It's time to move from air cooling and non-gaming workstation to water cooling and play around a little. I'm replacing an old system I put together while at an overseas military base a few years back. I had to wait to upgrade until Win 7 was stable and the Harmony remote people shipped a working driver for Win7. That's done, so it's buy & build time. I'll probably use a Cooler Master HAF X case.
The questions I have are, given the 6-core CPU with some overclocking but stock dual 470 SLI, how much radiator do I need and what kind of pump / resevoir can I get away with that's easy to install (I do not have a shop to work in)?
I'm more than willing to go with 2 radiators in the HAF-X, a 120 (or 140) on the back fan and a dual 120 on the top, under the existing fans (I'll add a 2nd one). That would give me a limited push-pull as well as draw a lot of air out of the box when not gaming. Does anyone know if it's easy to use a 3x120 up top (move the Blu-Ray /DVD reader one or two bays down) - meaning without drilling and other metal mods?
The 1x120 + 2x120 should, given I'm not going to do heavy overclocking, give me a heat dissipation capacity (yes I have an engineering degree) of nearly over 450, nearly 500 watts. Is that sufficient for the CPU + dual GPUs? if I go 1x120 + 3x120 then I have nearly 700 watts to play with, which I know is more than enough.
I want the box to be quiet and expect to use mid range fans, probably 1500 rpm or so. Remember, gaming is about 10% of the time spent (50% is just general personal stuff like email & news). I also like listening to classical music in the background while doing non-gaming, so quiet goes a long ways.
Here is the overall HW I expect to use:
1) Core i7-970 (yes, I want 6 cores)
This is the item that gets overclocked
Note: I'll be doing software development on it, including SharePoint in a VM, where I want all the RAM and CPU power I can get, and when I'm done, I'll game.
2) 12 GB of DDR3, speed = 1600 (size not speed matters to me) in 6 DIMMs
3) Probably a motherboard on the order of the MSI Big Bang
4) Dual 470 SLI
5) 30" 2560x1600 display (the need for Dual 470); I may later upgrade to 2 of those monitors because of the main purpose: in software development, "the more screen real estate the better" (it's not frame rates, sorry).
6) Boot SSD drive and at least 5 hard drives each of which will be 1.5 - 2 GB in size - essentially 4 drives with the data drive being [4 drive RAID] running off a Rocket Raid card on a PCIe slot (needs x4). This drives the need for a full tower that has good drive cooling, and prevents all the 5.25 bays from being available for cooling use (Blu-Ray reader near the top and the SSD in one of the hot swap bays that are designed for a 2.5" drive as well). I also don't care if a 2nd 470 only gets x8 PCIe.
7) This will all be running on Windows 7 64 bit, a business/pro edition (to get the full up IIS web server and have the memory to serve to the SharePoint VM). Feel free to comment on any compatibility issues I might have with games.
8. There will be external backup storage over USB, probably upgraded to USB 3 after the system is up and running for a while.
Finally, this will be the 4th system I've built from scratch. I love the screwdriver stuff and the wiring (my degree was in electronics not mechanical engineering) but I have no interest in Dremel tool mods or even drilling holes in the case. I'm not as young as the folks likely to be reading this post, so while I've been in technology (even space work) for decades, my interest here is less customization and cool factor and a lot more about industrial strength and results. The HAF X look actually fits that attitude, although I also want a fairly "clean" system when it's done.
Thanks.
The questions I have are, given the 6-core CPU with some overclocking but stock dual 470 SLI, how much radiator do I need and what kind of pump / resevoir can I get away with that's easy to install (I do not have a shop to work in)?
I'm more than willing to go with 2 radiators in the HAF-X, a 120 (or 140) on the back fan and a dual 120 on the top, under the existing fans (I'll add a 2nd one). That would give me a limited push-pull as well as draw a lot of air out of the box when not gaming. Does anyone know if it's easy to use a 3x120 up top (move the Blu-Ray /DVD reader one or two bays down) - meaning without drilling and other metal mods?
The 1x120 + 2x120 should, given I'm not going to do heavy overclocking, give me a heat dissipation capacity (yes I have an engineering degree) of nearly over 450, nearly 500 watts. Is that sufficient for the CPU + dual GPUs? if I go 1x120 + 3x120 then I have nearly 700 watts to play with, which I know is more than enough.
I want the box to be quiet and expect to use mid range fans, probably 1500 rpm or so. Remember, gaming is about 10% of the time spent (50% is just general personal stuff like email & news). I also like listening to classical music in the background while doing non-gaming, so quiet goes a long ways.
Here is the overall HW I expect to use:1) Core i7-970 (yes, I want 6 cores)
This is the item that gets overclocked
Note: I'll be doing software development on it, including SharePoint in a VM, where I want all the RAM and CPU power I can get, and when I'm done, I'll game.2) 12 GB of DDR3, speed = 1600 (size not speed matters to me) in 6 DIMMs
3) Probably a motherboard on the order of the MSI Big Bang
4) Dual 470 SLI
5) 30" 2560x1600 display (the need for Dual 470); I may later upgrade to 2 of those monitors because of the main purpose: in software development, "the more screen real estate the better" (it's not frame rates, sorry).
6) Boot SSD drive and at least 5 hard drives each of which will be 1.5 - 2 GB in size - essentially 4 drives with the data drive being [4 drive RAID] running off a Rocket Raid card on a PCIe slot (needs x4). This drives the need for a full tower that has good drive cooling, and prevents all the 5.25 bays from being available for cooling use (Blu-Ray reader near the top and the SSD in one of the hot swap bays that are designed for a 2.5" drive as well). I also don't care if a 2nd 470 only gets x8 PCIe.
7) This will all be running on Windows 7 64 bit, a business/pro edition (to get the full up IIS web server and have the memory to serve to the SharePoint VM). Feel free to comment on any compatibility issues I might have with games.
8. There will be external backup storage over USB, probably upgraded to USB 3 after the system is up and running for a while.
Finally, this will be the 4th system I've built from scratch. I love the screwdriver stuff and the wiring (my degree was in electronics not mechanical engineering) but I have no interest in Dremel tool mods or even drilling holes in the case. I'm not as young as the folks likely to be reading this post, so while I've been in technology (even space work) for decades, my interest here is less customization and cool factor and a lot more about industrial strength and results. The HAF X look actually fits that attitude, although I also want a fairly "clean" system when it's done.
Thanks.
