My New Intel Build ( a work in progress)

[Snowbiz]

Hello everyone, I am new to this community so thank you to everyone in advance for your input.
I recently sold my old build ( ASUS Crosshairs V Formula Z, AMD FX-8350, 32gb Patriot Viper (1866MHz), Nvidia GeForce GTX 660ti, thermal take 850w psu, antec case, stock cooling (air cooled, heat sink that was included with the cpu, OCZ Vertex 80gb SSD, 1TB WD Carnivore 64mb cache, 2TB WD green edition hdd) which had some pretty decent benchmarks and played any game I threw at it with ease. Needless to say being a programmer for my day job and an "all things tech enthusiast" for every other hour in the day I wanted more and I wanted to see exactly how good of benchmarks I could get (Catzilla / 3DMark) so let me start by telling you what I have already ordered for my new build ( which btw, in case whoever reading this has not looked at prices for the new DDR4 equipped rigs....they are NOT cheap..lol)

Parts Ordered:

Motherboard:
ASUS Rampage V Extreme

RAM:
64GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum (DDR4 / 2400MHz)

Power Supply:
Corsair AX 1500i

CPU:
Intel Core i7-5930K Haswell-E 6-Core 3.5GHz LGA 2011-v3 140W


Parts (Still Needed):

GPU: (I am a Nvidia Fanboy, just getting that out of the way..lol)
I have been considering the GTX 970 or GTX 980
But my question on this is as follows;
For future compatibility/ease of future upgrades I know that it would be better to go with the GTX 980,
But for the current price of the 980 being quite high considering what I'm already spending on the rest of my build would it be better to go with one of the following combinations:

- 2 GTX 970 in SLI
- 3 GTX 680 in SLI
- 4 GTX 660ti in SLI
- any other recommendations that I didn't mention above...

(Parts still needed continued..)

Cooling:
I am new to liquid cooling but I have been doing a good amount of research and I am rather knowledgeable with the concepts of liquid cooling and have a "high-level" design in mind for what I want.

My design in mind:
- 1 waterblock for the chipset on the motherboard
- 1 waterblock for the (VRM / MOSFETs) module
- waterblocks for the individual RAM modules (side question related to this below)
* Is this a good idea? My ram has the factory heat spreaders already, but I have read about some amazing overclocks for my ram, and I have seen the waterblocks for the ram where I remove the factory heat spreaders and encase each ram module and then coolant is ran directly over the face of the ram) this sound quite dangerous but maybe that's just me being nervous with my first liquid cooled setup. Are their Pro's/Con's to this method of cooling and are there any other better alternatives?
- waterblocks for my GPU I also plan on purchasing the "full card" waterblocks for my GPU/GPU's
- waterblock for my CPU

- 1 Radiator (would having 2 be any better for cooling?) obviously this would require a rather large case but is 2 really better than 1 in this case?
- Pump / Fittings etc.... Whatever else is needed for my cooling setup.

- I have seen waterblocks for your Harddrives, are these actually needed for the little heat a non SSD creates? I'm sure it would help a little for the air temp inside my case but is this actually needed?

- I am still thinking of having a few strategically placed fans in my case as well just as a bonus for any components not cooled by the liquid cooling loop.

I plan on putting the Overclocking panel (the one that comes with the rampage V extreme mb in one of my front drive bays, which i believe also has fan controls, my power supply also supports the "Corsair Link Software" is this something that I actually need? Or something my OC could benefit from?

- Another Cooling Question:
- Are there any "control modules" of sorts that monitor flow/ performance metrics for a liquid cooling loop that I could add into the loop?
- Are modern day liquid cooling loops still needing a "Silver insert" in the reservoir for anti-microbials?

Temperature Monitoring Questions:

My motherboard has the preset locations for temp monitoring, but also has 3 more sensors to be placed wherever I choose, where would be the best positions to place these?
( if you look here http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/RAMPAGE_V_EXTREME/
About halfway down you can see a picture that shows the temp sensor placement.)


If there is anything I am missing, please feel free to address it, I am looking for comments, wisdom, concerns or whatever else you would like to say on any of the things I have mentioned (or forget to mention) in this posting!

Thank you!
-SnowBiz

 

[trents]

64 gb of RAM? What in the world are you planning to do with the computer that will benefit from that much RAM? CAD or professional Photoshop stuff? Loading the IMC with the much RAM may limit your overclock.

Liquid cooling for the individual RAM modules? Wee doggies! I haven't heard of anyone doing that. Are you planning on severely overclocking the RAM itself?

If you are planning on significantly overclocking the video card (or cards) then you would want to put water blocks on them.

Cooling is not needed for hard drives. Focus on good case ventilation.

 

[Witchdoctor]

Wow

looks like an epic build

I would go with the 980's

might as well go with (3) of them as you are throwing money around like it does not matter, so why settle at this point


As far as water cooling goes for me at least I look no further than EK

Great performance, one of the larger selections and I like the looks of their stuff, I personally stay away form the nickel plated crap and fluids, distilled and Nuke for me

Performance wise the memory and vrm's do not require water cooling as long as you have decent airflow
That being said it does give the build a cool look but do not look for night and day gains

RAD area, make sure you do the calcs. so you can get a quite system when it is all done

if you figure 90 watt's per 120mm you should be cool and quite,

 

[Theocnoob]

Dom plats? Most expensive RAM ever dude why would you do that?
64GB? Is this a control station for a minute man missile silo?

Go with 2X 970 or 2x 980. Other cards are not DX12 compatible and you do not want that.

There is NO NEED for liquid cooling. The expenditure put out gives very minor returns in performance gains.

With the aftermarket coolers on 980s these days and the low wattage they pull, you can oc to the moon on a good air cooler.

For the CPU just get a 280MM AIO like something from Swiftech, NZXT, Corsair, ETC.

 

[trents]

Snowbiz, you mention you want to build a champion benchmarking machine. Is this the whole intent of this build? Can you elaborate on what this machine will be used for? Some of your choices for parts are curious to us and not necessarily in keeping with your stated purpose for the build, at least what you have shared so far. We don't want to sound critical but neither do we want you to throw money down the drain.

 

[Theocnoob]

Snowbiz, you mention you want to build a champion benchmarking machine. Is this the whole intent of this build? Can you elaborate on what this machine will be used for? Some of your choices for parts are curious to us and not necessarily in keeping with your stated purpose for the build, at least what you have shared so far. We don't want to sound critical but neither do we want you to throw money down the drain.

Which is exactly what I see happening here. The choice of RAM alone is a massive money flush. It's hard not to sound critical when saying that but if we aren't blunt and honest more money will be flushed unnecesarrily.

 

[Snowbiz]

Thank you for all of your replys, actually as far as the ram I got an amazing deal on it. I looked on the corsair website and saw that for that set of ram is was going for around $1500. I only paid $900 for a brand new unopened, unused set of the ram. So for the price, I figured i was doing pretty good when other smaller sets of ddr4 were already quite expensive. (Again, please correct me if I am wrong on this assumption)
And as far as the purpose of the build, I won't be entering any competitions or anything like that, I just like to have fun building the best rig I can. I like watching it run benchmarks on programs like "Catzilla or 3DMark" and I like seeing high scores I also enjoy gaming at the best possible detail. That is the "fun" purpose of the build, I am also a programmer for my day job and at times it is very useful to be able to run a handful of vm's for various development tasks.
I am kind of new to the overclocking world, and have been playing around with it in the past.
If there is anything on my build that you think should be changed to give me better overclocking / gaming / all around 24/7 performance increases and at the same time saving me money, please let me know after all that's why I joined this community so I could have others to talk to on things like this!
You mentioned some of my choices are curious, which ones? Please elaborate, I am still within the early phases of this build so if I have made any mistakes in your minds I'm still at the stage where I could correct them if needed.
Again thanks for the input and I'm looking forward to future responses!

 

[trents]

The "curious" choices were the massive amount of high speed expensive RAM and the expressed intention of water cooling the RAM. Now that you are talking about running VMs it makes more sense, at least the amount of the RAM. Using high speed, low latency RAM seldom makes much difference in performance except on a few applications that are really memory intensive. Testing has proven that. All of our modern RAM is so fast that the bandwidth between the CPU and the RAM is already saturated. But yes, it will show some degree of gain in benchmarks which measure things like latency. The biggest bang for the buck in all around computing would be to invest in fast, high capacity SSDs as opposed to conventional spinner hard drives. For gaming, the biggest bang for the buck would be to invest in multiple fast video cards, especially if you are using large, multiple monitors and gaming in high detail.

 

[Snowbiz]

Any recommendations for the SSD? Also the motherboard I picked out has the m.2 slot, I have seen the 1tb M2 SSD's seen here http://tech4gamers.com/adata-1tb-m-2-ssd/

Is this going to serve me better than a normal SSD?
I am not as up on SSD's as the normal spinning hdd.

 

[trents]

Intel seems to make the absolute fastest SSD drives with the Samsung Evo series being a close second and much better bang for the buck. I would wait on the M2 SSD's as that is a relatively new technology and all the bugs may not be worked out yet. Plus, I bet M2 is more expensive per gb of storage. The most popular SSD of this forum community is the Samsung Evo series. Not all SSDs are created equal. Some are definitely faster than others and some of them have had firmware issues. You can't go wrong with the Samsung Evo series.