it was months late and turned out to be nothing special. People are just looking at scenarios and thinking this MUST be the same thing all over again. Outside of ati and people that have card samples no-one really knows.

The one thing i will say though is that ati are getting worse at releasing things on time. Anyone remember when we had reviews of nvidia and ati's new cards with only a few weeks between them? Seems these days anytime ati bring out a new highend core it gets massively delayed, r-520 is a good example, only reason the r-580 was on schedule was it was a mildly tweaked r-520 core. Hardly an amazing feat to get existing tech with a few tweaks out the door on time. Amd\ati really need to get the thumb out, this delay delay crap is getting pretty tedious, its about the only ati news we see these days, :rolleyes:
 
Damn Kyle...your office is even messier than mine. I didn't think that was possible.
 
it´s good to be the [H] King, u get to keep all the [H]ardware :D
 
In an attempt to satisfy your last request...

Your hardware choices suck, and you are stupid.


:p. Joking aside, nice stuff. I just made the move to C2D and 8800 myself, and its been pure gaming bliss. Enjoy!
 
I have never been a fan of water-cooling. The way I look at it if you want something in water just buy a fish tank and be done with it. It is 2007 and the need or usefulness for water-cooling is moot. Also the fact that you didn't go Vista means you have no DX10 support and that is extremely odd considering this upgrade is from an enthusiast hardware site and thrives on having the latest and greatest. It seems you passed on vista just so you can have RAID. Why anyone needs 4 hard drives is beyond me but to each is to own. Good luck going to a lan party =)

Othen then that nice system...
 
M1ster_R0gers said:
So which one of us lucky members gets to root through your old stuff and build a system?

That is a very nice setup. I have questions about video and audio editing requiring so many hard drives. Is this purely for IO or is it mainly for easily moving folders around in storage?
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1) Multiple IO drives allow faster disk performance, obviously.

2) Video is generally HUGE.

I have one array set for "Work" - it's the speedy array.

I have another array set for storage : It's the BIG array.
 
maleficarus said:
water-cooling is moot. Also the fact that you didn't go Vista means you have no DX10 support and that is extremely odd considering this upgrade is from an enthusiast hardware site and thrives on having the latest and greatest. It seems you passed on vista just so you can have RAID. Why anyone needs 4 hard drives is beyond me but to each is to own. Good luck going to a lan party =)
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you're quite arguementative. moot? hardly. 2 each is own tho. he does say why no vista, "I have yet to see a compelling argument as to why I should use it". I couldn't agree more as there is shit for it right now and we still haven't seen dx10 and 9 comparison. however having 8800gpu makes it quite easy. ..its hardly a lan party computer :rolleyes:
 
Chris_B said:
Well it was like when nvidia brought out that laughable fx series, it was months late and turned out to be nothing special. People are just looking at scenarios and thinking this MUST be the same thing all over again. Outside of ati and people that have card samples no-one really knows.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I just dream shit up and never talk to anyone in the industry. ;) ;)
 
I concur with your lack of faith in moving to vista because without any dx10 games out right now and all of the issues it has and the no raid thing xp was a smarter choice for the moment. In all honesty tho you could've gone with a different board not that im knocking your asus commando :D but i think something in the gigabyte series would've probably been a better choice but if all else fails u can just dual boot and have the best of both worlds :cool:
 
I to just updated my machine to a Intel dual core solution, and I have to say, I'm impressed with it. It was probably the easiest install I've done to date, though coming from a long line of AMD processors, my knowledge is hardly comprehensive. Over all the CPU is good, the ASUS mainboard, is much better now, after a bios update or two.

I think I'm going to give Vista a spin, if I can find a good deal on pricing.
 
t1daballer said:
I concur with your lack of faith in moving to vista because without any dx10 games out right now and all of the issues it has and the no raid thing xp was a smarter choice for the moment. In all honesty tho you could've gone with a different board not that im knocking your asus commando :D but i think something in the gigabyte series would've probably been a better choice but if all else fails u can just dual boot and have the best of both worlds :cool:
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Out of all the Gigabyte P965 boards and the ASUS Commando, I'd pick the ASUS too. After working with both I can safely say the ASUS is the better choice in my opinion. The ASUS Commando was problem free, rock solid stable and easy as hell to overclock with.
 
I just went with the Commando as well... and also because its the ONLY Core2Duo MB with any OC capability to speak of that has 4 PCI slots... how weird is that? Only thing is... the reason I needed 4 PCI slots didn't really work out like I wanted...: http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1030862903#post1030862903 .

In any event, I have (had) too many expensive PCI cards that I can't justify replacing them with PCIe as long as there's a MB around that will run them all. But the days seem numbered for PCI... considering there's only ONE mb with 4 PCI slots, we're damn fortunate the Commando is as good as it is. Of course as it turned out I didn't need to get the Commando for the 4 PCI slots after all but at least its not bad that I did.

The Newegg user reviews of the Commando complained about the heatpipes "humming" and it not having good contact with the NB/SB and bad thermal compound... I took it off, scraped the old stuff off and put on AS5. But I wasn't really as careful as I should have been taking off the old thermal gunk, scraped the hell out of the bottom, and it looks like the heat pipes are really made of aluminum covered with copper... weird. Haven't heard any humming though.

I still use my old Exos1 for water cooling. I haven't OCed my E4300 yet so I haven't measured temps but so far everything is running stable for a week of general purpose use and WoW... my only BSDs were caused by borked network drivers, haven't happened since I re-installed. I got the new Koolance CPU cooler, the 330 I think... mounting mechanism is a hell of a lot better with native support for every modern CPU socket.

I initially installed NOT using the on-board raid, since I boot off a solo Raptor hard drive and wanted to use 2 Seagates in Raid 0 as a data volume. That idea wasn't so good on this MB... when I enabled the on-board raid I'm forced to put all the HDs onto the raid controller, even drives being used solo... so that means I couldn't boot onto the C drive since I didn't install the Intel Matrix raid drivers when installing Windows. So since I didn't know how to add the raid drivers after the fact (if there's even a way), I had to re-install again... word of warning. None of my previous MBs had this problem.

Overall for the Commando, so far so good. I bought 2 2Gig ram modules... 3008 MBs shown as available... would that increase to the full 4 Gig if I were running a 64 bit OS? Using the 902 Bios that just came out. Will probably try OCing this week or upcoming weekend... will be interesting due to the memory... but all I really want is to get to 3 GHz... heh we'll see.
 
You may also want to note that under XP you arent going to be able to use an 8series and a 7/6 series together, at least for a while. But expect the UDA for XP to come out soon.

Vista does allow this :)

Sorry if this was a repost.
 
LibertySyclone said:
You may also want to note that under XP you arent going to be able to use an 8series and a 7/6 series together, at least for a while. But expect the UDA for XP to come out soon.

Vista does allow this :)

Sorry if this was a repost.
Click to expand...


I am using a 6600 and an 8800 currently side by side....just needed to install the 6600 drivers first.
 
Brand new XP Pro install. I have an 8800 and a 6600 installed.

Installed the 97.94 driver first, but it did not install for the 6600. Installed 93.71 to pick up the 6600. Box would not reboot. BSOD at splash screen.

Went in safe mode, reinstalled 97.94, all is working fine now, except for this error message at bootup. Reporting it sends me back to MS for fix that I stalled several times, but it does not fix the error. But otherwise, everything is working just fine.

NVIDIAerror.jpg


Also, checking the system information screen in the NVIDIA control panel, I show both cards to be using 97.94.

NVIDIA2error.jpg


And yes, I did select each entry to check if it is identifying two cards and it is.
 
EODetroit said:
Overall for the Commando, so far so good. I bought 2 2Gig ram modules... 3008 MBs shown as available... would that increase to the full 4 Gig if I were running a 64 bit OS? Using the 902 Bios that just came out. Will probably try OCing this week or upcoming weekend... will be interesting due to the memory... but all I really want is to get to 3 GHz... heh we'll see.
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Yes, you would have a full 4GB of ram available if you were using a 64bit OS.
 
Also on the subject of temps I added this to the article....

Update 04-09-07: Worth mentioning as well is that these temperatures above were taken with an ambient air temperature of 80F/27C. Doing some gaming testing over the weekend when the ambient temperature in my office was 70F/21C, we saw temperatures of 115F/46C for CPU and 160F/71C for GPU during STALKER gaming sessions.
 
Thanks Kyle, thats more or less what I was looking for. The single UDA driver that supports the 6/7/8series cards will be out HOPEFULLY within the month.

The beauty of Nvidia's UDA driver is for example is: If your 8800 failed tomorrow and you had a 7950 laying around that you could slap it in and not have to uninstall/reinstall a new driver. Currently you can only do this in Vista (with the single driver).

There are currently a lot of people that are having issues like you had with installing the 8800 driver before the 7/6 driver. Its nice to know that you can install the older driver first and it will work.
 
Kyle must have copied my rig or something. I have an E6700 OC'd to 3.4GHz on a Corsair Nautilus with an 8800 as well :D

Idle: 41
Load: 61

Same temps as Kyle, and very quiet. I was running a Zalman 9700 on its quietest setting (hate noise) but it was getting up to 73C or thereabouts under load, so I opted for water this time around.
 
swatbat said:
Will say those suckers work well. Have 2 clients that use them for there servers rooms. One of them has like 3 servers in a room with the switches and has one.

Other client just got 2 new servers to replace the old one and we used one of these untill we moved them to another room that has its own zone on the ac system.
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Yeah they work ok, but they will double your electric bill.

I was absolutely shocked after running it for one month during the evening/ night. Needless to say it is now in sotrage.

Mine was a 4000 btu model form Walmart.
 
Well that nautilus system looks pretty nice, haven't moved to water cooling yet, I might start though.
 
daphatgrant said:
Well that nautilus system looks pretty nice, haven't moved to water cooling yet, I might start though.
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If you want to get started with water cooling, the Nautilus is the way to go. It works well and is super easy to setup. I had mine going in about 20 minutes or so after taking it out of the box.
 
I must say that your rig is ready some [H]ard Work. Its got buisness written all over it, Good Job ! What monitor do you have hooked up to it?
 
Dan_D said:
I think that everyone who works for the [H] runs a triple monitor setup. I know I do, I know Brent and Kyle do as well. I think I remember reading that one of the [H] consumer guys and Mark Warner (Video Card editor) does too.
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Sadly, my third monitor plans have not come to fruition just yet. I keep finding more pressing uses for the money I keep setting aside for one. :( It makes me a sad panda, and a sad walrus at the same time.

And yes. the lack of sufficient desktop space is painful at times. When I have Frontpage, Excel, IE, and Photoshop open, along with a half a dozen explorer windows...well...it sucks.
 
Dan_D said:
I think that everyone who works for the [H] runs a triple monitor setup. I know I do, I know Brent and Kyle do as well. I think I remember reading that one of the [H] consumer guys and Mark Warner (Video Card editor) does too.
Click to expand...

I have "just" a 24" LCD, but it's perfect. I can totally use two apps at once, and don't hurt my neck always looking around.

I used to have two 21"s but prefer a single, widescreen display.
 
I'd like to go quad, but I really don't want 4 video cards in my system, plus I'd have to buy a bigger desk.

I'll be running 1 LCD connected to 2 cards in SLI enabled at all times so I can jump into games easily with the performance I want, and then a 3rd video card to run 2 LCD's, for a tripple monitor setup. I'd have to add a 4th card if I wanted quad LCDs, and that I aint gonna do.
 
Josh_Norem said:
I have "just" a 24" LCD, but it's perfect. I can totally use two apps at once, and don't hurt my neck always looking around.

I used to have two 21"s but prefer a single, widescreen display.
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I'm guess I can see that. I use to have "just" a 23 inch lcd(apple hd). Went from a 21 inch crt and a 17 inch lcd to it. Used it for 2 years. Switched a few months ago to 2 22 inch lcds. A single bigger screen would be nice for some things like video playback and games. Having the 2 22 inch screens is really nice though. Trying to figure out a reason to buy 2 more and have a wall of 4.
 
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