Ever since I had my P1 133 MHz, I always dreamt of one day building a monster that would feature beautiful surround video and make my nerd friends cry when they saw it. My day has finally come.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/vXZsQ7
I got a very generous tax return from the government and started planning this in March. I faced many hard decisions and had to learn all about the new tech on the market as I had fallen out of the tech loop. My biggest debates were 4790 or 5960 and fury vs titan vs 980 ti. I picked the 5960 just due to its ability to do anything better then anything else, faster ram, my background with engineering (3-d modeling). As for video cards, they were the absolute last thing I bought as I was waiting on the Fury to be released and the 980ti Hydro to actually be in stock. I was able to score 3 hydros in the 2 minutes they were in stock and before the limit was lowered to 2. Also in this process I decided 1080P X3 wasn't good enough and I wanted triple 2k monitors.
I bought all the parts over a 2 month period to get the best sales since I was killing time waiting on the video cards and I also got a Newegg Premier membership for 3 months. IMPORTANT TIP: For ANYONE who is building a new computer - This was the best $20 I spent on my build as it saved me at least $200 due to "issues" and you get free returns and free shipping. You can basically try any piece of equipment and simply send it back for free and Newegg covers shipping. I sent back over $1000 worth of products to them and they also have a special call number and give you superb customer support. Again if you are building or just want a few upgrade parts, this is a GREAT program. Also Newegg is tax free for most places compared to sites like amazon. That's $70 in savings roughly for every $1000 spent.
Back to the dream. My dream also had another bullet, I wanted water cooling, because well, what super awesome computer doesn't have water cooling. My original vision had uv coolant but with some reading I read pastels aren't as bad for stains and with the cost of the water cooling, I figured I would start with less chance of stains and could go UV later. I bought almost all my cooling products from performance PC except the video cards (evga) and video card connectors (amazon). Performance PC is also amazing, they will price match, you get a discount for liking them on facebook and the customer support is just simply amazing. I've emailed Duke at their customer support and he has helped me with several items within 24 hours.
I then also decided that I want it as quiet as possible and that lead me to my 1600W EVGA PSU. It has an eco mode and will basically put out 800W without its fan on OR I can overclock the 3 video cards, cpu, and ram if I want and have no worries about power restrictions. The radiator fans were difficult for me to decide on. I wanted PWM and figured saving some wouldn't hurt either. I ended up going with the couger 1500 RPM fans as they were pwm quiet and seemed to put out good numbers. I like the big range of control also for quiet or overclocking operations. The mother board will even control them for me with fan profiles.
Onward to assembly and also why my girlfriend hated me for 2 weeks.
This project while being awesome was more then anticipated and I feared I was over matched a few times. Plus a large portion of dining room and kitchen were unusable for a large portion of time. As per EK website, some of my components were not to be cleaned with the cleaning agent that came with my tubing. My first step I wanted to perform was cleaning and checking my water cooling setup had everything needed. I cleaned my radiators with heated demineralized water. I then found that my beautiful and amazing EK block for my 3-way 980 TI's was not compatible as EVGA gets special blocks with a wider gap between ports then normal EK blocks. I hurried to order over priced fittings from titan PC via amazon with free prime 2 day shipping. I ordered 4 fittings which listed 13 in stock. For some reason only 2 shipped right away and then 2 a day later. They also were received 2 days after the PROMISED date of delivery. Summary don't use Titan PC and instead go with performance PC as they are amazing.
Once I had these new fittings I was able to cut and fit all my water cooling and I decided to do a flush for 24 hours with demineralized water for cleaning and to check if any components had a terrible leak. I had a minor leak on the bottom video card but decided it was easily fixed with tightening on final assembly.
As for the fitting and placement of all the parts, this was another place I felt like I bit off more then I could chew. I wanted overkill so I bought 2 480mm radiators and they were supposed to fit by spec but the width on the bottom rad was slightly bigger then the hole. I also had 3-way sli knowing that the 3rd card would most likely have issues as my case had a bracket for a reservoir in the same area. Third, I wanted a drain line and temp sensor plugs in the extra ports of the radiators, but the 480mm radiators were huge, believe it or not, and there was no room for my drain and the sensors barely fit. My last issue was my case was huge so I assumed fitting the pump would be easy, HAHA what a joke that was.
The bottom rad was a tough fit but I got it in and I used gasket material on the sides and a gasket under both rads for any vibrations for sound dampening. The fans also had rubber where the mounted to the rads. The 3 video cards barely fit with my giant reservoir and the bottom one had a little help from a hack saw, sand paper, and black marker. The drain line idea was sadly scraped and performance pc allowed me to return the port/plug for a refund. Lastly the pump, I'm still not super happy with putting the pump in the default spot as you cant enjoy the beauty of it and it destroyed my wire management.
I also had an issue as I wanted an LCD display of my cold and hot water temps but the 1 display had a short and my one sensor had too short of a wire. Performance PC sent me a replacement LCD and for now the temps are read on the motherboard.
Downhill from here?
With my 24 run complete I then pulled it apart and let the components dry a day so I didn't have to worry about getting other parts wet assembling them. I slowly managed to get it all put together over another day taking breaks when frustrated trying to get screws into radiators that didn't fit right and align with holes and trying to get wires to fit where they don't. I did manage to almost no wires showing from the window on the case. This was a great achievement I felt. The motherboard had sata cables on a 90 angle and aligned with holes in the case and the case had many ports to get cables into the back wire area.
I was able to do a bench test to ensure everything worked before getting everything set up and it appeared good but I'll discuss that more later. I finally got all the components installed, with the reservoir barely fitting with the video cards and the realization that my hopes of beautiful cables were lost. The cables for 3 video cards and the motherboard alone barely fit into the cramped PSU / water pump area with minimal clearance between the pump and case also the PSU and pump. Now I was finally ready to fill the coolant, but I was a little scared my 2 liters wasn't going to be enough. I am not sure if I could of planned it better but my system holds 2.0001 liters of coolant. I got all the air out and cycled a little bit.
Time to celebrate?
The time has finally arrived to boot her up and test it out. First thing I got was an error for cpu fan. well I don't have one but I had the water pump hooked up to the cpu fan figuring if the pump shut off, then I'd want it to behave like the cpu fan shut off. What I didn't know was my PWM pump made it unhappy as the cpu fan on my motherboard is only supposed to be 12 watts max. I also wired my 8 pwm fans into 2 banks via 1-4 splitters and had 1 running at half speed. My case fans were also in a bank via a splitter bank that came installed on the case. My fan issues never went away but in the end I determined one of my 1-4 splitters was bad and am awaiting replacement from performance pc. I ended up just installing 1 200mm case exhaust to the cpu fan port to make it happy. The front 2 200mm case fans to the case splitter. then my 2 banks for the radiators. My motherboard has 8 fan connectors so this wasn't an issue.
Great fans work now less install windows. I bought windows 8.1 pro from reddit for $25 and highly recommend this to anyone wanting an OS. I know, I know windows 8.1 sucks but I don't care. I only got windows 8.1 for the free upgrade to windows 10 and I only want windows 10 for direct X 12 and the fact of how it will utilize my 3 GPU's in ways I've only dreamt about. Once I had windows booted, the first thing I wanted to do before adjusting ANY bios was get a benchmark for the base. I got 3dmark at the steam summer sale in anticipation for this moment and Firestrike Extreme seemed like the proper path.
Wow decent score before any setup. Time to adjust the RAM to its proper speed and explore my bios. I also decided to get all my drivers working properly although most were already great and working. Ram adjusted to 2800 and start up, run my benchmark and crash. This was the part I mentioned from earlier. I tried several things over the next day or two but ended up just running the ram at a slower speed for the rest of the process. I was almost always stable at 2666 but even that had a hiccup or two. In the end my Newegg Primer support allowed me to return the ram for replacement and for free even though I had thrown the package out. That is yet another reason to pay that $20 for the premier. Side note G.skill promises rated specs or warranty covers it but why deal with that process when I can just send it to newegg and get replacement with a new product fast and free.
Now that I had a stable system that ran smooth I figured it was time to test that. I downloaded EVGA's software to overclock video cards and started tweaking my bios for the CPU speed. I always dreamed of being in the overclocking club but never had a machine to test it on. I also lacked a lot of knowledge so I was only willing to test until temps seemed high without testing a safety system and was not willing to adjust voltages until I'm smarted and left them in auto in the bios. This was most exciting as I finally got to test my water cooling out. My initial benchmark had temps not exceeding 30 C but that was before any setup in the bios for speeds.
My Ram was crippling me but I had the CPU up to 4700 MHz and the highest temp I had on record was 60C. My cooling was working as planned and it seemed I also had a winning chip. I overclocked the Video cards with some success as well. I was barely able to get the video cards over 30C before the overclock crashed the video drivers. As a side note my coolant path is Res ->pump ->CPU ->VGA (parallel) -> Both Rads (Series) -> Res. I did this order to allow even cooling of video cards with less restriction on flow and my Rads back to back for my temp monitoring of max cold and hot temps and delta T. My best bench mark placed me 70th overall on the 3d mark wall of fame and 17th for 3 way sli. With this I was happy to stop for now, lower my clocks some and play some games before sending the ram back.
My best test run
The sadest part of the story is that after the few hours of glorious gaming I had to travel for work for a few weeks. I will return home to find my working LCD, an extension for the temp sensor, a new 1-4 splitter to allow proper fan speed and control, and new working Ram. I also hope to decide on my 3 new monitors before then. I want 2k but would love for Asus to release the new 279 swifts. If not im torn between the old swifts or the predator, which I used 1 of for all the setup. I also intend to add proper knowledge of how to overclock with detail not just the surface knowledge I had a week ago. I hope that I'll be able to update this in a few weeks with even better results then I've had so far. I also might invest in some bling such as some case lights or change the 200 mm fans that came with the case for some quiet PWM's but the phantek 200mm's are already pretty quiet.
my game stops at around 3.6GB of ram
why kind of shitty computer are you using that only has 1GB?did you really expect to play anything more than minesweeper with it?
-CPU & mobo to X99 - the 4790k is so closely priced to the 5820k, it almost seems like a no brainer to get the extra two cores, the benefits that come with x99, but a slightly lower clock speed. For what you mentioned with the multi tasking, more cores usually is a must.
The X99 motherboards are quite expensive and do come down to opinion mostly, but I would recommend something like the ASUS X99-A, MSI X99 SLI Plus, or even a more expensive option like the ASUS X99 Pro or Deluxe.
--The motherboard you chose is quite expensive, but one feature packed and sexy motherboard, you could get something cheaper like the Ranger with pretty much all the same features or even a lower priced board than that, but you won't get as sexy as a look as the vii formula, this is if you decide to stay Z97.
-No sound card - most high end motherboards, especially ones from ASUS, come with top notch sound built in. I'm not too much of an audiophile, but as I understand it sound cards are pretty much outdated nowadays, and something like an external AMP & or DAC is a better solution if you want a better sound experience.
-H100i to the H100i GTX - an updated, better performing and sexier version of the h100i
-The memory is fine, but I prefer the aesthetics of something like the Kingston Hyper X Fury, but again the corsair memory you chose is fine. If you decide to go X99, you will have to go DDR4, I recommend any 4 stick 2400mhz kit or faster, and with DDR4 so cheap already, it isn't too expensive of an upgrade.
-The 980 Ti cooler - depending on what motherboard you choose, I would get a matching cooler. For example with the asus maximus vii, getting the strix direct cu 3 ASUS GTX 980 Ti will match a lot better aesthetically. You may have to wait a week or two before all the aftermarket cooler options come from all the manufacturers, however.
The rest like the case, storage, and PSU all come down to opinion, budget, and the ones you chose do not have any problems as I understand. The fans can be a bit loud for what you pay for, but they will match the build very well, a sacrifice I'd be willing to make. With all those fans you will be able to run them at low RPMs anyway.
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