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By Admin, May 21, 2007 18:10

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Some of you looking at that title might wonder what I’ve been sniffing (packets I tell you!!, Packets!!) In fact this was an article I created on Sept 26, 2006 and actually never posted it!

That’s correct. I typed this article up back then and never published it. I decided that I could honestly publish this now as well I could show you guys some of the pictures I took at the time of building this rig. In early September of last year I finally had all my material for building my two new PC’s were in place. The DVR was cheap running in about $500.00 including all the cabling, keyboards and other miscellaneous stuff that adds considerably. Total system costs break down like so: Existing parts used: Video card. Cost: $0. New parts for PC: motherboard, cpu, harddisk, power supply, ram, case. Cost: $388 Reallocated parts for PC: illuminated keyboard, 50 foot VGA cable, wireless mouse, extended power supply cable. Cost: $112 even though I didn’t actually buy either the keyboard or mouse at this time, I already had them I included their costs since they were now at home in this system.

Ok I didn’t say I’d talk about the cheap system I threw together, I’ll get to the actual story from last September

Well this is a little bit older technology, but still on a very high end.

For this Gaming System I’ve hand picked the parts due to their excellent quality, warranty, and durability. To say nothing of offering the best features and designs to be found anywhere.

The start of our system begins with our case. A Cooler Master CM-Stacker 830. This is a phenomenal case for a gaming rig. However it’s greatness is also it’s curse. This case alone weighs as much as my fully assembled DVR rig, and I’m adding a lot of weight to this. Total should come in around 45~55 lbs completed. Thank god this case features a pair of handholds at the top of the case.

I could get into more and more detail about the case and it’s features but instead I’ll discuss them as I use and work with them. There are many. Primary ones are the many locations for fans, the front jack plate onto of the front of the case and the additional (duplicate) jacks on top with the power/reset buttons and HD activity light. Also is the airflow that this case allows by not having really solid walls. The black mesh is a open grill much like is found in many rack mount components. The other major feature this case offers is it’s size. It sits 22inches high and 25 inches long! Thats 56cm and 64cm for the rest of the planet. This case will support an ATX motherboard in two orientations, or a BTX motherboard.

Our motherboard is a ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe powered with an AMD Athlon FX-60 Dual Core CPU. We are using an ATX in normal configuration due to the heat pipes our motherboard features. This is a very important determination of the setup in our case and we will follow the instructions as directed by ASUS.

This is an awesome combination which should give us incredible gaming performance. However in order to not bottleneck the CPU any more than required, we chose the recommended and expensive RAM, Twin 1GB’s matched with the lowest latency we can get for this motherboard. Using unmatched ram is not recommended and we would much prefer to add another 2GB but….unless we are using a x64 compliant OS (not XP or less) it will not work. We could run Redhat or Fedora with 4GB but even this is not that easy to accomplish. We will run Vista on this box so hopefully we can eventually accomplish this.

After we have the RAM installed it’s time to mount the motherboard to the motherboard tray on the case. This makes working on this system very easy since we do not have to work with the entire case while loading the motherboard, etc. This prevents scratching the aluminum case unnecessarily.

All this makes a great computer except for the true power horse behind any decent gaming system…the video card, or in our case the Dual Video Cards. My choice was the extraordinary eVGA Nvidia 7900 GTX times two! These awesome babies are black with silver heat pipes, just perfect match for our black/silver system. They are HUGE! Each card fills two expansion slots (of course each only using ONE PCI-Ex16 slot) and each requiring it’s own power supply connection! These babies are going to get the electricity meter running.

Given the large size I decided to dry run the video cards to see how they would fit and how much they may interfere with the cabling I still need to do. I discovered these huge cards would be very troublesome in a smaller case, even a slightly smaller one, but not for me! Still the biggest problem is denying me access to any of the ports on the motherboard for the front panel connections primarily as well as thinking about using any other expansion slot in the case…it ain’t happening!

Another problem with the eVGA cards is the double slot tabs. My case seemed to have very tight slots to attempt to insert this card while using two of them at the same time. What a patience test! One I was able to stretch out enough to get the card to seat nearly perfect, the second one annoyed me so much I cut the tabs off the video card. My first custom modification

Routing the front panel cables was a bit more challenging as they needed to either lie flat on the motherboard or route around the twin video cards. Since I didn’t want to use any of additional back plate connections since room is a premium with the eVGA’s, I got the connections in as best I could. The case offers a routing rack on both sides of the power supply/water cooler shelf, but I chose the one in the middle between the motherboard and the drive bays. This allowed all the wiring to be routed through and tied up except where it was not possible (one PCI-E power cable just wouldn’t reach until it was allow more direct access), or it was impractical (the ATX 12v connector just made sense to use the other routing since it was closer and hid the cable).

The Enermax Liberty Power Supply Unit is one of the nicest PSU’s I’ve bought without a lot on frivolous features. Ok, there were two which I’ll disclose afterwards, but I don’t want to detract from the nice features of this supply. This 750watt badboy has only built-in cables for the motherboard connections, of which we used all of them except the extra 12v motherboard connector since we are not using an advanced ATX or a BTX motherboard.

The supply itself is enclosed in a black mesh grill aluminum and has round cloth cables on most of the lengths. It features a selection of cables to add which consist of; 2 PCI-E cables; 2 Molex and 2 pSATA connections; and two more Molex and pSATA with Floppy connections also. All the cables come in a Velcro wrap storage bag for convenient and safe storage. I used all but one. Additionally it comes with a key tag necklace for what reason I’m not certain, other than you can wear it. But don’t try to attach the power supply to it. It’s a tad heavy for this necklace, but it’s great for thumb drives and other light weight items

After getting this all in place, like requiring a mounting plate to be removed to install the PSU, I’m now ready to start installing the drives. 4 SATA2 Seagate 7200.10 300GB hard drives go into the original 4-in-3 module. This is going to be converted into a RAID 0+1 array equaling roughly 610GB of storage in a mirrored striped array. Formatting this puppy will take most of the afternoon.

Adding a 5th Seagate on the second SATA controller and installing the 6th Seagate in the external enclosure I purchased so it can be removed and plugged in quite simply.
I will have roughly 1.3TB of storage on this box once it’s complete. Plus another 610GB for mirroring on the RAID0+1 array equals nearly 2 TB or Terabytes of disk space.

The case handles a total of 9 120mm fans and only comes with one. Ultimately I’m going to have 6-8 fans. The rear fan was replace with a white w/Blue LED fan. A chassis ceiling fan was installed of the same type and a third was installed on the lower left cage in the access door. Four fans will fill this space ultimately. Ensuring all the front panel connections are done prior to installing the video cards is important and routing the power cables also is done roughly. Technically we could boot this machine but first we want to check a few things and ensure we don’t need to access anything on the motherboard. We still have a matrix LCD display to install, yes in the case.

To top off the drives we add a Silver NEC DVD 16x burner that supports dual layer disks. This will become our workhorse drive but with all the storage space we’ll put Nero to work building virtual DVDROM’s. Below the burner we install our Matrix LCD display. This unit is red in difference to our silver/black/blue theme simply to give the appearance of an eye (ok now you’ll have to sniff or smoke something to get that image in your brain…). We still have room to add another 4 drives if we acquire another 4 in 3 module, which to date we cannot get. Bad CoolerMaster rep’s…BAD! But realistically we have no capability to run them unless I make them IDE…uh no. However it would allow me to split the 4 drives in the one into two modules and greatly improve airflow between the drives. However my drives run currently a nice 32 degrees so I’ve nothing to worry about at this time.

With the eVGA video cards installed, now the system looks very menacing and promising. We decide that it’s time to exchange the Molex connectors with the UV reactive ones I purchased. The Molex extractor tool is very handy, even though the task is not a highly rewarding one. I simply not using any of them except for the DVD Burner. The other two are attached to fans at the moment and will probably route to the matrix display. Two connectors you will probably never see will glow. Wow…

The time of trial now comes are we are ready to power up the system for the first time. Booting the system the first time was flawless, as everything came to life after powering the system. Quickly went into the BIOS to make a few changes and then rebooted to get the RAID and SATA controllers working. This proved to be a greater challenge. After a few driver upgrades and reconfiguring we get the drives setup, unfortunately our external SATA drive is missing the correct cable, which we will have to get at a later date.

Originally, I had planned to install Vista beta RC1 on this for the time being, later upgrading to the release version of Vista Ultimate 64bit, but none of my tricks could get the OS to see my SATA drives. I did have to install a floppy drive and have the drivers for the SATA I wished to boot from ready to go during OS setup. But otherwise nothing else needed to be modified from my setup to get this up and running.

Vista was not as accommodating. It simply hung during several phases of the install, but popping the DVD out of the drive usually moved it to the next step. This was not foolproof and was ultimately dumped as a choice and I installed XP SP1a instead. I may upgrade this to SP2, but that will have to be decided later. For now I want to get all the drives working and formatted, drivers installed, and get testing this box out.[Author's Note: At this point I have the PC playing with several OS's using various external SATA drives and Firewire drives, and I've now acquired my Vista Ultimate 64bit I'm going to reattempt this.]

So fan totals: Power Supply = 1 120mm; CPU = 1 80cm; Motherboard = 0; Video Card = 1/each = 2 80cm’s; Chassis has 1 in 4-3 mod, 1 rear, 1 top, 1 side, all 120mm. Total is 8. At this configuration motherboard is running at about 49 C. When we add the 3 other fans this should decrease the temps by about 4-6 degrees. [Authors Note: After getting another 3 fans to fill the side grill up with fans the temperature is now running at 44 idle and 46 peak. The CPU also never peaks over 61 and typically is running around 50] The real beauty is how quiet this whole thing runs at. It’s much quieter than many of my other systems

All the drivers installed ok, and we installed most of the bonus software that came with the hardware, even the time limited stuff, like Nortons Internet Security. Most of this we toasted including the buggy Forceware Firewall that comes with the product. Many other programs had issues with it.

Today the system still runs great. We have also acquired a pair of Viewsonic VX922 monitors to serve as our dual-monitor setup when not playing games, and perform very well when we reduce the output to one display for SLI mode. We have had many games installed and many framerates peaking over 140FPS. Even games like Oblivion we run constantly acheiving over 40FPS even with all the graphics on the highest settings using a display mode of 1280 by 1024. Yes, we do enjoy the games and the performance of these games on this rig. Now we are planning our next build…something to store a incredible amount of files on.