PROJECT LOG Sneaky's Back!!! ==> Mean Green Gaming Machine

THE POWER SUPPLY IS DONE!:

Looks good Sneaky!

That must have taken forever

Wwzers!! Mean Green is looking good! One helluva job on those psu cables!

Can't wait to see the finished rig!

Radeon HD5850 #1 got the all-out heatsink treatment tonight - still have to do HD5850 #2 later on and get the water blocks mounted.

Heatsinks & High Life

Dayum! Lookin' sa-weeeet!

So I wasn't all that bright and glued the RAMsinks to the card before I checked for barb clearance from my EK Supreme VGA waterblocks... so I took care of it afterwords and busted out the Dremel last night:

Me likey!

Nice job with the dremel, nothing else is chopped up
(kidding of course )

Okay, well it's been a good while since I posted any updates on this thread. I finally had a weekend off that I could take down my Skulltrail setup and cobble together my new build. This went off fairly easily, except for the fact that I found out that my Rampage III Extreme Mobo was DOA after I bought it brand new 3 years ago. Never had a chance to test it until now, but I'm not counting on Asus to do much after that period of time, so that $250 gets chalked up.

So with that lovely news, everything just sat there and I was left with nothing but my smartphone (HTC One M8 for Windows) to work with until I got a new motherboard. Picked up a refurbished Intel DX58SO2 Smackover 2 x58 motherboard from eBay (I've always been happy with the performance and stability of Intel factory motherboards). That next weekend I put that all together, was finally able to POST (yay!), but one of my HD5850's was screaming the electronic screech of death from its little onboard speaker. Whatever, it's been three years, my brother borrowed one of the cards while I was incarcerated, plus I was grinding down RAMsinks while they were attached to the cards - I'll take it at face value, 1 out of 2 5850's still works, cool.

Ended up having a lot of issues setting up the BIOS settings in the motherboard because the whole i7 architecture and overclocking process is brand new to me after being incarcerated for three years. After pulling an all-nighter Sunday-through-Monday morning, I was finally able to get the board properly configured and achieved a stable overclock of 4ghz @ 1.35v.

I honestly must say that after running a Skulltrail rig with 8 physical cores since 2010, making to move to an i7 920 with 4 physical cores - even clocked at 4ghz - really leaves something to be desired, especially when it comes down to media encoding. Yes, I was spoiled with SMP, but Stoneyman101 is going to spoil me all over again with an early Christmas here: an eVGA SR-2 motherboard fresh-back from RMA and a pair of Xeon x5680's IIRC. This I am REALLY looking forward to, as I ordered this MM case with the SR-2 motherboard tray for a reason... now I get to lay that massive motherboard down in my mean & green Mountain Mods Ext-U2-UFO.

Anyways, here's some pictures of the rig at the moment. And yes, that is a dead HD5850 hanging out the side of my case, disconnected from power but still attached to the WC loop! Your eyes DO NOT deceive you there. LOL!

Man, you have three years warranty on the Rampage III, give it a try.

Hell of a mean green processing machine... much respect

Looking great man!
Shame about the rampage, that is just plain unlucky...

I'm officially sponsoring my old friend with some decent hardware coming his way.
(soon as I box it up-lol)
I can't believe I remembered my password to get back on here-lol.
This build is going to really take off .