Final Thoughts

First of all, I would like to thank all the Sponsors for donating prizes for this contest. ASUS gets a huge shout out for organizing the contest. The sponsors Would include: Antec, ASUS, Intel, G.Skills, Nvidia, Razer, and Samsung. I have used all your products in the past, and am still impressed with the quality and performance of them.

So, after having and using the completed build for the last few days, I have finally settled on a final overclock. 4.3Ghz seems to be acceptable for stability and temperatures. I would use the system at  4.4 or 4.5ghz, but the stability worries me for having using it over a long period of time.

My biggest regret for the project is not checking into the water block for the gpu. Air cooling is so yesterday in my books for a system described as "Xtreme". As a result I have not overclocked the gpu at all. However there really does not seem to be a huge need to, every video game I have played I have been able to crank the video settings as high as it can go with out once having huge frame rate drops, or running below 60 fps.

Overclocking and Bench Marks

So, for the fun part. For the last few days I have been having fun playing with all the ASUS tools for overclocking, as,well as reading other people's experience with LGA1156 CPU's.

First I decided to let the Turbo Evo's Auto Tune feature work some magic and see what an automatic tuning program would do. After leaving it for an hour, it came back with a stable overclock between 3.6ghz and 3.7ghz. Not too shabby in my opinion. But what I have read is people pushing their processors to 3.9ghz and even 4.0ghz using stock cooling with this CPU. I know not all CPU's are created equal, but using water cooling means I should be able to do better than stock air cooling, right?

 4.4ghz on four cores!

After tinkering for about 30 minutes I got this. 200mhz bclk (base clock), 22x multiplier, and just under 1.4v to the vcore. This was pretty stable, I managed a who slew of benchmarks without fail.

Leak Testing

I mentioned in the last post that I just made, that the case is complete, and the water cooling loop is read for leak testing. Time to get out of my grubby basement, and into the living room to fill the loop. I have laminate flooring in my living room which requires re finishing so if I spill coolant, or even sulfuric acid on the flooring, I am not damaging anything that I would be upset about.

My first task at hand is setting up my test environment. I do not want to be running the system while leak testing (which would negate the leak testing) so I need to "hot wire" an old power supply unit. Just about anyone who hoards old computer parts will have one or two these things. My choice was my "Power Max" 250w power supply. I doubt this thing could handle a 150w load on it, let alone 250w, but that is enough to run my pump.

Old power supply unit

Final Paint

So I have actually finished the build overall in a physical build sense. I have been for the last few days playing with over clocking and trying to install games to try with. So far I am really impressed with EVERYTHING.

I would love to make this post all about my over clocking and experience with gaming on this beast, but I figured I should probably post about my story of getting it to this point.

I will start with what I said from last post, about the side panels. All cut up and painted, I just needed to put plexi-glass into those openings. What I use is Picture frame plexi-glass that I find from hardware stores. Home depot sells 18"x24"x1/8" sheets for just under $10.

What some people say to use for cutting is to simply score the sheets with an razor knife, and snap it. This method works when you need rectangular shapes, however one of the shapes as a bit different (the L-shaped windows). So I used my jig-saw with a bi-metal blade to cut the window. This can cause the plexi-glass to melt slightly and make some plastic burning like smells. Nothing terrible, but the results work.

For the L-shaped window

Video card woes

So now that the main chassis is painted, and the side panels are most of the way done, I began piecing the system together.

You may have noticed last post, on the last picture was the motherboard mounted inside the case, there were four long bolts coming through the cooler mounting holes. These bolts are part of the mounting hard ware to mount the waterblock for the liquid cooling system.

What I did not show was the video card and its mounted water block. Why? because the water block does not fit...

GPU water block