[Build Log] Viggen Blue - Page 5

R.I.P MSI Z68A-GD65 after bad BIOS flash... and welcome Gigabyte Z77X-D3H.

Bloody MSI and their official BIOSes... Did everything as per MSI website and it bricked my mobo, even tho it reported a successful flash...
As the latest P80 BIOS is being flashed to both BIOS chips no chance of recovering from the bad flash from the 2nd chip, the motherboard is just dead!

Now I will be without the main computer for at least a week, as the new mobo will not arrive until at least Wednesday and I will not have time to fit it until Friday and then full OS re-install... All day wasted because of MSI! For that what they have done I will never go back to them for any new components!

It took me nearly half a day to replace the mobo...

Drained coolant and took the first HD 7850 out:






Since I was there inspected the tubing for the plasticizer and could not see any signs yet! That is after 3 months with Alphacool Blue tubing and Mayhems Blueberry coolant.

Then the 2nd HD 7850, two cards next to each other... I really need to order 2nd backplate!


... and obviously little Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium, I really love that card!


Since I had everything out I went to have a look at the new mobo and expect ugly heatsink on the Z77 chipset the board really appealed to my taste, it is black not brown-ish like the MSI!


Installed the RAM and the waterblock, decided to change the injection jet for the one designed for LGA2011, which in various tests performs better with LGA1155 than the one designed especially for that socket!


Mobo in with my new Intel Gigabit PRO CT card.


Coolant in and a few photos of the system in a close up...






I have had some problems to get the mobo POST, when oc'ing the CPU, but fiddled with some advance options in the BIOS and the mobo successfully POST'ed with the CPU at the same speed I had it with my MSI board. Also the problem with running the RAM @ 2133MHz disappeared.





I am a bit disappointed with Ebuyer, that they did not provide the full information about the mobo when I was buying it and I got revision 1.0 instead of 1.1. There is a significant difference between them 2 revisions, which is the 8 pin CPU power cable in the later model, which could give me a bit more OC overhead in the future. I will still try to push the CPU to 5GHz, just to see if I can match my MSI record

Bad luck does not seem to leave me alone this year... My Seagate Barracuda has just gone Fortunately it is still on warranty, so I just dropped a line to Scan.co.uk.

I found a way of cooling those VRMs ... Antec Spot Cool 80 is the answer Plus it is blue...