Scratch Build – In Progress Project Black Swan: started

As I have planned this for ages, and now finances are finally here, I decided to give my project Black Swan a go. Following recent death of my beloved GTX 275 I decided to sell Intel Q9400 and use the money towards this build. I dug out my old Celeron 1500 (oc'd to 3GHz to give it a bit of grunt) and my trusted XFX GTS 250.

There are few rules I set myself here:
1. I want to have fully functional PC at all times without the need of a second one.
2. I want to know how exactly is power consumption changing through my build.
3. End result must be quiet and cool.

So, here it is - this is what I start from:



And here is the power consumption idle:



and at full load:



Above mentioned power consumptions are reflecting the hardware in my sig.
As I stated in my rules - I want this pc to be functional at all times, so on that note hardware changes are the first to happen, case and cooling will follow after all hardware upgrades are in place. Few things already came so I'm off to take some photos and will be back shortly.

 

Motherboard and RAM

First came motherboard. For this project I chose EVGA P55 Cheesecake (For The Win). This choice is motivated by few reasons:

1. All reviews I read about this board state it's a great overclockers' board and stable at it as well.
2. Will accept Intel i7 860 which supports Hyper-threading and saves me money by not forking out on i7 900 series.
3. Supports Nvidia SLI. And - yes, this system will be equipped with two GTX 480's
4. It's entirely black! (apart from some dark grey accents, which are OK for me).
5. Has triple, yes you read it right, TRIPLE BIOS, so if I mess up one, no problem there
5. EVGA logo lights red, which will go nicely with overall lighting concept.

Here is the board's layout (with Corsair H50 1156 socket retention bracket installed):



And a back of the board showing how may connections it has:



As I mentioned before, this is the overclockers' board and it would be a criminal offence not to overclock the CPU and this handy tool will ease this for me:



(I just noticed how skewed the image is so hope you can forgive me this oversight )

EVGA calls it ECP V2 and what it gives me is a direct access to all the buttons that will be covered by GPUs. As a bonus it will also let me disable the third PCI slot, make clearing CMOS easy, I can adjust voltages with a press of a button without having to go to BIOS every time I want to do it and finally it has a poster which will tell me CPU's temperature when in Windows, and display a code if something would fail.

As for the RAM memory I went for Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600MHz with 8-8-8-24 timings as suggested by WarrenJ in one the posts I wrote (find it here), asking for really good memory for overclocking (thanks mate!). Those just came today and here they are in full glory:



Those are really well made, ooze quality if a bit on the chunky and overweight side, but this can be excused as those heat spreaders will have tough job on their hands soon enough.

As always all critiques are welcomed and all suggestions will be taken under the consideration.
Next step - Intel i7 860 - this comes on Saturday and I will be able to share this with you as well as first report on how the power consumption grew. Stay tuned.

 

Awesome choice of motherboard. I'll keep an eye on this one.

 

That mobo is bloomin' goregous So slick and black. And those black fins, damn it belongs more on a fighter jet than a mobo.

I'm loving how your keeping it all consistent in colour, black memory, black mobo, black CPU cooler. Looking yummy

 

This should be cool to follow.....

 

And here is the logo design.



This one will be cut on the left hand side of the case and perspex will be mounted, giving you the inside view of the Black Swan. Case will be lit red inside.

 

CPU arrived, and first it's not 860, but i5 750. Reasoning behind is that I read so many reviews and none of applictions I run is highly hyperthreaded, hence this choice. And here is the baby:



Shortly after taking this photo I slotted in the processor and clocked it straight to 4GHz.



At this level power usage in idle went to:



, and on full load:



Anyone thinks it's excessive?