Maxim Posted July 17, 2013 Report Share Posted July 17, 2013 It's been a while since I've posted any pictures of my rig on here and I figured with all the help I try to offer for others' builds I may as well show you all what I've been working with. After upgrading my monitor to a Dell 30" 2560x1600 screen earlier this year I've been itching for more performance. I built this computer almost exactly 2 years ago and not much has been upgraded in that time period. My original specs were: Core i7-2600K Asus P8Z68 Deluxe motherboard 8GB (2x4GB) Corsair 1866 RAM 850W Corsair PSU Intel 120GB SSD Radeon HD 6950 (flashed BIOS to 6970) Antec H2O 920 CPU cooler NZXT Phantom case Later on I added a second 6950 (also flashed to a 6970) and another 8GB (2x4GB) of RAM. Here's a shot I took of the inside: And here's a shot of that 30" Dell U3011 screen (I love this thing) By flashing a 6970 BIOS to my 6950s I was able to unlock the extra processing power these cards had hidden. And with the help of MSI Afterburner I was able to overclock them from their stock 800mHz to 975mHz. With 2 overclocked high-end cards and my old 24" 1080p monitor I was able to max out every game for the last 2 years and maintain 60 FPS. But once I bought my 30" monitor this last spring I quickly learned what doubling your resolution will do to performance. Most games would still play at 60 FPS due to the overclock but I started to experience microstutter and other weird issues caused my CrossFireX and my high resolution monitor. A few more upgrades were needed to really bring this machine up to the level I wanted it at. wtf is lolcats? I'd def get a fat hooker if i had to resort to that kinda thing. I feel like they'd be grateful and work harder. Also its more bang for my buck, more real estate for my dollar if you catch my drift. its like the Costco of streetwalkers. I was hoping for 150 . I was hoping she would let me put it in her butt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maxim Posted July 17, 2013 Author Report Share Posted July 17, 2013 Step 1 was replacing my CPU cooler. I know it seems like a weird place to start, but I had been toying with the idea of a larger water cooler ever since I saw the first reviews for Corsair's H100. The H2O 920 was the best all-in-one cooler when I bought it but, like everything else in the computer world, it has since been outperformed by newer, larger coolers. I had my eye on Corsair's H100i (I have a thing for Corsair products) but once Swifttech's H220 was shown at CES I knew what cooler I was going to buy. Sorry for the blurry photo. It was a tight fit to squeeze a 2x120mm radiator above the RAM and below the 2x200mm fans in the top of the case. I had to bend the radiator mounts to allow the cooler to clear the memory heatspreaders. At one point I thought I would need to buy new low-profile RAM in order to fit this cooler but with some work it was able to fit. The added power of the bigger pump and the larger radiator size brought down my load temperatures drastically. The combination of the 2 120mm fans on the radiator and the 2 200mm fans directly above functions as a makeshift push-pull setup. wtf is lolcats? I'd def get a fat hooker if i had to resort to that kinda thing. I feel like they'd be grateful and work harder. Also its more bang for my buck, more real estate for my dollar if you catch my drift. its like the Costco of streetwalkers. I was hoping for 150 . I was hoping she would let me put it in her butt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maxim Posted July 17, 2013 Author Report Share Posted July 17, 2013 Step 2 was the graphics cards. I waited a long time for this upgrade because until just recently nobody made the card I wanted. I've been gawking at Nvidia's GTX TITAN since the day it was announced but at $1000 the performance wasn't there to justify the price. My pair of unlocked/overclocked HD 6950 cards in CrossFireX performed around the level of a single Radeon HD 7970, which is a $400 card. A pair of 7970's in CrossFireX outperforms TITAN in almost every scenario for $200 less. But sticking with AMD meant I'd still be experiencing the microstutter issues I had been facing. A single 7970 is a killer card at $400 but 2 at $800 also didn't make sense. Enter Nvidia's GTX 780. 85% of TITAN's resources for 65% of the price. Sure, a $650 video card still isn't a great value but I needed something to get me out of my scenario, and I told myself that GTX 780 was the card. Every benchmark showed GTX 780 right behind the GTX TITAN at 2560x1440 and 2560x1600. Games ran at solid framerates even when maxed out. And when overclocked, GTX 780 was even able to outperform TITAN most of the time. This was exactly what I was waiting for. But I didn't buy one. I saw the card get launched, saw it pop up at online stores, and I knew I wanted it but I didn't even click "add to cart". The reference cooler looked amazing but it wasn't the enthusiast card I wanted. Non-reference cards started popping up. EVGA released their new ACX cooler, MSI had their dragon-emblazoned Gaming edition, Galaxy had their monster Windforce cooler. But nobody made a card that I wanted to put in my system. They all compromised between noise and performance. I already had 2 loud cards. The reference 6970 was a loud card on it's own, never mind having 2 of them. I didn't want to upgrade to something just as loud, but I also didn't want to get a quiet card that was hot and slow. I needed something fast and cool and quiet. Enter the Asus GTX 780 DCII. Faster, quieter, and cooler than any other card I had seen. Benchmarks showed this card beating the TITAN out of the box. This was the card I had waited for. And yet I couldn't find it anywhere. No release date was announced and it wasn't listed on any online retailer's site. Newegg, Amazon, TigerDirect, nobody had this thing for sale or pre-order. I even wound up an Microcenter asking if they knew a release date. I got all excited to buy this card and nobody wants to sell me the damn thing. Somebody take my money please! A few weeks go by and I'm checking Newegg every day to see when this card will launch. Finally, it's like 8:30 at night and I check before hopping on Steam and I see it on Newegg. I go back to reviews I read and make sure it's the right model and everything. It's even $30 cheaper than MSRP. So I bought 2 of them. The way I see it, if 1 is good, 2 must be better. 1 of these cards outperforms my existing cards by ~20-30%. So a second card is all gravy on top of that. Plus I couldn't bear to go from a sweet dual-card CrossFireX setup to a single card. The story part is all done now. I know most of you already scrolled past that to get to the photos below. Thanks for reading it all if you actually took the time to. wtf is lolcats? I'd def get a fat hooker if i had to resort to that kinda thing. I feel like they'd be grateful and work harder. Also its more bang for my buck, more real estate for my dollar if you catch my drift. its like the Costco of streetwalkers. I was hoping for 150 . I was hoping she would let me put it in her butt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maxim Posted July 17, 2013 Author Report Share Posted July 17, 2013 There's one last piece to this puzzle, and I'm not even sure if it will work the way I want. Below the bottom graphics card there is a PCIe 16x slot that is wired for 4x mode. I purchased a single-slot reference model GTX 650 Ti to install in that slot to run as a dedicated PhysX card. I don't even know if the thing will fit above the power supply but I hope it does. Currently, I have the 2 GTX 780's in SLI with the bottom card running the PhysX calculations but offloading that work to a dedicated card should bump performance even higher. The card should be here Friday so I'll have more updates (and pictures) next week. And a photo of the card (courtesy of AnandTech) wtf is lolcats? I'd def get a fat hooker if i had to resort to that kinda thing. I feel like they'd be grateful and work harder. Also its more bang for my buck, more real estate for my dollar if you catch my drift. its like the Costco of streetwalkers. I was hoping for 150 . I was hoping she would let me put it in her butt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bump4life Posted July 17, 2013 Report Share Posted July 17, 2013 looks real good. always facinated in a sick computer build. Buyer/Seller Feedback Thread: http://www.stevemead...5015-bump4life/ MB C220 153 Trunk Car Build Log: http://www.stevemead...d/#entry1840136 MB C280 Ipad Dash SQ Build Log: http://www.stevemeadedesigns.com/board/topic/194484-bump4lifes-new-benz-tony-c-relay-kit-pictures-ce-electric-audison-front-stage-installed/ My SPL Log: http://www.stevemead...__fromsearch__1 BMW M340 xDrive Stock, for now. Corner Load 10" maybe soon. But does 10s in the 1/4... Best Scores out of a trunk 153.0 sealed legal full tilt clamped 5524 @ 42 hz 154+ windows down, 155+ kick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maxim Posted July 17, 2013 Author Report Share Posted July 17, 2013 Benchmark scores please! I'll add more of these as I run more benchmarks. These are at out-of-the-box speeds and the i7 is OC'd to 4.6GHz 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme: 7388 http://www.3dmark.com/fs/654811 3DMark 11 Performance: P18623 http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/6872209 3DMark 11 Extreme: X8680 http://www.3dmark.com/3dm11/6872221 wtf is lolcats? I'd def get a fat hooker if i had to resort to that kinda thing. I feel like they'd be grateful and work harder. Also its more bang for my buck, more real estate for my dollar if you catch my drift. its like the Costco of streetwalkers. I was hoping for 150 . I was hoping she would let me put it in her butt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beaker Posted July 18, 2013 Report Share Posted July 18, 2013 That cooler looks way better than the H100i (I have one) I got the H100 on a crazy 50% off sale, so I cant really complain. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maxim Posted July 21, 2013 Author Report Share Posted July 21, 2013 The GTX 650 Ti is here! Single slot Nvidia design. The bottom PCIe slot. A tight fit! Flipped the PSU so the card and the PSU fan weren't fighting for air. wtf is lolcats? I'd def get a fat hooker if i had to resort to that kinda thing. I feel like they'd be grateful and work harder. Also its more bang for my buck, more real estate for my dollar if you catch my drift. its like the Costco of streetwalkers. I was hoping for 150 . I was hoping she would let me put it in her butt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maxim Posted July 21, 2013 Author Report Share Posted July 21, 2013 Quick screenshots from Batman: Arkham City after running the in-game benchmark with different PhysX processors. For all tests the game was running at 2560x1600 at maximum settings (max AA, max detail, max shadows + occlusion, High PhysX). All scanarios were running off of 2x GTX 780 in SLI and an Intel i7-2600K at 4.6 GHz. The only thing that changed was the chosen PhysX processor in the Nvidia Control Panel. CPU running as PhysX processor GTX 780 (2) running as PhysX processor (as well as running as 2nd card in SLI) GTX 650 Ti running as PhysX processor The biggest difference I noticed were in scenes that had tons of sparks and heavy fog at the beginning of the benchmark. When the CPU was running the PhysX calculations the framerate fluttered around 25-30 FPS in these spots. With the GTX 650 Ti running all the PhysX calculations the framerate stayed at/above 60 FPS. Although the min/max framerates show small differences, the average framerate clearly saw an increase from having a dedicated card running PhysX. wtf is lolcats? I'd def get a fat hooker if i had to resort to that kinda thing. I feel like they'd be grateful and work harder. Also its more bang for my buck, more real estate for my dollar if you catch my drift. its like the Costco of streetwalkers. I was hoping for 150 . I was hoping she would let me put it in her butt Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inm Posted July 21, 2013 Report Share Posted July 21, 2013 Not bad, I'm a little jelly of the GTX780s, althought I'm not a fan of Asus's card designs. I'm an EVGA fanboy lol On 2/28/2013 at 2:52 PM, Chaise said: "Now spread your butt cheeks so I can zap your asshole." 2008 Subaru Forester XT Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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