Build Advice Violet Haze - Custom Build i7 *Revised Specs*

Ok, so looking at your spec list, i would personally make a few revisions, i know people do it their own ways, but that's the great thing about community advice, you can choose to go with it, or ignore it, so here goes what i would keep/change:

• Intel i7-920 D0-Stepping Processor. - £249.99 -
• Asus Rampage II Extreme X58 Motherboard - £295.00
• Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB - £119.99 or Two Samsung Spinpoints 1TB or wait for their 1.5TB?
  Personally, i wouldn't even look at a 1/1.5tb drive as a boot drive, why? Well, i guess your looking to partition it, ok, that's all dandy and fine, but say you have Windows on 1 partition, and loads of documents and other things on another partition, and the entire drive fails for what ever reason? What then, not only have you lost your OS partition, but also a good portion of maybe important documents, music, films and games, not only is it a real bummer, but it's a lot of time and patients wasted, so my advice would have a smaller drive for the OS, say the WD Velociraptor 300gb, and then have 2/3/4 1/1.5tb drives in Raid, the Raptor is quick as anything, and has ample storage to store some games on it, and if it goes, then you only loose some games and Windows, and not an entire collection of Top Gear or Music.
  
• OCZ 12GB DDR3 RAM. - £199.99 Or 2x 6GB Triple-Channel DDR3 1600Mhz+?
  I would only have 6gb here, but, if you really really want 12, then have 12.
• BFG NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 H20 - £659.00 -
  You could save nearly £200 if you buy a non H20 card, and buy a normal card, then the waterblock on top: BFG GTX 295=£432.40 + EK 295 Block= £109.99
• LG GGW-H20W BluRay-RW Drive. - £147.99
  (Buy from Novatech and save about a £1:thumb)
• Corsair HX1000 - 1000W PSU -£209.99
  Just a thumbs up on selection of this, have one myself and is bloody brilliant, best PSU buy so far.
• Windows Vista Ultimate 64-Bit Edition. - £219.99 -
  I would buy either Home Premium or Business over Ultimate, both use less HDD space, and are just as good, Home Premium does pretty much everything Ultimate does anyway, Business does everything Ultimate does, except for Windows Media Center being included, I would also buy it as OEM, as Windows 7 is due late 09, early 10
• Sound Card may be included after completed build!
  This is upto you, but the Asus Xonar D2/PM PCI 7.1 Sound Card is only £97.74 at Novatech, and is the one i would have.

Right, Water cooling, if you plan to Cool your CPU and GPU independently, that pretty much means needing 2 loops, each with a Block (CPU/GPU) Radiator, Pump and Reservoir, many sites doted around the UK offer water cooling gear.

Water Blocks:
Now, the Blocks to cool your CPU and GPU:
The blocks in this page are for Intel processors, so look out for the 1366 bit (Theres only 3 anyway):
Intel CPU Blocks
For GPU Bocks:
Theres only 2 blocks, and both are the same pretty much:
EK 295 GTX Block

Radiator:
As i'm unfamiliar with the case you have selected, i can't really say what radiators you would need, but as food for thought, i'm looking to buy the Black Ice GT Xtreme 480 Radiator and would be cooling both CPU and GPU, but as i'm looking for quiet and stabilty, it works differently to me, and i'm sure someone else will be able to help further with choosing the right Radiator.

Pump:
People have select choices in pumps, when my W/C setup was working, someone told me what to buy, and i did, but i believe the pumps within this page have good ratings, and is currently in my eye also.

Reservoir:
Now there are many many different Reservoirs to choose from, some sit neatly inside the PC in a tube like fashion, other sit in Drive bays behind a Bay Cover, others on the other hand sit in Drive Bays with windows so you can see how much water you have, this page gives you a nice sized collection of Reservoirs to choose from, but, there are plenty more scattered around.

Coolant Fluid:
Well, there are different coolant fluids around, and bit-tech reviewed some last year, Feser 1 Liquid was the choice winner, and at about £7 per 1litre bottle is reasonably priced, but again, there are plenty more around which maybe better, and or worse.

Hose/Tubing:
Well, this is the sketchy part for me, as again, i was told to buy a certain type, and i always did, there are two things to take into account when buying hose, and the layout of your setup is pretty crucial, because if you have nasty bends, or, hard to reach areas, then you may want smaller diameter tube, but for better performance, then larger tube is best advised.
OD= Outer Diameter
ID= Inner Diameter
I always bought Tygon Clear 3/8" ID Tube, some sites list tubing either in Feet, or Meters.

Right, that's all i can think off for the time being. I hope it's all food for thought, and it is only my advice, i'm sure someone else has either more advice, and probably much better advice too, but it should get you started.

Sam

 

Wow. Haha.

I do appreciate your advice on the HDD's. but I think I'm just going to stick with my initial choices! But thanks nonetheless

& a big thankyou for clarifying on what components I need for Water-cooling.

Has anybody managed to find that listed components cheaper than the guide price stated?

Thanks once again guys!

 

Specked it all up on Novatech for you.

Total Price ex VAT: £1738.00
Total Price inc VAT: £1998.70

But what does that get you? Well"
OCZ Gold 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C8 1600MHz * 2
Intel Core i7 920 "D0 Stepping" 2.66Ghz
BFG GeForce GTX 295 1792MB GDDR3 Dual DVI HDMI
Asus Rampage II Extreme Intel X58
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB SATA II 7200rpm 32MB
Samsung Spin Point F1 SATAII 1TB 32Mb * 2
Corsair HX 1000W ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU
LG Blu-ray Rewriter GGW-H20L DVD-/+RW HD DVD ROM Black SATA - Retail
Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 64-Bit Edition DVD - OEM
Asus Xonar D2/PM PCI 7.1 Sound Card - Retail

Delivery is an extra £5.99 on next working day, or £0 on the 3/4 day service.

So, only £600 left of your budget, so, onto the case:

Lian Li PC Armorsuit PC-80 Black - £228.85 ex Delivery.

Watercooling, and there isn't much of a budget left, so lets see what we can do:

CPU: EK-Supreme LT i7 - Acetal - £34.19
GPU: EK-FC295 295 GTX SLI - Plexi - £104.99 (Not in stock currently)
Loop 1: CPU
Pump:12V Laing DDC-1T Pro 10W (MCP350) - £48.42
Res:EK Multioption RES 100 Rev2 - £26.99
Rad:Black Ice GT Stealth 240 Radiator - £41.12
Hose:3/8" ID - 1/2" OD - Clear - Hose Length 3 Meters - £7.31
Liquid:1l Feser One Fluid - UV Purple - £6.19 (scan.co.uk) *4
Loop 2: GPU
Pump:12V Laing DDC-1T Pro 10W (MCP350) - £48.42
Res:EK Multioption RES 100 Rev2 - £26.99
Rad:Black Ice GT Stealth 360 Radiator - £45.99
Hose:3/8" ID - 1/2" OD - Clear - Hose Length 3 Meters - £7.31
Fluid:1l Feser One Fluid - UV Yellow - £6.19 (scan.co.uk) * 3
Extras:
PrimoChill White PVC Hose Clip 1/2" OD (10 Pack) - £8.21 * 2
Arctic Silver 5 - 3.5g - £5.49

Watercooling Gear total excluding liquid from Scan:
£413.61
Watercooling Gear total including liquid from Scan:
£468.41 (£413.61+£54.80)

Total Build Cost:
£1998.70+£228.85+£413.61+£54.80

£2695.96

Several reasons for it being £95.96 over budget is because i did add a Soundcard as well as 12gb ram. Also, listing up for 2 loops will double the W/C budget, which it had done, but what made it worse is it's coming from 4 different e-shops, it could possibly be narrowed down to just 2, Scan and Watercooling UK, but i don't know.

So, there you have it, all listed and priced out for you.

Sam

 

well the Koolance CPU-350 is supost to be the best wc block out there closly followed by the heat killer 3.0 so go for either of thoses

don't buy quad rad only you gives you 1-2 degrees benefit from tri-rad so quad rads are a waste of money

 

Bagman I take it the Koolance is i7 compatible or designed?

 

yes it fits on skt 1366

 

Ah good. Thanks for that!

 

Any luck with the quotes yet guys? I do appreciate it

Also, these new 1.5TB and 2TB Samsung Spinpoints. Are they actually fact or still just rumours?

Thanks.

 

With regards to your soundcard, as your going for the z-5500's I take it you live somewhere where you can crank it up a little as they are loud. I love mine to death but they just don't get the treatment that often in my small flat.

If you are having them loud then this is where you'll notice the difference in a dedicated card as the signal to noise ratio will be much better. Therefore the hiss you'll get will be reduced with a better card.

 

Yeah, Well i have neighbours either side, but they are used to me and my houseparties and blaring music, and if they don't like it then b***ocks to them I say!

Yeah, i don't really know which Soundcard to go for.

Which is the best one from both Creative and Asus?

Thanks for the response!

 

i uses the asus xonar d2x amazing card

http://www.micomonline.co.uk/search.asp?searchtext=90-YAA055-1UAN00Z&go

 

I've lost touch a little as quite a few new cards have come out since I bought mine. Creative's have been shocking for their driver support up until recently when finally all the features on the cards are now functional.

I personally love my X-fi Elite Pro for like mentioned, the signal to noise ratio and it's range of features, but also because I have a break out box with a full size headphone jack on the front. Sounds silly but it's really helpful having such easy, simple access.

 

Yeah the Rampage Extreme II Mobo comes with some kind of X-Fi Sound?

So is the Asus Xonar DX2 the best? I would have assumed Essence was considering it's the most expensive!?

 

It's actually NOT an X-Fi. Doesn't have that audio chip. It's just mislabeled.

The Essence has a headphone amp inbuilt AFAIK. I'd say the D2X is the one to go for, or if you want to save money, get a DX. Not much audio quality difference.

 

Nice system you're building.

The motherboard you have chosen is a superb board but if you aren't going in for extreme overclocking it's a bit over spec'd.
I've just built a system using an i920 DO stepping on a Gigabyte EX58-Extreme (link).

This board overclocked my cpu to over 3.8ghz with only a small increase to the cpu & qpi voltages. If I pushed the voltages up (still to less than 1.4v on the cpu), I managed to overclock it to a nads under 4.5ghz (link).

My system is also watercooled, to the CPU and g/card. I have the GTX280 H20C. I'm running them in a single loop, the gpu follows after the cpu in the loop and even when running folding on the gpu 24/7 the temp of the gpu never exceeds 48deg.
I use the Swiftech Apogee GTZ block. I did need to buy the socket 1366 adaptor for it though.

This Gigabyte board also has an inbuilt chipset block that would allow you to watercool it. Unfortunately, mine arrived with fittings for 10mm piping, I use 1/2". The air cooler that the chipset has, does a fantastic job. I was going to watercool this block at a later date on a separate loop. As the temps don't get that high on it, I'm not going to bother with it.

If you are looking to reduce some costs I would definately recommend this board, especially if you don't need all of the options on the Rampage II.

I built mine in a Silverstone TJ07 case. It's fantastic for watercooling. I have fitted a double rad in the roof and a triple rad in the base. A slight overkill, but will allow for 2 loops at a separate date, should I choose to go that way.

I have that same corsair power supply, superb and quiet.

 

...

 

Yeah, I am definitely going to go for a hefty overclock, so the Rampage is the one for me in terms of features.

With the watercooling. Is it better to run the CPU and GTX 295 on one cycle together or have them on seperate circuits?