Dwayne's New Computer

[Dwayne]

Hello all, I bit the bullet and without regard for cheaper prices once the i5s hit the shelves I went ahead and bought a new i7 system.

Parts are:

Coolermaster HAF922
eVGA X58 SLI LE
i7 920 D0
Mushkin XP3-12800 Xtreme Performance Tri Channel kit (3x2GB)
2 WD 640 Black in RAID 0
1 Seagate 500 GB 7200.1 with 32M cache as the backup drive
TSST Corp (Samsung) DVD RW
Coolermaster Hyper 212 Plus with 2 Scythe 1900 rpm fans push/pull
Corsair HX850 Power Supply

Moved from my old rig are the BFG GeForce GTX 295 and Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music.





I started the build last night and finished up this morning.

Installed PS and then HDs





The case is a snap to work in and the tool-less features make installation go quickly.

This morning I gathered the MB, CPU, HS and fans and started to install them.







Lots of clearance around the socket for this push/pull combo. And a very clean and neat board too. A little odd that there is no eSATA on the back plate, but I could scrounge something if I need it real bad I guess.

A shot of the interior as I installed the board.



Loads of room to work, a joy coming from an Antec 900.

Here is the final install wiring cleaned up.



And a shot of the back, which had no trouble with the side panel... no help needed to close it at all!



And here are a couple of shots showing the Antec 900 next to the HAF 922.





Longer, wider and taller... a monster - and this is the baby brother case!

I have just started to play with the beast, it flashed up with no problems at all. I set the RAID up and installed Windows 7 without a hitch... just the way it should be. The idle temps at stock are around 38/38/41/37 and after a couple of hours of Prime95 running blend the top temps were 58-60 across the 4 cores.

I do have an issue with CPUZ showing my Mushkin RAM as PC3-10700 part # 991679 (998679) because the web site shows 998679 as PC3-12800. I clocked them up to 1600 and they are running 7-8-7-20 74 T1 and survived the blended Prime95 but I wonder why they are not reporting right in CPUZ.

Next step will be ramping up the chip to 3.6 GHz and seeing how it handles.

Someone may notice, I hooked up my front panel USBs to the Firewire header. Not a good thing. I am not sure how my flash drive survived when I plugged it in, but I lucked out and did no damage! Overconfident on hooking up the bits, I should have had a quick refresh on the headers. No harm done, but another lesson learned.

Thanks for reading and watch for my OC adventures in the appropriate forum!

[silent1mezzo]

Sweet rig. That case is a beast. I'm looking at my 900 right now and I think its big. I can't imagine the size of its brother :P jeez....

[Dwayne]

TY SM... I was thinking of getting the HAF 932, now I am glad I passed and got the smaller case A breeze to work in for sure. A big to Coolermaster for a great case, imo. No, it isn't an understated Fortress or Lian Li, but it is an aggressive looking beast with a great interior.

[miggs78]

Yes sweet looking rig.. you could improve on the wiring a little bit more :p

It still looks clean though..

[element291]

nice build! if you want "big" check out the antec 1200

[shayan288]

Wow.. That HX850 really looks like its it worth it. I had a hard time hiding all my tx750's wires

[crazyhorsejohnny]

Originally Posted by element291

nice build! if you want "big" check out the antec 1200

If you want "huge" check out HAF 932....

[Dwayne]

Originally Posted by miggs78

Yes sweet looking rig.. you could improve on the wiring a little bit more :p

It still looks clean though..

There are always critics I could have improved a bit I think, but there is a certain amount of excitement that I could not overcome completely. That little voice in the head telling me to get on with it already and put the covers on and flash it up!

First prelim OC run at 3.77 (180*20 in BIOS, e-leet shows 179.5*21). One hour of Prime95 got the temps up to 74ish with a vCore of 1.26 when loaded at 100%. I'll turn that down a touch and run all night now... as it is, bed time!

[miggs78]

Sorry Dwayne.. didn't mean to be criticizing.. *slaps myself*..

Hopefully that 212+ does a descent job on cooling those hot i7 chips.. I'm fairly impressed with it cooling my e8400, clocked it to 4.3ghz temps at idle don't go above 43C, still to test load at that high, been using that clock for two days and its stable, and mine's only with the stock fan pushing air..

Good luck ocing, Lol at your sig..

[Sagex0]

Everything so far looks pretty sexy to me.