It's all up and running, folding away (sorry Bit-tech, not for you any more!) Found this pic I posted a little bit ago of it. the 970's my main workhorse, so that job was about getting it back up and running again. I've got two sub projects on the go, which I'm at a standstill with TBH. Mini ITX build - the motherboard had to go back to scan - really odd fault on it whereby it would run fine up until you installed a PCI-E gfx card, then it wouldn't remember the bios settings. The battery was scuppered, so I replaced it with a new known good one, and that then flattened overnight. Board then wouldn;t do anything, so back it went. They're sending out a replacement from what I can gather by their RMA notes. The Homemade Boreas I'm in the design stage still. Just back from a weekend away, so not going to make too much progress this weekend TBH. One of the guys in the modding forum has been helping guide me on that one, so I'm going to quickly knock up a prototype and see if the concept works, and then I'll have a go at assembling the real thing. Probably do that tomorrow night if I can. My folding team are having a push for 100 million this weekend so it's all machines to the pumps until Tuesday morning.... no down time!
Mate thats one tidy build and top notch gear, the 700D looks so roomy and houses your gear so easily. In a lot of ways I have some regrets of not getting any use out of my 800D before chopping it up, I destroyed a quality case before it had a chance to have a life! I'm liking how you've used two 120 fans as sandwich filling between the two rads at the bottom front lol, looks quality! Hope you have better luck with the ITX replacement pal!
The rads work ok. The top one is the outbound loop to the GTX 480 SLI, the lower is the return leg. Despite overclocking to 785/2000 it keeps them at 60C when folding 24/7, so they definitely work. Have you planned your loops yet? Are you having separate loops for each CPU or separate loops fro the CPU's and GPU's? Also, are you sourcing your own fittings or are you looking for sponsorship? I really can't wait to see the next update! Enough about my rig, what's happening with yours? Sorry if I've hi-jacked your thread in any way.
Tattysnuc, being almost 7 months late to respond to you but mate your welcome to post as you like, hell it needs hi-jacking lol! alternativesurfer having admittedly struggling to get my ass in gear and get on with the build a few months back, when I did I stumbled into some major financial difficulties and on top of that some personal problems ...but having kind of addressed those unforeseen issues and now presently going through a house move, hopefully it won't be long before I finish this thing off once I get settled. The only thing to report really on the build is there have been some major changes to the case and I managed to pick up a pair of xeon x5680's on the cheap and an apology to anyone who was following the build. The first thing on my things to do list though is to sort out my broadband provider at my new home and whether or not to ditch BT who I'm absolutely sick to the back of my teeth with ...New place is in a Virgin fibre optic area so it may well have to be goodbye to BT's download speed throttling and ripp off prices lol
Welcome back Joe. Please dont apologise to any of us - we just got a little impatient following such a fabulous and ambitious build. Grea to hear from you, and that alive and well. Hope your problems are nothing to do with your makeshift spray paint booth in the bathroom.... What's the deal with BT? Sounds like you've something of a bad experience? I've been using Virgin for the past (nearly) 5 years, and with the occasional drop of service, it's been a good service for me: Mine's on 24/7 folding and I occasionally use certain P2P facilities. It's not one of their fibre optic services (4mb line) as far as I know - hell, we don;t even have an LCD or HD TV, so I've not even looked at that package since we installed it. The wife's mentioned a couple of times "why are we spending £70 a month on Virgin's services" not realisign that we'd have to buy a digital tuner for the TV, pay for a BT line to be put in, and then still pay around £50 for the monthly services we've come to take for granted. Maybe if you can give me some ammo, you can get that gorilla out the room, so to speak... As for the X5680's on the cheap - have you seen the for sale thread one of the other guys is doing... http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=217208 There may be bits there you could use - I think from memory (I'll go back and re-read all your worklog again later today - my credit cards too close and I might do EVEN more damage) you have all the key bits now, but I can't be sure to be fair. It'd be great to be reminded where you are up to. Any chances of some up to date piccys of the rig as it is to remind me/us? Welcome back mate!
Joe, your still in the land of the living. I was thinking about this build the other night and wondering what was happening with it. I did think it might be the cost of it that was slowing you down a bit. I've got the whole house moving thing coming up soon so I know what a pain that is mate. It'll be good to see some progress on it once you're sorted and and up and running again.
Cheers pal, thanks for the welcome back! Right mate the best way I can describe BT's broardband service is to call them dishonest. Now let me elaborate ...my apartment has BT's exchange butted right up against it's wall so you couldn't get any closer if you tried unless they were to fit it in my living room, and keep in mind when ever you call BT or any other provider to query broardband speeds they'll always base it on how close you are to the exchange- the closer you are the faster the speed as we all know too well. So for me that box is ticked and at the beginning of my contract with BT I'm told to expect maximum download speeds of 20mbps after choosing their top package. Well for the first year before I got clued up on this subject they had my IP profile capped to 6mbps and was averaging 4 to 5. This was only discovered after I had a fault with the line and an engineer asked me to go on to the BT speed test site which shows all the information you need about your IP profiles and what speeds your presently getting. Your IP profile is set to a certain amount and your not likely to punch above that figure and the reason I didn't notice it being sluggish is that you don't miss what you never had in the first place in other words I was under the impression that 4 to 5mbps was fast because I didn't know any better. So when I saw the settings I said hey wait a second I'm getting ass raped and demanded they reset my settings to what was promissed and what I was paying for. They did and my new IP profile was set to 20mbps for my download speed and 1.2mbps for my uploads. They refund for every day I over payed, I was happy and was enjoying speeds of anything between 16 and 18.5mbps with a ping of around 27ms ...for a month that is. BT doesn't think about all us guys in the UK that actually get clued up and enjoy our computers and want the best performance out of them, I'm guessing they think we're a nation of people that just want to use facebook, ebay download a bit of music from a few torrents and so on. So they don't expect you to keep tabs on your set IP profiles and speeds so it wasn't long before they capped my line again, this time down to 8mbps. So I get on the phone and call them up to tell them of the situation they need to put right again. This is moment you get patched through to India and get someone proceed to lie to you and insist that BT does not cap your line. He/she does not anticipate that I've just tested my line myself and have the results staring at me in the face. If your IP profile is set substantially lower than what your line is capable of getting then that is your cap. As soon as he/she realises you know whats going on they will 7 times out of 10 hang up on you. After about 4hrs of phone calls and more lies and about 2 - 3 days the line gets reset to what it's supposed to be and what I'm paying for. But guess what happens a month or two later ...they cap it again and you have to go through all the crap again to get it put right. I Later had another fault on my line and they had to send an engineer out to look at the exchange and from within my apartment. This was the worst thing they could have done because the engineer was absolutely brilliant. He told me that the BT call centres give the engineers the same treatment, when they're working on exchanges, they have to call the same call centres the customers do to get caps removed. He told me he has to call them up and ask them to remove the cap, at which point they denie there's a cap on the line and he has to tell them not to lie to him because he's the engineer and he's working on the exchange and can see the cap. He also told me they can cap the line at both ends, he discovered that they had put a cap within the exchange on my throughput speed which effects everything. If your throughput speed is set low then it doesn't matter how high of an IP profile you have it'll be goverened by the throughput setting. Thankfully the engineer is that much of a nice guy that he took my mobile number and calls me whenever he finds a cap on my line when he's ever called out to my exchange for whatever reason. There's a couple of hidden charges too for example, I didn't appreciate being fined for 'not' using my phone line one quarter because I'm on the free weekend calls package. This is how the pattern constantly repeats it's self with my BT service, there's no mention of this treatment in their big budget advertising campaign on the television and there's no wonder why. So for me mate even if Virgin is more expensive I'd rather jump ship and join them just because of all the bull crap I've had to go through with BT. Hope this helps mate and I'll do my best to get some pics up soon! How's things with you and your rigs? Hey Jeff how you doing pal? you got that right about the cost of it all, the pot ran dry well an truly! And yeah the whole moving thing just takes me out of my comfort zone so pain ain't the word lol! I'll try an get some pics up asap mate. I can see you've a couple of more builds under your belt which is no surprise lol, so I'll be hopping over to your logs to catch up! Has your new house got the all important tool shed at the bottom of the garden to do all the modding?
I had all that crap with BT a few years back, ended up telling them to shove it in the end. The house movings all to come, probably some time next month. I'm gathering bits for my next build so hopefully once I'm settled in I can make a start on it.
I discovered that a few months back too, I think it was a £1 fine for not making any chargeable calls- what kind of crap is that?! The issue with the capping is just disgusting though, if you pay for 20meg I can't understand why they would cap it much lower; throttling at peak times is one thing, trying to screw over people who have paid for a certain service by forcing them to use a lesser one without telling them is just not on. I think deserves to be aired on Watchdog, you can't be the only person with that happening, would make for some great TV to see Mrs. Robinson ripping into some corporate pleb full of BS and lies...
Jeesh - that sounds so bent, it's almost unbelievable. I can't think how many laws and consumer acts that is breaking. You've got me thinking now about the service that I'm paying for from virgin - how do I test the speed I'm getting to measure against my contracted speed? My rigs are doing ok - I've just broken my server rig and replaced with a i7 2600K / P7V68 rig - the P6T was fine, but the i7 980X simply kicks out too much heat for me too have on as heavily overclocked as I do, foldign 24/7. My room was exceeding 40C this summer, and that's not healthy for me - the wife sees me disappear into my room, and I leave 10 minutes later stripped down to my pants - no wonder whe expects the worse - "been talking to your imagingary friends online again dear?" she says. Hmmmf I also sold on my RIIE board and switched over to a p7p67/2600K for my main gaming rig - I managed to keep the plumbing in situe, so there's no reaol change to the layout shown a couple of posts ago. The combination of the two rigs kicks out a noticably smaller amount of heat so I'm happy now - under load they both sit at between 65 and 72C depending on the room temp and oth are at 4.6Ghz/1.38v, which seems to be the sweet spot I've been looking for. Next project is my HTPC rig. I've got to try and pass two MS certification exams before Xmas so that might have to wait until then. The rigs up and running (folding) but I haven't watercooled it yet so it's a bit noisy. That and it's without a case. Laters dude...
October 2011 Time to bring this project back to life with an update as it's been a very long time. After some unforeseen troubles, a home move and just getting back online I have my self some time to get this thing moving again. Today I dug out the case from the dusty graveyard of a store room to do a little work on a couple of bits and take some pictures for you guys to show where it's at at the minute, not much has changed a great deal in terms of how it looks but a lot has changed in how the air will be pushed through the case and the positioning of the rads. The top compartment has gone and the bottom one has been totally changed internally. It will hold the 480 rad and a second psu and will pull the air in from the side and vent it out the back. No warm air now will pass through the motherboard compartment as it would have done previously. Any comments and imput welcome good or bad and I'll try and make this a regular thing, cheers guys. I wasn't happy with this being in two bits so I tidied it up and made it into one.
Welcome back Joe, good to see that you're all sorted and this is up and running again. I just want to see it finished..lol . It's my kinda modding, it' big, it brutal looking and totally over the top...Just the way it should be..Top modding dude..
Thanks LooseNeutral an hopefully I'll keep it in action this time Cheers pal ..."Brutal," Surely thats a name for a next mod? Thanks Cheaps ...I reckon I'm not only gonna be last to cross the finish line with this but I must be looking at getting lapped a dozen times aswell lol!
Holy God - if this one ever tips over on you, the local undertaker will have a hard time scraping your remains off the floor!
Cheers matey! You know what you pair are? ...A right couple of pi** takers lol! One of the main reasons for all the access panels I've cut out of it's bottom section was to try and shed some weight off the bloody thing aswell ...It's not done much though
