Hi,
After writing code for more years than I care to remember I finally decided to get my hands dirty and with the help of the YouTube tech community including TinyTom attempt my first complete build ... Project Firest0Rm a 4690K based system with a custom water loop (CPU only, couldn't justify the cost of GPU water blocks, though now I wish I had, they look sooooo cool), plus a single Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X OC. Will add another one as soon as I can pick one up on the cheap. Had lots of fun even if I had to remove the water-block 3 times and re-apply the thermal paste which was the one damn thing I really only wanted to do once. (Grain of Rice, Pea, Cross or Spread ... aarrrgggghhh!!)
Also did my first overclocking, she is fairly stable at 4.7 with vcore set to 1.25v (but as I am on a MSI Z97 MPower the LLC is pushing the voltage to 1.27 under load so at Bios version 1.8 they still havn't sorted that out as Tom hoped in his Z97 MPower Max review. I bought the board before watching the review .... Dohh!). Temps at idle are 7c above ambient and ~76c under full load synthetics. I managed to bump the R9 290 up to 1131 on the core and 1403 on the memory but this took an extra 69mv and 40% power which I am a bit nervous about so normally dial it back to 1105 on the core and 1352 on the memory which only need an extra 20mv & 20% respectively.
Subsequent to finishing the build however had a little problem which I would appreciate your thoughts on .....
With the R9 290 Graphics card was a 6 & 8 pin PCI-E to molex cable which as it was in black & yellow matching both the graphics card & motherboard I decided to use. The only thing was that the PSU (Corsair CX-750M partially modular) cable with the molex connectors only plugged into the socket on the PSU marked 'peripherals' rather than the one marked 'PCI-E' so that's the one I used. They wouldn't supply me with useless cables right?. All was well for a week or so then when running a GPU benchmark I started to smell burning and on investigation found that the socket I had plugged the GPU into was the cuplrit and had overheated and basically welded the pins from the cable into the pins in the socket.
My question is ... Should it have been OK to plug the R9 290 into the socket marked peripheral? or was that a big 'Noob error' and it was inevitable that it would burn out? BTW I ditched the molex cables and now use the PCI-E cable supplied with the PSU plugged into the socket marked PCI-E and all seems fine, and as the cable is all black it still matches so not so bad.
Just before I started this build I discovered a desktop enhancement suite called Rainmeter ...It allows the displaying 'skins', much like Windows Widgets on your desktop. During the overclocking process while using programs like CPU-Z, GPU-Z, HWinFO etc I thought 'wouldn't it be cool if I could use Rainmeter to display the stats from those tools on my desktop?'. So I looked around to see if i could find a skin that did it. I couldn't find one so after the build was complete I reverted back to my natural state i.e. that of a software developer, and put one together. (see below).
If you are interested pictures of Project Firest0Rm can be seen here
http://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?t=70140
OverClock - The Rainmeter Skin for OverClockers.
A suite of Rainmeter skins showing a comprehensive list of overclocking related data including cpu/ring/ram/gpu voltages, temperatures & power draw, Core & Uncore clock speeds. Ratios & base clocks both stock and overclocked. Dram info, Cpu load & fan speeds. Plus current bios settings for voltage modes & targets. Bios version and other Motherboard info such as chipset data, board vendor and model. Most of the data is sourced from HWinFO & Cpu-Z.
Also recently added visual and audible warnings for Temperatures and Voltages that breach your specified thresholds.
Plus most importantly the RSS feed from overclock3d.net
If you would like to check it out go to
http://www.deviantart.com/art/OverClock-1-2-5-Rainmeter-Skin-for-Overclockers-519894955
Would love to hear your thoughts.
After writing code for more years than I care to remember I finally decided to get my hands dirty and with the help of the YouTube tech community including TinyTom attempt my first complete build ... Project Firest0Rm a 4690K based system with a custom water loop (CPU only, couldn't justify the cost of GPU water blocks, though now I wish I had, they look sooooo cool), plus a single Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X OC. Will add another one as soon as I can pick one up on the cheap. Had lots of fun even if I had to remove the water-block 3 times and re-apply the thermal paste which was the one damn thing I really only wanted to do once. (Grain of Rice, Pea, Cross or Spread ... aarrrgggghhh!!)
Also did my first overclocking, she is fairly stable at 4.7 with vcore set to 1.25v (but as I am on a MSI Z97 MPower the LLC is pushing the voltage to 1.27 under load so at Bios version 1.8 they still havn't sorted that out as Tom hoped in his Z97 MPower Max review. I bought the board before watching the review .... Dohh!). Temps at idle are 7c above ambient and ~76c under full load synthetics. I managed to bump the R9 290 up to 1131 on the core and 1403 on the memory but this took an extra 69mv and 40% power which I am a bit nervous about so normally dial it back to 1105 on the core and 1352 on the memory which only need an extra 20mv & 20% respectively.
Subsequent to finishing the build however had a little problem which I would appreciate your thoughts on .....
With the R9 290 Graphics card was a 6 & 8 pin PCI-E to molex cable which as it was in black & yellow matching both the graphics card & motherboard I decided to use. The only thing was that the PSU (Corsair CX-750M partially modular) cable with the molex connectors only plugged into the socket on the PSU marked 'peripherals' rather than the one marked 'PCI-E' so that's the one I used. They wouldn't supply me with useless cables right?. All was well for a week or so then when running a GPU benchmark I started to smell burning and on investigation found that the socket I had plugged the GPU into was the cuplrit and had overheated and basically welded the pins from the cable into the pins in the socket.
My question is ... Should it have been OK to plug the R9 290 into the socket marked peripheral? or was that a big 'Noob error' and it was inevitable that it would burn out? BTW I ditched the molex cables and now use the PCI-E cable supplied with the PSU plugged into the socket marked PCI-E and all seems fine, and as the cable is all black it still matches so not so bad.
Just before I started this build I discovered a desktop enhancement suite called Rainmeter ...It allows the displaying 'skins', much like Windows Widgets on your desktop. During the overclocking process while using programs like CPU-Z, GPU-Z, HWinFO etc I thought 'wouldn't it be cool if I could use Rainmeter to display the stats from those tools on my desktop?'. So I looked around to see if i could find a skin that did it. I couldn't find one so after the build was complete I reverted back to my natural state i.e. that of a software developer, and put one together. (see below).
If you are interested pictures of Project Firest0Rm can be seen here
http://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?t=70140
OverClock - The Rainmeter Skin for OverClockers.
A suite of Rainmeter skins showing a comprehensive list of overclocking related data including cpu/ring/ram/gpu voltages, temperatures & power draw, Core & Uncore clock speeds. Ratios & base clocks both stock and overclocked. Dram info, Cpu load & fan speeds. Plus current bios settings for voltage modes & targets. Bios version and other Motherboard info such as chipset data, board vendor and model. Most of the data is sourced from HWinFO & Cpu-Z.
Also recently added visual and audible warnings for Temperatures and Voltages that breach your specified thresholds.
Plus most importantly the RSS feed from overclock3d.net
If you would like to check it out go to
http://www.deviantart.com/art/OverClock-1-2-5-Rainmeter-Skin-for-Overclockers-519894955
Would love to hear your thoughts.
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