Latest revision pictures

Along with the new cooling, I added a bit of sound dampening foam to the rig. Obviously with the window on the left panel I'm a bit limited in how much I could use (the right panel has a full section of foam on it though), but I am very happy with it. The cooling system is not only working fantastically, but the rig is very quiet as well, which is exactly what I've been going for all along.

At this point, it's hard to think of anything I would want to change about this PC. Each revision has brought more knowledge, and this PC truly is my "dream machine".

As always, click the link for a full-size picture.

Preliminary results with the new cooling setup

I'm currently letting the loop get out the extra air bubbles, but it's full and running, and I've got Prime95 and ATI Tool running tests. Let me tell you, I don't know why I ever went with the Swiftech Compact because the results are worlds apart. With an 8800GTX in the loop, you need more beef: I'm back to using a dual 120mm radiator and 1/2" ID lines. I skipped the reservoir and went with a fillport instead, to shorten the lines and improve cooling.

Anyway, with the Compact, my Q6600 was running around 68-71° (each core varies slightly in temperature) under load; the 8800GTX would top out at around 67°. With the new cooling setup, the Q6600 is at 52-56°, and the 8800GTX is topping out at a cool 55°. That is a positively HUGE difference, and I'm really glad I went back to this kind of setup. It's especially exciting because temperatures should improve a bit as the bubbles get out of the system and it gets a little more full. The icing on the cake though is that it's much quieter. I can barely hear this thing running at all; there's just the quiet hum of the case fans. In fact I actually got a little annoyed at one point because my hard drive was so loud compared to the rest of the rig! This is why I love liquid cooling – great temperatures while being extremely quiet. And it looks pretty slick too!

Quick updated: after filling the loop a little more and turning off the stress tests, my quad core is idling at a remarkable 31°!

Quick updated 2: It's looking like I'll be able to bump the core clock of the GTX back up to 648mhz. Tonight I ran ATI Tool for over 30 minutes without errors, and the card's temperature never got past 51°. Definitely goes to show that temperature makes a pretty big difference when it comes to overclocking these cards. I'll do some more extended testing to be sure, but I'm definitely happy with the results at this point.

Cooling system overhaul.... yet again

Well, unfortunately, after using the Swiftech Compact for a while and doing some extended stress testing, I've decided I am not happy with it. The performance is just not there. With Prime95 running 4 instances (one for each core) and ATI Tool doing its stress test at the same time, the GTX reached 67°, and the proc hit nearly 70°. The card temp is still better than stock, and an overclocked quad is really tough to get below 60° when you have a GTX in the loop, but I was overall dissatisfied, especially with the GPU temps. Temperatures affect the videocard overclocking significantly – in fact I always started getting errors at the current clock speeds after the card hit 67°; keeping it below that, it would run fine. And keep in mind I've already lowered my overclock from what it was with the previous cooling system.

The temperatures might be okay if the system was silent, but it's not. The pump, while by no means loud, is quite audible over the fans in the system. By contrast, I could barely hear the MCP655 at all in my old setup. Worse, it creates a rattling in the case that further elevates the noise factor.

So, the new parts are in the mail and I'm awaiting a redoing of my system. I sold my previous pump, reservoir and water block so I'm replacing those components. I'm certainly glad I kept the Swiftech Radiator, which is still widely considered to be the second-best radiator around (topped only by the far more expensive Thermochill radiators). I won't be using a reservoir though – just a Danger Den fillport I've had laying around forever in a basic t-line. I'm also using a compact 12v pump that should be quite easy to mount discreetly. Lastly, I've purchased some sound dampening foam to help give the case some weight and reduce vibrations.

It's all been a big learning process for me. I want it all – great performance, compact design, near-silent operation and reasonable cost. Unfortunately the real cost to me is swapping out all these components because I obviously can't sell them for what I paid for them, but at this point I'm pretty well educated about how to construct the right system.

Oh, and I'm going for a blue dye in the loop this time. :D

Gaming couldn't be better

The recent onslaught of demos that I've downloaded (Timeshift, Unreal Tournament III, Clive Barker's Jericho, World in Conflict, Call of Duty 4, Medal of Honor Airborne) have proved to be a great little test for my hardware. With all these big titles coming out, would my rig be strained and pushed to the limit, or would it sail through the games, or somewhere in between?

I'm happy to say that so far, playing on my 22" Samsung monitor at 1680x1050, my rig is positively flying through every game. All the above demos are playing with butter-smooth frame rates with maximum in-game settings selected (included any DX10 bells & whistles).

I've been really enjoying UT3, even though it's a little disappointing in the sense that it feels more like a slight upgrade than a true sequel. Call of Duty 4 was disappointing and Medal of Honor Airborne completely sucked, but I was very surprised by how good Timeshift was, and Clive Barker's Jericho positively blew me away and is a complete must-have for me. I wrote a quick feature about these games over at GameCritics.com here. (Which, btw, if you didn't know, I am a writer/critic for the site.)

But yeah... all the hardware tweaking is certainly a hobby unto itself, but in the end it's all about the gaming, so I'm happy that my effort has paid off and I'm getting such a terrific gaming experience on this PC. Some people may wonder if it's worth the money, but man, once you see those games in widescreen high resolution with all the next-generation details running at 60 frames per second, it's definitely worth every penny.

A word on fans

I just upgraded the fan that sits over my radiator. Before you golf-clap, let me tell you that this was no small task. Obviously we all know that more speed = more heat dissipation. However, more speed also = more noise. We all want to find the best balance between noise and heat dissipation, and with all the fans out there claiming to be "quiet", it can be hard to figure out which one you should use.

Obviously you want a fan with a low decibel rating and a high "cfm" rating. But there are a couple of things you might not consider. For example, a fan with a lower decibel rating but a higher "pitch" or "whine" will be more annoying than a louder fan with a lower-pitch noise characteristic. The big red flag here is cheap materials, like lightweight plastics some "quiet" fans use. These fans will always have noticeably more "whine" than heavier fans. The other issue is static pressure. This isn't so much a big deal when you're just using a fan for your case, but if you're cooling a radiator or heatsink, you want fans with higher static pressure. A lot of the super-quiet fans use clever engineering to increase airflow per revolution, but sometimes at the cost of pressure.

I've used a gazillion fans. I've used expensive Noctua fans (weak static pressure), those floating exhaust-only Artic cooling fans (too loud), some Scythe Minbea "medium" speed fans (very loud), and some S-Flex fans. Currently I am using two low-speed Arctic Cooling fans, and two Scythe S-Flex fans – one medium speed, one high speed. The arctic cooling fans are nearly inaudible, but they don't move much air either. That's okay, because I have four 120mm fans total, so the goal with them is just to keep the airflow steady. The higher speed S-Flex – SFF21F, which I use for the radiator – moves a lot of air while maintaining a low pitch and while audible is certainly not intrusive.

So before you buy a fan, check out the materials. Read some reviews over at silentpcreview.com. And make sure that the fan you're getting is ideally suited for your specific needs.

It works!

I got the Creative X-FI up and running. It took some guesswork, but I went into the device manager and saw an unknown PCI device. I uninstalled it, popped the card in, and everything works fine now.

After thinking about it, I've decided to hang on to it. After all, it sounds great, and a lot of games support EAX, and music does sound a fair bit better with the crystalizer. Plus, Creative has released some noise canceling headphones that received an editor's choice from PC Mag that are designed to take advantage of the features of the card. And I don't know why it never occurred to me before, but I can always just buy an extension cord for my current earbuds (thanks Nomad).

EDIT: Shit... the problems continue....

Refinement of the 8800GTX overclock

Rivatuner 2.05 has yielded some interesting results for my graphics card. I've gotten a much better sense of what "real" stability is and what the optimal settings are for the card.

First, I had to own up to the fact that something about my GPU just wasn't stable. That can be hard to swallow when you've been running a super-high clock. Errors were rare, but they were there nonetheless. Vista is much better than XP about telling you exactly what's wrong, so when there was a display driver error, I generally knew it because Vista told me, and I didn't have to spend hours troubleshooting. So I messed around with various settings and did extensive stress tests in ATI Tool (which seems to be working just fine with the WHQL drivers – the stress test wasn't working with the betas), and ended up with a whole new clock speed.

The culprit for the errors was the core clock. The memory was totally stable at 1000mhz. I backed the core down to the next "interval", which is 621. I miss the good old days when you could clock a card 1mhz at a time, but oh well, I sure don't miss the inferior performance of those cards! Anyway, the card was rock-solid at 621. So then the natural question arose – how might this affect the shader? Well, a few blogs back I had tried the shader at 1600 and gotten quite a few crashes and errors. I stuck it back at 1600, and ATI Tool detected a mess of problems immediately. So I decided to take it back 25mhz at a time. Well, to my surprise it sailed through ATI Tool for an extended period of time at 1575, which turned out to be 1566 actual. My final clock then is 621/1566/2000. Not too shabby!

So things have actually worked out pretty well. I had to take back the core clock a bit for maximum stability, which sucked a little. But I was able to crank up the shader clock and keep the memory clock high. I definitely have nothing to complain about with this card's performance!

"Edge Smoothing" – the new AA?

Clive Barker's Jericho is definitely one of the best-looking games I've ever seen. So is S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. But there's something that they have in common, which is that they don't support anti-aliasing. Neither do GRAW (both of them), Rainbow Six Vegas, and Neverwinter Nights 2.

It has to do with a rendering method that is in vogue these days, called "deferred shading". I'm not exactly sure how it works, but like HDR on the last-gen cards, for some reason standard AA just doesn't seem to work with it. So developers are integrating a feature called "edge smoothing", or "advanced smoothing" as it's described in Jericho. It's sort of a fake anti-aliasing that just blurs the entire image. It doesn't have much of any effect on actually reducing jaggies, but it might somewhat reduce shimmering caused by aliasing, which obviously isn't something you could really tell from pictures. It can definitely take a hit on the frame rates though. Playing Jericho with 8x smoothing kept my game around 30 frames per second; with no smoothing it was closer to 50. Most notably though is that there is pretty much zero difference in image quality.

So, is AA obsolete? Do we have these insanely fast cards that can handle AA no problem, only to have developers decide AA isn't worth the hassle? It'll be interesting to see what happens next.

Vista (re)impressions

Back when Vista was new, I jumped on the bandwagon and installed it. Well, the whole experienced pretty much sucked llama nuts. It wasn't that I didn't like the operating system, it's that nothing actually worked because drivers were a mess. My games crashed all the time or didn't work at all, the nVidia Forceware panel was missing tons of features, game performance was lousy, and on and on. So I went back to XP.

Now that nVidia's drivers have finally caught up to XP in terms of raw performance and there are more games taking advantage of DX10, I figured now is as good a time as any to give it a go again.

And I have to say that while it hasn't been a totally smooth transition, overall it's great. I had some crashes that turned out to be my own fault due to some overzealous overclocking, but I also needed the latest hotfixes from Microsoft. Most of those updates are optional so they're easy to overlook.

DirectX 10... well, not much to say really. I could tell some minor differences with the World In Conflict demo. Call of Juarez looked like a whole different game, and ran a ton more smoothly as well. Bioshock looks worse, mainly because the improvements are pretty minor, but you have to give up anti-aliasing. Booo! I just play the game in DX9. And Clive Barker's Jericho, which looks like it'll be amazing from playing the demo, is easily one of the best-looking games I've seen, but it's in DX9. So DX10 seems to be mostly hype, though I'm sure games will be making the transition more regularly.

A minor frustration is that my desktop color settings don't always save, and nVidia still lacks the "Display Optimization Wizard" and the automatic send to system tray. Also, my overclocking settings didn't save when I used nTune. 'Course, nTune is nothing compared to Rivatuner. But I ended up disabling UAC, because it was preventing me from booting up with Rivatuner and D3D Overrider. There were supposedly some complicated workarounds, but I don't have the patience for that. We're talking basic functionality here, and I'm not going to turn into some Linux-type guy. I hate that Windows asks you permission for a program every time you want to use it. Why can't it just ask you the first time, then log that application as having permission? Besides, how many viruses are there for Vista? Zero. Anyway, I turned off that obnoxious UAC, and everything is hunky dory. Maybe Microsoft will tidy things up with Vista SP1, and I can enable UAC and the supposedly awesome security protection it offers. Until then, I'd rather have my overclocks boot with the system.

OH! And I finally found out why I couldn't BIOS overclock with a bootable CD: This Intel chipset doesn't support it. I'm supposed to use a floppy or USB. Laaame.