Night Fury (250D Powerhouse)

[FoxHound]

Over the last few months I have been building my new PC specifically to play MGS5 do renders for work and get ready for virtual reality headsets and have the best possible experience. I was originally intending to play MGS5 on PS4 but the announcement that it would be on PC immediately convinced me to build up a new rig. I decided the last full tower I had (Lanboy Air) was just too big, and therefore I needed to build a m-itx system. This Quickly turned into wanting to build the most powerful system that I could in a corsair 250D. I think I have almost achieved that goal B).

 

 

The first build of what I'm now calling Night Fury, included a GTX970 and only a single WD Red 3TB drive.  Thanks to EVGA Step-up and another WD red 3TB drive, Night Fury now contains about as much power as you can cram into a 250D.

 

Link to PC part picker build: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/Wt7TD3

 

GTX 970

 

Originally I ran a EVGA GTX 970 SC ACX 2.0 GPU, however my first card had memory issues and the second had a bad case of coil wine. The 970 would run most of my games on the highest settings with no AA at 1440p around 40-50 FPS. My 3DMark Fire Strike score with the 970 Clocked at 1400MHz (Highest Stable Overclock) got a score of 10060.

 

Image of Night Fury with old 8GB kit of ram and 970

 

GTX 980 + Kraken G10 / H90 Water cooling

 

I decided to use EVGA step up to get a GTX 980 ACX 2.0 and I immediately Decided that I wanted to water cool and compare the performance before and after. Overall I saw a large jump in the stable over clock on the 980 as well as a much cooler load temperature. Documented below is the process of installing the Kraken G10 and H90 while maintaining the mid-plate of the GTX 980.

 

First Was testing with the ACX 2.0 cooler as well as stress testing the GPU before starting the work.

 

The Lighting on the side of the ACX 2.0 cooler was really nice.

 

The Water cooling Begins

First step was to remove the GPU and put it on a suitable working surface.

 

Next the stock cooler needed to be removed with the 4 screws at the corners of the GPU die.

The mid-plate of this card is a nice brushed aluminum.

 

Next I had to remove the mid-plate (more on this later) you can see the pads for cooling the VRM and VRAM.

 

Now I had to remove the mid plate because it interferes with the H90 water block. One of the reasons I went with this card was to keep the mid-plate to help cool the VRM, so some modding needs to be done.

 

The 4 fingers around the GPU cutout need to be removed to allow the water block to correctly attach to the GPU. So it was time to run to work and break out the Dremel. For the time being I'm keeping it black but in the future I will be painting the plate red.

 

Yes the edges are a bit rough but that will be worked out when I paint it. Now the cutout is free from all interferences.

 

Now that the cutout was large enough I attached the water block and G10 with a noctua 80mm fan.(note the tubing position had to change due to the length of tubing)

 

The card was installed and the tubing rerouted to its final position. (had to remount the water block a few times to get the temperatures I was looking for)

 

 

 

I really was impressed with both the 980 performance as well as the water cooled 980 performance. Below are the 4 games I tested before and after water cooling, Both the air and H2O overclock where at the highest stable overclock with 124% power target and a 25mV voltage boost. The game settings are at the bottom.

 

Game        FPS(Air)    Boost Clock(Air)    FPS(H2O)    Boost Clock(H2O)    FPS Gain %    Boost Clock Gain MHz
Crysis 3          47                 1497                     54                     1585                     12.96                    88
Metro LL         64                 1456                    72                      1572                     11.11                    116
Farcry 4          58                 1487                    67                      1581                     13.43                    94
The Crew        56                 1487                    60                      1572                      6.67                     85
 

 

Now for the Fire Strike results.

1. This was the result after water cooling, it achieved 1600MHz with an over voltage of 50mV power target of 124% and GPU offset of +300.
2. This was the result with the stock ACX 2.0 cooler, It achieved 1490MHz with an over voltage of 50mV power target of 120% and GPU offset of +250.
3. This was the 970 SC that I had before, It could only achieve a overclock of 1400MHz power target of 110% and GPU offset of +100.

 

These are the settings for each game that I used in my testing. (link to a larger image)

 

 

4790K troubleshooting.

 

The last major part of the build was stabling the temperature of my 4790K. For the longest time my mild overclock of 4.5GHz at 1.19V would hit 80c during renders this troubled me deeply and I remounted the H100i a few times. During benchmarks the wattage of the CPU would hit 150W, this was the issue. My Gigabyte z97n wifi (apart from setting my default CPU core voltage to 1.35V) would not control the wattage or current of the CPU correctly and limiting it to 130W in the UEFI not only dropped the temps by 25c but it also let me clock it to 4.7GHz at 1.25V and keep it cool at 55c under load.

 

Let me know what you think of the build, what would you have done differently?

[dadasmithywinkle]

Pretty nice! I don't think I would've put a Kraken on the 980 in that small of a build, though.

[FoxHound]

Pretty nice! I don't think I would've put a Kraken on the 980 in that small of a build, though.

 

It increased my fps by more than 10% and keeps the system cooler.

[dadasmithywinkle]

It increased my fps by more than 10% and keeps the system cooler.

Oh, ok. Well, if it works well then more power to yah