Camride
New Member
- Joined
- Jan 17, 2009
I finally got around to getting my upgraded hardware. Unfortunately I picked the absolute worst week ever to try to pull this off. I closed on my new house yesterday (Link Removed due to 404 Error Check the Final Walkthrough folder to see what it looks like finished) and am consulting for a school system this week (school starts Monday) so things have been insane. But, despite all that I did manage to get the system up and running.
I kept everything from my old system except the cpu/mb/ram. I reused the Xigmatek Dark Knight heatsink as I didn't want to buy a better one now considering I will be doing water cooling in the semi-near future. It does well enough for now though so I should be able to get a decent overclock out of the i7 with this setup. So the new parts are:
Core i7 920: Link Removed due to 404 Error
EVGA X58 SLI LE: Link Removed due to 404 Error
12GB OCZ Platinum 1333Mhz: Link Removed due to 404 Error
That should do me alright for a while.
Well, I finally got everything in Wednesday night, but ran into a problem. The EVGA board has the SATA ports aimed sideways instead of straight up. While I agree this makes for cleaner wiring, it makes it very difficult to wire anything in a mid tower case. My HD cage ends up sitting right on top of the SATA cables once they're plugged in. So what am I to do? Bust out the beer and the dremel!
Link Removed due to 404 Error
Everything that needed to be cut was on the bottom of the cage so you can't see it once it's in anyway. I also wanted to mount the HD's the opposite direction to clean up the wiring a little more, so I made a few more cuts to accommodate that. It ended up working out perfectly and everything went in cleanly.
Link Removed due to 404 Error
Link Removed due to 404 Error
Unfortunately the wiring is not done, nor are all the fans in as I just didn't have the time. I still haven't finished packing and we're moving tomorrow (though fortunately it's only about 2 miles away). But the system is up and running with Win 7 Ultimate x64 build 7201 (that's the last one I had time to download and it runs well enough for now). It really is fast as hell.
Now the things that went wrong: I have a 640GB Seagate that I had to RMA a few months ago. I've been extremely busy so I haven't touched it since I got it back from RMA in June. Well, it was going to be my OS drive (as it's faster than my 2 250GB drives in RAID 0) but when I went to hook it up the plastic piece for the SATA connection was broken on the hard drive. So now I have to RMA it again and hope they don't blame/charge me for that broken connection. So I had to load Win 7 on my slow 250's, which is why my score sucks. I'm also having issues with my 8800GT and may need to RMA that. I've had a string of stuff needing to be RMA'd recently so I hope this will be the end of it for a while.
Anyway, what do you guys think? I'll get more pics once it's completely finished sometime next week. Then comes the overclocking! I'm hoping for at least 3.6Ghz on air, 4Ghz would be nice (and may be completely possible since it's a D0 step) but I'm not going to expect it.
Here are a few screens for you with Win 7.
Link Removed due to 404 Error
Link Removed due to 404 Error
Link Removed due to 404 Error
Link Removed due to 404 Error
I kept everything from my old system except the cpu/mb/ram. I reused the Xigmatek Dark Knight heatsink as I didn't want to buy a better one now considering I will be doing water cooling in the semi-near future. It does well enough for now though so I should be able to get a decent overclock out of the i7 with this setup. So the new parts are:
Core i7 920: Link Removed due to 404 Error
EVGA X58 SLI LE: Link Removed due to 404 Error
12GB OCZ Platinum 1333Mhz: Link Removed due to 404 Error
That should do me alright for a while.
Well, I finally got everything in Wednesday night, but ran into a problem. The EVGA board has the SATA ports aimed sideways instead of straight up. While I agree this makes for cleaner wiring, it makes it very difficult to wire anything in a mid tower case. My HD cage ends up sitting right on top of the SATA cables once they're plugged in. So what am I to do? Bust out the beer and the dremel!Link Removed due to 404 Error
Everything that needed to be cut was on the bottom of the cage so you can't see it once it's in anyway. I also wanted to mount the HD's the opposite direction to clean up the wiring a little more, so I made a few more cuts to accommodate that. It ended up working out perfectly and everything went in cleanly.
Link Removed due to 404 Error
Link Removed due to 404 Error
Unfortunately the wiring is not done, nor are all the fans in as I just didn't have the time. I still haven't finished packing and we're moving tomorrow (though fortunately it's only about 2 miles away). But the system is up and running with Win 7 Ultimate x64 build 7201 (that's the last one I had time to download and it runs well enough for now). It really is fast as hell.
Now the things that went wrong: I have a 640GB Seagate that I had to RMA a few months ago. I've been extremely busy so I haven't touched it since I got it back from RMA in June. Well, it was going to be my OS drive (as it's faster than my 2 250GB drives in RAID 0) but when I went to hook it up the plastic piece for the SATA connection was broken on the hard drive. So now I have to RMA it again and hope they don't blame/charge me for that broken connection. So I had to load Win 7 on my slow 250's, which is why my score sucks. I'm also having issues with my 8800GT and may need to RMA that. I've had a string of stuff needing to be RMA'd recently so I hope this will be the end of it for a while.
Anyway, what do you guys think? I'll get more pics once it's completely finished sometime next week. Then comes the overclocking! I'm hoping for at least 3.6Ghz on air, 4Ghz would be nice (and may be completely possible since it's a D0 step) but I'm not going to expect it.
Here are a few screens for you with Win 7.
Link Removed due to 404 Error
Link Removed due to 404 Error
Link Removed due to 404 Error
Link Removed due to 404 Error
