- Joined
- Jun 21, 2008
- Messages
- 6,201
The last time I rebuilt my main desktop machine was approximately 3.5 years ago, so as you can imagine, some of my hardware was slowing down a fair amount. The CPU I had was an Intel i7 920 with original C0 stepping, which I was overclocking from stock 2.66GHz to 3.9GHz. This helped with some of the CPU-intensive games such as Arma 2, but for the most part I was having real problems with the majority of recent game releases.
I had been wanting to upgrade my rig for nearly a year, mainly to replace the GPU. Unfortunately, to replace the GPU I needed a new motherboard and CPU as well, which meant an upgrade last year simply was not in the cards. I finally got enough money saved up following Christmas for a new build, so I purchased a GPU, CPU, mobo, and some RAM from Newegg.
Well, I have been using my new build for about 2 weeks now, and after ironing out a few minor problems and 1 major one, everything seems to be working as expected. I will list the issues I ran into, but that can wait until the end of this thread. I will go ahead and apologize in advance for any lack of quality in the photos to follow; I was experimenting with the camera in my Asus Transformer Prime, so I apologize for any graininess, imperfect focus, and less-than-perfect exposure.
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The parts finally arrived from Newegg after nearly a week of delays due to order backlogs from the company's New Years vacation.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Here is a backside snap of the GTX690. Pretty normal-looking for a dual GPU card. Nothing out of the ordinary here, very similar to the HD5970.
-----------------------------------------------------------
And of course a topside view, showing off the fantastic build quality and care that Nvidia has given this card.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Next is a nice size comparison between the HD5970 and the GTX690. I was initially surprised to find that the GTX690 was so much significantly shorter than the HD5970, but this should not come as too much of a surprise. With smaller chipsets and increases in smaller nm construction abilities, it is not so surprising, after all. Perhaps the most impressive part of the card was the build quality, and the fact that one GTX690 scales extremely closely (95% +- 1%) with 2 GTX680's. Also, the GTX690's power consumption and noise levels are extremely low, relatively speaking. Overall, an extremely impressive card, and head-over-heels better than my HD5970, despite it only being 2-3 tiers higher in the consumer GPU hierarchy.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Next is the motherboard, an Asus Maximus V Extreme. This board is extremely impressive, and very easy to install, despite its technologically advanced features. Now, having a Rampage II Extreme (Another RoG board) probably simplified the task of installing the new one by a large margin, but the Asus installation manual was very easy to understand, with one exception regarding power connections. As for technical aspects of the board, the most impressive areas are 2 x16 (native) 3.0 PCIe slots, and a Thunderbolt port. The overclocking headroom on this board is also rediculous, but other than that the majority of the board is pretty standard for the price range. The areas of memory and storage are par for the course. One major improvement I noticed on this board, however, was the layout. Nearly all of the problems I found with the Rampage II Extreme had been solved or at the very least, massively improved on this 1155 board.
-----------------------------------------------------------
I took pictures of the RAM and CPU for warranty purposes, but they are nothing special by themselves, nor are they very interesting in a photo, so I won't post them here. At this point I began taking apart my machine. A fairly easy process with the case I have, but very hard to put it back together. Since there is not much room behind the PSU, it takes a while to get the cable management up there to a reasonably clean state. But anyway, here is my old board, looks pretty lonely compared to the color scheme of the newer boards. You will see I am working on an anti-static board; very important for anyone getting into computer building to work on a surface that conducts electricity poorly. You will also notice I leave the board on the metal back-plate, which keeps it grounded while I work. No need to waste money on those silly anti-static wristbands, etc, if you understand what you are doing.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Now the next 2 pictures are from when I installed my H80 cooler on my old i7 920. I took these a couple months ago, but they are still appropriate as I am using the cooler on my new Ivy. Obviously I couldn't be bothered with the sub-par corsair default fans, so I took out some extra Noctua's I had. Overall a very easy installation, but I wish I had a cutout section on my motherboard plate so that I did not have to unscrew the motherboard from it to install a cooler. Some of the newer cases have this, and I would look for it if you are shopping for a case. I believe I had some minor leaking from the cooler when I rebuilt my rig this time around, but after wiping up some residue with a paper towel, I have not noticed any further leakage. I believe the leakage was caused by me moving around the cooler when installing it again, but it does not leak when in place on the CPU, which is fine with me. It does a fantastic job at cooling the CPU, and I currently have my stock 3770k (3.5GHz w/ 3.9GHz turbo) overclocked @4.6GHz, idling at a cool 25C. When playing Skyrim on Ultra, one of my more intensive games (and heavily modded), my temps rarely exceed 30C. My old i7 920, on the other hand, would usually shoot up to the 60's and 70'sC on a partial load with my overclock @3.9GHz. In short, I am pretty damn impressed with Ivy Bridge.
-----------------------------------------------------------
In this next photo you will see the majority of my board in my Canyon 695. I have actually made some changes to the cable setup here. I have plugged in a 6-pin to the dedicated PCI power port behind the CPU cooler cables, and I have put my GTX690 on its own dedicated 12V rail (my PSU has 2), so I can be completely sure it is getting sufficient power in all situations. This should also be safer than the setup I have in the picture below, as I was using the non-modular PCI cables here. The modular cables are a little more heavy-duty and offer greater throughput if I need it down the road (for quad-SLI, etc). I have also disconnected the front I/O audio connector from my audio card, as it looked ugly in the case (no real place for it to go other than right in the middle of everything), and I don't use the front panel for audio devices, anyway. Also I may note that the fan controller on the CPU cooler, the RAM modules, and the "GEFORCE GTX" on the GPU all light up when powered on, so it looks pretty neat inside the case. Unfortunately I do not have a transparent side panel for my case because I won't spend the extra money for it.
-----------------------------------------------------------
And the finished product before I closed her up. You may notice that I have no place to really mount my SSD, but its not much of an issue to me. I simply let it rest on the separator underneath my audio card, and since it doesn't have moving parts and does not heat up much, it does just fine there. Not the cleanest way to do it when its all said and done, but again, I can't see into my case so its not a big deal. Unfortunately Lian-Li does a pretty poor job of supporting cases and upgrades for those cases after the case itself is released, so I am stuck with my current HDD enclosures. I am lucky I got my veloci-raptor in the enclosure; I don't think its supposed to work with the hot-swap backplate, but it does.
But, overall a fairly clean case. Plenty of room for all sorts of expansion, and plenty of room for air cooling, which I prefer over liquid. I wish I had front I/O USB 3.0, but I have plenty of that on the motherboard I guess. The soundproofing and dust filters more than make up for 2 USB 3.0 ports.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Now, I mentioned I had 1 major problem with my rig. The problem was BIOS related, and was caused when I tried to update the BIOS using the Windows utility that ASUS provided on the driver disk that came with the motherboard. I thought this would work fine, but it corrupted the BIOS to the point where it only detected my GPU correctly once every 10 or so reboots, forcing me to flush power from the motherboard over and over again until the planets aligned and it decided to boot correctly. I finally fixed this after 2 days when Asus released a new BIOS version, and I used the EZ Flash 2 utility through DOS. Since then, everything has worked perfectly without any hiccups. An occasional BSOD now and again due to some very heavy modding I am doing with Skyrim, but otherwise fine.
Now for a quick windows 8 rundown. I ran into a problem the other day where I found out that Canon is not really supporting Windows 8 with their drivers, so my somewhat old Pixma iP4500 was without drivers until I was able to force some third-party XP drivers to install after about an hour and a half of fooling around with it. I don't think this was Windows' fault, rather Canon's, but annoying nevertheless.
Lastly, here are some cool screenshots I took in Skyrim today. I am running the game on ultra settings, and I have most of my vanilla textures replaced with 2k and 4k variants, rarely dipping below 60 frames. Enjoy, and as always I am very happy to entertain and questions or suggestions regarding my build.
*Note* These look a lot better in-game, I think Steam uses a pretty lossy JPEG compression format.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for reading.
Regards,
Blue
I had been wanting to upgrade my rig for nearly a year, mainly to replace the GPU. Unfortunately, to replace the GPU I needed a new motherboard and CPU as well, which meant an upgrade last year simply was not in the cards. I finally got enough money saved up following Christmas for a new build, so I purchased a GPU, CPU, mobo, and some RAM from Newegg.
Well, I have been using my new build for about 2 weeks now, and after ironing out a few minor problems and 1 major one, everything seems to be working as expected. I will list the issues I ran into, but that can wait until the end of this thread. I will go ahead and apologize in advance for any lack of quality in the photos to follow; I was experimenting with the camera in my Asus Transformer Prime, so I apologize for any graininess, imperfect focus, and less-than-perfect exposure.
-----------------------------------------------------------
The parts finally arrived from Newegg after nearly a week of delays due to order backlogs from the company's New Years vacation.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Here is a backside snap of the GTX690. Pretty normal-looking for a dual GPU card. Nothing out of the ordinary here, very similar to the HD5970.
-----------------------------------------------------------
And of course a topside view, showing off the fantastic build quality and care that Nvidia has given this card.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Next is a nice size comparison between the HD5970 and the GTX690. I was initially surprised to find that the GTX690 was so much significantly shorter than the HD5970, but this should not come as too much of a surprise. With smaller chipsets and increases in smaller nm construction abilities, it is not so surprising, after all. Perhaps the most impressive part of the card was the build quality, and the fact that one GTX690 scales extremely closely (95% +- 1%) with 2 GTX680's. Also, the GTX690's power consumption and noise levels are extremely low, relatively speaking. Overall, an extremely impressive card, and head-over-heels better than my HD5970, despite it only being 2-3 tiers higher in the consumer GPU hierarchy.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Next is the motherboard, an Asus Maximus V Extreme. This board is extremely impressive, and very easy to install, despite its technologically advanced features. Now, having a Rampage II Extreme (Another RoG board) probably simplified the task of installing the new one by a large margin, but the Asus installation manual was very easy to understand, with one exception regarding power connections. As for technical aspects of the board, the most impressive areas are 2 x16 (native) 3.0 PCIe slots, and a Thunderbolt port. The overclocking headroom on this board is also rediculous, but other than that the majority of the board is pretty standard for the price range. The areas of memory and storage are par for the course. One major improvement I noticed on this board, however, was the layout. Nearly all of the problems I found with the Rampage II Extreme had been solved or at the very least, massively improved on this 1155 board.
-----------------------------------------------------------
I took pictures of the RAM and CPU for warranty purposes, but they are nothing special by themselves, nor are they very interesting in a photo, so I won't post them here. At this point I began taking apart my machine. A fairly easy process with the case I have, but very hard to put it back together. Since there is not much room behind the PSU, it takes a while to get the cable management up there to a reasonably clean state. But anyway, here is my old board, looks pretty lonely compared to the color scheme of the newer boards. You will see I am working on an anti-static board; very important for anyone getting into computer building to work on a surface that conducts electricity poorly. You will also notice I leave the board on the metal back-plate, which keeps it grounded while I work. No need to waste money on those silly anti-static wristbands, etc, if you understand what you are doing.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Now the next 2 pictures are from when I installed my H80 cooler on my old i7 920. I took these a couple months ago, but they are still appropriate as I am using the cooler on my new Ivy. Obviously I couldn't be bothered with the sub-par corsair default fans, so I took out some extra Noctua's I had. Overall a very easy installation, but I wish I had a cutout section on my motherboard plate so that I did not have to unscrew the motherboard from it to install a cooler. Some of the newer cases have this, and I would look for it if you are shopping for a case. I believe I had some minor leaking from the cooler when I rebuilt my rig this time around, but after wiping up some residue with a paper towel, I have not noticed any further leakage. I believe the leakage was caused by me moving around the cooler when installing it again, but it does not leak when in place on the CPU, which is fine with me. It does a fantastic job at cooling the CPU, and I currently have my stock 3770k (3.5GHz w/ 3.9GHz turbo) overclocked @4.6GHz, idling at a cool 25C. When playing Skyrim on Ultra, one of my more intensive games (and heavily modded), my temps rarely exceed 30C. My old i7 920, on the other hand, would usually shoot up to the 60's and 70'sC on a partial load with my overclock @3.9GHz. In short, I am pretty damn impressed with Ivy Bridge.
-----------------------------------------------------------
In this next photo you will see the majority of my board in my Canyon 695. I have actually made some changes to the cable setup here. I have plugged in a 6-pin to the dedicated PCI power port behind the CPU cooler cables, and I have put my GTX690 on its own dedicated 12V rail (my PSU has 2), so I can be completely sure it is getting sufficient power in all situations. This should also be safer than the setup I have in the picture below, as I was using the non-modular PCI cables here. The modular cables are a little more heavy-duty and offer greater throughput if I need it down the road (for quad-SLI, etc). I have also disconnected the front I/O audio connector from my audio card, as it looked ugly in the case (no real place for it to go other than right in the middle of everything), and I don't use the front panel for audio devices, anyway. Also I may note that the fan controller on the CPU cooler, the RAM modules, and the "GEFORCE GTX" on the GPU all light up when powered on, so it looks pretty neat inside the case. Unfortunately I do not have a transparent side panel for my case because I won't spend the extra money for it.
-----------------------------------------------------------
And the finished product before I closed her up. You may notice that I have no place to really mount my SSD, but its not much of an issue to me. I simply let it rest on the separator underneath my audio card, and since it doesn't have moving parts and does not heat up much, it does just fine there. Not the cleanest way to do it when its all said and done, but again, I can't see into my case so its not a big deal. Unfortunately Lian-Li does a pretty poor job of supporting cases and upgrades for those cases after the case itself is released, so I am stuck with my current HDD enclosures. I am lucky I got my veloci-raptor in the enclosure; I don't think its supposed to work with the hot-swap backplate, but it does.
But, overall a fairly clean case. Plenty of room for all sorts of expansion, and plenty of room for air cooling, which I prefer over liquid. I wish I had front I/O USB 3.0, but I have plenty of that on the motherboard I guess. The soundproofing and dust filters more than make up for 2 USB 3.0 ports.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Now, I mentioned I had 1 major problem with my rig. The problem was BIOS related, and was caused when I tried to update the BIOS using the Windows utility that ASUS provided on the driver disk that came with the motherboard. I thought this would work fine, but it corrupted the BIOS to the point where it only detected my GPU correctly once every 10 or so reboots, forcing me to flush power from the motherboard over and over again until the planets aligned and it decided to boot correctly. I finally fixed this after 2 days when Asus released a new BIOS version, and I used the EZ Flash 2 utility through DOS. Since then, everything has worked perfectly without any hiccups. An occasional BSOD now and again due to some very heavy modding I am doing with Skyrim, but otherwise fine.
Now for a quick windows 8 rundown. I ran into a problem the other day where I found out that Canon is not really supporting Windows 8 with their drivers, so my somewhat old Pixma iP4500 was without drivers until I was able to force some third-party XP drivers to install after about an hour and a half of fooling around with it. I don't think this was Windows' fault, rather Canon's, but annoying nevertheless.
Lastly, here are some cool screenshots I took in Skyrim today. I am running the game on ultra settings, and I have most of my vanilla textures replaced with 2k and 4k variants, rarely dipping below 60 frames. Enjoy, and as always I am very happy to entertain and questions or suggestions regarding my build.
*Note* These look a lot better in-game, I think Steam uses a pretty lossy JPEG compression format.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for reading.
Regards,
Blue
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