Building new i7 rig..Any tips?

I built the PC, now what?

I'm putting together the parts to an i7 rig for a friend tonight. It's been a couple of years since I last built a PC.

Mobo: GA-EX58-UD3R
CPU: i7 920
Memory: 3*2 GB PC 1333 (forget brand, maybe G-Skill)
Vid: Nvidia 9800 GTX
HD: WD Caviar Black 1TB
PS: Corsair 650
Case: Antec 300

Edit: So I put the PC together last night and everything booted up just fine. We got Win7 RC 7100 installed and it's running fine. I installed the chipset drivers provided by Gigabyte w/ the mobo and downloaded the latest nvidia drivers from the web. I also ran 3Dmark06. I haven't run that program before and I noticed in the CPU tests we were 1-2 FPS. Is that normal, especially for an i7? Our final 3dmark06 score was about 15700. That seem alright for the parts we're using?

I just want to make sure that not only is the PC running, but that it's running as it should be. I've read some other threads about i7's not running up to par or slower than they should and I wanted to know what tools I could use to make sure this build is up to speed. I tried checking around the BIOS some, but a lotta the settings confused me as this is my first build in a while and it was already late.

The only difference that you are going to have to keep in mind is that if you are going to use after market cooling, it will have to be compatible with a socket 1366. This means the pins or bolt through will have to have compatible spacing and or, the back plate will have to accomodate the stiffener on the back of the mobo.
Other than that, i7 is still a standard PC platform and can be built as normal.
As an aside, another difference is that X58 allows you to run both SLI and Xfire depending on what GFX you like.

Just one little tidbit of advice.

Dimm0 is not closest to the cpu socket. Sounds odd yes but they run like:
Dimm1imm0 Dimm3imm2 Dimm5imm4 and 0,2,4 is your first grouping for triple channel and 1,3,5 is the second. That may not be the correct numbering but that format, the 2nd slot is the "first" one to populate. That threw me for a loop when it wouldn't boot up, the manuals all say that but who reads those things lol.

Be prepared to pay alot of money!

Edited OP, would appreciate additional feedback and help. Thank you for the responses so far!

Can't say really much on the 06 results since its on a new release of Win7. All I can say with that it fits.

You'll want aftermarket cooling for the heatsink for OCing for sure. Plenty of airflow is required to get her up to speed at reasonable temps. Keep it 80C or under for overall CPU temp after testing it. While it won't reach that temp on a day to day basis, at least it gives you some room if you forgot to clean out the heatsink or have a really hot day or something like that.

hydrata said:

I'm putting together the parts to an i7 rig for a friend tonight. It's been a couple of years since I last built a PC.

Mobo: GA-EX58-UD3R
CPU: i7 920
Memory: 3*2 GB PC 1333 (forget brand, maybe G-Skill)
Vid: Nvidia 9800 GTX
HD: WD Caviar Black 1TB
PS: Corsair 650
Case: Antec 300

Edit: So I put the PC together last night and everything booted up just fine. We got Win7 RC 7100 installed and it's running fine. I installed the chipset drivers provided by Gigabyte w/ the mobo and downloaded the latest nvidia drivers from the web. I also ran 3Dmark06. I haven't run that program before and I noticed in the CPU tests we were 1-2 FPS. Is that normal, especially for an i7? Our final 3dmark06 score was about 15700. That seem alright for the parts we're using?

I just want to make sure that not only is the PC running, but that it's running as it should be. I've read some other threads about i7's not running up to par or slower than they should and I wanted to know what tools I could use to make sure this build is up to speed. I tried checking around the BIOS some, but a lotta the settings confused me as this is my first build in a while and it was already late.

Click to expand...

Finished my build last week.

GA-EX58-UD3R
i7 920 w/ stock cooling
G. Skill 6 gig 1333
320 GB HDD
Nvidia GTS 250

I haven't done a benchmark yet. I'll let you know how it goes.

The fps for the CPU test seems about right at about 1-2 fps. You should also compare the bench on the futuremark website. It'll show where you fall on the benchmark score. I'm thinking average here for that build.

It's not that the i7 come underclocked. It's that they have an apparently huge overhead for overclocking, if you get an aftermarket cooler.

Here's a note about the RAM. If you have RAM over 1066, his board will underclock your RAM by default. You should go into the BIOS and change the clock speed of RAM to match the specs of the RAM to get some optimal performance out of them.

I will try to remember to come back to this thread tonight and update my post with some articles on the i7/1366 platform. I have quite a few bookmarked on my home pc.

I will recommend some monitoring programs for you. Just two actually, Real Temp and Core Temp to monitor you cpu core's temperatures. If your last OC experience is the rig in your sig than you are used to reading temps at the socket. Newer processors have a reading internally and that is what we are referring to for CPU temps, not the socket temperature which is usually a lot lower.

I am gonna assume you know how to stress test for stability and where to find programs like P95 or OCCT for example.

The voltages/settings to explore first will be: BCLK(baseclock); which is similar to FSB on older systems, CPU multiplier, Memory multi, UnCore multi, vCore, DRAM voltage, and VTT or QPI voltage. That's a bit more than a SocketA had since it was just FSB, VCore, ram voltage and then FSB.

The first thing you should do, imo, is to manually set as many of the voltages and settings as you can. Use a program to read what voltages are at stock and take them off of auto and set them manually. The reason I recommend this so much is that as you raise your BCLK, if you leave the setting at auto, the system will raise the voltages...often higher than they really need to be.