So after sticking with my old p4 and 6800 gto for about 5? 6? years now I decided to move forward. So I jumped head first into the brand spanking new Core i7s.




First shipment of goodies arrived last week. Since this is mainly a gaming rig I decided to go without the little wireless card and made the sacrifice of moving my hard line from my PS3 over to the new computer.



Corsair 1000watt modular PSU overkill from what's in the comp right now but I'll make use of it when the next gen of graphics cards come out.



MSI 4870 with 1gig of gddr5 place holder card. I was originally going to go with the 4870x2 but ended up with some unforeseen dental work so had to cut that out. Same thing with the original plans to water cool. Those will still be followed trough with though maybe at Christmas.




Case is pretty big with pleny of air flow 3x230mm fans 1 on front as intake and 1 on side as intake with the last ontop as exhaust and a 140mm in the rear for exhaust.


Today's shipment of goodies the i7 920 2.66GHz, MSI eclipse sli/xfire capable motherboard. And 2x3gb of G.Skill 1333 9-9-9-24.




Only real problem I had was the Sound card in this pic that came with the motherboard turned out to be dead and it took me a while to determine that it was causing my problems.

Can you imagine how atrocious my the rest of the comp would look if my case didn't have this AWESOME wire management system?

So anyway that's my new computer, I plan on overclocking the i7 as soon as I get it on water, they're said to be able to do 4GHz on air with a good heat sink so it'll be interesting to see where I can go and at what temps. Maybe throw the 4870 on water as well, that thing is a freaking vacuum cleaner. Just started downloading my games from steam so I haven't had a chance yet to unleash the beast and see what it's like. But now that I have something capable if anyone wants to play anything I'm down with it.

Oh and just because he's awesome here's a picture of my squirrel rocky:

He wants your nuts.

 

Groovy shit, but I think Middy has a sticky'd thread for posting your rig.

 

I hate you so much >_>

Congrats. Post some clocking stats when you get around to it.

 

Nah don't worry about it. That thread is meant more for just text, or bragging when you get new stuff.

Does ATI not suck anymore?

And nice stuff. I've falled way out of touch with current top of the line PC stuff. My system, other then the 680i going to shit multiple times, has been rock solid, only thing I'll be doing for awhile is adding new hard drives and new coolant I think.

 

I hate you so fucking much right now >_<.

Awesome looking rig. How's it run?

Midknight: ATI makes a few REALLY good cards value wise, especially if you wanna get twins.

 

4850 and 4870 are way better cards than the GTX 260 and 280 value wise. Esp. in CF.

Nice rig. What monitor are you going to drive with the beast? I hope it's not a shitty acer. Also, I completely forgot the 920 was a quadcore. I know they are going to be releasing a dual core i7, thought the 920 was it.

lols @ squirrel

You can actually have them as pets?

 

Awesome squirrel.

:awesome

 

I fucking love Rocky

 

OK I'm still just getting games on it and have had a chance to play them a little, just some Far Cry 2 and tried a little BF2 as well. And I just have to say I love this thing, and it was totally worth it. Though like I said in the original post I'm coming from a P4 and a 6800gto.

It's nice to actually be able to turn up settings and play at a native/max resolution. And on that not I admit to playing on the shitty Acer you can see in the one picture. I am in the market for a new monitor of the wide screen variety , but like I said money ended up tighter than I was expecting. I'm not really in the know on what brand of monitor is good, so I'm open to any and all suggestions you might have.

I'm still reading up on the motherboard before I touch any of the overclocking features, since I was never really into that kind of thing before I don't want to fuck up my brand new system because I jumped right in without looking.


I'm as much Rocky's pet as he is mine. He's still a wild animal but doesn't mind humans especially when they give him food.




For whatever reason the images aren't working so you just get links of rocky watching you masturbate.

 

Nice rig. The 4870 is a great graphics card (the one I recommend to my friends looking for a single graphics card) and i7 really really speeds stuff up. I'm waiting for the Foxconn Blood Rage motherboard for my i7 gaming rig though. Can you say 4x GTX280 (3 SLI 1 Physx) :awesome?

 

Looks to me as though you would only be able to fit a single 280 on that board the others would have to be single slot cards if you were going 3+physics. And only 3 ram slots whats up with that?

 

Gah, I'm arguing about something totally unimportant.

Here's my full rig if anyone's interested including OC specs.
Gaming Rig


@ Zield

PM me if you want to game some time. I play TF2, COD4, DOW, COH mostly.

/thread hijack

 

Dont waste your money on the Physx shit, nothing supports it worth a damn. And SLI is for folks who want to show off their cocks.

Get 1 high quality card and call it done. Get 2 if you use a super high resolution or multiple monitors running ultra intensive shit, but do not waste the cash on more then 2. Nothing really supports it worth a damn yet, your cards are going to get too hot from lack of airflow between them, and to be honest, it's effing stupid. Edit: Oh dear sweet jesus, you want to water cool 4 vid cards? You do realize the cost of that is beyond retarded right?

I choose you Murton! To give a more in depth summary.

 

Here's indepth

SLI: Only useful for High Resolution. Not useful for more than one monitor setups. Not cost effective. More cost for little gain. Doesn't scale as well as CFX does.

It is better to buy a decent rig and upgrade it every year or two than to buy a massive rig right now.

I would spend the majority of my money on things I will keep such as Mouse, Keyboard, Speakers, Sound card, Monitor/s and storage.

Things like the CPU, GPU and Mobo can be upgraded fairly often, aswell as RAM to an extent fairly often. Going for an extreme CPU, 4x SLI cards is insanely stupid if you won't use it. And from the games you listed, you won't. Not one bit.

Water cooling: Eh. If you get a decent OC. Maybe. But 4 GPU's, CPU, RAM, MoBo and HDD's will require at least two reservoirs and you will be refilling the coolant VERY often and you will want a TONNE of fans cooling the Heatsinks on the reservoirs as the amount of heat being made by the GPU's, CPU, MoBo, RAM and ALL those HDD's is going to be MASSIVE. I wouldn't be surprised if you couldn't cool down the water fast enough and ended up overheating everything by running hot water through the pipes which ends up in being hotter than air. There is a point in which water cooling does become louder than air btw. 4 280's in SLI and that many HDD's will certainly reach that point.

That setup is stupid unless you do some SERIOUS video rendering, i.e. Feature Film Level as in the MATRIX REVOLUTIONS CGI. It's seriously wtf. Although you would be using a quadro for that work anyway

Water cooling/buying that rig is almost as stupid as buying the ten grand quad core laptop from Dell. (Although if I had the money, I would buy the Dell. I could actually max it out pretty easy with my audio editing.)

Also an interesting thing about Snow Leopard; it is said to have the ability to use spare GPU processing power to aid the CPU. I wonder if Windows 7 will go down this route?

 

Matches the bed spread.

 

Adding on to the water cooling. It's overrated as fuck. I regret the.. hrm. 350$ for the WC case with shit integrated components, another $60 for a decent rad (I should of bought the 140$ one, this one isn't great either), $100 for a pump, $100 for CPU block, $40 for NB block, prolly 100$ in 120 mm fans, 100$ in nonconductive coolant, 100$ in tubing, clamps, lights.

So almost $900 later, I get a fuckload of noise from the fans, which is what I was trying to GET RID OF, a ton of experience ripping my rig apart, a really cool looking set up... and oh yeah, my temps are only 3 degrees cooler then the 90$ Zalman 9700NT I was using BEFORE I blew nearly a grand on this bullshit, and the fans pulling through the 3x120mm radiator are fucking louder. AND, I'm only cooling a e6600 chip @ 1.30v overclocked from 2.4ghz to 3.4ghz. Not fucking impressed. Unless I have a chip that runs just piss out hot, I literally pissed away 900$. But hey, my case glows bright green... what a trade off.

Water cooling is for enthusiasts who want to tinker with shit for small gains, IF, IF, you use high end, high quality, expensive as hell stuff in the first place. Looping all that shit together, you'd need at least 2 3x120 rads, at least 2 pumps to push the water through all that shit without massive drop offs in pressure, a big resevoir, and great management of the tubing. I say that cause you'd going to have to swap out the water after the CPU>NB>1st vid card loop, as the water is already getting pretty warm. You'd need at least 2 pumps, because of the flow reduction per item, and the amount of elbows you'd have to have in there to the card alone. Each elbow equates to the pump having to push the water 1 foot higher pressure wise. Many pumps will flat out die in no time if put in a shitty loop with tons of rise and elbows.

Overall it's just a damned headache, avoid it unless it's a hobby.

 

Well that was fun while it lasted, my PSU just blew up on me. Literally. So much for the "quality" of corsair.

Only solace in this is that it was easy to diagnose the problem.

Would it be better to RMA through Newegg or Corsair?