Case Mod - In Progress RV02 - Stealth Stalker

Those are some nice water cooling components. I like the jet black tubing and the silver fittings. It almost makes me wish that I had built my computer differently.

 

Thanks buddy, I'm going for the almost all black look with minor highlights of colour.

 

UPDATE : Installation of RAID controller and SSD's

I have updated the firmware of the Crusial M4's 0.0.0.9 and setup raid 0 using the RAID controller. The controller it self is based on a marvel chip so performance will be capped and wont be as good as native intel controllers on sandy bridge platforms

That being said here are the initial results.





Stock values of the system



Next up overclocking.

 

UPDATE : Improved drive performance

I was not satisfied with the above results so, I switched back to the Intel controller rebuilt the array, Installed windows and all the Patches / Drivers

And did a Benchmark , Instant increase in performance

Here are the figures





So I'm going to return the Marvel Raid controller and get my money back, at least I know the thing chokes when put on raid with 2 cards.

But this speed is not as good as Intel sata 3 raid which comes with the sandy bridge systems.
But since I wont be upgrading my system till Ivy bridge comes out this will have to do for now.

UPDATE : More speed .....

Installed Intel Rapid Storage Technology and optimized the drives and this was the result.



That's about the maximum I was able to squeeze out of the controller.

 

UPDATE : Overclock to 4.0 GHZ

I successfully O/C'd to 4.0 , Ran prime for 12 hours (I know its not enough )
The temps were in the mid 70's which is OK for a 920 DO but I had to run my fan on full to keep it at this (2500 RMP) which ended up being a bit noisy for my liking.



But here's for keep sake the settings I used

AI Overclock tuner - Manual
CPU Ratio setting - 20.0
BCLK Frequency - 200
DRAM Frequency - 1604
CPU Voltage - 1.35
CPU PLL Voltage - 1.96
QPI / DRAM Core voltage - 1.35
DRAM Bus voltage - 1.66
CPU Differential : 1000mv

CPU Spread Spectrum - Disabled
PCIE Spread spectrum - Disabled
CIE- Disabled
Intel Speed step - Disabled
Load Line Calibration - Disabled

So before I got told off by my wife for the din coming out of the PC I relaxed the timings and put it to 3.8 Ghz. I'm running prime right now on blend and will be leaving it on for 24 hours before I decide if its going to hold. I will put my settings up then.

Cheers guys that's all for now, Its slow going right now until I get my configurations done.
Catch you all soon.

 

What model is the RAID card?

 

Well I bought a cheapy 1 from scan, here's the link to it.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/lycom-pe-114m-esata-iii-6gbps-external-2ports-low-profile-pcie-20-host

The 640 High point rocket raid would have fared better no doubt since it has 2 marvel chips on it but the increase would have been marginal I suppose to what I get from the native Intel controller on board. And since it costs almost 100 quid I thought it does not justify the cost.

That's why I bought the cheap one to test and see if it got any better at all, but it turned out worse.

Any other better controllers out there ? If anyone knows please let me know.

 

UPDATE : Finalised CPU Speed results

Well after messing around for the last 48 hours with my settings and running tests using both OCCT and Prime95 I have finally determined my system is stable at 4.0 Ghz

Well what happened to under clocking at 3.8... Something really funny happened.
I had reduced the VCore, QPI and the other relevant settings to reflect this but had problem getting Prime to run without crashing for more than 20 - 30 mins. I kept bumping up the values until I hit the same values in voltages as my 4.0 Ghz stable. Only the BCLK was set to 190 rather than 200. But some thing else as different too. I thought the temps must have jumped up again, but they were only in the mid 50's, which puzzled me since last time it was the mid 70's and that's a big gap. So I thought what the hell lets push it back up to 4.0 Ghz and changed the BCLK back to 200. Even then the temp only went up to mid 60's. Which was good cause I was not running my fans on full and hey the temps are less as well.

So I decided to check my stability on these settings. Ran Prime on Blend for about 12 hours and then ran OCCT tests both medium data and Linpack for an hour each.

Here are the results





























As you can see every thing seems rock solid. But the magical temp difference kept troubling me.

Even while running Linpack it barely hit 70

So after everything I went back into the BIOS and double checked all my settings with my previous settings and guess what, I had mistakenly change 1 setting and that is what made the whole difference.

Load Line Calibration - Enabled

Even though it happened by total fluke, it turned out to be for the good.

Almost every where I read they had mentioned to keep this disabled, but enabling it for me reduced my temps and increased stability.

The back plate temp was 43 the whole time with an ambient of 24 in my room.

Here are my final settings

AI Overclock tuner - Manual
CPU Ratio setting - 20.0
BCLK Frequency - 200
DRAM Frequency - 1604
CPU Voltage - 1.35
CPU PLL Voltage - 1.96
QPI / DRAM Core voltage - 1.35
DRAM Bus voltage - 1.66
CPU Differential : 1000mv

CPU Spread Spectrum - Disabled
PCIE Spread spectrum - Disabled
CIE- Disabled
Intel Speed step - Disabled
Load Line Calibration - Enabled

Now on to the GPU, cheers guys.

 

UPDATE : GPU Unlock

I 1st managed to unlock the shaders of both the cards by flashing a modified version of the 6950 BIOS.



As you can see the shader counts are different for both before and after.

After which I attempted to over-clock the card to 6970 clock speeds 880 Mhz (Core) / 1375Mhz (Mem) respectively. This was a total failure. I attempted to increase the Vcore but no success there as well. Tried with afterburner / Smart doctor everything possible out there but it was a no go.

Then I reverted back to the original 6950 BIOS and tried just to O/C, that went along fine but got capped at 850 Mhz the memory refused to budge from the default speed.

Finally decided to find a 6970 compatible BIOS to flash, decided to use the most compatible one by logic the 6970 2GB Direct CU edition from ASUS.

The BIOS code is : Asus.HD6970.2048.110106.bin

Tried flashing it using ATI win flash and it would'nt let me flash from windows.

So I got on to command prompt with Admin user rights and forced ATI win flash to flash the BIOS

I used :

c:\Atiwinflash -f -p 0 [BiosFileName].bin for slot 0 GPU

and

c:\Atiwinflash -f -p 1 [BiosFileName].bin for slot 1 GPU

Restarted the PC, windows recognised them as new cards and installed them.
ATI catalyst crashed though. So I un-installed catalyst control centre and all the related drivers and apps and reinstalled it.

Rebooted and Woo hoo every thing was fine.

2 6970's up and running.



All the clock speeds (890 Mhz) were fine memory speeds (1375 Mhz) was fine as well.

Now the next thing was to check if it was stable.

So I ran 3D Mark 11 , it finished without any glitch



Here's the score SWEET

Then I ran OCT 1 hour test on GPU's just to test it more, and to check temps
It finished perfectly and the temps were 72 / 60 for both cards respectively.

So all good. So just to confirm the Asus Direct CU II 2GB 6950's are unlock-able and can be flashed with the 6970 BIOS (from asus as well). I complied a Zip file with all the files needed to achieve this. Here's the link to download it.

http://www.codereaction.com/PC-Modding/RV02/downloads/ASUS DCII 6950 - 6970.zip

That's all for now guys. Catch you all soon. Now back to modding.

 

UPDATE : Laser cut logo (Teaser)

Here is a small update of what is to come.

I got my laser cut logo back from the shop.







At work right now, will be back with more soon when I get back home.

Finialy can start work on the side panel.

 

UPDATE : Finished left side panel

Finished installing the laser cut acrylic on to the panel, here's the final result.





Night shot



Cheers guys,

Will be back soon with more stuff, awaiting a couple of packages

Let me know what you think.

 

UPDATE : Cable sleeving + PSU + top panel modding

Got my next package



YES it's from MDPC-X

Got some IMBA cable sleeving, shrinks nuts washers and bolts





I also bought my self a cable sleeving tool kit from phobya, these are exactly are like the once that sunbeam do.



Now on to voiding the warranty of my corsair HX 850 PSU.

These PSU's are not the easiest to sleeve since they are not fully modular and require you to pull it apart. Thus no warranty

I marked out all the pins and locations before I pulled everything out and decided on the colours I'm going to use in which location.







I painted the grill of the cosair white to go along with the rest of the colour scheme.



The PSUis now all ready for sleeving and the top of the PSU for black matt painting, which I will be doing next.

I also painted / modded the top panel of the RV02, here's the result



Will be back soon when I finish with the PSU sleeving. Cheers all.

 

looking good you should also paint the RAVEN logo on the front of the case as well. ( requires a steady hand but looks fantastic )

 

Yes, I'm definitely doing that. Yea I was thinking of the best way to do it.

 

i used citidel paints 'skull white' removed the front panal and just have a VERY steady hand (you only want the paint on the front not the sides of the raised letters )
but the end result is really worth the look

 

Thanks man. I'm going to try it out.

 

UPDATE : PSU - Drives - Raid - Cable management

At-last I am back with a update after 2 weeks. Been modding all the while but could not do any substantial work warranting a update.

I managed to finally finish the PSU cable braiding. It took ages. The Corsair HX 850 is a pain to cable mod. Corsair has used cheap mole-x connectors which were very hard to work with. I spent ages trying to remove the pins which did not come off easy at all, even with the correct tools. Cut my hand twice in the process

In the end I just gave up and bought new mole-x connectors, cut the existing connectors off, extended the cables and attached new once.

Attaching new extented cables for the PSU





Soldering the new connections



New connectors



Bought a new PSU tester to test all the cables and power output before plugging them back in.



Testing the newly built cables on the PSU



Finalised PSU





As a side note : If u can avoid sleeving corsair PSU's do so. They are a big pain unless you are prepared to do a fare bit of modding. You are better off using some thing like silverstone strider PSU's which are easy to work with and you dont end up voiding the warranty while you are at it. I did one for a mate of mine and finished it with in quarter of the time I spent on this.

I also purchased a pulse modding silver coil to put into my Res, just to fight off the algae (If any)



Another major change to my plans was to go all all SSD
No more traditional HDD's, thanks to my lovely wife who decided to give me the funds for it

Got 2 more Crusial M4's to add on . So all in all 4 X 64GB Crusial M4's
That is more than enough for my main rig. As I have a server with 5 TB running at home for all my documents and movies. I wil be modding that soon in the near future

Hooking up all 4 drives and doing some cable management





Power on



Building the new raid array.



The new drive stats



SWEET

The speed limitation is by the ICH10R controller.
If not for the I should be hitting close to 2000 MB/s with 4 of these babies.

But its ok since I can use it with my next upgrade when Ivy bridge comes out.

Build is almost done folks. Will be back next time with my final post and pics of the complete rigs.

Thanks for all the support.

 

Soz pics were down for sometime fixed that

 

Nice work,

What was the cost of the lazer cut you had done thinking of something like that for mine

 

Thanks dude, not much just cost me 40 quid.