Windows 7 Excited to Upgrade: New ATI Radeon HD 5870 and Modular Power Supply on the Way!

[kemical]

Well I'm tired of waiting and so today ordered this:

Powercolor ATI Radeon HD 5870 "Dirt 2 Edition" 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card [AX5870 1GBD5-MDHG] Graphics and Video ATI HD 5870 Series

As well as this:

OCZ ModXStream Pro 600w Silent SLI Certified Modular Power Supply [OCZ600MXSP-UK] Power Supplies OCZ

Delivery is set for Wednesday 17th although I'll be stripping the pc down on Tuesday as I need to respray the inside as it's gotten a little scratched... So if I'm not around you know why....

 

[cybercore]

Let us know how it feels.

 

[Mike]

Nice hardware. It will not disappoint. Gradually I suggest an SSD. You will notice, probably the greatest improvement in overall general usage performance on the computer you will have see in years.

 

[kemical]

I'd love to have an SSD but personally I feel the price point is far too high.. Once they start getting near a reasonable price I'll go for it.

 

[kemical]

Well the upgrade went well and I'm happy to say that this card is an absolute beast! A nice surprise was that my original order was out of stock and so they sent instead a powercolor 5870 PCS+ which is a factory overclocked version with a custom heatsink... Woohooo cheers Overclockers .
The delivery arrived about mid-day after which I had to shoot off to a meeting.. Damn! Anyway I scurried back as fast as I could.

The day before I had stripped the pc right down to the bare frame. This was then washed and degreased ready for the 'wet 'n' Dry' abrasive paper. After rubbing the frame back it was then duly filled and primed ready for the top coats. This was a Black 'matt silk' effect which looks very nice inside pc's...
Four coats later and the frame was left overnight to harden off. To be honest it would have been better to have left it longer but hey, I need my pc.
I took my time over the rebuild paying close attention to cable laying. The new OCZ PSU has modular cabling which helped although as the new card was so long (12' with the custom heatsink) it meant I'd had to move the HDD cage to the front and slot it below the DVDRW which it's designed to do. This meant I had to redesign the cabling layout as before the cage was at the bottom. Anyway all this took time and it was around 11pm before I was ready to start the pc..

The pc booted up fine and once it realised a 4870 wasn't there anymore applied the drivers.. I duly then took these off and re-installed the latest cat just to make sure everything was ok, then, I installed 3dmark 06. I wasn't sure what the score would be.. I thought maybe 18,000 as my old 4870 did 16,500 when overclocked but I was really happy to see 19,600! Since then I haven't had chance to play with it further..
I'm currently downloading the free Dirt2 game so I can check out the DX11 stuff plus I don't mind the odd driving game...

Apologies for the condition of the photo's I think I had a setting wrong somewhere..

Just to add that this project isn't finished yet so I'll post again when the next phase is completed.

 

[Highwayman]

Good to hear.... be getting my powercolor 5870 tomorrow finally... there was a delay in posting, spent the last few days clearing out junk and doing backups. Although not going to respray my case like you did..lol

 

[kemical]

Roll on tomorrow then..

My case really did need doing badly, if the photo's had come out a little better you'd have seen what I mean. Now it's like having a brand new case again and just shows the quality in these thermaltake cases..

 

[kemical]

Here is a better internal shot as you can see the custom cooler on the 5870 clearer. I've also tweaked the cable routing again as well finished off spraying the inside face of the side panel.
This card runs at 30c which is great as overall my pc is definitely cooler running this card compared to the 4870 (which would idle at 75c unless I tweaked the fan to spin up).:

Link Removed due to 404 Error

 

[Highwayman]

Well the SSD will certainly load things faster and use slightly less power so increase battery life, the downside is obviously less storage for ya money, but you can always add a USB hard drive on if that was an issue.