[Joe]

So I got my new rig put together... its specs consist of:

Core 2 Duo E6600
Asus 680i P5N32-E SLI
2x OCZ PC8500 EPP/SLI 1GB sticks
4x Seagate 7200.10 250GB SATA Hd's (for RAID 0 action)
2x Samsung 18x DVD multi writers (SATA)

and I put all this in my recently purchased Antec P180B Case with a Sunbeam NUUO 550Watt PSU and my 7800GTX vid card. (Which I may replace with a 8800GTX in due time if I start gaming again.) Also with a CFA-635 in it for prettiness.

I also put a Adaptec 39160 SCSI card in with a Seagate 300GB 10K U160 HD that I have kicking around just as some extra storage (1.3TB in this box).

All connected to a new Samsung 226BW monitor (22in Widescreen)

So heres my lil review of what setting this thing up was like:

The Asus designed (non Nvidia reference) 680i SLI chipset mobo is a beast of a device. Very non plug/play, it required LOTS of tweaking and reading online to get it stable. I made a mistake and had the pins for the CFA all wrong, I didn’t pay enough attention when putting the leads onto the Asus "Q Connector" USB header thingy... I put the +Data on the +5 from the USB and the +5 on the +Data from the USB. This didn’t damage anything but caused the machine to act VERY weird. Like not going into windows setup to load XP!

After a day of working through that I got it all loaded and running. I then started playing with overclocking a bit.

I tried the EPP/SLI deal and have to say I was less than impressed, it never would put it to a stable speed... that could be because the OCZ ram just isnt stable at 1066 like they claim. So I did all the settings by hand Here are the settings I found were stable with stock air cooling that’s silent and in a hot room.

VCore- 1.36 (CPUZ mis-represents it as 1.26 but I assure you its 1.36)
VMem - 2.0
(stock voltages for the rest)

CPU QDR FSB - 1333Mhz
Mem DDR FSB - 800Mhz
Mem timings 4-4-4-12 1T

LDT Freq = 4x (but I have been playing with it at 3x to ensure stability 5x is stock)

Spread Spectrum shut off, and lots of the other crap shut off.

Resulting in a CPU speed of 3Ghz on the intel stock cooler, and I have run StressPrime on the cores and mem for 2 days without a single error or lock up. it took a while to get to the point it was this stable, the 1.36v is what did it for the CPU to keep it stable, and dropping the v on the ram back down to 2.0 from 2.1 made it more stable and let me drop the timings.

The HD's are setup into 2 RAID 0 arrays and the speeds off them are acceptable (150 - 180MB/sec) Load times are almost nothing now.

The PSU runs at like 50C at full load in this hot room with 5 HD's so its good to know there’s more headroom there for an 8800GTX in the future. The CPU runs at 40C at idle, and 57C at full beat down load.

Now I have more power than I know what to do with, and my 4600+ X2 rig is going into my server to be a Vmware ESX box or just a Vmware server load on it with 4GB of ram (soon to be 8GB).

As far as cooling and noise goes, this machine is dead quiet even with the 2 rear fans at their middle position I cant hear it over the ambient noise in my apartment! The seagates are also so quiet that I cant hear them accessing. The lower air "tunnel" of the P180 is great and keeps the 4 drives cool to the thouch.


Some pics: (attached)

The CFA-635 pic shows the LED's on the side are set to react to different things. In this case the bottom 2 transition from off - green - yellow - orange - red depending on CPU core utilization, and the top 2 do the same for Network utilization from 0 - 200Mb/sec. I absolutely love the 635 for this! and it looks pretty dead sexy. its refresh rates are insane it updates prolly 10 times or more a second making it very reactive to system changes.

For the inside pics, the SCSI drive is in the upper drive bay while the 4 SATA disks are in the lower bay. All 6 SATA connectors on the motherboard are used (4x disk 2x DVD RW)

These pics were taken with my cell phone so ignore the crappy quality.