ケイ - Watercooled Enthoo Primo

[Kei]

Yeah that grey ribbon cable is ruddy irritating as there is nothing i can do to hide it any more. It links the xonar essence to the 7.1 hdav daughter board. I can't believe that they haven't improved this on the new STX II either.

I've decided in my infinite wisdom to replace that dead 640GB WD black with a 1TB WD enterprise SE disk instead as it comes with a nice long warranty and decent performance. (also has an unusually large 128mb cache)

 

[Kei]

Would a friendly mod change the title of the thread to ケイ - Watercooled Enthoo Primo

The 1TB WD enterprise SE arrived today. Remarkable difference between it and my current 1TB WD black (FAEX) regarding noise. The SE is silent unlike the black which reminded me of my original raptor 74 when seeking. It also outperforms the black by a healthy margin too. It's finally allowed me to retire my old 200GB spinpoint which is knocking on ten years old. (Crystal disk says it's only run for 23,000 hours) I'm very tempted to replace the other drives with these SE's too, although it'd probably make more sense to go with the 2TB version as it's cheaper than most of the other 2TB drives.

 

[Kei]

Near enough one year down the road since building my X79 rig into the enthoo primo and all is well. It was a tad dusty, but i haven't cleaned it since january. Certainly collects less dust than the old CM690-II. Primochill advanced LRT is definitely worth the money as it looks almost as clear as it did when installed. The xspc tubing went pink within 6 months. I'll have to admit that this has so far proven to be the most reliable machine I've built as I've not had any issue with it at all. I'm hoping that it'll still be up to the task of running witcher 3 once it lands. Get the feeling that the single 780 is going to get a spanking.

 

[Kei]

Another long overdue update on this one. After upgrading to windows 10 somewhere around october 2016, the system sporadically suffered from black screen lock ups, which were TDR errors. Cue a lot of faffing and fiddling, involving a full strip down and me swapping my GTX 780 out for a spare HD6850 and no longer having problems. I tried the 780 in a spare AMD 990FX system and it was all good there too. Getting pretty annoyed by that point as I'd flashed the default bios on to the gpu, removed all my overclocks, changed drivers and applied more updates than I could remember and finally had to rebuild the watercooling to remove the GPU.

Took the opportunity to change coolants too.


After a month of no problems with the 6850, I put the 780 back in and back to square one. Eventually after 6 months of putting up with this, I managed to stumble across something on the nvidia forums regarding intel VT-d being a potential cause. Shut it off and finally got a reliable system once again. Doesn't help that asus didn't keep VT-x and VT-d in the same menu in the bios and they called it something totally different. I put the 780 back under water and restored the skyn3t bios and both the cpu and gpu overclocks and it has been great.

How it looks today. Took the HDAV surround daughter board out as I'll admit that I have never actually used it, instead opting for DD live via bitstream through toslink if I want surround. I added an AJA kona capture card which I've been using to transfer my old VHS tapes to file. Lastly a 4TB WD Se disk was added as I was running out of space for my photos.


Other changes include a ducky shine 5 keyboard along with a smaller ducky desk mat. Swapped the iiyama 4:3 panel out for another 16:10 24" panel. (HP LP2475W AH-IPS) Not a perfect colour match to the dell VA but not far out, certainly no worse than the iiyama. It has substantially less input lag than the dell so it's become the primary display. I'm planning on replacing the desktop with some nicely oiled full stave ash which is a tad longer so the monitors fit on properly and the JBL control ones behind the monitors have more room to breathe.


Only problem now is that I'm super tempted to replace it all for an X399 & 1920X threadripper system. It's one heck of a cost though. The annoyance would be having to replace the sound card which is an original xonar essence ST which uses PCI not PCI-e. Thankfully the AJA kona capture card is PCI-e as that would be very expensive to replace.

Potential spec is looking like:

AMD ryzen 1920X
Asus Prime X399-A
EK supremacy evo TR4 acetal
32GB 8 pack dark pro 3200 ram (4x8gb)

Bit's I'd stick with for now:

GTX780 3GB (will replace in next gen)
Corsair TX650 psu (hopefully still sufficient)
Crucial M500 240GB + 4 other random disks + Bluray writer (nvme ssd to come in future)

 

[tolagarf]

Why do you want to go Threadripper? Do you work with something that requires a massive amount of CPU computations that you couldn't do with graphics cards? If it's just for some gaming, streaming, a bit of professional work, I'd say just get a Ryzen 7 and save a bunch of money in the process.

Don't let hype dictate your Manic Upgrade Syndrome (M.U.S.)

 

[Kei]

I seriously considered ryzen 7 and whilst it'd provide some improvement, the extra features of TR4 are worthwhile. That is primarily the extra pci-e lanes and quad channel memory. TBH, when I finally moved on from my phenom II x4, I really wanted to go for a 6 core machine but at the time, I felt a 4930k was too expensive for what it was.

I use my pc for a lot of editing, capture and encoding work and at present I either have it encoding and I use something else to game or palm it off on the server, which is the old phenom II x4 underclocked, which takes about 4 times as long. It'd be nice to be able to leave it encoding in the background whilst I do other things.

 

[Kei]

The deed is done.

Spec changed slightly:

Gigabyte aorus x399 gaming 7 instead of the asus prime. Always used gigabyte before so felt more comfortable particularly with the asus being suspiciously cheap.
Ryzen threadripper 1920x
32GB 8 pack DDR4 3200 C14
EK supremacy EVO TR4 acetal+nickel (prefered straight copper but not available)

 

[hmmblah]

The deed is done.

Spec changed slightly:

Gigabyte aorus x399 gaming 7 instead of the asus prime. Always used gigabyte before so felt more comfortable particularly with the asus being suspiciously cheap.
Ryzen threadripper 1920x
32GB 8 pack DDR4 3200 C14
EK supremacy EVO TR4 acetal+nickel (prefered straight copper but not available)

/drool. Looking forward to the pics and your impressions on the hardware after you've had a play with it. I'm kind of feeling the same itch for my work PC, currently on X99 with a 5820K.

 

[Kei]

/drool. Looking forward to the pics and your impressions on the hardware after you've had a play with it. I'm kind of feeling the same itch for my work PC, currently on X99 with a 5820K.

I have to admit that I don't find the 4820K all that limiting unless I wanted to game and do something in the background. This is entirely a case of gluttony because I can. Although it definitely hit the wallet quite hard, I will run it for a long time, hopefully longer than the phenom II which lasted 5 years.

Bits arrived this afternoon whilst I was in work. I can't wait to get it all assembled in the case as this is definitely going to look awesome once built.

8 Pack 3200C14 ram


Ryzen 1920X


All together in the Aorus

 

[Kei]

Add in cards removed. Sadly the sound card won't be going back in as it's pci. PCB colour on the AJA capture card is a little annoying as it stands out like a sore thumb.


Block fitted and the motherboard is now housed inside the case. Just got to give everything a clean off and fit some new tubing and get leak testing.

 

[Kei]

Partially filled it last night and finished it off this morning. So far leak free and bleeding slowly.

 

[Kei]

Cable chaos kept under some semblance of control.


Built and running. Can't seem to change the lighting colour in zones like they suggest, but I'm only trying in the bios as I'd prefer not to have to install superfluous software.


Bios on it was F1, which seems to run the 8 pack ram just fine at XMP settings (3200C14) without needing to tweak anything else. netwtw04.sys bluescreen issue showed up due to the intel wifi driver, so I just disabled it completely as I don't use wifi. Cinebench scores seem to be inline with expectations for running at stock speeds, a smidge faster than my overclocked 4820K on single core (168 vs 164) and 3x faster on multi core. (2447 vs 826) Temperatures seem excellent, idles at 31 degrees and max load on prime for half hour got it up to 68 degrees. I'm guessing that the VRMs get quite warm though as TMPIN4 shows the highest temperature of 78 degrees.

 

[AverageNinja]

Great job dude, it looks great. Those RAM modules are very classy.

Maybe you could try and make a simple backplate out of acrylic for your capture card. AlienALX recently did something similar with his Oldskool build. Though it honestly doesn't look that out of place with those blue/green cables

 

[You_What?]

Lovely build, love them Dark Pro RAM, IMO an alternative to the Dom Plats.

 

[Bartacus]

OG Gentle Typhoons FTW!

 

[Kei]

OG Gentle Typhoons FTW!

Wish you could still get them for the same money they used to cost. I've only got 6 on the radiators and want to have them all round.

Had a few minor headaches so far getting the memory to run at rated speed. (3200C14) Seems to need a little tweaking. Raising memory voltage to 1.45V and SOC voltage to 1.125V along with a ProcODT of 60 ohms seems to have improved things significantly but I'm not counting my chickens yet. Needs more testing to be sure. In any case, I'm pretty certain windows 10 needs reinstalling. Whilst it works ok, this install dates back to the phenom II system at the start of this thread which was upgraded from 7 to 10 around october last year.

In other news, I tested running my hifi off the analogue connection using my Yellowtec puc balanced I/O interface and finally got a perfect noise free signal using the DAC up usb ports which makes a nice change. The last two systems have both suffered from terrible ground loop issues with any form of direct copper link to my hifi introducing a ton of switching noise meaning I've always had to use optical only.

 

[Bartacus]

It might cost you a bit, but our local Canadian water cooling supplier sells the new GTs in multiple variants (including PWM), with black blades. Not cheap, but they are superb fans.

 

[Kei]

Gave overclocking a quick test. Seems my chip is pretty is pretty average. Requires north of 1.45V to get 4.05GHZ stable enough to run cinebench, not stable enough for one run at 4.1GHz. Tried out P states which sort of worked, however the voltage didn't drop at idle even though the clock speed did.

I've since dropped back to stock as I think it's the more optimum place to sit. I've also added a negative voltage offset (-0.1825V) as normal voltage with XFR functioning normally seems to hover around the 1.4V mark a little too often, peaking a hair over 1.5V. This has dropped the peak voltage to 1.308V and the running voltage is 1.2V.

 

[Kei]

Added a firewire card so I can capture DV directly from the camera. Bit annoying that it uses an old floppy power connector rather than a molex, but it hides under the gpu well enough that it's virtually impossible to see from normal angles. More air has slowly been bleeding its way back to the reservoir so the level has dropped a tad. I've also dropped the memory voltage to 1.4V and all is still stable.

 

[AngryGoldfish]

Someone told me the other day that the Primo was outdated. BAH! It's still one of the best cases out there for watercooling.