Project log: Liquid Monster

Posted: Fri Sep 16, 2011 10:54 pm

My parts have started to arrive, albiet rather slowly as I've had to buy fridge's, cars and all other sorts of crap inbetween >_<

case and motherboard

its kind of hard to see just how big this case is.... i'll try and get a better angle for my next shot Wink

and of course the whole point of my new machine; my eyefinity monitors Very Happy

the middle one is plugged into the laptop at the moment, only just unpacked the other two this morning.

And I apologize to everyone for the rubbish ppicture quality I don't own a camera and had to take these on my phone Sad

Anyway the case is a Xigmatek Elysium, motherboard ASUS maximus IV extreme-z, I've also got an OCZ agility SSD but that's rather boring so i didn't bother to take a pic, same story with the PSU (Corsair AX1200) . Monitors are Dell u2312hm's. I had to down spec my original planned build a bit cos of cost/availability concerns (no-one would buy alcohol infused kidney, apparently the real liquid monster here is me :p)

Anyway just thought i'd share, nothing particularily interesting going on yet, i'll update with some more picks of my other stuff after i get paid later in the week and then lots more when it all starts to go together (if anyone would like to donate a camera maybe (^_^) ). And I know this isn't the most technically orientated forum out there, so if anyone is looking at starting their own build or have built their own machine and wants to reflect a bit feel free to ask any questions you have. the reason i'm posting this here and not a hardware forum is to try and inspire you guys cos its not only a rewarding experience but its also damn easy when you know how Wink

Posted: Sat Sep 17, 2011 4:54 am

That looks like a lot of fun mate!
I need more money and more space to be able to play, but hopefully soon I'll break my cherry on the home build front.
Nick a camera from a mate and keep us updated Wink

ps. Did someone mention rugby?!

Posted: Sat Sep 17, 2011 6:41 am

Hey lndestructible are you going to use all three monitors when you have built the system? I want to use three monitors, a 24" L.E.D. for gaming and 2x 22" LCD monitors for everything else, so what I would like to know is, if you are going to use all three monitors at the same time how are you going to set it all up? Are you going to run the three monitors off one GPU card, or are you going to have two GPU cards in SLI/Crossfire.

Posted: Sat Sep 17, 2011 7:48 am

for multi monitor setup's like mine its probably easiest to explain using a video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poaUQp_LMDM

That is an example of AMD's eyefinity, you can also use nvidia cards with their surround technology (surround also works in 3D on 3 monitors at the same time assuming the monitors support 3D). With the AMD solution you only need one card, a 6950/70 is more than capable of running 3 monitors at the same time by itself, obviously you can't play crysis with only one card but for less demanding games that support the technology its fine. Nvidia surround works basically the same except you must have a minimum of two cards for it to even get off the ground. widescreengamingforum is a good place to start if you are interested in learning more.

My plan is to use eyefinity, this means that one of my monitors must be connected using a display port (a requirement for eyefinity) and that all cables are plugged into the one card. I will however be using three cards in my setup, either 2GB 6950's or 6970's. As per usual there is the ever present issue of drivers as multi card setup's are forever a slave to drivers, there is also the problem of monitors as the short story is they all suck.

@breadthief i tried explaining it to my little sister and the old girl but they just don't get it, its basically just lego for grown ups, I love it Very Happy

Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2011 9:34 pm

get it off the FLOOR!!! Laughing

Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2011 7:49 am

schlomo72 wrote:

get it off the FLOOR!!! Laughing

looks like they just moved in, or else bought the display in favor of no furniture.
sooooo.. $21,000 gets you three of those huge wraparounds Cool

Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2011 12:37 pm

LORD! GARTH! wrote:

schlomo72 wrote:

get it off the FLOOR!!! Laughing

looks like they just moved in, or else bought the display in favor of no furniture.
sooooo.. $21,000 gets you three of those huge wraparounds Cool

I better stick to my Samsung 22 Inch LCD monitor!

Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2011 5:00 pm

Actually I just spent two hours cleaning that room up before i took those pics (that's why you can actually see my desk usually it's more or less buried Laughing

)

I might stick it up on the desk for easier photo's but it can't stay there.... where would i put my feet?

I didn't think those Alienware wrap-around screens were ever put into production or made commercially available, there are large seamless monitors available though http://www.seamlessdisplay.com/products_radius320.htm these are closer to 10K for the smallest one however Surprised

Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2011 5:09 pm

Oh my, that's a little beyond my price range. Gaming is good, but not if it makes me feel buyer's remorse.
I'll give it 7 year and 5 months before these become the norm.

Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2011 5:14 pm

Its like peering through your letter box Shocked

I just plug mine into my big screen tv now and again for lols

Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2011 1:21 am

Moar toyz I WANT MOARRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*indie shouts and flails limbs wildly*

wont bother to post pictures of my most recent purchases, but i'll get some once it starts to go together.

I7-2600K

patriot RAM

and a good old 1TB WD caviar black (which will be used for games, handbrake rips and virtual machines + some backing up) - I already have a 2TB HTPC for video storage.

Can't decide if I want to start putting it all together and doing some overclocking and benchmarking now, only to have to pull it apart in a couple of weeks to start adding radiators and pumps and all that goody goodness.....

Anyway the next thing on the shopping list is.... graphics cards :p which will have to wait for my next pay check unfortunately. Fingers crossed I don't get it all together then start playing starcraft for 5 hours a day and get too distracted to see my build through. Laughing

hehe Since I'm bored I'm also adding a poll for which graphics card trio will go best in this machine. Look forward to hearing everyone thoughts Very Happy

Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2011 2:54 am

I've got a 6850 and I say no complaints here, everything runs on full max so a 6970 in that machine will be grand.

On the other hand, Why an i7? Just out of brand loyalty or are the chipsets in the mobo ibm also? Or is it a performance thing?

If your bridges and cpu are ibm, I would probably go with nvidia due to any possible compatibility issues. But I could, and probably am, wrong about that. I can sense a disturbance in the force and someone is going to school me.

Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2011 4:50 pm

hmmm, I think you mean intel not IBM, the sandy bridge platfrom and CPU are both intel products, to the best of my knowledge IBM haven't had anything to do with the consumer market for 20 years.

basically the descision was performance, I went sandy bridge and i7 because the platform has the highest single threaded performance out of all commercial processors, i7 over i5 because they are supposedly binned higher and also the extra threads are nice as I'm a power user running virtual machines/video encoding etc.

As for compatibility both the ATI and nVidia cards use PCI-e 16x slots, beyond that its really just an issue of drivers, and in all multi cards setup's that issue is the same for both manufacturers. Interestingly, with my board supporting the NF200 chipset (developed by nVidia) the test's I've seen actually show the ATI cards to benefit more so than the nVidia cards. This was several driver revisions ago so that might have changed along with scaling on the 69xx series cards which was better... still if everything has evened out it comes down to a purely cost vs performance comparison, the same as any other GPU buying decision

Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2011 6:18 pm

Yes I did mean intel, not IBM. That's what I get for posting first thing in the morning before coffee. I now stand schooled.

If the decision boils down to a matter of cost vs. performance, I would go with performance. The less you pay, the less you get. And as technology advances and becomes more and more demanding of hardware resources; essentially the more you pay now, the less you'll be paying in the long run.

Posted: Fri Sep 30, 2011 5:16 pm

still on the dodgy camera phone I'm afraid

seriously, why do they bother to include this with k spec processors, literally no-one who buys a 2600k will use it unless they were trying to buy the locked version and were given an unlocked processor by mistake...

well i caved and built it air cooled, they don't have any stock of the video cards i wanted, and its almost impossible to find a 420 rad in this country, so in the interm its normal computing for me Sad

and finally a proper picture with a decent camera, you'll notice the lazy mess i've made of cable routing thus far. in particular the 12v 8 pin CPU which isn't long enough to go behind the backplate and still plug in at the top of the motherboard Sad

its just hooked over the cooler at the moment but i'll clean it up once i start getting my proper cooling kit. Anyway I'm glad i decided to go liquid cooling as far from the rewarding experience of learning about it this thing is loud on just air.

Now I'm off to do some more online shopping for the rest of my kit, wish me luck Very Happy