FAH-Addict

Hello fellow FAH Addicts. I just thought I'd take the time to show off my new rig to ya'll. First some background, mostly to explain the expensive case.

Around the beginning of December, I fell in love with EVGA's 4-way Classified and decided I would go about building a rig with this motherboard. First, I had to find just the right chassis for the XL-ATX form factor motherboard. I decided upon the Mountain Mods Pinnacle-18 tower chassis. I'm far from rich so I had to hold off for another month before ordering the rest of the components. Therefore, I ordered the cast first and tried to patiently wait for December to pass before proceeding with the build. About a week and a half before I was to order my 4-way Classified, we in the overclocking community started to see some intelligence reports about a new dual-processor socket 1366 board also from EVGA. I instantly decided that, as a true FAH addict, had to hold off on the 4-way Classified and save up for this new bad boy.

Alas, I still had an itch to add moar points to my farm and start doing some bigadv work along with some other beta work I can't discuss at the moment. So, I decided to put together a low-budget X58-based setup in this chassis for now until the dual-processor EVGA board is announced. I had been reading many great reviews about the ASRock X58 Extreme motherboard so I decided to give it a try as it is very cheap here in America. Boy, am I glad I did. It has proven to be a great little overclocker and is currently folding A2's and all GPU based work via WINE just fine. There have been no hints of instability or any other weird quirks.

I can't wait to see how it does with -bigadv. -bigadv is the true test of stability.

Some specifics:

ASRock X58 Extreme
Core i7 920 OC'd to 3.99 GHz (21x190)
6GB OCZ DDR3 1600 Memory
BFG GTX260 (Stock Clocks)
Corsair H50 pseudo-water cooler

Operating System:

Gentoo Linux - Extremely minimal install, no GUI
2.6.32 Kernel with Zen Project Optimizations/Patches
64-bit 195.30 NVIDIA Driver
32-but CUDA 2.3 Toolkit

Code :







Edit by Tobit On 01/07/10 at 21h25

Surprising, very little. They are all low RPM 120mm Yate-Loons. I honestly can't hear it over the other machine in the room.. but that has a single slot 8800GT in it contributing most of the noise.

Welp, I just started doing my first -bigadv a couple hours ago and it is running fine. I am seeing TPF's of 30m 11s and very pleased. Rig is running well so far. *knocks on wood* The rig is currently doing 35K PpD.

Be careful, a big new case is almost like a "Gateway upgrade".

It's been a few months since I bought my Antec 1200, and ever since then I've had this nagging urge to get a server mobo + procs just to help "fill out" all that extra space. *Twitchy Newegg finger*

BTW: I think that to use multiple procs, they MUST be the server versions - no popping in a second 920 allowed.

EDIT: Nevermind, found the board you were talking about - but I'm wondering if EVGA is going to get some flack from Intel over this - Intel doesn't hesitate to "make it's presence known" over smaller things than this.



Edit by berserker29 On 01/10/10 at 23h30

How do you like that cooler? I've been debating on a water cooling setup and that seemed like a possible place to start.

I've got on of the H50's in my new rig ( i7-860 @ 3.8GHz), and I like it. Running SMP2 all the cores hover around 77C. If I shutdown the client it drops to 50C in one second and it's idle temp of 42C in under 2 seconds. At stock speed on the CPU the system is almost silent even at 100% load.

Update: One thing about the H50 is that it seems very sensitive to ambient temp. With a room temp of around 65F I was getting the 77C readings, room temp 72F, CPU @ 84C, room temp around 82F, CPU up in high 90C's. Am swapping the fan out for a higher volume Noctua, but might have to look at an alternative cooler - we're only in Spring and the CPU temperatures are making me a little nervous.



Edit by Haitch On 04/14/10 at 01h37

Nice rig / central heater