bduchch

Noctua NF-F12's are awesome, but ugly. I tried Corsair's SP120 Quiet Editions and I am not impressed. I have Noiseblocker BlackSilent Pro PL-2's on order to try out. (PL-3's are PWM if thats what your looking for)

Would probably upgrade my work PC

I have been running the build on air for a couple months now, I figured I would post my thoughts on it so far and future plans. Gaming wise its a beast. It runs everything I have thrown at it, which it should. BF4, Farcry 3, Bioshock Infinate all run really well on Ultra settings. I havent loaded many benchmarks yet, just Unigen Valley benchmark which on Extreme HD averaged 60fps. I have not done any overclocking at all yet. Some quick thoughts on the Obsidian 900D: NOT WORTH THE MONEY! It's a great looking case, but build quality is not there at all. The drive cages are flimsy and i have on several occasions popped the metal nubs that hold the hard drives in place out of the cages. The side panels dont fit worth a damn, the window side is a PITA to get on/off to the point where you have to hold your tongue in the right position to get it to come off and the bottom of it doesnt seem to sit flush with the front of the case which really annoys me. The bottom sections of the case that fold down dont hinge very well. It may just be that the hinges are cheap, but you get it down half way and you have to force it the rest of the way down, which you should not have to do on a high $ case. Do I recommend this case? ABSOLUTELY NOT! Will I be keeping it for this build? Most likely. Reasons I will be keeping it: - I will be running two 480 rads. Not many cases support this out of the box. - The MSI Z87 XPOWER is an XL-ATX board - Aside from the build quality it does everythign I need it to do. I have been looking at CaseLabs, but they do not have a case that has everythign that I want without being stupid big. I found one CaseLabs case (single wide) that suports XL-ATX and has room for a 480 in the bottom and top, but to put a rad in the top you need the extended top panel so you can run the rad on top of the case because a rad will not fit with the motherboard in. What I would really like is a modern version of the Silverstone TJ07 that has an all aluminum construction, supports a 480 rad in the bottom as well as the top with a couple intake fans in the front and a 120-140 exhaust in the back. In my mind that would be the perfect case. Current Specs of system: Intel i7 4770k MSI Z87 XPOWER motherboard 16GB Dominator Platinum 1866MHz ASUS R9 290 Direct CU II 4GB eVGA Super Nova 1000G2 1000W Power Supply Samsung 840 Evo 250GB Boot Drive WD Black 500GB Data Drive 2x NF-F12 PWM Fans in the front 1x NF-A14 PWM Fan in the rear Still to come: Watercooling: 2x 480 Rads - Either Alphacool or EKWB EKWB Clean CSQ CPU Waterblock EKWB R9 290 DCUII VGA Waterblock XSPC Motherboard Waterblock D5 Pump with Bitzpower modtop/cover 250mm clear res Bitzpower black compression fittings Clear 3/8x5/8 tubing UV Green fluid Hardware: 1TB Corsair Force LX SSD for storage Creative SoundBlaxter Zx Possibly another 16GB memory Possibly a Blu-Ray drive I have a Noctua NH-U12S coming just to hold me off until I get the money for watercooling. Depending on how well the 4770k overclocks on water it may get replaced with a 4790k. Aesthetics: Green 12" LED light strips behind the front cover, should illuminate the sides of the front cover nicely, as well as one in the bottom UV LED's to illuminate tubing/reservoir Possibly a white LED strip for the top to illuminate some of the hardware I am in the process of painting the drive cage covers and expansion slots green I replaced the tinted window that came with the case with a clear lexan window I have had my mind set on Noctua fans since before I started the build. I love how quiet they are and how they perform, and dont really mind the aesthetics of them. I have recently been thinking of going with SP120 quiet edition fans going forward. Mainly because I can paint the rings green to match the rest of the system. I looked at the Noctua industrial fans, which are freaking badass, but do not want a high speed fan. I am looking for as quiet as possible.

Maybe. The mosfet heatsyncs are going to be replaced by a xspc block thats black. The chipset heatsync I might just change the yellow part to green.

There may be an ASUS z97 Black Edition coming too. I've used lots of gigabyte boards, havent used any evga though. This is my first MSI and I like it so far. Would be better if it was all black with white LED's though.

Yeah I would like that too. Gigabyte has some that are mostly black, but usually their lower end boards. ASUS needs some more BE boards in their ROG line.

True, but its getting way over done. There needs to be options rather than just saying every gamer wants a black and red system.

Yeah, only downside to the evga power supply. Ill figure out something to do with them. I really dont get why every "gaming" product needs to be black and red. not everybody wants to build a black/red system.

The 1000W is definitely overkill but the SuperNova G2 is 90% efficient so who cares if its overkill. At lower loads it hardly puts out heat so it stays quiet, and leaves headroom for future expansion.

Progress! I have most of the parts now: i7 4770K MSI z87 XPOWER motherboard 16GB Corsair Dominator Platinum 1866 CL9 ASUS R9 290 DirectCU II OC 4GB eVGA SuperNova G2 1000W Power Supply Obsidian 900D Noctua Fans I have it together and running. Windows is just on an old WD Black 500GB for now but it will do until i get my SSD's.

Have the case cables sleeved now, will get some pics up later. I also ordered an ASUS R9 290 DirectCU II OC 4GB yesterday

Yeah they do look pretty badass

LOL gotta love auto correct! You're right about the black/yellow color combo - I want to go black/green for the build so the yellow kinda sucks. But it doesn't have a whole lot of yellow on it, mainly just on the heat-syncs and the mosfet heat-sync is going to be replaced with a water block and the SB heatsync will be easy to paint if I want to. The only real upside to going with x79 is more memory bandwidth and more pci-e lanes, which honestly wont make any difference to me so performance wise the 4770k should still be more than I need.

OK so I know I said I wasn't interested in Haswell but I think I changed my mind. Now that I am getting closer to ordering parts, I was messing around on a retailers site today and threw the R4BE, 4930k and R9 290 into the shopping cart and the total was over $1700(CAD) for just the three components. So that got me thinking... If I go with Haswell, I can get a 4770k, MSI z87 XPOWER mobo, R9 290 and 16GB Dominator Platinum 1866 for under $1600. After researching the z87 XPOWER that board is a beast! probably way overkill for what I need but a damn cool board. And its XL ATX so it will fill up lots of room in the case.

Let me know if it works. It would definitely work using optical out, but I don't have any speakers that work off optical right now. The card I am looking at is a SoundBlaster Zx - I've been running sound blaster cards in my systems for over 10 years and have always been happy with them.