Mira [Finished - 2016-09-25]

[brandishwar]

The time has come for another build log.

 

Seven months ago for Valentine’s Day, I posted a revisit to Absinthe (LTT forum thread) in which my wife’s AMD FX-8350 system was upgraded to an Intel i7-5820k. Well, β Ori is next on the upgrade list. And the upgrade is going to be similar to Absinthe’s. And this will actually be a double-revisit.

 

First here are the current specifications:

 

CPU: AMD FX-8350 (stock speed)
RAM: 16GB (4x4GB) EVGA DDR3-1600
Mainboard: ASRock 990FX Extreme6
Graphics: PNY GTX 770 OC x2 in SLI
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO M.2 500GB

 

The system is water-cooled as well with an external radiator box supplying the pump, reservoir, and radiators:

 

CPU block: EK Supremacy EVO
GPU block: Watercool Heatkiller GPU-X³ for GTX 680
Pump: Koolance PMP-450S (D5 strong) with AlphaCool HF D5 clear
Reservoir: Phobya Balancer 150 Silver-Nickel
Radiators: XSPC EX-360 (x3) with Cougar CF-V12HB fans

 

 

And this is the upgrade target:

 

CPU: Intel i7-5820k
RAM: EVGA DDR4-3200 2x8GB
Mainboard: ASUS Sabertooth X99
Storage: Samsung 950 PRO 512GB

 

So I’m taking β Ori up to X99 as well, Haswell-E instead of Broadwell-E. The selected mainboard supports Broadwell-E (with a BIOS upgrade), so it is an option if I decide to spring for it later. And the nearest Broadwell-E chip to the selected Haswell-E on core/thread count is the i7-6800k, which is about 50% more than what I paid to get the Haswell-E chip.

 

The AMD FX platform is admittedly dated, though it does still have its uses. I mean it’s an 8-core processor for under 200 USD. I considered holding out for the Zen platform but ultimately decided against it. I may check it out when it finally hits shelves, or use it as a platform to build a computer for another friend.

 

I also opted against retaining the EK Supremacy EVO. Instead I’m going with the same waterblock I used in Absinthe: the Watercool Heatkiller IV Pro. The graphics cards are also not going anywhere right now.

 

So what’s the “dual” part of this revisit? The radiator box.

 

The only thing I want to change is the reservoir. Replacing the bottom-return Phobya Balancer with the top-return option on the EK-XRES 250. It’s an overall larger reservoir — larger diameter and length. And since this whole thing will need to be drained and flushed and taken apart for cleaning, it’ll be the perfect time to do that.

 

And yes, the name for the system is changing as well.
 

[brandishwar]

New chassis

As functional as the Zalman chassis has been, I decided I didn’t want to keep with it for this build. But for the switch, I still required another mid-tower chassis with water cooling grommets. And the pickings weren’t all that great.

In the Corsair lineup, I was really impressed with and considered the Carbide Clear 400C as it provided for a full side-window. But without water-cooling grommets, the case would have to be modified or I’d have to find a different way to route tubing to get it through a Koolance PCI L-bracket. The same with the very impressive Crystal 460X (plus it’s available from only 1 reseller at the time I write this, and they were out of stock). The grommets on the Obsidian 450D also aren’t grommets but merely holes in steel, and they were too large to fit any pass-through fittings on the market.

So I looked at NZXT and Fractal Design. Fractal Design doesn’t have any chassis available with water cooling grommets, so they were out. And looking at NZXT, the only options I considered reasonable were the S340 and H440. Only one of which has water cooling grommets on the back.

Any guesses as to which?

NZXT H440

An all-black NZXT H440 was the selection.

The size of the water cooling holes is the only downside with this chassis as the holes with the grommets removed are too large for any pass-through fitting available. And while I considered trying to find an alternative means of mounting the fittings into the holes — e.g. using washers — I decided to go with a different route that will actually cut down on the number of fittings that will be in use.

But there was another reason to lean toward this that became apparent when I was researching the chassis. I have four (4) 1TB Western Digital Blue drives left over from another project that never panned out. The H440 has plenty of room to set the drives while allowing for adequate airflow around all of them. And the Sabertooth X99 has plenty of SATA connections. The only question is RAID 0 or RAID 10. And through the BIOS or through Windows.

Next Phase

So after buying the H440 at my local Micro Center, I started building the system into it. And I decided to violate the cardinal rule and not test the hardware before installing the water block — I’ve never had to return base hardware on the system, so I’m not worried.

Only the graphics cards and power supply are going from β Ori. to Mira. And the fittings as well. Everything else is getting set aside to be used for something else. Not sure what just yet. But getting the system finished requires tearing down β Ori.

Before tearing down the system, I took some benchmarks to get a performance comparison.

• 3DMark Fire Strike: 9797
• 3DMark Cloud Gate: 19918
• 3DMark Sky Diver: 25205
• Unigine Heaven: 1826 (Ultra Quality with Extreme Tessellation)
• Unigine Valley: 3025 (Extreme HD preset)

For immediate reference, the system is an AMD FX-8350 (stock speeds) with 16GB RAM and two GTX 770s in SLI.

Draining the system

The graphics cards were set up in a U-parallel configuration, wherein both the inlet and outlet were on the top graphics cards:

Draining this using quick disconnects would’ve meant having to tilt the system in various directions to get the water flowing out. An alternative that panned out quite well is just taking the two stop fittings off the bottom graphics card and letting it drain out through there.

Once I had the graphics cards out, I flushed them with distilled water — three (3) gallons pushed through with a spare pump — and installed them in the H440, finished the cable management, and set that aside and turned my attention to the radiator box.

Radiator box

This was cause of all of my problems. After draining it (just took the quick disconnects off the tubing at the sink), I tore it completely down.

Getting the radiators off and flushed. Getting the dust blown out of the fans. Mostly. I didn’t take a brush to the fins this time. Then came putting the thing back together.

Before taking the box down completely, there was actually one fan that got disconnected during the last assembly that I never bothered to reconnect. So to ensure I had all nine (9) radiator fans and the three (3) exhaust fans powered and running, I periodically tested the fan connections to make sure everything was sound.

The new reservoir suits this project much better as well being top-return capable. This top, though, is a separate purchase, but worth it for this, in my opinion. Your mileage may vary based on your project.

And now, looking up from the bottom, the cabling at that point was a mess, but at least I was able to get the radiator panel mounted to the rest of the case without any difficulty. Managing the cabling was, at that point, less important than making sure all the fans were still connected.

Then it was time to clean up the cabling.

With the radiator box essentially done, I turned my attention to the main system, getting it tubed up and connected to the radiator box. The direction of flow is in to the graphics cards at the bottom, up through to the CPU, and out to the inlet on the radiator box. The inlet takes it through the bottom to the top radiator, then back to the reservoir.

But the leak test didn’t go smoothly. There were a couple leaks from the inter-connects on the radiators. At first, it looked like the leaks were coming from the Swiftech SLI fittings. So in tearing those apart, I noticed that the fitting wasn’t nearly as tight as I’d liked. A few measurements pushed me to buy #6 and #8 O-rings from Home Depot. I used one of each with the brass ring in between them. That sealed the SLI fittings nice and tight in a fashion similar to the Primochill Revolver compression fittings, but didn’t take care of the leak entirely.

That is an EK 90° rotary fitting. It snapped, and I’m not sure entirely how. But it was still sitting flat enough in the fitting that I didn’t notice it immediately. It was when I took out that fitting and the adjacent one on the other radiator that it came apart like this. Thankfully my local Micro Center had replacements in stock. Once I had that fitting replaced, the leak test passed and I was able to get the system up and running.

NZXT H440 – Mini-review

Let’s momentarily revisit the NZXT H440 chassis. I really enjoyed building into this. Even for the Sabertooth X99 and it’s full-cover “armor”, the mainboard seated relatively easily and I was able to easily access all the needed points for cabling. Cable management was reasonably easy as well, though having two PCI-Express power cables seemed to add just a little too much cable bulk for the back panel.

The threads, though, are very tight for the thumb screws, and I had to resort to a screwdriver to keep from tearing up my fingers. This is likely due to them not protecting the threads when painting the parts.

And the smoked window is darker than my sunglasses. Seriously. It requires you to install white lighting (definitely can’t go with a different color on this, or at least I can’t see doing that) replace it with MNPCTech’s clear window. So… yeah. Time to order a lighting kit, or pick up something from Micro Center.

Benchmarks

Here’s how the new platform tested (old benchmarks in red).

• 3DMark Fire Strike: 12638 [9797]
• 3DMark Cloud Gate: 31911 [19918]
• 3DMark Sky Diver: 35006 [25205]
• Unigine Heaven: 1904 [1826] (Ultra Quality, Extreme Tesselation, x8 Anti-aliasing)
• Unigine Valley: 3743 [3025] (Extreme HD preset)

So the Unigine benchmarks didn’t change much. Not even an 80 point gain on the Heaven benchmark, though Valley went up by over 700 points. Valley is a bit more CPU-reliant, though, doing calculations with plants, wind, and rain. So given that the graphics cards didn’t change, seeing Heaven’s score go up by an insignificant amount (4.2%) isn’t surprising.

Further showing that the change in platform didn’t mean much for GPU performance, at least with regard to these GPUs, the graphics scores for the 3DMark benchmarks showed insignificant improvements on the X99 and 5820k versus the 990FX and FX-8350 in Fire Strike and Sky Diver:

• Fire Strike: 16091 / 15849 (1.5% gain)
• Sky Diver: 54593 / 52455 (4.1% gain)
• Cloud Gate: 102438 / 81712 (25.4% gain)

The significant gain with Cloud Gate I’ll speculate is similar to the significant gain with the Valley benchmark: Cloud Gate relies on the CPU more than Fire Strike and Sky Diver for its graphics testing and scoring.

The gains in the overall 3DMark scores, however, show the much better contribution of the Haswell-E processor where the better CPU performance is needed: almost 3,000 points gained on Fire Strike, almost 12,000 points on Sky Diver, and almost 10,000 points gained on Cloud Gate.

It’s clear as well that the GTX 770s are holding things back now. But those will get changed out in a later upgrade.

Temperatures

Given that I’m using a very non-standard means of water-cooling this system, how does it perform, especially compared to the FX-8350?

The FX-8350 would easily get up above 60°C when under a high amount of stress — e.g. transcoding videos — with an EK Supremacy EVO block. But the graphics cards wouldn’t ever really get all that high — they’d touch at 50°C, maybe a little higher, but it’d take a while to get there, and the temperatures would typically hover in the mid-40s.

On Mira, after running a string of benchmarks, the GPUs would get into about the mid-40s°C. The CPU also touched in the low 40s on the hottest core.

But for a good temperature test, I took a BD rip of the latest Jungle Book (I own the physical copy as well) and transcoded it with Handbrake. The original file was 24.3GB. It took about 21 minutes to transcode and kept the CPU pegged at 100% the entire time, with the cores all running at the boost clock of 3.6GHz. At the time I write this, I’m using just straight distilled water as the coolant.

The CPU temperature jumped up to around 40C almost immediately. During the transcode, the hottest core hit 43°C, which was also the package temperature, with the coolest core being at 39°C.

And that is why I have an external radiator box, and why external water cooling had me intrigued. These temperatures are certainly rather interesting as well given that the i7-5820k is specified at a higher TDP than the FX-8350 — 140W and 125W, respectively. So easily the water block is the variable here, where the EK Supremacy EVO isn’t able to perform nearly as well as the Heatkiller IV. Which makes sense since I don’t recall seeing temperatures nearly as high with the Koolance CPU-380A as I saw with the Supremacy. Oh well.

Specifications

Main system:

• CPU: Intel i7-5820k
• Mainboard: ASUS Sabertooth X99
• RAM: EVGA DDR4-3200 2x8GB (running at XMP profile)
• GPUs: 2xPNY GTX 770 4GB OC
• Chassis: NZXT H440 Black
• Power supply: EVGA 1050 GS

Water cooling system and radiator box:

• CPU block: Watercool Heatkiller IV Intel Pro
• GPU blocks: Watercool Heatkiller GPU-X³ GTX 680
• Radiators: XSPC EX360 (x3)
• Pump: Koolance PMP-450S with AlphaCool HF D5 clear housing
• Reservoir: EKWB EK-RES X3 250 Lite with Multiport Top and 140mm Internal Tube
• Tubing: Primochill Primoflex Advanced LRT 3/8″x1/2″
• Fans: Cougar CF-V12HB
• Housing: Mountain Mods Pedestal 18 with Triple-120 panel

So for now the system is complete. About the only other change I’ll be making will be to drain out the distilled water and replace it with Mayhem’s X1 clear coolant and installing a bright white light to illuminate the system behind the dark window.

And later down the line will be a GPU upgrade, pulling out the GTX 770s and replacing them with, likely, a GTX 1080.