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

Long time no post

My apologies for not keeping this up to date. I would like to blame college classes for taking away from my free time. I had three choices with what to do with my free time being: Homework, Project Build, or Project Blog. Since as you can see I have been slacking on the blog, I will present you with a huge update. This probably will not be dial up friendly, I warn you now...

Penciling out one of the side panels

Unboxing video!

Finally got a firewire cable and some time to cut the video together.

POST Test and Some Bench Tests

So, last night I did a POST Test with the goodies I received. I will be voiding warranties here, (no doubts about that) so I may as well make sure everything powers one correctly before going much further.

I'll let the captions under the pictures guide you.

Laying out the goods

Unboxing Water Cooling Parts

So, also on Monday I recieved the water cooling parts I ordered. I also took pictures of the unboxing...

Here they are!

12' of Fesser One UV 1/2 I.D. Tubing

Box Opening!

So Like I said, I would post all the pictures and video at a later date. I had a bit of a hard time getting pictures off my camera, since I took apart my main computer for the build last sunday. Slight oversight on my part, but I do have other comptuers to use.

I apologize, there is no video as of now, since I lost my firewire cable :(
I will purchase a new one tonight, and see if I can upload the video to you tube by the end of this week.

For now pictures!

Thank You ASUS and Sponsors!

 More below the jump!

Parts from Asus!

So I got another email from my mother, apparently a large package had come to the door from FedEx. She wasn't sure who it came from but it was pretty big.

I just got two emails form Brian, from Asus, he apparently put our prizes in the mail last week, and just sent us the tracking number. Checking the FedEx tracking number it seems that the parts were delivered today!

Hurray!

Christmas is officially November 23rd now.

Expect pictures and a you tube video to be in following posts.

Parts Order

So my parts order for water cooling products had came in today...

I had began to research and order the water cooling products as soon as I was announced as a stage one winner. It sometimes takes a bit of time tracking down water blocks and specific water cooling products, so I wanted to order the parts as soon as possible.

There were some issues trying to find the correct water blocks for the build. At first I knew there would be few choices for lga1156 socket coolers. Even if I were to use aftermarket air coolers, there are very few choices for models and manufacturers. Water blocks, even tougher.

Changes and Clarifications

So, as I had mentioned in an earlier post I have minor changes to my build that I had identified when I began to further plan the project.

The biggest change is the additional radiator I am using. I originally posted in my entry that I was going to use two 2x120mm radiators. Actually if you look closer at the original entry, on one of my mock up pictures I had made, I had labeled the radiator a the front of the case would be a 3x120mm. Apparently my subconscious is psychic and saw into the future that I would indeed be using a 3x120mm radiator...

With that being said, I will be actually using my original 2x120mm radiator, and an additional 3x120mm radiator. Reason for changing: when I went to go order additional water cooling parts, the Fesser One TFC Triple Xchanger (3x120mm) radiator was onsale. It was still cheaper for a Swiftech 2x120mm radiator, or even the Fesser One TFC Dual Xchanger (2x120mm) radiator, but the 3x120mm radiator should be able to transfer heat much better.

Next, Interior case color will change from being red, to blue. Reason: ASUS P7P55 motherboards use a nice blue theme. Why fight it? there really is no way of changing it.

Now with going with a blue theme, I will be getting blue UV reactive tubing, opposed to using clear tubing and coolant dye.

I will also be trying to change the color theme of the Antec Power supply from yellow to blue. I will see once I get the power supply what will all be involved. All I can tell currently, is that I will be covering over the yellow on the power supply with blue.

There will probably be more minor changes in the future. I imagine there will be road blocks during my build, and I will need to adjust some of my planning to overcome some challenges.

Original post

This is the original entry found on the SilentPCReview.com forum. The direct link to the forum page is here. You will see at the top of this page, the prizes which were awarded for stage 1.

Introduction

So as an introduction to this blog, I will introduce myself. My name is Randy Fyfe. I am 22 years of age, living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I would normally hide my identity, but as this blog is part of a requirement of the Xtreme Design Contest (Hosted by ASUS) for Stage 2, I will throw some caution to the wind.

My gamer handle varies; I have been known on the internet as: Dude, Minimum Infinity, EyeKanSpele, Randay, Sharri (World of Warcraft, I played as a female Draeni),  Randie (I later server transferred and decided to switch names), and fps randy. Generally I like to keep my handles pretty common, you never know who may be lurking on the internet...

Anyways, so if you are here, you may be wondering "What is an Xtreme Design Contest?" or "Stage 2?". Well the best thing I can do to help explain is to go here. That is a link to a Facebook event that Asus had created for the contest. After you are done reading the face book page everything should begin to make sense.

First Post

First Post!

So, I have finished up setting up this blogger account and blog. What took so long was setting up the domain with 1and1.com to work with blogger. For some reason while adding a CNAME entry to the domain on 1&1's end and waiting for it to propagate across DNS servers, something must had gone wrong. 1&1 forgot I was trying to add a CNAME and decided to revert the domain to continue to forward to their place holder page.

Oh well, two tries later and some head banging, it is now setup!