I've spent last week continuing to tinker and have blasted the dust off all the old components excepting the GPUs, which I'll be taking apart at some point. Here's the mobo all cleaned up: That CPU seems a lot happier now. I also found that Young Pete had not quite been as stupid as previously thought and the RAM had actually been a 4x4GB single set. However, in today's Brave New World, that won't do, so deciding to commit to 128GB, I thought "sod it, let's go RGB" and purchased this: Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO DDR4 128 GB 4x32GB 3200MHz CL16 Unfortunately, a few hours later, I was looking through my mobo's manual for the umpteenth time, and only then noticed the following statement: "You may install 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB and 16 GB unbuffered and non-ECC DDR4 DIMMS into the DIMM sockets. LOL." Balls. Annoyingly, I had missed the cancellation window, so will be travelling to the Post Office to return them at some point, hopefully not having to contend with Horizon. In the meantime, I ordered this: Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 128GB 8x16GB 2666MHz CL16 At least my OCD of filling ALL ZE MEMORY SLOTS will be satisfied, and I'm hoping that by upping the voltage from the default 1.2 to 1.4V, I'll be able to run it at 3000MHz. I want to point out that I have absolutely no need for this amount of RAM; it is all for the epeen. I was also a little surprised to find that I had not, in fact, bought an M.2 SSD drive all those years ago, probably owing to the weird way the mobo has its single M.2. slot orientated such that the drive sticks out perpendicularly and therefore wouldn't have fit. I started looking into 2230 form drives, then found that if I did install an M.2 drive, the 3rd 16xPCIe lane would go from 16x to 8x, robbing the second GPU of vital bandwidth that I absolutely would not notice. So Instead, I'll be RAID 0ing two 850 EVO SSDs for the boot drive (epeen) and purchasing a nice, new 870 EVO for £35 off evilBay to fulfil my esoteric and outdated need to have a scratch drive. I also found out that for some utterly inconceivable reason, Young Pete had connected the USB3 header to ports 3 and 4, therefore robbing the GPUs of even more barely noticeable bandwidth. Anyway, I got to actually putting things in the case: GTX Titan X (Pascal) for scale. I also decided to upgrade the CPU cooler's fan: Noctua NF-A15 HS-PWM chromax.black.swap Unfortunately, DeepCool made the 140mm fan in the cooler a proprietary affair, so I've had to get a little busy with the Noctua replacement . Not finished yet, but at least the requirement of injuring myself each build has been met: Next week, it's time to start putting in cabling and to bite the bullet and take a GPU apart to understand cleaning it and applying new thermal pads.
Got everything in, excepting the GPUs and CPU cooler (for which I'm still modifying the Noctua fan): I came in with the best of intentions for cable management, but after building my new rig that had next to no cables whatsoever, I gave up and squidged them in as best I could. Be glad we live in an age of the M.2 slot, folks. I've also attached a spare SATA cable in case I want to temporarily attach a SATA drive for some reason (plus it means all the SATA slots are filled on the mobo). At least on the windowed side, everything looks nice. Now, time to do that task I've been dreading: taking apart the GPUs. Obviously I'm starting with one and seeing how that goes. If I fudge it up, I'll concede and buy a new GPU, using the other older GPU as the world's most extravagant dedicated PPU. Here's the underside (well, technically the top, I suppose): Let's see what happens if I take those four big screws out... Interesting, springs on the screws rather than inside. Nothing comes apart. Let's take the backplate off: The little screws were supringly torqued quite highly and I had to really press down on the little toolmaker screwdriver I have to ensure I didn't strip the screw heads. Somewhat disappointed by the large lack of thermal pads, excepting that little one. I didn't notice it until I accidentally nudged it, and in the process of removing it, ended up smearing it on the soldered pins next to it. Frustrating from an aesthetics viewpoint, but it's not going to be visible once everything's back together! Thermal pad was about 0.5mm thick (EDIT: measured it and yes it was, but I plan to utterly fill the thing with thermal paddery anyway. Flipped the card over and removed more screws: Nothing came loose, so looks like the next stage is to buy a mini spanner set (delivered today) and see about loosening off those hex heads - 4mm in width they are. But seeing this build is at my folks' house and I'm back at my own for the weekend, looks like that'll be an adventure for next week. Stay tuned...
Found a couple of handy Youtube videos (Gamers Nexus Cheesecake) for aiding me in my GPU disassembly antics:
My small spanner kit turned up, so let's pop that rear plate off: Check out that sexy DVI-D port, younglings That's what real men used back in the day. I finally did the thing I'd been dreading: There we have it, folks. My first ever GPU disassembly. No turning back now... Thermal paste is dried right out. And there's the complete disassembly. Not going to lie, always doubting if I should've bothered. But it'll be worth it. I hope. Since then I've air blasted the components, but a decade of dust means some is REALLY stuck on. Ordered a litre of isopropyl alcohol to aid getting rid of that. I've ordered lots of thermal pad material of varying thicknesses. Next week, I hope to at least get the replacement thermal pads back in place. Stay tuned...
Not much to report on this at the moment. I've disassembled the second GPU, and given it an extremely good clean with isopropyl. The first GPU with need a good clean. A lot of thermal pads have arrived too, so I can experiment with adding more pads in locations they weren't originally in. I've also been modding the Noctua D14 fan to fit in the CPU cooler. Almost there, just needs more patient sanding/filing so it matches perfectly and looks nice - however, once in the cooler, you won't be able to see it!
THEY SAID IT COULDN'T BE DONE. THAT A 140MM NOCTUA FAN COULDN'T FIT IN A DEEPCOOL ASSASSIN IV. BUT I MADE IT HAPPEN. Unmodded: Modded: And that means I finally got around to installing the CPU cooler: That was a trial: The cooler was by far and away THE MOST DIFFICULT CPU cooler I've ever installed. This is thanks to the fact that the spring loaded compression screws are extremely stiff and a lot of swearing and sweating was needed to get the effing thing on. In fact, related to the above, I wasted some PTM 7950 as I thought I'd misaligned the cooler. and took it back off. The 7950 was awkward to remove as it crumbles and goes everywhere . Fortunately I have just enough left for the GPUs, but can't afford any more mistakes. There was a moment of panic when I finally got it in position as it looked as though it wasn't going to fit. Luckily for me, the LCD display on top of the cooler perfectly "kisses" the glass side panel, so looks great and actually helps with the weight. The more observant amongst you will notice that the rear fan on the cooler has been left off. This is almost entirely for aesthetic reasons as this PC is meant to be a nice objet d'art in my study as well as being functional: The rear fan shroud might prevent some of the RAM heat being taken out of the case. The cooler maintains symmetry this way. I want people who look at it to KNOW that it has a completely unnecessary 128GB of RAM (though I'm going to use it to do some photo editing in earnest, so it might come in handy). The GPUs have been thoroughly cleaned and the coolers reassembled. The only thing left to do is apply the thermal pads next week
This is giving me serious itchyness to do something. My recent build was far too simple for my taste, although contemplating custom looping it with an external giant alphacool 1080 rad and some ap184s. Mod also needs a full teardown, now my shed is operational I might get round to properly finishing it. Too many ideas and not enough time
All the cooler facing thermal pads in place: I have since then put the coolers and boards together and attached the output plate. There is some slight bowing of the boards,, which I put down to the higher firmness of the replacement pads. I was hoping to "wiggle" things a bit in order to encourage a bit more "squishing", but there wasn't much scope for that when things were put together. Hopefully things will sort themselves out once I get the cards up and running again - I expect the heat generated to allow things to move around a little. Next week, I'll put the rest of the GPUs together and think about adding additional thermal pads between the boards and backplates. Interestingly, the underside of the board actually has a couple of zones specifically labelled for thermal pads, but none were there: a mistake, or deliberate? Who knows, maybe I might even get around to installing Windows (again) as well...
I bought some more 1.5mm thermal pad material and went to town filling up the underside of the GPUs: Note that in the above, only the little blue square on the right side originally had a thermal pad applied! When I put the back plates back on, there was some bowing unfortunately, but nothing too severe, and hopefully over time, continued use will allow things to settle. I decided to leave the thin polymer film on the inside of the backplates (presumably there to prevent any chance of short circuiting), and maybe I was imagining things, but touching the backplates afterwards seemed to feel colder than stock. Anyway, let's get them finished up: For the life of me, I just couldn't shift the residual dust on the fans and I didn't have the patience to clean every single slot by hand: Maybe an ultrasonic bath would've shifted it, but I didn't want to buy one for something that won't affect performance and won't be seen when the PC is in operation. Speaking of... The above is literally booted for the first time, hence why the CPU LCD isn't displaying anything. Got to say, already the PC and Titans are noticeably quieter. I spent one evening last week getting Windows installed, which I eventually managed to do. I spent about two hours faffing around with getting the SATA drives to play nice with RAID 0 and also getting the optical drive to be compatible. I actually reinstalled Windows about 3-4 times as I kept running into issues. Fortunately, everything is now running as I want it to, or at least as best I can. I ended up using the old skool Intel RAID to maintain backwards compatibility with the optical drive: (Not my own image, taken from teh Internets). Although this means no TRIM support IIRC, that's not too much of an issue as the two RAID drives are for the boot and game drives, so aren't going to be subjected to much rewriting (that's what the scratch drive's for). Also, I like the fact that this screen now pops up during booting as it's a reminder of when I first got into serious PC building all those years ago with my GTX 260 SLI / GTX 480 tri-SLI rigs. Next week I'll get Windows updated and a proper licence key (I haven't connected to the internet yet), then start overclocking the 6850K.
