Home Brew- A Core i7 PC build

jeffreaux2 · April 24, 2009

After struggling with a combination of an aging single core cpu PC, 20mb and up RAW files, and Adobe Lightroom I decided a change was needed. I began researching a few weeks ago and quickly decided to build a new pc based on the new Intel Core i7 processor.

Yesterday was D-Day, as all the parts finally had made it home.

A quick run-down.

-CoolerMaster ATCS 840 Tower-
-ASUS Rampage II Motherboard-
-Intel Core i7 920 CPU ( I got the newer "DO" stepping version by luck)
-Corsair Dominator Series DDR3-1600 RAM - Installed 6each 2 gigobyte modules for a total of 12 gigs RAM.
-ATi Radeon 4870X2 graphics card - This is their dual processor card...it's a beast, and there is room for two more of these on the motherboard.
-300GB Western Digital Velociraptor 10.000RPM hard drive - For OS and Programs
-1 Terrabyte Western Digital Caviar "Black Edition" - for storage
-Samsung 22x DVD burner
- Prolimatech Megahalems CPU cooler
-Yate Loon 120mm x 25mm 80CFM fan for the CPU cooler
-Enermax 1050watt Power Supply.

* I plan to eventually run Windows 7 once the OS is released, and will add a Solid State Drive at that time for the OS and programs. I am currently using Vista 64.

We finished the build around mid-night last night. It posted with no major issues with half the RAM and only a single hard drive. After installing the OS, we threw in the sound card, the remaining RAM, and the second hard drive. No issues.

I still have some tidying up to do inside the case, and I need to update the BIOS, and all of the drivers. After that I hope to be able to post some testing results....as well as more photos. For now, it is exporting the files from Lightroom that are in this thread at the rate of 1 to 2 per second. A HUGE improvement from my older pc. Its a beast!

This is the pile of parts listed above.
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The hard drives mount 90 degrees from any of my old machines. The tooless designed case made it a snap....literally. Note the brackets for two additional fans at rear of hard drive bays.
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Here's the case chasis....al aluminum. There are three HUGE fans. Two on top, and a third bringing cool air in over the hard drive bays. A fourth smaller fan is on the rear...attatched to the motherboard tray....which rolls out on bearings. Super nice touch. You can also see the filter and intake at the bottom rear for the power supply to get air.
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Richard · April 24, 2009

ivar

Sounds like a killer machine. Enjoy!

jeffreaux2 · April 24, 2009

Theres the Samsung DVD drive mounted.

-The motherboard tray with Motherboard mounted. There's that fourth case fan near the I/O panel.

-The Core i7 920 CPU in its home. It's a true quad core cpu that is multi-threaded. It will behave as 8 cores when multi-threading.

-This is the motherboard still, but with the heat sink and it's fan attatched. I ended up changing this configuration, and moved the fan around back to pull air through rather than push it through the heat sink. This was to allow access to the nearest RAM slot. The Corsair Dominator series DDR3 have some rather tall heatsinks of their own, and it wouldnt fit otherwise.

-Another view of the same. There's the Enermax 1050 watt power supply in the bottom of the case. The quality of the cables that came with it made the extra investment justifyable. They get an A+ from me on that!

More to follow as time allows. Stay tuned!!!

chrisdg · April 24, 2009

Sweet. Great job.

Interesting timing, I was thinking about doing the same thing with many comparable components. Just debating whether or not to order it from a custom-builder like ibuypower or cyberpower, or build it myself. Did you by chance do a cost comparison of the build-vs-buy option?

Doing a very quick custom configuration using your component setup (or similar where necessary), cyberpower wants $1893.

jeffreaux2 · April 24, 2009

chrisdg wrote:

Sweet. Great job.

Interesting timing, I was thinking about doing the same thing with many comparable components. Just debating whether or not to order it from a custom-builder like ibuypower or cyberpower, or build it myself. Did you by chance do a cost comparison of the build-vs-buy option?

Doing a very quick custom configuration using your component setup (or similar where necessary), cyberpower wants $1893.

I could have built it for around $2k with cheaper components, but with the parts listed ended up around $2.6k. I didnt cut corners. The power supply, RAM, motherboard and case are of excellent quality. As far as I know, the only mobo "comparable" to the Asus Rampage II is the EVGA Classified, and they run about the same price. I dont see how they could put these same components in a box for less than 2k. I say buy it.....or build it.....your choice.

dogwood · April 28, 2009

Forget the components-- I'm in love with that Coolermaster case! It's awesome how the MB platform can be pulled out so you can actually work on it.

One question though-- with all those fans-- is the case loud?

D'Buggs · April 29, 2009

Holy mother of god! This is one hell of a machine your putting together.

This is their dual processor card...it's a beast, and there is room for two more of these on the motherboard.

I just upgraded (bought, not built) too. I'm working w/ 8 gigs on a quad core processor. Considering where I came from, It's like I know have an octopuss working as an assistant.... Things move very smooooth.

Look forward to hearing the review once yer done.

jeffreaux2 · April 29, 2009

dogwood wrote:

Forget the components-- I'm in love with that Coolermaster case! It's awesome how the MB platform can be pulled out so you can actually work on it.

One question though-- with all those fans-- is the case loud?

Yes and no.

The 3 eight or nine inch diameter fans are silent. They turn at very low RPM.....and still....due to their size move a LOT of air. Cant hear 'em at all.

The smaller...120mm fan at the rear of the MB tray is also fairly quiet.....just a slight whir from it.

The fan on the video card....if set at 40-45% is also nearly inaudible. Above that and it becomes annoying. However....in 2D apps....it isnt hardly working and 40% seems to be a good spot to lock it in for noise vs temperature on the processors.

Now....the fan I bought for the CPU heatsink is going to be replaced. It is the one component that makes any noise to speak of.....and it is quite loud. It is an 80CFM fan that spins at 2000 RPM. Its just too much....and the CPU never got above ambient while I edited my first batch of files. I am going to try to find something in the 40CFM range. If that doesnt work out, Ill get a fan controller so I can vary the fan speed......though I should be able to also do this through the BIOS, Id rather have a knob somewhere on the machine to lock that in at a reliable RPM.

The case is super nice. It has a nice finish....is all aluminum...and unlike most of the "gamer" cases is very adult looking. It is humongous though.

Other notable features...
-Filters on ALL of the air intakes.
-A seperate intake....exhaust for the pSU that keeps the PSU from taking in warm air from inside the box.
-tool less mounts for drives.

jeffreaux2 · April 29, 2009

D'Buggs wrote:

Holy mother of god! This is one hell of a machine your putting together.

I just upgraded (bought, not built) too. I'm working w/ 8 gigs on a quad core processor. Considering where I came from, It's like I know have an octopuss working as an assistant.... Things move very smooooth.

Look forward to hearing the review once yer done.

Yup....Its just about all I could afford. I am probably going to RMA the video card as it is iffy on 3D apps.....may be a driver issue....but I am pretty sure it's the card. Even so, it managed a score in 3Dmark06 above 15000 with all the cpu and VGA processors and RAM at stock clocks. That is about what I expected from it, so all is good. Its buttery fast. Apps are open and drawn up before you get pressure off the mouse click.....and jpeg from RAW in adobe Lightroom seem to export at the rate of about 3 jpegs every 2 seconds.

I came from an Athlon64 3200 based system with an ATi 9800 Pro VGA card. It did have the luxery of RAID 0 hard drive arrays and 2.5 gigs of RAM on WinXP.....but there is really....no comparison. It was built by ABS PC.....a company I HIGHLY recommend for those folks who would rather NOT build their own PC.

jeffreaux2 · May 11, 2009

Well....

I had video card troubles. Tough to troubleshoot really since I mainly use 2D applications and everything worked fine and dandy in 2D apps. If, however, I started a 3D application with both graphics processors enabled I lost the video signal to the monitor.....black screen..and was forced to re-start the pc. I chased the issue a bit, but finally relented and RMA'd the video card to Newegg. The RMA went smooth, and I recieved the replacement today.

Here is a screenshot of my 3DMark Vantage Benchmark test results. My overall score was in the 6000 to 7000 range before swapping the video card for one that actually works as it is supposed to. You can see from the screenshot below that the score went up quite a bit. FWIW, a speedy CPU on this test wont neccessarily hurt your scoring, but the overall score seems to be heavily weighted towards graphics processing power. In other words, the more powerful the video card....the higher the score.

I also did a test with Lightroom to see how the new system handled exporting full size, full resolution jpegs from RAW files. In my test, I exported 208 files at a total of 2388MB. These files ranged in size from 7.6MB to 24.8MB. The export took a total of 438.5 seconds. That comes to(by my math

)....5.4MB per second....or.....2.1 seconds per jpeg. I had one snafu during this test. I meant to export to a drive that I use for storage, but these acually got planted on my "c" drive. It may make a difference in speed to export to a drive that Lightroom is not physically located on....but the speed was still VERY good!

Heres a screenshot captured during the export. You can see the 8 threads working in task manager as well as a LOT of unutilized RAM. The CPU-Z window shows the CPU is working in "Turbo" mode. The multiplier shown is 21 which enables the cpu to run at a higher clock speed (2.8GHz here) than the 2.66GHz it is advertised to run. I think the moniker is "speed stepping". This is at factory settings and is not "yet" overclocked. From other tests I can promise that if the CPU is overclocked to 3.8GHz, the speed stepping can...and will...step it up over 4MHz occasionally.

...and lastly, a shot of the same open apps above, but only this time the system is more or less at idle....albeit with a tray full of open apps.

I have had the LUXURY of editing a set of over 700 photos from a recent wedding on the new pc. I had processed the RAW images on my older system, but did all of the photoshop work...and polishing...on the new pc. It was super nice to be able to open as many files as I wanted, and run whatever filters I needed without interruptions or slowdowns. No memory warnings......nothing...just buttery smooth and quick edits. I am VERY pleased with the system and its performance.

I had also done one other test. This is the same test that many Dgrinners run that originated on the Retouch Pro website(I think?) There are several pages of results that can be found at the top of the "Digital Darkroom Gear" forum on Dgrin.

Retouch Pro Test

With CPU at stock 2.66Ghz clock speed:
8 bit=10.0 seconds
16bit=12.62 seconds
32bit=11.29 seconds

With CPU at 3.6Ghz clock speed:
8 bit= 7.83 seconds
16 bit= 9.62 seconds
32 bit = 8.43 seconds

I am not sure at all why it is faster with 32bit than 16bit tests. The 3.6GHz clock speed is a fairly conservative overclock for this processor and is probably where I will clock it for 24/7 usage.

chrisdg · May 18, 2009

Hi Jeff - curious now that you've been running this system for several weeks, how is the Vista 64-bit OS treating you in terms of performance and compatibility. Any issues, particularly running Lightroom and Photoshop?

Since I am not an OS guru, I'm debating whether I should go this same route.

Thanks!

jeffreaux2 · May 18, 2009

chrisdg wrote:

Hi Jeff - curious now that you've been running this system for several weeks, how is the Vista 64-bit OS treating you in terms of performance and compatibility. Any issues, particularly running Lightroom and Photoshop?

Since I am not an OS guru, I'm debating whether I should go this same route.

Thanks!

No problems at all.

I went with a 64bit OS so that I could cram all that RAM in there. The 32bit OS's can only utilize somewhere near 4gigs of RAM. I havent hit any snags....well at least none that can be blamed on the 64bit OS. Most of my snags are user error!:D

Home Brew- A Core i7 PC build

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