Andre's Z77 Personal Rig

andrevautour said:
I also got a reply from MSI about the memory wake from sleep issue and they send me a BIOs to try. Not sure what version it is though I can't tell by the file name but I will try that. It's a .H64 file I guess it needs to be placed on a flash drive and flashed I'll have to read how to do that and then I will report back if it works or not.
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good luck mate
 
andrevautour said:
This morning I got a package - update on this coming soon :)

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You just cannot keep that from us for so long brother. You just can't!
 
hey man i havent even opened it yet actually i was out earlier getting something but im switching it with something else and when i get home i will have another update :))

i will reply to your last message when i get home :)
 
Mark3Max said:
I will take a guess here and say it's a Corsair H100i
Click to expand...



Not quite! I will be honest I am eyeballing something like that but I'm not totally sold on the H100i yet. I am having a look at the various options though and there may be a cooler change in the future. Partly because I would like some extra space in the case around the CPU area, and partly because I am really liking the look of the Kingston HyperX Predator memory these days and I would like to use some.

So what I'm going to do for right now is I am going to shut down and tinker with some stuff for a while, but I have some pictures ready and I'm going to post some here now.

I also have some videos but it will take some time to upload them plus I have some videos I want to upload before I upload the ones for here, so I will have an update later with some videos and some more photos.
 
Hey everyone,

I am about to shut down and do some work on my system, so I will definitely have lots more after that, but for now here is a little update for you.


It's been a while since I've had any sort of proper nice headphones, and I have been needing a new pair for watching my TV and movies at night, so here is a look at what I picked up today.

I really like the look of these. I think they have a really nice retro style aesthetic and they are well made. The other pair I was playing with today were my dad's Sennheiser HD 598's, which are lovely too, but they don't sound that much better than these to me.





IMG_0294 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_0295 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_0296 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_0297 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_0299 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_0301 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_0303 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_0306 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_0308 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr




IMG_0283 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_0282 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_0281 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr



IMG_0292 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_0291 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_0290 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_0289 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_0288 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_0285 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr
 
Very nice headphones Andre , they look like they will be comfortable too.
Make a short review and tell us what you think of them.
 
Now that's a simple design headset. They remind me of an old pair I had ( was probably from the 80's ), big ones with volume buttons on each headphone and with good quality rubber for the soft gromet. I used to plug them straight into the amplifier ( they had a resistence to increase impedance so they wouldn't break ). when something reminds me of something I like and used to like ... it's a good thing.
I bet they are loud too :)
 
dragoonk said:
Happy New Year! :)

Yes, there definitely is something very interesting about small cases. The small Silverstone I linked at the top of the post is one of the most beautiful and well built ITX form factor I have seen. Things get very tight in there but surprisingly the temps are good and it looks fantastic. I don't know if you watch Linus building a powerful gaming rig in that case... If you didn't, here's the clip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWAeZYB9DGg

i think that is so cool... powerful processor, and graphics and watercooling kit inside that case? just beautiful. Plus the pannels are made of massive aluminium.

Also, the two cases you posted pictures of

19174943621l.JPG


v700-01.jpg


... I don't know which one I would buy if I had to choose between the two... they are beautiful.

Also the HyperX Predator has one of the finest looking heat spreaders on the market, I think.

HX-Predator_4PK_hr.jpg


When I first bought my HyperX Blu, i remember being very surprised by the quality and looks of the heat spreader, i couldn't belive that i got that pretty cheap. Also the reviews were impressive, peole reporting very good overclocking figures on these. Only thing I regret is not having the resources to get an 8GB kit.

My MSI board is a looker in my opinion. It doesn't look cheap at all, it's very well built. I wish it had a VRM heatsink although I was pleasently surprised to notice that it has mounting holes for one ( the ASUS didn't from what I remember ) so I decided to make one :), but about that in another post ( I should of documented the build, I only have pics with it installed ).
And yes, that is the Asus that was replaced by the MSI board. It had some some weird problem, it booted, sometime it froze, in the BIOS, it made these lines on the screen and eventually freeze. I sent it back and they made me wait 2 weeks before I started to become impacient and sent them an email. Then they told me that the board can't be fixed or replaced cause they don't have one just like it anymore, so I ordered the MSI and ( I did do alot of research before ) and I am loving it ever since.
if you noticed Both the ASUS and the MSI have 6 audio jack ports, and 4 slots of memory so I picked the best boards for that price ( I know what I like and need :) )
The boards color is similar to the ASUS board but a bit darker, it's a dark brown just like this
8201379707_d7944f7412_h.jpg


I have absolutely nothing against that color, on the contrary...

Battlefield 3 is a demanding game, but the lack of smoothness doesn't come from the graphics card or the CPU... I have seen people playing battlefield on lower end stuff ( AthlonII x2 250, HD3870 ) and it was running smoother. Now I know my computer is faaaar less powerful than yours and most of the people here, but it can still handle games pretty nicely.
Now the problem with BF3 could lie in my hard drive... Because every time stuttering happens I notice HDD activity. It's loaing textures into the RAM from the HDD now... I only have 4 gigs but it doesn't use nowhere near to the max ( about 3 gigs total RAM usage when BF3 is on ). I've searched for this problem... one guy was experiencing this exact same symptom and he had a system similar to yours in terms of components. So he changed his HDD and the problem was solved. I belive that the problem lies in my hard drive which is small and old and slow ( 5.7 points in windows 7 when everything else is at atleast 7. ) and it's bottlenecking. BF3 also uses big data pakets for the transfer and the hard drive isn't fast enough. Other than that ... you would be surprised that the game is perfectly playable on my "rig". ( Also the stuttering doesn't happen all the time so I did have the chance to play BF3 smoothly on this computer. )

I forgot to mention that when the stutter/freezes happen CPU and GPU usage go down and HDD LED is on.

The Phenom 965 was/is still a decent chip... and it's priced a bit above an Athlon like mine. But now that the big boys are out ( 3570K, 3770k ) and more demanding games come out too, and... sadly it falls further behind.
I feels sorry for AMD, I do want them to do better, I want to see some competition, like it is with nVidia and Radeon.

Honestly I liked the looks of the nergon PSU better than I like this one, AND it had longer cables, too bad it wasn't enough for that power hungry card. But the SL-700 is the btter PSu. Although... I think that the one 12V rail poweres all the connectors except the CPU 4+4 pin which is powered by the other 12V rail. Now... I don't know, I wish that the 2 2X6+2 pin PCI-E connectors were powered by separate rails. If this turns out to be true then one 12V rail is enough to power the card and the other stuff.

I think this

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looks really really nice. It reminds me of a kid that built a custom water cooling kit for a 800MHz Pentium 3 I belive, and the rad was from a car and it had this transparent small blue LED fan smack in the middle of it ( was cute ). In other wrds it reminds me of that time when you're young and you;re learning and you are passionate but you still have alot to learn. Besides there was no place to hide the cables in that case lol.

the seasonic PSU's you posted pics of are good quality PSU's. I think I see a 80 Silver on one of them. There is no such thing on mine, but Inter-tech does have a few 80+ Silver certified PSU's showing that they may not be so bad.
In the future, if I have the right resources, I want a Corsair AX850 if I decide not to build a small form factor rig.

My PSU is gray because I didn't hve the money to worry about color or looks, I wanted my computer to work properly. You see a set of mixed colors in there like the red graphics card ( which I got for free and I couldn't even think of daring to complain about that lol ) and the gray PSU and the blue RAM and the brown Motherboard but I didn't have the resources to be picky. Hell, I even accepted that the PSU has short cables. That's how tight budgets are. And mine was very... VERY tight.
I agree with you on the Win H frame case, it's a fantastic looking case. Very well built, high quality materials, just hardcore enthyziast look, all shapes are in aluminium , there is no cheap plastic feel/look. The hyper X Blu would go perfect with that case lol.

8336963528_d753c7f2c2_h.jpg


look at those things together hehe. They do look like my card, but... quite a bit smaller. I think I am pretty lucky to have this one for free and being able to run the latest games at decent framerates at medium settings... when you think about it this card is 5 years old!
The only thing I hate about it is that I just cannot overclock it abpove 860MHz on the core... it just isn't stable.. and when it is, it always freezes or the driver stops responding when I alt-tab out of a game, when I quit a game or sometimes when I start it. I this is cause by the PLL VCO divider bug.. a limit made by ATI so that people can't overclock their cards.. which I think it is damn stupid ( the PLL VCO divider bug was first reported in the single 3870, then in the X2's ) so I belive mine has it. I tried everything. I flashed the card with so many bioses as much as.. hundred of times ( no exageration ) without any positive results. So now it runs at 857/1008.

BTW, did I tell you I think that Predator looks a bit better than Patriot?
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hey :)


I started watching Linus's build but I never finished for some reason or I wasn't paying full attention. I am planning to re-watch it today though :)


i love both of the small cases i liked as well, the lian li one is definitely a lot larger though so i would probably pick that. my next case will probably be a very large tower though like the x2000fn, but i do love small cases as mentioned here.

I agree the HyperX Predator is very pretty memory. I would definitely use it myself once I get a lower profile cooling solution sorted out.


I'm glad you're pleased with the HyperX Blu :) I agree that it looks very nice.




The MSI board does looks very nice -- Im interested to see a picture of the heatsink you made for it.



Sorry to hear about your trouble with the Asus board, waiting is never fun :( i usually buy motherboards and graphics cards at local computer stores like ncix and canada computers so that if anything is wrong with it i just go back in and get it replaced right away.

I think the MSI board is probably a little bit nicer looking though so in the end it worked out pretty well i think :)


The heatsink cover on the card is also made from very thick, rigid aluminum and there are steel braces on the card so it has a very high quality feel to it, versus some of the other cards i've hard like the gigabyte 6950 windforce which has a plastic heatsink cover or the gtx580s windforce which do have an aluminum cover but its very think so it actually bends sometimes if you handle it a certain way. there is none of that with the msi card :)

(that is not a major knock against gigabyte's cards they perform perfectly well they just don't have as high a quality feel to them imo as the msi card does)



I agree that dark blue color MSI uses is very attractive in my opinion. I think dark brown is very elegant looking. also the heatsink on the 7950 twin frozr card is sort of a dark gun metal gray, but in some light and pictures it appears a bit of a purple color which i think is really neat looking as well.


here are some pictures of it hopefully you can see what i mean from them


IMG_1399 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_1403 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_1408 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_1409 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_1410 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_1404 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_1405 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr



IMG_1413 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr





Sometimes it can be hard to say exactly what a specific issue is, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it was something like the hard drive. I can say that even on an SSD BF3 still loads levels/matches really slowly so I dont know if that's an issue with inefficiency in the loading process or what the problem is there.


I didn't mean to sound too negative about the 965 when i was talkign about it ;P it definitely is a decent chip for the price which is about $90 here at the moment. You can get a 965 now for about the same sort of price as a current gen i3. Not sure which would perform better with modern games though.


I can't say for sure what main performance issue was with my sister's last build, because when she was using the 990fx board, dual 4990s, and the 965 she also had different memory and a very old slow hard drive that took forever to boot.

so when i build the new system for her using my old stuff she got my old crucial m4 ssd, the gigabyte 6950, the 12gb kit of kingston hyperx 1600mhz memory, the sabertooth x58 board and the intel i7-920. so everything that was there in the old build was replaced and then the performance was dramatically improved, but i never found out which piece of hardware was the main problem or combination of hardware was the problem with performance.


I agree competition is always a positive thing in the marketplace. I would like to see whatever AMD comes out with next be extremely powerful and competitive, probably with an all new socket like Tom mentioned in his bulldozer review.




Well it's good that you ended up with the better quality PSU--that is what matters the most in the long run.


Thanks-I always had a soft spot for acrylic cases too. This one actually had a Pentium 4 in it and the motherborad was an MSI 875P Neo from way back in 2004 probably... Needless to say it was not a very fast or good computer, but I did like the look of it


6843046019_f0f07bd2b7_b.jpg



You can see in this picture it actually started out with an Ultra XConnet PSU but that died before I could even set the system setup. Another one of many dead Ultra PSU's ;)

and I even had Monster Mods round UV IDE cables :p

6843049275_7446ea88ed_b.jpg






.

you could see the red motherboard through the back panel which i thought was neat

6843074469_04582dd5cd_b.jpg






it even had sound blaster audigy live front panel IO connections

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we also had a sound blaster audigy 2 zs with the front IO panel




even though there is no place to hide psu cables in there i still like the look of it for some reason it just does hit a spot for me where i still like it ;p


i was at canada computers yesterday when was picking up the headphones and returning some things and in the psu isle on the bottom shelf they have a bunch of those grey silverstone psus. i think you can get a 500 or 600W version for about $70 or so.



the corsair ax850 is a lovely quality psu , made by seasonic -- with the 850w versions though some of them have an issue with coil whine (mine included). if i was picking a psu again i would probably get the ax750 instead if i was pickign corsair again, or im really loving the look of the seasonic platinum units more and more . at the time i got the corsair ax850 because i liked the look of it a bit more than the seasonic, but im liking the look of the seasonic more and more now so i might go with that insead of the corsair if i was picking now



b2c194e6_vbattach225925.jpeg


nt1.jpg



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not that it matters much but the ax850 is 80 plus gold i believe so i guess maybe its based on the seasonic gold rated model and the 860 platinum from seasonic is 80plus platinum as the name implies ;p



i hear you about the red graphics card -- when i was shopping for one i was looking at 7970s first, but most of them were either reference with red coolers or stuff like the the msi lighting for example which matches the motherboard but i dont like the look of it as much as the twin frozr 3 version. they do have a version of the 7970 with the twin frozr 3 cooler but they didnt have it in stock where i was looking -- so i ended up going with the 7950 because its very close performance wise but it was better looking in my opinion.

even half of the current generation cards like the xfx ghost and the gigabyte stuff i think are not that great looking to me in fact the xfx ghost is pretty ugly imo and not the quietest either apparently.



The H frame is lovely i dont think i would use it myself though, but i think it is amazing as a sort of engineering showpiece.


the 4890s were way shorter that the 6900 or 7900 or geforce 580 for example probably by a couple inches. they even had the power connections on the back end of the card, which shows you what era and how short those are

how long is your card?



there's no doubt that a 3870X2 is much better than any integrated graphics you might get

well the 6950 i had wouldnt do any more than 890 on the core, so your 860 sounds pretty good compared to that ! the 7900 will do way more but the coil whine gets really loud when you push the volts

sorry to hear about that ! it must be annoying :(


i agree the predator does look better ! i want to use the predator i just need to find a good quality low profile cooling solution first :) i was eyeballing the h100i when i was at the store yesterday -- but i want to read more reports about the sound of the pump first. also those new nzxt kraken's with 140mm fans look good too because of the extra radiator fin real estate.
 
Mark3Max said:
Very nice headphones Andre , they look like they will be comfortable too.
Make a short review and tell us what you think of them.
Click to expand...



thanks! i'll see what i can do it is hard to write about how things sound,though.


CPMFW said:
thats some decent looking headphones brother
Click to expand...

thanks man! i'm falling behind a bit with the updates but i am still working on something right now i just need to step out for a bit and then ill be back and i will have lots of updates coming along shortly :)

dragoonk said:
Now that's a simple design headset. They remind me of an old pair I had ( was probably from the 80's ), big ones with volume buttons on each headphone and with good quality rubber for the soft gromet. I used to plug them straight into the amplifier ( they had a resistence to increase impedance so they wouldn't break ). when something reminds me of something I like and used to like ... it's a good thing.
I bet they are loud too :)
Click to expand...




i agree i love the design and the reminded me of something from the 80's as well.


we were comparing them up against the sennheiser 598's yesterday and they complete very well which is impressive considering they are a third of the price
 
Yesterday I got a reply from MSI about the sleep/wake issue that I have. The guy just sent a new BIOS to try.

As of yesterday when I checked on the Live update service 17.5 is the latest bios that MSI is offering for the Mpower broad.

And this is the BIOS version that the guy at MSI sent me.

(It didn't do anything to fix to problem, by the way, but I guess it's a bit cool to have a newer bios that the current release version)


8341317664_2581e3c432_h.jpg


8341313646_f501750a5f_o.jpg



Here is a screen shot from about a week about with the version 17.5 BIOS.

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Last edited:
Hey Brother!:)
They must be working on it. I wonder if you're the only one having this issue. Did he mention anything about other people reporting a similar problem?
 
I have actually had this problem myself, but back then I blamed it on Windows and just stopped putting my computer to sleep. I wasn't using it anyway, I discovered this by accident.
 
hey guys,
this evening i worked on a few things including new lighting and i removed the fan controller and setup the fans differently.
i have new pictures and i'll make a proper detailed post about it tomorrow.
 
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