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Watercooled rig - AMD64 3200 or Prescott 3200?

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stu_allen

Registered
Joined
May 22, 2004
Hi folks, yeah sorry its another amd vs intel thread :(

Am going to be building a new rig soon, watercooling for the first time. So i am going to be doing a bit of overclocking ;)
Above all though, the rig must be silent....so i'm not going to clock crazily, but want to go as far as i can.

I game quite a bit, but also do a fair bit of DV encoding, so the "traditional" lines dont apply.

Ive read a few of the other threads, but now that the n-force 3 boards are out, allowing a locked PCI/AGP bus, how does that afffect the "which is better" argument, given i want to o/c?


Intended spec is roughly:
cheiftec dragon full tower,
lots of dremmeling and acoustipak deluxe matting!
4x Hitachi 7K250 250gb drives in two raid1 arrays suspended in aquadrives
1-2gb* of Corsair TwinX 1024MB 400Mhz 3200 Cas 2 Low Latency (LLPT) *depending on mobo
Sony DRU700A DVDRW
Qtechnology 350w PSU
Intel mobo: Gigabyte GA-8KNXP i875P
AMD Mobo - not sure, MSI K8N Neo Platinum at the moment
WCing likely to be a whitewater block, enheim pump (not sure yet), some serious heatercore action ;) and a load of 5v 80mm papst and 120mm panaflo fans.
 
Welcome to the forums!

The fair bit of DV encoding would get me to point you to the Intel. Otherwise, they're both pretty even, with the A64 doing better in gaming.

But swap out that power supply for a Fortron/Sparkle or an Antec, or else you may not be overclocking that far.
 
Yeah, its a weak point so far (but is so lovely and quiet!). Its 220w combined output is not bad for its size though.
Not sure i could meet my noise goal with a mossive power supply...will have to investigate watercooled ones!

I'd say i game most days, and DV encode every fortnight for 6-7hrs.
 
Take a 3.2C over the 3.2E if you want a quiet system. the C will probably perform better and create less heat, not only to the CPU but to the mosfets as well.

Is the watercooling going to be passive?
 
Hmm, yeah, point taken about northwood vs prescott. Wil that make any difference to o/cability or results?

W/C is going to be active, certainly for the cpu loop. Pair of 5volt 120mm panaflo FBK-12G12LH sucking through the heatercore is the current plan for that, they are 30db at 12v, and very quiet at 5v. Depending on how much room i have for baffling their intake, i might do a push/pull too.
 
Looking like the w/c rig will be DD maze4 blocks for cpu/gpu and NB, with the NB/GPU and HD on a split loop. Rad will be some kind of heatercore, trying to find a suitable single pass thats 2x120 or 3x120 in size. Am trying to keep flow restriction to a minimum in this setup.
HD cooler wise, ive seen some dual HD coolers, so am going to investigate these (i will have 4 hds in this rig!).

Its looking like the choice of chip will come down to motherboard features - the nforce3-250 boards only have 3 dimm slots and drop speed massively with large modules. Socket 939 is going to be too much ££££, so i'm looking at an intel (northwood) chip at the moment on a Gigabyte GA-8KNXP i875 board. Annoyingly though, that dosent support RAID 0+1 on the sata drives, so i'll have to get a highpoint raid controller too.

In terms of northwood chips - am i best off going for the 3.2? Or would i get better results with a "lower" chip that will be easier to clock up to a faster speed due to easier multipliers?
 
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I think if you were willing to wait for s939 you might want to wait for the i915 and i925(i think) chipsets Ive heard that these are pretty good with ddr2 (don't know if it affects intel platforms differently than amd) so... you might want to wait for that with the pcie also and lga775 get something at 3.6 ghz
 
You seem to have looked over a large majority of thing here so I'll be brief.
ALso seem to be lloking toward intel so my first comment goes to motherboard. Asus P4C800E-D might be a good choice for OC and carry you raid array out of the box.
Next your water loop could probably be reduced to CPU and GPU in a single loop, as the HDD's get warm but not enough to actively cool them. And NB wont need cooling until serious OC'ing begins. I.E 300 FSB. The passive NB HSF will be fine for a 3.0C or 3.2C oc's.

Just my &#162 .02
 
d]g[ts said:
You seem to have looked over a large majority of thing here so I'll be brief.
ALso seem to be lloking toward intel so my first comment goes to motherboard. Asus P4C800E-D might be a good choice for OC and carry you raid array out of the box.
Cheers for the input, i'll look into that board a bit more.
Re the raid setup - the gigabyte board has 4 sata ports, with raid 0 and 1 support. However, ive realised that i would be daft not to do a 0+1 setup with 4 disks - niether the gigabyte and asus boards only allow that as they use two controllers:(
So it looks like i'm going to be using a PCI raid controller.
This does open up my mobo choice a bit more, as i'm no longer looking for boards with 4 native sata ports...

Next your water loop could probably be reduced to CPU and GPU in a single loop, as the HDD's get warm but not enough to actively cool them. And NB wont need cooling until serious OC'ing begins. I.E 300 FSB. The passive NB HSF will be fine for a 3.0C or 3.2C oc's.

Just my &#162 .02

NB is probably overkill i admit. But it'd be nice to not have to worry about it, and it'd look good ;)
HD wise - the reason for the cooling is that there is going to be zero airflow over the drives. They will be the noiseyest part of the system, so will be totally encased by a good few inches of foam/noise retardent material to make them silent. With that in place, i expect their temps will rise a bit.
 
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CPL.Luke - i think that the 912/925 boards are going to be pricey, and the memory even more so. They arent going to offer significant performance hike straight away, so i reckon i can stick with existing tech for a year or so and wait for DDR2 and PCI-Express to stabilise before upgrading again.
 
After a lot of reflection and reading, it looks like the IC7-max3 is the board i am going to go for, with a 3.0C intel chip. I'll probably up the memory spec too to 4000 though.

However the w/c area has taken a bit of a twist. I was concerned that even with slow 120mm fans and some baffling, there would still be too much noise from the machine.
I then read the article about the guy with his rad in the garage...and it so happens i have a perfect location for this type of external rad on teh otherside of the wall where the pc is.....
So fan & pump noise no longer becomes an issue (just drilling large holes in walls!).
That in turn means i can have a bigger pump (located with the rad), and means i dont have to keep flow to a maximum, so can use better waterblocks.
So at the moment i am looking at this tangent (that i may or may not go down), and looking at larger radiators (car?).

The final piece of the puzzle that i still dont have enough info on is watercooled PSU's....

/random musings
 
I would get an abit Is7 for $90, a 2.8C for $180 and be done. I got my 2.8C to 3.3 on default Vcore. Many get it 3.5 on 1.55.

Save your money here then put in silence. Then look at my system in sig for silence. It is silent at more than 4 ft away. And I'm not just saying that. I spent hundreds of dollars finding the right stuff and lots of RMAs. If you wish to see pics pm me or need further assistance.
 
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