Unimatrix One - Resistance is Calculating...

[Jedziah]

Hi Guys,

I'm new to the OC3D forums but a long term watcher of the reviews. Hope you are all well.

It's come time for me to build a new rig and as a lifelong Star Trek fan, the Carbide Air 540 from Corsair was just something a little different that had that Resistance is Futile feel about it.

As such, I decided to head on down the route of building something that had a little feel of the Borg about it.

The end specs (which will be tomorrow!) will look something like this:

Gigabyte G1 Sniper Z87
Intel i7 4770K (Will be Overclocked but we'll see what the silicone lottery gives me tomorrow)
Corsair H100i with Noctua Quiet Fans
BitFenix Spectre Pro Case Fans

16GB of Corsair Vengeance Pro Silver running at 2400Mhz

Geforce GTX 780Ti (again will be OC'd from base but we'll see what the lottery gives me)

All running from a Corsair AX860i to give a little headroom in case 1 780 wants to become 2 when the price begins to drop next year.

As I did the build in two stages, I have all of the case, fans and mobo in the case now for a test mockup of the lighting.

I've also modded the Corsair Logo on the front to fit a matching Borg Theme for the case in the last photo.

I'll post some pics below of the WIP and then tomorrow, hopefully you can se the whole thing up and running!

The New Logo (still drying!):

Happy Viewing

Jed

 

[GregPalos]

nice! are you going to custom paint the case? Any future plans to get rid of the H100i and go with something more star trek looking to cool your cpu/GPU(s)

 

[Jedziah]

Eventually yes to both!

Post Christmas, I'll probably look at building a WC loop in to fit the scheme a little better and add the second 780 Ti.

Parts arrive around 3pm today. Feels like Christmas already!

 

[tinytomlogan]

Eventually yes to both!

Post Christmas, I'll probably look at building a WC loop in to fit the scheme a little better and add the second 780 Ti.

Parts arrive around 3pm today. Feels like Christmas already!

Have you seen our Borg case?

 

[Jedziah]

I did Tom, sadly didn't win! The winner has a truly awesome case!

Ok some pointers before I go onto some of the photos:

As I stated on the main review, the SoundBlaster Recon 3Di onboard has some rather core issues with Windows 8/8.1 which are known to Creative. The same issues occurs with the Alienware range that have the same onboard chip which causes around 3 in every 5 boots to not recognise the SoundBlaster and as such, you have no sound until you do a cold boot!

It's a pain. So much so for me that I laid down a few more notes for a SoundBlaster Zx. Now please note that as of yet, I have not snipped out the Red LED in the Zx and as such, it's a Christmas Borg themed case right now!



Outside and Front of the Case with the custom logo:



Some Photos of the Internals including the Noctua's on the H100i (will likely change these for some black ones pending release and my god...I know people say they are quiet..but seriously...I have to check they are on)

Note as stated in the comments on the review, the orange LED on the board is incredibly off putting and very very bright...such a shame.

Results after a week of testing the overclocks are a stable 4.6 Ghz and 1.25v. I'm tempted to up the voltage a little but I'm unsure if I care enough to impact the life of the chip for a potential 2-300MHz. I'm no master overclocker either, basically relying on Tom's vids to stop my house catching fire

The GTX 780 Ti...wow. This one is happily accepting a monster 350Mhz overclock to GPU and 400Mhz on the RAM and still, the card will not attempt to go over 78 Degrees even during Firestrike Extreme. Amazing stuff.

Other things of note. The H100i/Corsair Link is a ballache with this board. You have to plug the USB header in whilst the board is on for it to be detected which basically defeats the object of it for me. I've seen this apparently happens with a few boards and maybe Corsair will fix it in the future.

Overall. I'm pretty happy other than the problems mentioned above. The Sniper Z87 is so ridiculously good for its price, it's just too good to pass up, even if you plan to run 8.1 and potentially run into the Sound problems.

Happy Viewing

Jed

 

[KyoKomodo]

Well done! I cant wait to see this thing with a Borg themed WC loop though