Skeletion rig

[Kei]

First thing I'll say is, Not my decision on the case. :lol: The parts being used in this are from my old pc which got replaced by a phenom II x4 in august 2009. I donated it to my parents and they only use it for browsing and photoshop work.

Spec at present is...

Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego @ 2.9GHz + Zalman CNPS-9500
2GB OCZ Gold XTC PC4000
DFI Lanparty NF4 ultra-D + Thermalright HR-05 sli
XFX Radeon HD 6850 1GB
Antec NewTrue power TP-650
Creative SB X-Fi fatal1ty champion
Belkin USB 3.0 card
60GB OCZ Vertex 2
1TB Samsung F1
80GB maxtor diamondmax
74GB Western digital raptor
Samsung DVD-RW

Some of the old shots when i put it together. (The gpu was an x800 and the raptor was a 13GB IBM deskstar back when these were taken)

Sorted out an upgrade for it this week. Will be changing to an opteron 180 dual core and adding another 2GB or PC4000 ballistix ram. I'm hoping that the opty will clock as well if not better than the sandy and that the ram will work together with the OCZ at 2T. The main cause for an upgrade is it keeps on running out of ram in photoshop.

 

[iiBetrayforAR]

To be honest, I don't know what to say... cool?

 

[JezEngland]

That's a cool PC. I want to build something like that. Does is have a suited dust cover for when your away!?

 

[vorticalbox]

is that a cpu cooler on the heat sink?

 

[Kei]

Sadly no dust cover, the printer got that. Since it's open though, it's easy to dust whilst vacuuming. I find the case to be a pain when trying to fit decent cooling as the shroud around the top fan gets in the way of large heatsinks. The cpu socket on the dfi is ideally situated as its closer to central. On any other normal motherboard, I doubt i could have fitted the 9500. I tried to fit my old megahalems to it but the shroud got in the way. (About an inch overlap) The cooling does seem to be quite effective though as it tends to sit around 48-50c under load and it remains fairly quiet. The fan on the gpu is noisy but the 6850 is total overkill as they've never used it yet.

is that a cpu cooler on the heat sink?

The thermalright cooler on the chipset is an HR-05SLI which I fitted after the original dfi cooling fan started rattling. It was designed to be passive cooling when sli stopped you fitting the regular HR-05.

 

[Kei]

New processor dropped in.

Seems to be a good stepping, as it overclocks quite well. Prime stable up to 2.9GHz at 1.39V. Should be prime stable around 3.2GHz at 1.45-1.5V provided i can cool it sufficiently. (The 9500 isn't enough for this)

A better look at the case.
Front

Back

Side

Complete cable chaos at the front. It's not helping that this system is running 3 IDE devices. I'll look at the cables when the ram gets here as I will need to reinstall windows as 64 bit so it can address all 4GB, plus i can switch it over to AHCI at the same time.

 

[epeets]

may want to try posting your pics directly to the site or to somewhere like Imageshack. Can't see any of them now.

 

[Feronix]

Picture links are broken...

 

[Kei]

Fixed links, I've gone over my bandwidth allowance on photobucket hence the placeholders.

Ram arrived just over a week ago so i fitted and tested it.

Sadly one module of the ballistix wasn't all that healthy so it had to go back. (notice I was testing it at 400 not 500 and it still couldn't pass)

I'm now thinking of my options as DDR500 (PC4000) isn't all that common. I may end up sorting 4 modules of g.skill DDR400 instead and run a memory divider as the dfi board is known to be quite fussy when using more than 2 memory modules. CAS latencies in the SPD profiles need to match else it either won't boot or it'll ignore the memory installed in channel A. 4 matching Geil PC3200 modules booted and ran ok but i only have 1.5GB that way.

 

[epeets]

Nice rig! Sad thing about the memory. I've been using G.Skill for over a year now in 2 rigs and not a single a problem so I hope it works out the same way for you if you got that route.