[2thAche]

Long story, but I have alot of machines. Alot of pretty cool ones, I think. There is not going to be any crazy modded stuff, just some good stable rigs, most of which are overclocked. I'll try to separate into separate posts in this thread.

This is my main home machine, which gets upgraded about once a year more or less, not counting little things.
The latest things to change were the case, H2O layout and drives.

As it stands, it's running a G0 Q6600 I grabbed from ebay a while back on a DFI DK X48 T2RSB with 4GB of G Skill PC2 1066. It does daily duties at 3.6 with a 402 FSB. The cool thing about this machine is that it runs with Virtualization, C1E, and SpeedStep ENABLED. Vcore is 1.5 in BIOS but shows 1.47 in CPUz. It throttles down to 2.4 when the CPU is idle, which to me is funny since it's the stock speed of the chip

A single GTX260 does graphics duty and is plenty fast for the 1680x1050 monitor I use.

I originally had 8GB of the GSkill, but it refused to be fully stable with 4 sticks. I can't tolerate any instability, I'm too obsessive and can't leave things alone, they have to be %100.

A Lite-On IDE SOHD 16P9S and a Samsung SATA DVD-RW are up front, the reservoir is beneath them.

Two WD 500GB/16MB SATAs in RAID 0 are the main storage, with a WD 1TB/32MB SATA used as a clone (I clone the entire array with Casper 4.0) This machine dual-boots Win 7 32bit and Win 7 x64.

The 3/8" water cooling started as a Corsair Nautilus. I used Tygon tubing for most of the plumbing. A double-deep 2x80 is up top and a 120mm radiator out back. Why 2x80? Because I had it from the old

case and it's an extremely good radiator. I've used blocks on previous GPUs, but IMO they are too expensive for what they're worth unless I go SLI with this machine. Now I just use a manual fan control. I used the quick-disconnect couplers from the corsair system, placed so that the board can be uncoupled from the main loop and taken out of the case without draining fluid. Pretty cool! The pump is fixed to the bottom of the case.

A couple more shots, I blurred some 'cause of the crap on my desk detracting from the machine

Top view you can see the 2x80. Looks small in this giant case.

 

[2thAche]

Here is the "weaker" of 2 performance machines I keep at the office. This one is based on a Striker Extreme that used to power my main home rig when the E6600 was all the rage. I have a love/hate relationship with this board, but right now it's tweaked into submission and seems to like the E8400, an Ebay cherry-pick. It has not always been stable in the past, but seems to really like this current config. It hums daily at 3.8GHz but is more than capable of 4.0. 4000 is a bit too warm for the Zalman CNPS 7500. 2GB of GSkill PC2 800 at 850 cooled by an OCZ dual-fan memory cooler and a 4870 512MB round out this machine. Two 160GB WD 1600BBs in RAID 0 handle storage. It dual-boots XP Pro and Win 7 x64.

CPUz

Front1/4 low

front1/4 flash

sidedoorlow

sidedoorflash

interior

This machine is very good looking in person, and is the probably "prettiest" of all, if you're into blue and bling. Before it's last revision, it was running the memory and SLI from the 750i machine below, and IMO was really a good looking box with all the exposed copper:
oldSLI interior

 

[2thAche]

This machine I just put together to be my main rig at work. Some of it was pulled from the build above which was based on the ASUS Striker Extreme. I decided I really wanted to play with SLI on an Nforce 7XX board and put together a more low-key, quiet machine. The other thing I wanted to do is see if a dual-core and 2 cheap cards in SLI could be as fast as my Quad/GTX260. I had a P182 a buddy gave me to start with. The Striker was too pretty to put in a window-less case honestly and the 7xx series is just right for a cheap SLI build. I took 2GB of OCZ Reaper DDR2 1150 and two 9600GT OC Zalmad Ed from the machine I had already. I picked up an EVGA 750i FTW and an E0 E8400 with a low wafer number on ebay for pretty cheap. (I'm a good ebay shopper

) Two WD 1600YD Raid Edition drives in RAID 0 do storage. They used to be in my main home rig before the 500s went into that one.

The results were more than I expected! As it turns out, this sucker whoops my main home rig in many games and is a screaming machine for daily use. If you get into something like Crysis Warhead, all bets are off, the 512MB buffer on the 9600s can't hang as well as the GTX260. It barely beats the GTX260 Quad machine in 3dm 06, and beats it by 2k in 3dm 05 at over 27K.

Solid 4.3GHz on air, much more than I expected. EBay FTW!

2 9600GT OC:

I picked these cards 'cause the price was right and I wanted to see what kind of numbers they'd put up backed by a fast E8400. They came with factory OC and Zalman fans.

From the outside, there's nothing going on.

A Mugen 2 does an incredible job with cooling duties. It doesn't hurt that it's surrounded by 120mm fans. The 750i scales the main fan's RPM very well with temp. I set it to max out at 60C. I don't like to see much over 60C personally on Core 2s. The machine is very quiet for a performer.

I don't like the way the wiring had to go, looks like a wierd tree. But the bottom 9600GT sits directly on top of the P182's wiring hole and that was the only way to run it in the BTX layout.

I used a subtle blue mirrored 120mm up top, just enough to let on that something's going on in there.

 

[2thAche]

This box I use at home as a secondary machine, for wife/kids/guests. The previous version of this machine was in a smaller cube with an AMD 3200+ BE on another mobo, the rest of the components were the same. A buddy of mine was over, and challenged me that all the hot hardware I had in that little cube was gonna make it go up in flames. My reply? No way, I'm Pro! About 2 weeks later, the PSU did in fact die, complete with smoke and crackling noises. LOL! My kids came running to me saying that the computer was on fire

.

So it was time to re-group. I picked up a Micro-ATX Gigabyte G31M-S2L in an NZXT Roque, both grabbed on clearance

.A new BFG 550W PSU (bought on clearance!) picked up where the old had failed.

This case is huge for a cube but has some cool features. One of which is the pull-out tray. I had an E6600 that used to do 3.4+ on the Striker Extreme board (above), 2 sticks of "NewEgg Lanfest" memory (Crucial Ballistix PC2 800 4-4-4-12), and an 8800GTX that all used to be in my main home rig a while back. It's running at 3.0 with Speedstep, C1E and Virtualization all enabled. At low throttle I think it's doing 1999MHz.

The other nice thing about this case is how the panels come off. There are two identical 160GB SATA drives, one on each side. I clone the main drive to the other with Casper 4.0 about once/month or so. That way, even if my wife or kids completey hose the OS, it's no biggie. Boot off the other drive and re-clone, nothing can get F'd up in this rig.

This case has mounts for two 120mm fans on each side. I'm only using 1/side and one on the radiator.

The water cooling is from one of those el-cheapo starter kits, and also used to be in my main rig back when fast was an overclocked Athlon 64 1800+. It's been butchered up over the years, and currently uses a single 120mm radiator that looks like it was made in a sweatshop. Every month or so the fluid level gets low and has to be refilled. Where it goes? Nobody knows! I think it evaps through the latex-feeling 1/4" tubing. Despite all that, it has no prob cooling the 3.0GHz E6600 with the 120MM Antec fan on medium speed. She runs Win 7 x32.

 

[2thAche]

Server:

I have a room in the basement with all all wiring centralized (cable, phone, Gigabit network). I'm serious about storage, redundancy and centralization. All our family photos, home movies and music are on this server. Also, a crap load of ripped DVDs and possibly Blu-Rays in the future sit on here. It was also recently upgraded. All my machines now run Win 7 including the HTPC (AMD so it's not in this thread), and network transfers are MUCh faster than with XP or Vista when you have Win-7 networking. BTW Vista is garbage.

Here is the old array, freshly pulled before this rig was re-tooled. Four 500GB WD drives. Two of them have a new home as a RAID 0 array in my main gaming rig (above).

Here is the new array, a hot-swap RAID box with 4 1.5TB drives I got from a buddy who's in IT for large corps. They trash stuff like this believe it or not.

Check out the size of that array! That's some pretty awesome **** right there. RAID 5 on Windows 7 x64. The OS is on a single 80GB SATA drive. Here is the interior of the machine, inside an Antec P180:

The mobo is a supermicro server board, from the same buddy. It's intel X38 based. No, there are absolutely no overclocking options! The four 1.5TB drives dump to a Highpoint RocketRaid card. An E5300 sits under its stock cooler at stock speeds next to 4GB of DDR3. I know next to nothing about the E5300 series, but it runs cool and was on sale for like $60.

The DVD movie rips can be played in Win 7 Media Center and stream great over the GB LAN. I have a buddy who is figuring out how to store and stream Blu-Ray content, and he thinks he has that figured out so that's the next project.