There are no words in the English language to describe how awesome this computer is. But first, the build story.
I ordered everything in the evening on Tuesday, June 9th and by Thursday afternoon, everything except for the power supply had come (the PSU was coming from Memphis while everything else came from Edison, NJ). I managed to contain my excitement on Thursday and only checked to see that everything came and read the instruction manuals. I got up bright and early Friday morning and began building.
The whole process was fairly easy and standard. First the CPU went into the mobo (and made a horrible crunch as it locked, but that was apparently supposed to happen), then a bit of thermal paste, and then the cooler. Installation of the gigantic CoolerMaster V8 was a little tricky and awkward, especially when I had to flip the whole motherboard over and rest it on top of the cooler to screw in the rear plates. the mobo went into the case without a hitch, as did all 6 of my hard drives, the optical drive, and the 2 extra case fans that I purchased.
I took full advantage of the Antec 1200′s main cable management feature: a recessed area on the other side of the moutherboard mount. I wired up everything fairly neatly, assuming that I could then just use the remaining space for the power cables. Originally, I had anticipated receiving the PSU that Friday, but when I checked the tracking site again, I found that the package was just a few hours too late to have gone on Friday’s local shipments. So, I would have to wait to Monday to be able to power up my computer.
Somehow I managed to get through what seemed like the longest weekend in history (saw Angels and Demons… very good!) and Monday afternoon rolled around. I stuck the PSU in and pretty much immediately realized that I would have to rewire the entire computer because the power cables were just too bulky and my system was becoming a mess.
So, I spent another two hours laying all the cables over again until I approached a configuration I liked. Finally, after almost a week of waiting (well, more like two or three years), I had a computer that would be far faster and more powerful than my needs would require for probably the next decade.
I fully anticipated seeing all sorts of random problems when I started the computer up for the first time; that’s how it usually works with me. After waiting about 20 seconds for it to POST, my suspicions were almost confirmed, but to my surprise, everything seemed to be okay. I went into the BIOS and made some initial settings. I noticed that my second IDE drive seemed to be missing, but I think that’s probably because I don’t have the master/slave jumper settings setup correctly.
I installed Windows 7 RC1 onto my 160 gig SATA drive without any issues. For the heck of it, I tired out Nexuiz and was amazed to see the game consistently run over 100FPS with all of the highest quality settings enabled.
Next, came Linux. Setting up software RAID was a ridiculously easy task and before long, I had Arch Linux up and running. I’m using 3 640GB Western Digital Caviar Black drives in RAID5, so that gives me about 1.2TB of space. I gave about 100MB to /boot (ext3), 150 gigs to / (ext4), and 25 gigs to /var (ReiserFS for optimized pacman performance), leaving about 1.1T for /home (xfs with allocations properly alligned to the stripes).
After spending all week copying my old settings and files over to this computer, here I am. I finished overclocking the system to my liking this morning. The results are something like this (stock values are in brackets):
- Base Clock (BCLK): 160MHz [133]
- CPU Freq: 3200MHz [2667], multiplier still at the locked 20X
- RAM Freq: 1600MHz [originally 1600MHz, but my mobo didn't want to set it that high], multiplier 10X
- Uncore Freq: 3200MHz [2667]
- VCore: 1.2V (stock voltage!)
- VCore VTT: +100mV [+0mV] (had to increase it because the memory controller would fail otherwise)
- VDimm: 1.65V (OCZ’s recommended voltage, but I think I could go lower)
The VCore VTT threw me off for a while; I didn’t expect that I would need to increase it at all. The BIOS has a base voltage of about 1.17V or so and allows you to choose how much you want to increase it by. The fact that VCore is still at stock values is pretty nice; my CPU doesn’t heat up that much more than it did when my BCLK was at the stock 133MHz.
Before I overclocked the computer, I never paid attention to the voltages that the mobo was automatically choosing for the CPU and memory. Thankfully, I hadn’t run the computer too long before I realized that VCore was at 1.3V and VDimm was at 1.7V!
I’m fairly sure that I could really push this system further. With a small voltage increase, I bet I could get up to 3.8-4GHz without too much of an issue. But why would I need to? The system is already far faster than probably all of my other computers put together and I honestly don’t need any more flops than I have right now. Plus, I don’t want to risk damaging any components or overly reducing their lives.
I still need to fix some of the cabling; the side panel for the cable management trough doesn’t quite fit due to some leftover pesky SATA connectors, so I have to do a little work there. Also, I need to figure out why my second IDE drive isn’t recognized. But other than, that, things went quite swimmingly. 
Anyways, here are some pics from the build process (I wish I had taken more 
).
And a screenshot:
Edit: And also a shot of my new Conky config with box drawing around some of the fields. It’s getting out of hand now.
