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jonathann1818

jonathann1818

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This is the new rig that I recently changed to watercooling.

Specs are:

Computer Hardware:

Core i7 930
P6X58D-E Motherboard
12 GB Corsair XMS3
AX1200 PSU
3 x EVGA GTX 580 1.5 GB
ASUS Xonar D2X Sound Card
LG Blu Ray Drive
NZXT Sentry LX Fan Controller
Corsair 800D case
2 x Corsair Force 60GB SSDs
2 X Western Digital 2TB Green Drives
3007WFP Monitor

Water Cooling Hardware:

Laing D5 Vario Pump
RX360 Rad
RX120 Rad
3 x Koolance VIDNX580 Blocks
3 x EK Single Slot IO Bracket for 580's
EK Supreme HF Acetal + EN Nickel CPU Block
EK Acetal Spin Bay Reservoir
EK D5 X-top for Laing Pump
4 x Scythe Gentle Typhoon 1850 RPM Fans
1/2" - 3/4" Tubing
1/2" - 3/4" Compression Fittings

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I am planning on adding a ram block for the ram (ill have to change it to dominator modules) and also get a motherboard block.
 
lowjack989

lowjack989

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jonathann1818

jonathann1818

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Nice effort to clean it up lowjack989. Looks much better IMO than a lot of rigs that ive seen.

What I like is that you used a consistent colour scheme. That is using amd graphics cards with their red accents with red power cables and red liquid. Some people get carried away with trying to put way too much colour/stuff into their rig thinking that the more they add the better. Logic such as this only produces rigs that look awful IMO. Best to keep it simple, elegant and sleek.

Does the case have a window?

Also, post some pictures that were taken without the flash on because it would give a more accurate idea of how the rig looks in person and im sure it actually does look quite good.
 
rubix_1011

rubix_1011

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This is the new rig that I recently changed to watercooling.
Click to expand...

Tri-SLI 580's? Damn...this would be a Folding/BOINC beast. Excellent in the gaming graphics realm, but how much benefit is the 3rd card vs. 2? I've seen some pretty interesting tests of high end SLI of 2, 3 and 4 cards...just curious on your experience.

Regardless...very, very, very clean build. I like it.

@lowjack - has the watercooling bug bit you enough to run your Crossfire setup in your loop? :) You'll need another rad, if that is your plan.
 
jonathann1818

jonathann1818

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Well right now I am starting to use it more for video editing, photoshop, cad and stuff like that. Adobe premiere with the cuda enabled video rendering engine is amazing with these cards.

I still use it for a bit of gaming though.

As much as it would surprise a lot of people, it actually does scale quite well, especially with mature drivers now. If I recall, I got about 2.8 x scaling with these on Metro 2033 on the absolute maximum settings. Crysis 2 also ran really well, never dipping below 50 fps if I recall again on absolute maximum settings and achieving a scaling rate of about 2.75. Games like Battlefield 3 benefit less at about 2.6-2.7ish and about 2.6ish for bad company 2. Other games like Stalker COP do well though at about ~2.75. And yes some games do really poorly when compared to dual sli, but I dont play those ones so it really doesnt bother me. I agree though it is not the sweet spot but you know what, I just love it.

Keep in mind these results were achieved with only one display running @ 2560x1600. I saw absolutely no memory bottlenecking which proves to a lot of people out there that 1.5 GB of vram for one monitor up to 2560x1600 is still plenty. Multiple display setups will need more than 1.5 GB though.

These are my scores. You can check out this webpage which is a review on dual 590s vs dual 6990's. In there they have benchmarks for the 580, 580 sli and 580 tri sli in a huge suite of different games. Some of their numbers are different from mine but this review was posted almost a year ago. So the drivers updates since then would explain the difference in scores.

http://www.behardware.com/art/imprimer/829/

And thank you for the kind words on my rig. I am glad people like it. I spent about 3 months trying to figure out exactly how it was going to look - what blocks to use, how the tubing would connect and where the cables were going to go - as an attempt to make it look as clean as humanly possible. I picked parts out based on a black and chrome theme for this rig to keep it simple. Eventually I want to get a black motherboard block to replace the northbridge and southbridge heatsinks, largely because the current ones are blue and detract from this theme. A ram block would be nice as it would allow for a shorter connection to the 360 Rad than what is currently there between the CPU to and 360 Rad.
 
Lutfij

Lutfij

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jonathan - what dya do for a living? i asked since i use all those programs and thas what i have my rig primarily do. On the off hours, sometimes i game.

* how long have you been running now? when is your next pull apart+maintenance session?
 
jonathann1818

jonathann1818

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Well these are actually more hobbies than anything else. I want to get into some computational finance stuff in the future. I am trying to get practice with CAD and programs like that because I have a general interest in it and I like developing useful skills, especially ones that I might benefit from in a professional setting. Its also nice to be able to transcode videos really fast as I often do to get my full 1080p videos into a smaller file size so I can put them on my tablet, sometimes 3 movies at a time (1 per gpu) to get the transcoding done really fast.

Overall I just love rig building/customization and stuff like that.

The next time I am pulling everything apart probably wont be till later on in the summer. I just assembled the loop about 2 weeks ago now.
 
jonathann1818

jonathann1818

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Sure thing. I am keeping my fingers crossed. Have not seen any deposits or stuff or junk or anything of that sort in the reservoir.

I added a minimal amount of biocide to the distilled water so I dont think I should have any major problems with the nickel plating. I am not basing this off of the claims EK made about coolants and additives wrecking the nickel plating, just intuition.
 
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