My new system

[Phisionary]

Well, this is try number two for typing this. I just about put my fist through my monitor. POS computer... :angry:

...​

Hi folks. All my parts have arrived, and I'm ready to put my new computer together. :E I'f you're asking yourself "Why is he making a thread about this, doesn't he realize that we don't care?" well then, um, I don't know. I just am. Maybe I'll post some pics of my shiny new system to brag about it.

Actually I just like hearing myself talk. So it's a shame that all I hear is "click, clack, click, clack."

Seriously, if anyone is interested in the process or wants to have more details, feel free to ask.
Once it's up and running, I plan to do some basic benchmarking. If you want to see what performance is like at a certain setting, I can probably accomodate. I can't do many tests. I don't have HL2 (yet) and the only recent games are those that came with my vid-card (I think FarCry and Doom3, both).

I will be overclocking, we'll see how much I guess I'm going to test stability with memtest86+, cpuburn or cpu burn-in or whatever, and a 3d prog - maybe 3dMark05 or something. If someone has suggestions, do tell.

Here's my complete specs. You wont see them anywhere else, I dislike sig-specs.

	[u]new parts:[/u]
CPU			AMD Athlon64 3000+ 939pin 90nm
RAM			Patriot (PDP) PC-3200 (DDR400) - 2x512MB 2-2-2-5
GFX			eVga nVidia GeForce 6800 GT - 256MB AGP
motherboard		MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum - nForce3 socket939
HDD			Western Digital WD740GD - 10,000RPM, 74GB
CPU HSF cooler		Zalman CNPS7700-Cu
case			Antec P-160 (w/o window) - Aluminum, 1x120mm fan
PSU			Tagan TG480-U01 - 480 watt
add-on cards		Syba SD-PCI-2S - PCI 2-port serial expansion
mousing surface		fUnc sUrface - black
thermal interface	Arctic Silver 5 - 3.5gram

	[u]existing parts:[/u]
monitor			ViewSonic P225fb - 22" CRT
DVD-RW			Plextor PX-708A
mouse			Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer v3.0
headphones (headset)	Sennheiser HMD-280 Pro

I think my driver has finished downloading. With any luck, my next post will be from a brand new system. :cheers:

 

[Loke]

Nice computer.

I got a new comp a few weeks ago as well. The games makes such a huge difference when playing, and the games are very sharp-looking on my TFT 19" Monitor.

 

[Phisionary]

Well, it took a bloody lot longer than I thought it would, and I ran into a few snags, but she's up and running.

Just for informations sake, know this: When Zalman says the CNPS-7700 does not fit with a MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum, they are not kidding. :|

Sometime I'll go into more detail about how one overcomes this difficulty (Hint: Brute force is involved :cheese.

My sound doesn't work, but I have a weird faint buzzing in my headphones anyway. If this the the drawback of on-board sound, I think I'll need to buy a sound-card...

 

[FieryGoose]

so your psu doesn't fit on your neo 2 platinum or whats the cnps-7700?

 

[destrukt]

sounds good.

i've never heard of patriot before, are they good ?

also, is it much more to get a cpu above 3000+ ?

 

[FieryGoose]

i have patriot also, the same as his in fact, and to answer destrukt question probably about 60 bucks more for the 3200+ and about 100+ for a 3500+ 90nm.

 

[Phisionary]

well, it seems to be running fine at 2-2-2-5. I ran through a quick cycle of memtest86+ and had no errors. I haven't tried overclocking, yet. I wanna find what the maximum speed I can get from it, for fun....

the cnps7700 is a HSF. and no it doesn't fit.
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041213/
As soon I as reboot, I'll check MBM and see how well it's coolin.

 

[FieryGoose]

alright sounds good, does hl2 run smooth w/settings cranked up w/ all your new stuff?

 

[FieryGoose]

oops, i didn't see the top where you said you didn't have it, but how about doom 3 & farcry?

 

[Phisionary]

hehe. still not yet. I'm trying to iron out a few problems ATM. I'm getting a hang at boot-time, by all appearances at the IDE detection stage. Kindopf a pisser. Once it boots it seems alright.

I'm running cpu Burn-in right now, MBM refuses to go over 43 deg C. That's nice. I hope it's right, it shows case temps at 16 (I think they are a bit higher) at -12 and -5 do not show up at all... I don't think it's fully compatible with my board. This is at stock speeds, still...

Oh, and it loks like they subsituted doom3 for farcry in my vid-card package. Or maybe farcry wasn't included anyway.... I dunno, I read a review on my GFX, said farcry, and some other game, were included. But there's pretty much didly aside from doom3. I think it might have been a different deal, or something. Drat.

Oh well. I'm gonna have to get farcry though, I know it'll rock on this thing.

HL2 though... I gotz to get on that. It's hard to believe I've waited this long. And I so want to go get pwned at CS for 3 hours strait... I've been looking forward to that for months.

Edit: Back to the question earlier. Patriot is the same as PDP, I guess. ??? It's weird. Anyway, I believe they are one of the new memory manufaturers out of asia. I read an article, these companies would make memory and Other companies would rebrand it and sell it. Several places are cuttin out the middleman, and they seem to be good value. Not the fastest stuff around maybe, I don't think there as good as crucial or OCZ or whatever, but for the money it's good. Timings are timings, pretty much. tomshardware had a review of PDP memory on AMD64 systems I think, and I've read several other reivews that were pretty positive.

 

[Phisionary]

Well, cool. Running doom3 at 1280x1024, 4xAA, 16xAF. Frame rate is good, it get's a little stutter sometimes. I'd tell you it looks great but I cant ****ing see anything... with it being all, you know, pitch black 90% or the time.... :hmph:

Otherwise very cool. Pretty freaky-ass game.

Speaking of, not monitoring vid-temps, but even full doom3 my CPU doesn't get over 45, that with fairly elevated case temps. Having the vid-card running high puts my case temps up about 4-5 deg. C over just CPU.

It's not silent... but it is quieter than my last system by a fair amount.

:thumbs:

 

[J_Tweedy]

i heard that the 6800gt is only really on its way to being fully enjoyed with an amd64 of 3200+ or over?
did you consider that, or is the difference pretty negligable? is that how you spell that big word?

 

[Phisionary]

negligible. close enough. spelling neither important it be. grammer is that counts.

Well, yes, I know my CPU should be a little faster. I fully expect to be able to OC to that, I just wanted to enjoy it for a while (before I screw it up Hahahaha no it's not funny) now that it is running.

Honestly, frame rates are a bit choppy. Had a big firefight, got fairly slow. Haven't bothered to figure out how to display FPS, just playin the game right now. So, I don't really know what the botleneck is.

It definitely depends on the game, and the resolution. On higher res's (like 1280 and above), the bottlneck is usually the vid card though....

 

[pr0nking]

I have the 64 3000 and mine runs stable at 2350MHz!

 

[RogueFox]

Nice Phis, glad to see you got the 939 pin config so you can upgrade better. I think if you visit some boards you can solve the onboard sound issue. Personally I always buy ASUS mobo's and Seagate HD's, why did you go with MSI and Western Digital?


As far as overclocking goes, my friends and I experimented with it for a few months and just didnt see the advantage to doing it. I dont recommend it as your only getting a small percentage return on a chance of damaging your system and if the game you are playing is CPU intensive it tends to crash at odd times. 10-15 frames just isnt worth it IMHO>


Nice job tho, does MSI support point and click bios flashing?





edit:What was your previous system specs?

 

[Phisionary]

I got the sound fixed fine. Just had the wrong driver installed. The second ethernet port doesn't work, but I'm not using it anyway. Probably the same kind of issue.

There is a good amount of evidence that I could overclock as much as 33% I think that's worth it if I could.

My previous system... Well, let's just say that I built it so I could play half-life 1. :E

It was OC'd, and would have been darn slow if I hadn't. 33% on that one, strait off, never had a problem. It appears that my vid-card was failing, but I'm glad 'cause I was worried that it was my monitor, which is newer and cost much more. I wonder if that might have been OCing (AGP was overclocked I think), but never had stability problems, I think the RAMDAC was messed up. Maybe I was running my res above supported?

Oh and btw my old system was stable overclocked for a long time. Besides, when AMD releases their high-end chips, all they do is overclock the regular ones. They may have better methods to test stability, and know if it's running at reasonable heat levels, etc, but that's not worth $400 if I can get this one to reach 3700+ speeds.

I don't know about the BIOS thing. I'm not sure I would trust it even if it did. Not unless I hada gigabyte board at least.

I bought MSI because I read some good reviews, and it seemed to be the best offering on the nforce3 chipset. I don't buy enough parts to have real brand loyalty, really. I've read good reviews of seagates, but the WD was the fastest drive you could buy for desktop apps, and I thought it would be a nice change over run-of-the-mill drives. I don't know whether it was worth it still, but it's quiet and doom3 maps seem to load very quickly.

Well, I bet this post is disjointed, and possibly confusing, but I'm rushed. Thanks for reading.

 

[ankalar]

Nice Phis, glad to see you got the 939 pin config so you can upgrade better. I think if you visit some boards you can solve the onboard sound issue. Personally I always buy ASUS mobo's and Seagate HD's, why did you go with MSI and Western Digital?


As far as overclocking goes, my friends and I experimented with it for a few months and just didnt see the advantage to doing it. I dont recommend it as your only getting a small percentage return on a chance of damaging your system and if the game you are playing is CPU intensive it tends to crash at odd times. 10-15 frames just isnt worth it IMHO>


Nice job tho, does MSI support point and click bios flashing?

MSI is a great all around company. Their motherboards seem to perform better stock than others in general, including Asus. When it comes down to companies like MSI, Asus, Abit, and lately Epox, it's pretty much just personal preference. Same with Seagate vs. Western Digital, they're both excellent.

I agree with you on overclocking. On most of my systems I give them a tiny boost in FSB just for personal satisfaction. Nothing too major, and nothing that stock cooling can't handle. Serious overclocking is more of a sport than a performance boost.

Yes, MSI has a program that you can update your BIOS through Windows without a floppy, if that's what you're asking.

Good luck and good fun with that new system, Phisionary!

 

[RogueFox]

On your comment about the AMD method of chip selection your right, same chip different settings but it was tested. Please dont mess with it, you have a l33t system. Ok i warned ya.


I have had a few problems with WD and wont get one again, maybe my bad luck. I have heard good things about MSI so I look forward to what you guys have to say about them.




Thx for the answer Ank, thats what I was asking.

 

[Neutrino]

Well, cool. Running doom3 at 1280x1024, 4xAA, 16xAF. Frame rate is good, it get's a little stutter sometimes. I'd tell you it looks great but I cant ****ing see anything... with it being all, you know, pitch black 90% or the time.... :hmph:

Raise the gamma and brightness levels in the config file.

 

[ankalar]

He was making a joke...

 

[Neutrino]

He was making a joke...

Yes, but it seems not that many people know that you cannot adjust gamma and brightness in-game but have to use the config file. Just trying to be helpful.

 

[Phisionary]

I have had a few problems with WD and wont get one again, maybe my bad luck. I have heard good things about MSI so I look forward to what you guys have to say about them.

I know how that is. I had a IBM Deskstar (NOT the infamous 'Deathstar', actually it's supposedly reliable predecessor) that failed with all my un-backed up data on it. It was only 4 months old. I'm fairly sure I wont buy one of those for a while.

Raise the gamma and brightness levels in the config file.

It was a joke. I tried to change it in the game menu, it didn't seem to make much difference, so I thought that might be the case. I wasn't sure though, thanks for the tip.

 

[Phisionary]

well, I make allusions to this, but here it finally is:

How to make a Zalman CNPS7770-Cu cooler fit on a MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum motherboard

When I got my parts for my new system, I grabbed em all, lay them out, and started putting 'em together. I'd just attached my Zalman big-ass cooler to my AMD 64 3000+, when a niggling concern returned to me.

When I was ordering my parts, I read somewhere that the 7700's predecessor, the 7000, was a close fit on this MSI board. For some reason, I discounted this completely. After I learned that the Thermalright XP-120 had big issues with this board, I did some research, and found that this K8N was listed in Zalman's incompatible page. Well, hell. But, I assured myself, that is just there because it blocks some of the memory slots. One of the first reviews of the K8N mentioned that stability was better while using slots 3 & 4, which were those farther from the CPU. Since I wasn't planning on expanding to 4 dimms and kill my bandwidth, I decided this would not be a problem.

So, I ordered, and it came, and I stuck the Zalman on, and I inserted two sticks of memory, and I grabbed my GFX card, and.... oh. :O


Turns out it was a problem. :cheese:

Here's the huge-ass cooler, still in the package:

Here's a pic of my nVidia GeForce 6800 GT sitting lightly in the AGP slot. It is not inserted, BTW, just kinda resting in the slot:

Obviously, there is a problem. That graphics card is supposed to be perfectly perpendicular.

And a closeup:

This shot is about as isometric as I could get it:

What to do, eh? Well, I didn't want to send the cooler back, since there were no better ones I had seen. I didn't want to use the stock cooler; or gum up my CPU with paste, only to replace it later. And... I didn't want to wait any longer.]

So... time to grab those pliers... :naughty: If you look close you can see the marker line I made that I was trying to bend at:

The clearance issue was about a quarter of an inch, and I didn't want to cut it real close, since a shorted vid-card would be an expensive problem.

It's hard to bend things and take pictures at the same time... so here's the final result:

A Note on what you see. The fin design on the Zalman is kind of like a finger with the last joints bent into a hook. This surrounds the fan blades at a fairly constant distance. On the far right of my butchering job, you can see some twist and nicks on the copper fins. This comes from trying to bend the fin 'lengthwise', as in, down the length of the 'finger'. This worked: I just held the inner half with one pair of needle-nose pliers and used a second pair the outside part, and bend-bend away. Since the tip of my bending-pliers was not real wide at the end, it took several re-positions to bend the whole thing, and was also akward, ugly, and slow. About 8 fins in, I was bending closer to the 'joint' and bent there instead. It was so much faster, I decided to do the rest that way...

I wasn't sure how close the fins would come to my video-card, and wanted to ensure that there would still be no shorts. So I put on a doubled-width piece of electrical tape on the fins, with the adhesive on the fins of ther cooler. This may have been unneccisary; I had drawn out the bend-line before I had mounted the motherboard to the case, and it seems to have flexed a small amount inwards, making them appear as if the two would conflict slightly more. After I had mounted it, this flex was gone, and the spacing between the cooler and the video card was somewhat less severe. So my bends were ever so slightly more than I had intended (indeed, I thought I had underdone it slightly, compared to my plan), and the spacing is reasonable. I left it on though, just in case. Though the Zalman cooler doesn't budge, the fins are slightly flexible and not prefectly uniform in how far they protrude. The video card also has definite flex, and I didn't want creatively tight cable running or other tomfoolery ****ing my video card...
Tape on:

In summary? It was hard to come to this decision, to muck up this beautiful copper creation. But, between a mangled 7700 and no 7700, I opted for mangling. I have a windowless case, however, and personal asthetic standards aside, don't care what my system looks like on the internal. It is hard to justify taking to a 50 dollar cooler with pliers, also, but that is what was done.

But my system runs fine as it is, slightly overclocked to 1946MHz, with the Zalman cooler set on minimum RPM. This is reported as 950-some-odd RPM's, and the Zalman is probably the quietest mechanical part of my computer now. Excepting, perhaps, the PSU. The temps are about 28degC over ambiant at full load, if my temps are reporting accurately.
Here is the vid-card and cooler installed:

Who wouldn't work for? People who have video cards with rear-mounted heatsinks or wrap-around video cooling solutions. The farthest protruding part on the back of my graphics card was a stiffening plate for mounting the cooler on the other side... It is less than 1/8 inch out from the PCB itself. I imagine something protruding 1/4" could be made to work, possibly even 3/8's. But bending the Zalman any more than that would probably lead to the fan-blades hitting the bent copper fins, as the spacing is fairly tight between the two.
Obviously this would reduce your upgrade options somewhat, depending on how future AGP graphics cards are designed...


Well, whatever, it works for me. Thanks for reading. Any questions: just reply...

P.S. For regular-height DDR DIMM's, the 7700 would not block any of the four slots. I've heard some heat-spreaders make them protrude higher, but with my memory this would not have been a problem.

On other issues, I tried out the MSI 'Live Update, and was pleased with the result. Besides installing some stupic memory-resident auto-loading program (I much prefer a stand-alone executable), it worked wonderfully.

I also have some words about this blasted antec case... but that'll have to wait for another day.