- Mar 25, 2006
- 1,670
- 0
- 19,780
Here in the labs we test for compatibility, performance, and stability (though not necessarily in that order). Today, though, we�ve taken a time out from absolutely punishing ICs from different manufacturers with cruel devices of torture known as voltage and frequency to bring you a step-by-step guide on how to build an extremely powerful home system.
This isn�t going to be a �state of the art� system with liquid nitrogen and car batteries that requires protective eyewear and a good knowledge of spot welding and theoretical chemistry to build. This is something anybody can do with a little bit of patience and some basic knowledge.
We�ll start off with choosing our hardware. Since this is going to be a near top-of-the-line system, we�re going to use performance parts across the
board.
Here�s a quick picture of all the hardware we�re going to assemble.
Let�s break it down bit by bit, shall we? Starting with the thing most people decide upon first, the processor. Right now, for gaming, the Athlon64 processor is the best choice when it comes to performance. However, this system is going to do much more than gaming. The average enthusiast probably spends a lot of time watching movies, listening to MP3s, encoding TV shows and other media files, and browsing the internet. In fact, most of the time, we�re doing this stuff all at once. As a result, we decided to shy away from the Athlon64 and go with the Athlon64 X2. The X2 series processors are dual core, which means that there are two separate cores that allow the operating system and all multi-threaded applications to balance load across them. This means that we can encode a DVD and listen to MP3s and write a term paper all at once without worrying too much about CPU utilization.
Our processor is the Athlon64 X2 4200+
The Athlon64 X2 4200+ runs at 2.2 GHz and has 512K of cache memory per core. While there are faster X2 processors out there (the 4600+ runs at 2.4 GHz) and processors with more cache (the 4400+ and the 4800+ have 1MB of cache memory per core), we decided on this one because we just love a challenge. The other processors are significantly more expensive, and we�re convinced that we can get this machine to beat the performance of a 4800+ based system with some tweaks, some high performance components, and of course, overclocking.
The Athlon64 X2 processors are all Socket 939, which means we want a Socket 939-based motherboard. Since the fastest gaming experience available today is through nVidia�s SLI technology, we looked at Socket 939 boards based on the nForce4 SLI chipset.
We decided on a fairly popular board from Asus, the A8N-SLI Premium
This board supports dual PCI-Express video cards in SLI mode, all Socket 939 CPUs, and comes with a host of other goodies like dual integrated LAN, firewire, USB 2.0, 8 SATA ports, and a passively cooled chipset utilizing heatpipe technology. This is advantageous because heatpipes have no moving parts, thus there�s no fan to fail or make noise.
The next step was finding a CPU heatsink/fan combo. While the stock fan is fairly decent, it can be loud under full load, so we decided on something a little quieter that would still get us great performance when we decided to overclock.
Our choice was the Zalman CNPS7000B-CU LED
Zalman makes a variety of different heatsinks for chipsets, video cards, processors, and more. This one is made entirely of copper with a blue LED fan integrated into it, as well as near silent operation at idle and very quiet operation at load.
Now for the memory�where could we get some memory?
We decided to use our TWINX2048-3500LLPRO modules. These modules are rated PC3500 at 2-3-2-6 latency, and integrate our cool activity LEDs into the top of the heatspreader. Best of all, they are two 1GB sticks, and since some current and upcoming games are making use of memory over 1GB, we decided going with 2GB was the best course of action.
Two eVGA GeForce 7800GTX PCI-Express video cards
Western Digital Raptor 36GB 10,000 RPM SATA Hard Drive
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 300GB SATA Hard Drive
Antec NeoPower 480W Modular Power Supply
Other drives:
Top DVD Drive: NEC-3540 DVD+/-RW drive. Found online for around $50 at the time of writing, this drive does it all. Dual Layer, DVD+/-R, DVD+/-RW, and what�s more, we can order it in black, silver, or white to match the case we�re using.
Bottom DVD Drive: Sony DVD DDU1615. Sometimes you may want to copy a disc for backup, so having a basic DVD reader is always a bonus. It means you don�t have to copy to the hard drive first, you can just copy from one disc to the other.
Floppy Drive: Yeah yeah, we know, nobody uses them anymore. Well we do. For flashing a BIOS to installing SATA drivers during the Windows setup, floppy drives still have their uses. The only thing extraordinary about this one is its black faceplate. I mean, it might as well match the rest of the case, right?
Which, of course, brings us to the case�
Lian-Li V1000B-W Aluminum Case.
Now for the fun part: putting everything together. Like any puzzle, this machine is going to have pieces, and those pieces will only fit together one way to work correctly. Unlike a simple puzzle, however, computer components cost hundreds or thousands of dollars and can be completely destroyed by improper configuration.
No pressure, though. This is pretty fun to do, once you get the hang of it.
Preparing the Case
First, we take the side window off the case
Some cases have the motherboard mounts pre-applied, in which case this next step is unnecessary. This case, however, allows us to place the mounts wherever we want, so we just inserted them in the holes that matched our motherboard�s holes.
All done
Installing the Power Supply
Every case handles the PSU slightly differently.
This one has a mounting bracket that comes fully off the back.
Once it�s off, we just line up the holes on our PSU with the holes on the bracket:
Then we screw it on there.
Once we get that all lined up, we slide it into the case, and hand screw the thumbscrews in. To make sure they�re tight, we fasten them with a screwdriver a bit at the end.
Installing the Motherboard I/O Shield
Almost all cases come with an I/O shield of some sort. However, with most modern motherboards, it doesn�t fit the right amount of plugs. With a zillion varieties and combinations of USB, Firewire, PS/2, Serial and Parallel ports, not to mention other possibilities, case manufacturers play it safe and give you a standard shield. However, pretty much all modern motherboards come with their own I/O shields.
You can see the old one in the case, and the new one right next to it. There is quite a difference there. The old one pops out just by pressing on it, and the new one snaps right in easily.
And out of the protective wrapper:
Installing the CPU
First we open up the ZIF socket arm. It�s a little metal (or sometimes plastic) arm next to the socket, and by pulling it upwards we ready the socket for processor insertion.
Notice that on the left side corners on the socket, there is a missing series of pins. You can match this up to the missing pins on the processor:
This means that the processor will only fit one way. It doesn�t take any pressure or pushing at all to put the processor in the socket; if it does, you might have it keyed incorrectly.
It drops right in there! Then we just close the socket lever (this part does take some pressure)
Installing the Heatsink
Man, there sure are a lot of components to the Zalman heatsink we chose. But that�s only because it uses a custom bracket design. We�ll get to that later. Here�s what we see when we open up the box.
Arctic Silver provides for better thermal conductivity between the copper heatsink and the heatspreader on top of our Athlon64 CPU. Regular thermal paste works well if you�re not overclocking much, but when we want the absolute best, we refuse to settle for �works well�, and require �impressive� or �outlandishly unnecessary� levels of performance.
First step, remove the bracket around the Socket 939 CPU
Here�s what it looks like when we took both the front and back bracket off
Then we put the new custom bracket on the back
And screwed the thumbscrews in
Now, when applying the arctic silver, you don�t need a lot. Just a little pea-sized drop is more than enough. Put it in the center, like this:
Now, you can rely on the pressure between the heatsink and processor to spread it out, but I like to spread it out a bit myself. I did this by putting my finger in a ziplock bag and �sponge painting� the thermal grease around a bit.
Once that�s done, we put the heatsink on, and line up the holes in its mounting bracket with the holes in the thumbscrews
Installing the Memory
DDR and DDR2 memory are keyed differently, but the logic is the same. We�re using standard DDR memory. Well, standard form factor; our memory is anything but standard when it comes to performance and appearance.
We have to line up the slot in the memory socket to the slot on the module
Then we insert it and push it downwards. Don�t press too hard, it should go in with only a bit of pressure:
Complete!
Now we plug the motherboard into the case. It�s actually fairly simple now that we�ve got our Asus-supplied I/O shield in there!
Once we�ve lined up the holes in the motherboard with the motherboard mounts from earlier, we screw the motherboard into them with the screws that came with the case.
Finished with that
Notice, ours is upside down a bit. That�s the way our case is designed. Chances are, yours will look similar to this but with the CPU near the top.
Next, we insert our PSU connectors. This is the 24-pin ATX connector, the main power for the motherboard.
This is the 4-pin power connector, this provides separate power to the CPU itself.
The case has its own connectors for the front panel. Some cases have more than others, ours has Power LED, Hard Drive LED, Power Switch, and PC Speaker. Some cases don�t have the speaker and some include a separate switch for RESET. Check your motherboard manual for where your jumpers are.
We install the connectors to the right area, and again, miraculous wonder occurs.
Let�s start off with talking about what we need to do. We still need to do the following:
1) Install our Floppy Drive, and our Optical Drives.
2) Install our Sound Card and Video Cards
3) Install our Hard Drives.
4) Clean up our cables so everything looks pretty and we get good airflow.
To start, let�s take a look at the back of our drives. This is the back of our floppy drive. At the top right you can see the 4-pin power connector, and under that, the floppy cable connector.
The back of one of our optical drives. I highlighted in red the area that we need to pay attention to. Our optical drives, like most optical drives, still run off the IDE channel. As such, they require jumper settings. Almost all modern drives have three settings. Cable Select, Slave, and Master. The easiest thing to do is to move the jumper on all your drives to Cable Select (highlighted in yellow). If you�re using a modern system, this should not cause any problems for you, as it allows the motherboard to assign master/slave status to the drive instead of your jumper settings.
If your drive doesn�t have an embossed label like that, it might have a printed label, like this:
Once you get your jumpers set right, it�s time to put the drives in your case. Not all drives are the same length, our NEC-3540 is considerably longer than our Sony DVD reader. However, they both fit just fine.
The floppy drive is done identically to this, so I won�t cover it here.
Now for the cables. You�ll notice that on our motherboard, we have some connectors for various devices. Here�s a picture of our floppy cable (we�re using rounded cables, but most of these look like long ribbons) plugged into the �1FLOPPY� header.
Then we take the other end, and plug it into the floppy drive. Our cable is keyed so it only fits one way on our drive. In this picture, the power cable has already been plugged in. It, also, will only fit one way.
Here�s a final shot of both our floppy and DVD drives plugged in and fully installed.
Now installing video Cards
We�re using Dual 7800GTX cards from eVGA.
You can see the connector is different. That�s because these cards use PCI-Express slots instead of standard PCI slots. There is a much higher bandwidth over the PCI-Express bus, and that means video cards can transfer data much faster between the CPU and Memory and GPU when placed on this bus.
Here�s a shot of our two PCI-Express slots (Black and Blue) and a couple standard PCI Slots on top (white). The two slots between the PCI-Express slots are lower bandwidth PCI-Express slots. Since PCI-Express devices require different bandwidth (for example, a video card requires more data pushing power than, say, a sound card or firewire card) the PCI-Express �X16� slot (the longer ones) are designed for Video cards, while the smaller slots (X4, X2, or X1) are typically designed for slower, low bandwidth cards.
The video cards are installed, and we screw them in.
Our cards require external power, so we get our 6-pin PCI-Express video card lead from the PSU (not all PSUs have this pin, some require an adapter, but it�s typically free and comes with the video card)
And plug them both into our video cards.
Now, because we�re doing SLI, we have to install our SLI bridge:
Now for the Hard Drives
Our case is a little strange, it doesn�t require you to screw the hard drives into the case like most do, it comes with little custom screws that you screw into the side of the hard drive before you put them in the case.
After that, you simply slide the drive into the mounting area, and secure the little bracket.
On most cases, installing the hard drive is pretty similar to installing the optical drive. In our case it�s a bit different.
Now, because the Hard Drive cables are the last cables we�re going to run, I�m going to integrate cable management and running our hard drive cables into one section.
The most important things to know about cable management are that it provides much better airflow, makes your case look cleaner (especially cool if you have a window) and and requires a bit of patience and quite a few zip ties:
I ran our front panel, USB, and firewire cables all together behind the motherboard tray, and zip tied them together.
I plugged in our SATA cables
Here�s a shot of the cables all running down the back of the motherboard tray
Now, as for fan cables, most fan cables are 2 or 3 wires and look messy. An easy way of fixing this is by straightening out the wires, then wrapping them around the shaft of a long screwdriver like this:
Then, when you remove the screwdriver and plug in the connector, you get this nifty slinky-type effect:
And voila! Now that everything is installed, our case looks clean!
Many of you guys have done this stuff a million times before, so this will be nothing new. Many of you guys have never done this before at all, so consider this a primer. I�m trying to go step-by-step, but there are some things I did not think were necessary, like taking 1000 pictures of each �Click Next� driver dialog box. If you�re smart enough to find this build log, you�re smart enough to click Next and Submit a few times on your own.
I have faith in my readers.
Without further ado, onto the BIOS!
This is the post screen we get with the A8N-SLI Premium. I pressed the �DEL� key to enter the BIOS setup utility.
And we get to this:
In this screen, you�ll notice we can set the time and date and language, and identify all our hardware for the IDE and SATA drives. The primary IDE Master and Slave are our optical drives, and you�ll notice the First SATA master identifies a Hard Drive, this one is the 300GB storage drive. Our Third SATA master identifies the 36GB Raptor drive, that�s where we�re going to be installing our OS.
I have left HDD SMART Monitoring disabled by default, but enabling it can give you a heads up if your drive is getting bad sectors or is about to die. I don�t have much use for it here (dozens of hard drives surrounding me) but at home, I have it enabled.
Going to the ADVANCED tab up top, we see this:
These options are all in the manual for the board so I�m not going to go into all of them, but I�ll go into the ones that we are changing for right now.
Like this one, CPU Configuration:
|
You�ll see it correctly identified our X2 4200+ processor, and has an option for DRAM Configuration, which we�ll see here:
It�s on Auto by default, but it identified the SPD on our modules incorrectly. It identified 2.5-3-3-6 and 2T, we�re going to fix that by going to MANUAL and changing the settings to the 3500LL�s rated latency, 2-3-2-6 at 1T:
Once that�s done, I hit escape and go back to our CPU Config page, where I manually set Hyper Transport Frequency (going to call this HT from now on) to 5x. This means that our HT is going to be 5x whatever our clock generator is. By default, our clock generator is 200 Mhz.
Here�s a shot of Jumperfree Configuration, where I set it to Manual because I wanted to set our DDR Voltage to its rated 2.7V instead of the stock 2.6V. All other settings were left default, for now. When we overclock, we�ll come back here and change our CPU Frequency, and maybe some other voltages.
And of course, in the Boot Menu, under Boot Device Priority, I changed the first boot device to CDROM, because we�re going to be booting from the Windows XP SP1 CD instead of the Hard Drive, which is completely blank.
Fun fact: Almost every BIOS in the world uses F10 as its default �Save changes and exit?� option. So I hit F10 and got this:
When your computer starts up, make sure you have your Windows CD in the CD-Rom drive. You�ll get a screen that says �BOOT FROM CD (Y/N)?� or possibly �Press any key to boot from CD�, when you see these, hit Y to boot from the CD. In a few seconds you�ll see this:
Now, if we were using the Silicon SATA Controller, we�d have to hit F6 here and follow the on-screen instructions to load the SATA drivers from a floppy disc that came in the Asus�s motherboard box. However, the nForce4�s SATA controller works fine with most versions of XP.
Our next screen:
Hit enter, and here we go:
Of course it doesn�t see any partitions, both drives are new! So we have to decipher which drive to partition for our OS to reside upon. The size of the drives (35300 and 286,166) make it clear. The top drive is our Raptor, so we�ll use that. I hit C to create the partition, and formatted it in NTFS. It took me back to the screen, which now looks like this:
I hit Enter, and it started copying files:
A reboot after about 5 minutes of file copying, and we get the EXCITING NEW LOOK
Some assorted screens that are fairly self explanatory. They involve answering the typical Windows personalization prompts and clicking next a series of times.
Not my real registration key:
And after all that, a reboot, and we get into Windows for the first time:
When you first install Windows, it loads generic drivers for everything it can, but most of our hardware didn�t exist when Windows XP was released, not even SP1 or SP2. So we have to check what drivers are loaded.
Right click My Computer, and go to properties
Click the Hardware tab and go to Device Manager:
You�ll see all the hardware you don�t have drivers installed for under Other Devices:
Notice a bunch of really bizarre stuff? Well, let�s start loading some drivers to get rid of these.
The first thing to install should always be your chipset drivers. The chipset on our board is an nForce4 SLI, so I downloaded the newest drivers from nVidia�s website http://www.nvidia.com on another computer, and copied them to my handy USB key
If you don�t have this option, Asus includes all the drivers you need to get up and running on its Driver CD,
However, the drivers on nVidia�s website are updated every month or so, and I wanted the newest ones. You can always load the CD version first and then update later, but I already had the files on my USB Key by this point so I just started installing them:
do the same with the Video card drivers
800x600 resolution? Please�
You may remember, we installed two video cards to do SLI? Well, we have to enable that. In the SLI multi-GPU menu, there�s a check box for it.
then your go to windows update and download all the latest Fixes
Now, I could have gotten a little more performance out of this system had I tweaked our BIOS settings a bit more. I know this processor is stable up to 2.75 Ghz, because I�ve clocked it there before. I know our memory can do faster than 219 Mhz if I relax the latencies a bit, but that�s all doing the same thing over and over that I�ve already done once.
If you want to overclock, follow the basic steps, change the settings, and run some tests to ensure stability. I recommend super-pi, memtest, and prime95. Make sure you get at least a couple of hours on these if you�re concerned about stability.
Some of the other benchmarking programs you could use that would show more of a difference include SiSoft Sandra 2005, Everest UE, and Science Mark.
This is in addition to 3DMark05, PCMark05, and for full system benchmarks that are less affected by video cards, 3DMark2001SE.
Keep in mind, these are all synthetic benchmarks, and may not relate well to real-world gaming performance. The only way to measure real world gaming performance is to play the game and determine if it's fast enough for you. Some people have different standards as to what they believe is playable. I might think 60fps is playable, and my friend might accept 30fps. Turning options on and off can make a huge change in performance, as well, as can changing resolution.
The sweet spot for resolution right now seems to be 1280x1024, which is the native resolution of most 17" and 19" LCD monitors. In a newer game like Call of Duty 2 or Battlefield 2, even the top-of-the-line video cards like the 7800GTX and the X1800XT show slowdowns with all options enabled and Anti-Aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering turned all the way up. They're still playable, but they're faster without those options.
Part of the fun of a system build is the tweaking, changing settings this way and that way and experimenting with performance. It's a task that never really gets finished, as anybody who's built up an engine or done a case mod can attest to. Nothing is ever really finished, there's always a little more performance, one more little thing you can change that will make you more satisfied.
As for us, we're done with this build for now, but I'll still be tweaking it and messing with it, and this system might even end up at some of our trade shows. I've got a good idea of what I'm building for the next system build, but I don't think I'm ready to let the cat out of the bag yet. Let's just say I'm going to be keeping quiet for a bit.
All Done !!!
thanks to Corsair memory for the helpfull guide
http://sysbuild.corsairmemory.com/report.aspx?id=2&sid=1
😀
This isn�t going to be a �state of the art� system with liquid nitrogen and car batteries that requires protective eyewear and a good knowledge of spot welding and theoretical chemistry to build. This is something anybody can do with a little bit of patience and some basic knowledge.
We�ll start off with choosing our hardware. Since this is going to be a near top-of-the-line system, we�re going to use performance parts across the
board.
Here�s a quick picture of all the hardware we�re going to assemble.
Let�s break it down bit by bit, shall we? Starting with the thing most people decide upon first, the processor. Right now, for gaming, the Athlon64 processor is the best choice when it comes to performance. However, this system is going to do much more than gaming. The average enthusiast probably spends a lot of time watching movies, listening to MP3s, encoding TV shows and other media files, and browsing the internet. In fact, most of the time, we�re doing this stuff all at once. As a result, we decided to shy away from the Athlon64 and go with the Athlon64 X2. The X2 series processors are dual core, which means that there are two separate cores that allow the operating system and all multi-threaded applications to balance load across them. This means that we can encode a DVD and listen to MP3s and write a term paper all at once without worrying too much about CPU utilization.
Our processor is the Athlon64 X2 4200+
The Athlon64 X2 4200+ runs at 2.2 GHz and has 512K of cache memory per core. While there are faster X2 processors out there (the 4600+ runs at 2.4 GHz) and processors with more cache (the 4400+ and the 4800+ have 1MB of cache memory per core), we decided on this one because we just love a challenge. The other processors are significantly more expensive, and we�re convinced that we can get this machine to beat the performance of a 4800+ based system with some tweaks, some high performance components, and of course, overclocking.
The Athlon64 X2 processors are all Socket 939, which means we want a Socket 939-based motherboard. Since the fastest gaming experience available today is through nVidia�s SLI technology, we looked at Socket 939 boards based on the nForce4 SLI chipset.
We decided on a fairly popular board from Asus, the A8N-SLI Premium
This board supports dual PCI-Express video cards in SLI mode, all Socket 939 CPUs, and comes with a host of other goodies like dual integrated LAN, firewire, USB 2.0, 8 SATA ports, and a passively cooled chipset utilizing heatpipe technology. This is advantageous because heatpipes have no moving parts, thus there�s no fan to fail or make noise.
The next step was finding a CPU heatsink/fan combo. While the stock fan is fairly decent, it can be loud under full load, so we decided on something a little quieter that would still get us great performance when we decided to overclock.
Our choice was the Zalman CNPS7000B-CU LED
Zalman makes a variety of different heatsinks for chipsets, video cards, processors, and more. This one is made entirely of copper with a blue LED fan integrated into it, as well as near silent operation at idle and very quiet operation at load.
Now for the memory�where could we get some memory?
We decided to use our TWINX2048-3500LLPRO modules. These modules are rated PC3500 at 2-3-2-6 latency, and integrate our cool activity LEDs into the top of the heatspreader. Best of all, they are two 1GB sticks, and since some current and upcoming games are making use of memory over 1GB, we decided going with 2GB was the best course of action.
Two eVGA GeForce 7800GTX PCI-Express video cards
Western Digital Raptor 36GB 10,000 RPM SATA Hard Drive
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 300GB SATA Hard Drive
Antec NeoPower 480W Modular Power Supply
Other drives:
Top DVD Drive: NEC-3540 DVD+/-RW drive. Found online for around $50 at the time of writing, this drive does it all. Dual Layer, DVD+/-R, DVD+/-RW, and what�s more, we can order it in black, silver, or white to match the case we�re using.
Bottom DVD Drive: Sony DVD DDU1615. Sometimes you may want to copy a disc for backup, so having a basic DVD reader is always a bonus. It means you don�t have to copy to the hard drive first, you can just copy from one disc to the other.
Floppy Drive: Yeah yeah, we know, nobody uses them anymore. Well we do. For flashing a BIOS to installing SATA drivers during the Windows setup, floppy drives still have their uses. The only thing extraordinary about this one is its black faceplate. I mean, it might as well match the rest of the case, right?
Which, of course, brings us to the case�
Lian-Li V1000B-W Aluminum Case.
Now for the fun part: putting everything together. Like any puzzle, this machine is going to have pieces, and those pieces will only fit together one way to work correctly. Unlike a simple puzzle, however, computer components cost hundreds or thousands of dollars and can be completely destroyed by improper configuration.
No pressure, though. This is pretty fun to do, once you get the hang of it.
Preparing the Case
First, we take the side window off the case
Some cases have the motherboard mounts pre-applied, in which case this next step is unnecessary. This case, however, allows us to place the mounts wherever we want, so we just inserted them in the holes that matched our motherboard�s holes.
All done
Installing the Power Supply
Every case handles the PSU slightly differently.
This one has a mounting bracket that comes fully off the back.
Once it�s off, we just line up the holes on our PSU with the holes on the bracket:
Then we screw it on there.
Once we get that all lined up, we slide it into the case, and hand screw the thumbscrews in. To make sure they�re tight, we fasten them with a screwdriver a bit at the end.
Installing the Motherboard I/O Shield
Almost all cases come with an I/O shield of some sort. However, with most modern motherboards, it doesn�t fit the right amount of plugs. With a zillion varieties and combinations of USB, Firewire, PS/2, Serial and Parallel ports, not to mention other possibilities, case manufacturers play it safe and give you a standard shield. However, pretty much all modern motherboards come with their own I/O shields.
You can see the old one in the case, and the new one right next to it. There is quite a difference there. The old one pops out just by pressing on it, and the new one snaps right in easily.
And out of the protective wrapper:
Installing the CPU
First we open up the ZIF socket arm. It�s a little metal (or sometimes plastic) arm next to the socket, and by pulling it upwards we ready the socket for processor insertion.
Notice that on the left side corners on the socket, there is a missing series of pins. You can match this up to the missing pins on the processor:
This means that the processor will only fit one way. It doesn�t take any pressure or pushing at all to put the processor in the socket; if it does, you might have it keyed incorrectly.
It drops right in there! Then we just close the socket lever (this part does take some pressure)
Installing the Heatsink
Man, there sure are a lot of components to the Zalman heatsink we chose. But that�s only because it uses a custom bracket design. We�ll get to that later. Here�s what we see when we open up the box.
Arctic Silver provides for better thermal conductivity between the copper heatsink and the heatspreader on top of our Athlon64 CPU. Regular thermal paste works well if you�re not overclocking much, but when we want the absolute best, we refuse to settle for �works well�, and require �impressive� or �outlandishly unnecessary� levels of performance.
First step, remove the bracket around the Socket 939 CPU
Here�s what it looks like when we took both the front and back bracket off
Then we put the new custom bracket on the back
And screwed the thumbscrews in
Now, when applying the arctic silver, you don�t need a lot. Just a little pea-sized drop is more than enough. Put it in the center, like this:
Now, you can rely on the pressure between the heatsink and processor to spread it out, but I like to spread it out a bit myself. I did this by putting my finger in a ziplock bag and �sponge painting� the thermal grease around a bit.
Once that�s done, we put the heatsink on, and line up the holes in its mounting bracket with the holes in the thumbscrews
Installing the Memory
DDR and DDR2 memory are keyed differently, but the logic is the same. We�re using standard DDR memory. Well, standard form factor; our memory is anything but standard when it comes to performance and appearance.
We have to line up the slot in the memory socket to the slot on the module
Then we insert it and push it downwards. Don�t press too hard, it should go in with only a bit of pressure:
Complete!
Now we plug the motherboard into the case. It�s actually fairly simple now that we�ve got our Asus-supplied I/O shield in there!
Once we�ve lined up the holes in the motherboard with the motherboard mounts from earlier, we screw the motherboard into them with the screws that came with the case.
Finished with that
Notice, ours is upside down a bit. That�s the way our case is designed. Chances are, yours will look similar to this but with the CPU near the top.
Next, we insert our PSU connectors. This is the 24-pin ATX connector, the main power for the motherboard.
This is the 4-pin power connector, this provides separate power to the CPU itself.
The case has its own connectors for the front panel. Some cases have more than others, ours has Power LED, Hard Drive LED, Power Switch, and PC Speaker. Some cases don�t have the speaker and some include a separate switch for RESET. Check your motherboard manual for where your jumpers are.
We install the connectors to the right area, and again, miraculous wonder occurs.
Let�s start off with talking about what we need to do. We still need to do the following:
1) Install our Floppy Drive, and our Optical Drives.
2) Install our Sound Card and Video Cards
3) Install our Hard Drives.
4) Clean up our cables so everything looks pretty and we get good airflow.
To start, let�s take a look at the back of our drives. This is the back of our floppy drive. At the top right you can see the 4-pin power connector, and under that, the floppy cable connector.
The back of one of our optical drives. I highlighted in red the area that we need to pay attention to. Our optical drives, like most optical drives, still run off the IDE channel. As such, they require jumper settings. Almost all modern drives have three settings. Cable Select, Slave, and Master. The easiest thing to do is to move the jumper on all your drives to Cable Select (highlighted in yellow). If you�re using a modern system, this should not cause any problems for you, as it allows the motherboard to assign master/slave status to the drive instead of your jumper settings.
If your drive doesn�t have an embossed label like that, it might have a printed label, like this:
Once you get your jumpers set right, it�s time to put the drives in your case. Not all drives are the same length, our NEC-3540 is considerably longer than our Sony DVD reader. However, they both fit just fine.
The floppy drive is done identically to this, so I won�t cover it here.
Now for the cables. You�ll notice that on our motherboard, we have some connectors for various devices. Here�s a picture of our floppy cable (we�re using rounded cables, but most of these look like long ribbons) plugged into the �1FLOPPY� header.
Then we take the other end, and plug it into the floppy drive. Our cable is keyed so it only fits one way on our drive. In this picture, the power cable has already been plugged in. It, also, will only fit one way.
Here�s a final shot of both our floppy and DVD drives plugged in and fully installed.
Now installing video Cards
We�re using Dual 7800GTX cards from eVGA.
You can see the connector is different. That�s because these cards use PCI-Express slots instead of standard PCI slots. There is a much higher bandwidth over the PCI-Express bus, and that means video cards can transfer data much faster between the CPU and Memory and GPU when placed on this bus.
Here�s a shot of our two PCI-Express slots (Black and Blue) and a couple standard PCI Slots on top (white). The two slots between the PCI-Express slots are lower bandwidth PCI-Express slots. Since PCI-Express devices require different bandwidth (for example, a video card requires more data pushing power than, say, a sound card or firewire card) the PCI-Express �X16� slot (the longer ones) are designed for Video cards, while the smaller slots (X4, X2, or X1) are typically designed for slower, low bandwidth cards.
The video cards are installed, and we screw them in.
Our cards require external power, so we get our 6-pin PCI-Express video card lead from the PSU (not all PSUs have this pin, some require an adapter, but it�s typically free and comes with the video card)
And plug them both into our video cards.
Now, because we�re doing SLI, we have to install our SLI bridge:
Now for the Hard Drives
Our case is a little strange, it doesn�t require you to screw the hard drives into the case like most do, it comes with little custom screws that you screw into the side of the hard drive before you put them in the case.
After that, you simply slide the drive into the mounting area, and secure the little bracket.
On most cases, installing the hard drive is pretty similar to installing the optical drive. In our case it�s a bit different.
Now, because the Hard Drive cables are the last cables we�re going to run, I�m going to integrate cable management and running our hard drive cables into one section.
The most important things to know about cable management are that it provides much better airflow, makes your case look cleaner (especially cool if you have a window) and and requires a bit of patience and quite a few zip ties:
I ran our front panel, USB, and firewire cables all together behind the motherboard tray, and zip tied them together.
I plugged in our SATA cables
Here�s a shot of the cables all running down the back of the motherboard tray
Now, as for fan cables, most fan cables are 2 or 3 wires and look messy. An easy way of fixing this is by straightening out the wires, then wrapping them around the shaft of a long screwdriver like this:
Then, when you remove the screwdriver and plug in the connector, you get this nifty slinky-type effect:
And voila! Now that everything is installed, our case looks clean!
Many of you guys have done this stuff a million times before, so this will be nothing new. Many of you guys have never done this before at all, so consider this a primer. I�m trying to go step-by-step, but there are some things I did not think were necessary, like taking 1000 pictures of each �Click Next� driver dialog box. If you�re smart enough to find this build log, you�re smart enough to click Next and Submit a few times on your own.
I have faith in my readers.
Without further ado, onto the BIOS!
This is the post screen we get with the A8N-SLI Premium. I pressed the �DEL� key to enter the BIOS setup utility.
And we get to this:
In this screen, you�ll notice we can set the time and date and language, and identify all our hardware for the IDE and SATA drives. The primary IDE Master and Slave are our optical drives, and you�ll notice the First SATA master identifies a Hard Drive, this one is the 300GB storage drive. Our Third SATA master identifies the 36GB Raptor drive, that�s where we�re going to be installing our OS.
I have left HDD SMART Monitoring disabled by default, but enabling it can give you a heads up if your drive is getting bad sectors or is about to die. I don�t have much use for it here (dozens of hard drives surrounding me) but at home, I have it enabled.
Going to the ADVANCED tab up top, we see this:
These options are all in the manual for the board so I�m not going to go into all of them, but I�ll go into the ones that we are changing for right now.
Like this one, CPU Configuration:
You�ll see it correctly identified our X2 4200+ processor, and has an option for DRAM Configuration, which we�ll see here:
It�s on Auto by default, but it identified the SPD on our modules incorrectly. It identified 2.5-3-3-6 and 2T, we�re going to fix that by going to MANUAL and changing the settings to the 3500LL�s rated latency, 2-3-2-6 at 1T:
Once that�s done, I hit escape and go back to our CPU Config page, where I manually set Hyper Transport Frequency (going to call this HT from now on) to 5x. This means that our HT is going to be 5x whatever our clock generator is. By default, our clock generator is 200 Mhz.
Here�s a shot of Jumperfree Configuration, where I set it to Manual because I wanted to set our DDR Voltage to its rated 2.7V instead of the stock 2.6V. All other settings were left default, for now. When we overclock, we�ll come back here and change our CPU Frequency, and maybe some other voltages.
And of course, in the Boot Menu, under Boot Device Priority, I changed the first boot device to CDROM, because we�re going to be booting from the Windows XP SP1 CD instead of the Hard Drive, which is completely blank.
Fun fact: Almost every BIOS in the world uses F10 as its default �Save changes and exit?� option. So I hit F10 and got this:
When your computer starts up, make sure you have your Windows CD in the CD-Rom drive. You�ll get a screen that says �BOOT FROM CD (Y/N)?� or possibly �Press any key to boot from CD�, when you see these, hit Y to boot from the CD. In a few seconds you�ll see this:
Now, if we were using the Silicon SATA Controller, we�d have to hit F6 here and follow the on-screen instructions to load the SATA drivers from a floppy disc that came in the Asus�s motherboard box. However, the nForce4�s SATA controller works fine with most versions of XP.
Our next screen:
Hit enter, and here we go:
Of course it doesn�t see any partitions, both drives are new! So we have to decipher which drive to partition for our OS to reside upon. The size of the drives (35300 and 286,166) make it clear. The top drive is our Raptor, so we�ll use that. I hit C to create the partition, and formatted it in NTFS. It took me back to the screen, which now looks like this:
I hit Enter, and it started copying files:
A reboot after about 5 minutes of file copying, and we get the EXCITING NEW LOOK
Some assorted screens that are fairly self explanatory. They involve answering the typical Windows personalization prompts and clicking next a series of times.
Not my real registration key:
And after all that, a reboot, and we get into Windows for the first time:
When you first install Windows, it loads generic drivers for everything it can, but most of our hardware didn�t exist when Windows XP was released, not even SP1 or SP2. So we have to check what drivers are loaded.
Right click My Computer, and go to properties
Click the Hardware tab and go to Device Manager:
You�ll see all the hardware you don�t have drivers installed for under Other Devices:
Notice a bunch of really bizarre stuff? Well, let�s start loading some drivers to get rid of these.
The first thing to install should always be your chipset drivers. The chipset on our board is an nForce4 SLI, so I downloaded the newest drivers from nVidia�s website http://www.nvidia.com on another computer, and copied them to my handy USB key
If you don�t have this option, Asus includes all the drivers you need to get up and running on its Driver CD,
However, the drivers on nVidia�s website are updated every month or so, and I wanted the newest ones. You can always load the CD version first and then update later, but I already had the files on my USB Key by this point so I just started installing them:
do the same with the Video card drivers
800x600 resolution? Please�
You may remember, we installed two video cards to do SLI? Well, we have to enable that. In the SLI multi-GPU menu, there�s a check box for it.
then your go to windows update and download all the latest Fixes
Now, I could have gotten a little more performance out of this system had I tweaked our BIOS settings a bit more. I know this processor is stable up to 2.75 Ghz, because I�ve clocked it there before. I know our memory can do faster than 219 Mhz if I relax the latencies a bit, but that�s all doing the same thing over and over that I�ve already done once.
If you want to overclock, follow the basic steps, change the settings, and run some tests to ensure stability. I recommend super-pi, memtest, and prime95. Make sure you get at least a couple of hours on these if you�re concerned about stability.
Some of the other benchmarking programs you could use that would show more of a difference include SiSoft Sandra 2005, Everest UE, and Science Mark.
This is in addition to 3DMark05, PCMark05, and for full system benchmarks that are less affected by video cards, 3DMark2001SE.
Keep in mind, these are all synthetic benchmarks, and may not relate well to real-world gaming performance. The only way to measure real world gaming performance is to play the game and determine if it's fast enough for you. Some people have different standards as to what they believe is playable. I might think 60fps is playable, and my friend might accept 30fps. Turning options on and off can make a huge change in performance, as well, as can changing resolution.
The sweet spot for resolution right now seems to be 1280x1024, which is the native resolution of most 17" and 19" LCD monitors. In a newer game like Call of Duty 2 or Battlefield 2, even the top-of-the-line video cards like the 7800GTX and the X1800XT show slowdowns with all options enabled and Anti-Aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering turned all the way up. They're still playable, but they're faster without those options.
Part of the fun of a system build is the tweaking, changing settings this way and that way and experimenting with performance. It's a task that never really gets finished, as anybody who's built up an engine or done a case mod can attest to. Nothing is ever really finished, there's always a little more performance, one more little thing you can change that will make you more satisfied.
As for us, we're done with this build for now, but I'll still be tweaking it and messing with it, and this system might even end up at some of our trade shows. I've got a good idea of what I'm building for the next system build, but I don't think I'm ready to let the cat out of the bag yet. Let's just say I'm going to be keeping quiet for a bit.
All Done !!!
thanks to Corsair memory for the helpfull guide
http://sysbuild.corsairmemory.com/report.aspx?id=2&sid=1
😀
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram