>>> January 29th, 2008 <<<
Alright, so I've finally decided to do it. I've been beating around the bush trying to pick out parts for a new desktop. I bought a case over a year ago and 2 500 GB drives to run a file server. This past August I got a few parts to upgrade from a celeron based server to a Pentium 4 based one. More ram, faster processor, new motherboard, and it was all good.
Not 1 month later, my Alienware's motherboard died. Big surprise! (It's a 7700 and the most common component failure.) So after 4 months and 2 repair depot trips they finally got the right part installed, but managed to scratch up my case work pretty good. Gouges in my grips, 4" scrapes on the underside panels. I was not a happy camper
but at least it worked again.
So I'm a college student, and need to send it back to be repaired, but didn't want to part with it since I game with buddies and actually do the occasional assignment on my machine. So I decided I had until my warranty runs out in November 2008 to build a new "primary" computer and then I could send the AW back without worry.
So here I am. I'm saving up for a lot of other things in life, but I decided I'm tired of waiting for the next processor or graphics card or motherboard to come out. I'm done waiting, and here it is. I've decided to pull the trigger:
To be Delivered:
EVGA 132-CK-NF78-A1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard
$259.99
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor
$219.99
G.SKILL 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1000 (PC2 8000) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory
$114.99
Koutech IO-RCM620 USB 2.0 3.5"/5.25" Card Reader
$14.99
GIGABYTE ODIN GE-S800A-D1 ATX12V / EPS12V 800W Power Supply with Software Control
$229.99
EVGA 512-P3-N802-AR GeForce 8800GT Superclocked 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card
$249.99
Total: $1,089.94 + Shipping: $4.99 = GRAND TOTAL: $1094.93
For what I just bought, I am very happy with the price. Not only was shipping a measly five bucks, but I had $85 of instant rebates in my cart. Awesome!
I'm sure a few of you are scratching your heads (
) wondering "this isn't everything for a new PC...."
Well, here's a list of what I already have that will go to the new desktop.
Gigabyte 3D Aurora (Original generation) black full ATX case
Thermaltake V1 Heatsink
Two (2) Black Sony DVD+R Burners 20x
MERC Zboard
Logitech MX1000 Wireless Mouse
Logitech X-530 Surround Sound Speakers
Logitech G25 Racing Wheel
Two (2) Western Digital 500 GB SATA II Hard Drives
Four (4) Western Digital 400 GB SATA II Hard Drives
Cooler Master 4 in 3 Bay Converter With Fan
SIIG PCI SATA RAID card
Viewsonic 20.1" LCD DVI / VGA Monitor
I also have a 2 port USB PCI card that I might throw in the case.
I think these parts (old and new) will give me a beast of a desktop, and a second 8800 GT later on will push it over the edge.
Processor Consideration:
My original configuration called for a Q6600, but after Wolfdale came out the price wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Not only was it cheaper, but the stock clock rate was 3.0 instead of 2.4. Additionally, wolfdale is 45nm and thus can overclock much farther than the Kentsfield core Q6600. After reading an article on Tom's Hardware, I decided Dual Core would be just fine for my purposes. Quad would be awesome, but I just don't need it.
Graphics Card Consideration:
This was the real kicker. When the 8800 GT came out, I was hooked. It out performed the 8800 GTX, was a fraction of the price, and was only a single slot cooler. I was sold. The new 512 GTS is nice and all, but I can't justify the price, plus I want to be able to use my other ports. A 9 series GPU would be great, but I told myself an 8 series would be awesome to have when the 7900 GX2 came out.... It's a never ending loop and I'm done playing the waiting game.
RAM Consideration
I have zero (0) [none] {zilch} experience with G Skill RAM, but several members here in the AW section (Boyd, Huli, Shazza) have reassured me its a decent brand. It is supposed to have 5-5-5-15 timings at DDR2 1000Mhz, which should overclock to 1066. Four gigs of this for $115 was just too good of a deal to pass up (given it works). If I need, I will RMA it and choose another brand, but I'm optimistic. Another 4 gigs will be added down the road when it becomes necessary (or really cheap
).
I will update this log as time goes on, but please feel free to leave comments or suggestions. I've done builds before, but not of this caliber, and I have much more experience this time around.
*** I am putting out an official request for help with cable management. It is my weakest part of the build process and will be crucial to setup correctly. Any and all tips/tricks/experiences are very welcome!
***
------
>>> February 1st, 2008 <<<
I received 4 of 6 parts today from UPS. The 780i, G Skill RAM, card reader, and E8400 were delivered. The Odin PSU and 8800 GT are scheduled for Monday delivery, but luckily I am replacing desktop parts and have a PCIe-X 16 card to use along with a Thermaltake 500 watt PSU. I'll update this thread fully over the weekend with pictures of the un-boxing and initial build.
Quick Update: I've pulled the old board, and cleaned off my Thermaltake V1 Heatsink in preparation to mount it on the new 780i. Gotta look up the dual core procedure on AS5's site first...
Everything is looking good and coming together well!
Another Update: Got it together and first boot was at 12:40 EST. The PSU I'm using only has 4 pins instead of 8, so I'm not going to do much in the way of overclocking until my Odin comes on Monday.
-----
>>> February 2nd, 2008 <<<
Goings-Ons from last night: I picked up 1 of 2 packages from a buddy's house last night around 8:00pm. It snowed and sleeted all day, so UPS was running behind. The other package (8800 GT and Gigabyte Odin PSU) is in Ohio with a scheduled delivery for Monday.
Initial Unboxing:
Unpacking the Core 2 Duo:
Unpacking the Card Reader:
Unpacking the RAM. I don't know if you can see it, but that's a big white glow-in-the-dark G Skill sticker. No idea what I'm going to do with it.
Motherboard straight out of the box. Don't think I could get it all to fit back in if I wanted to.
All of the motherboard parts laid out, surrounded by the other parts I'd already unboxed. Thought this was a pretty cool shot.
SLI bridges and the various cables the motherboard shipped with. I was quite impressed I was shipped a floppy, IDE, and 6 SATA cables. EVGA rocks!
Motherboard unpackaged with the chipset cooling fan installed.
G Skill RAM out of its box and ready to be installed.
G Skill RAM installed on the motherboard.
Core 2 Duo E8400 ready to be dropped in the socket.
780i with E8400, 2 x 2GB G Skill RAM, and the chipset fan installed.
Corvette Case (Gigabyte 3D Aurora)
Front Panel open with 1 DVD drive and Cooler Master cage installed.
Other side of the case, with the C6 flags. I have plans to add more badges and graphics.
The old parts still in the case. Figured I'd show you all just HOW BAD my cable management skills are. As Shazza posted below, I went with #8: Cram it all in and close the door!
The old motherboard removed.
PCI cards and graphics card removed.
Pentium 4 570. After removing the V1 I wanted to see how my Arctic Silver 5 job turned out. The chip idled at 29 degrees C, so I must have done something right.
Cleaning the V1 in preparation for the E8400 and 780i.
Installing the V1 on the 780i.
Over a finger's width of clearance between the chipset fan and the V1. I figured it would all fit, but I was worried it would be a lot tighter than this.
First real problem of the build: I couldn't get the SATA between the mobo and my HDD cage, forcing me remove the mobo, connect the cable, and then drop the 780i back into the case. It was a real waste of time, but turned out just fine in the end. I especially like the corkscrew effect it now has to loop under the HDD cage.
Full stack in the 5.25" bays.
Mobo and 1 500 GB drive installed, no power cables have been connected yet.
Both 500's in the case, with data and power running to them. Front panel buttons have been connected, along with USB and 1394.
I can finally connect both DVD drives. (Last build in this case had my OS drive and a single DVD drive on the IDE channel.)
Booted on the first try!!
-----
>>> February 3rd, 2008 <<<
Well, I've made several replies to my own thread and thought it was finally time for a full-fledged update to the original post. After I did the build (using a XFX GeForce 6200 with TurboCache and a Thermaltake 500 Watt PSU) I overclocked the RAM just a tad to 1066. It is rated for 1000Mhz. I loaded windows and in the course of loading various programs or formatting hard drives, I kept getting blue screens. I increased voltage and they occurred less often (every hour, depending on what I was doing). The 4 400GB drives I have are set up for RAID 0. They were formatted into a 1490 GB array on my old motherboard, and you can't transfer a RAID array like that to a new motherboard. This required me to back up all the data on the array (1.06 TB), reconstruct the array on the new motherboard, then reformat the array and copy all the data back over from the multitude of drives I backed it all up to. I finally clocked the RAM back down to DDR2-1000 last night and copied a lot of data back over to the array. The computer stayed on for over 10 hours through the night and all my data was copied by the time I woke up. I installed Office and a few other things and I've rebooted several times for those installs and windows updates. No problems at all from the RAM, but I can't figure out why it can't handle a 66Mhz overclock. I'm still blaming this on my power supply, but I'll just have to wait until my Odin comes tomorrow. On a side note, I did have a blue screen occur because of Nero 7, but I hadn't applied the updates/patches for it and windows error reporting pointed to that as the root cause. I ran the updates and have had no more problems.
The power supply I'm currently using (from the old build) can be found here.
-----
>>> February 5th, 2008 <<<
The other desktop parts came in yesterday. This included my Gigabyte Odin 800 Watt power supply and an EVGA 8800 GT Superclocked Edition graphics card. I pulled out my old power supply, and moved my GeForce 6200 TurboCache down to one of the other PCI-e x16 slots to use for a secondary monitor.
New parts.
Unboxing the Odin. This power supply is one of the most well-packaged electronics parts I have ever had the pleasure of opening. It was double boxed, with slot tabs on both boxes, and ever side of the inner box was lined with Styrofoam, for protection during shipping.
[u]Extra power cables come neatly packaged in a pouch. This are the extra cables that correspond to the cable management feature on the Odin.
The whole Odin package: Unit, extra cables, power cord, and thermometers.
The 8800 GT unpackaged. I guess I go too excited and forgot to take a picture of it still in the box.
Behold: The EVGA 8800 GT Superclocked Edition!
Re-wiring the case with the Odin.
Thermometer in the RAM heatsink.
Thermometers in the Graphics Cards.
My best attempt at the main wiring bundle...
Finally got an 8 pin connector to the CPU.
After installing and updating the graphics card drivers, and setting up all the alarms in the power supply control software, I ran 3DMark06 and 05 at stock settings (E8400 at 3.0Ghz, RAM @ 1000Mhz 5-5-5-15, and the 8800 at stock settings). Here are the scores:
3DMark06: 12073 3DMarks; 2762 CPUMarks
3DMark05: 18646 3DMarks; 11287 CPUMarks
----
>>> May 11th, 2008 <<<
Right after I got this build finished, work got really busy as I was assigned to work on another vehicle at a different plant, and it required me to be on the road more, with less time at the plants and more work to do. At the end of March I left work to go back to school for the summer term (April to June) and obviously got really busy there too. So to update everything, the system is running beautifully. My RAM problems were fixed with a BIOS update, and I've had no other hardware issues. I'm currently running XP 32 bit, XP 64 bit, and Vista Ultimate 64 bit using BCD to control the boot environment.
A few weeks ago forum member Hulioni sold me his EVGA 8800 GT Knockout card to pair with my superclock card. The day the package arrived, EVGA released the first edition of their Precision software, specifically aimed at tuning and overclocking nVidia graphics cards. I had a test in every subject that week, but I found the time to at least set up SLI in XP 64 bit (The O/S I have all my games installed under - I use 32 bit for general apps and dual monitors).
Dual 8800 GT's (Top is the Knockout, bottom is the Superclock):
Installed in the Aurora:
Once I reinstalled drivers and enabled SLI I ran 3dMark06 and obtained a score of 17,530. Both cards were clocked at Knockout speeds, and my processor was running at 4.0 Ghz.
After playing games for the next few days, I noted very high temperatures - into the 80's, and decided to look into alternate cooling methods for the cards. I had seen the AKIMBO versions of the 8800 GT's for sale at newegg, but a google searched revealed EVGA would sell you the coolers directly and you could change them out yourself. This seemed like the perfect solution for me and further reading showed temps could drop up to 25 degrees centigrade and it wouldn't void your warranty (link). So I ordered 2.
The AKIMBO coolers feature a dual slot cooling system opposed to the stock single slot system that I currently had. The AKIMBO coolers also come with a top side heatsink/heatpipe attachement and of course a dual slot bracket.
The AKIMBO coolers arrived May 8th and I installed my 2 while a friend installed a cooler on his single 8800 GT. (Nothing like the buddy system when you're doing something for the first time). We followed EVGA's AKIMBO cooler installation pdf here without any problems.
The AKIMBO parts with the Knockout card:
The first size comparison:
The AKIMBO cooler right out of the box:
AKIMBO reverse side heatplate and dual slot bracket:
The Knockout split open:
The Knockout all cleaned up:
I decided to Arctic Silver 5 the memory and chip of my 8800 GT's for even better cooling. Thus I removed the thermal pads from the AKIMBO cooler and used alcohol to clean the thermal paste for the copper heatsink:
AS5 on the chips:
Assembled:
Now for a few shots showing the AKIMBO'd Knockout next to my still-stock Superclock:
Comparisons:
AKIMBO'd SLI 8800 GT's installed in the Aurora:
Here are a few pictures of the mess we made. We went through 50 Q-tips to clean off 3 8800 GT's.
I also have been monitoring temperatures of my northbridge and decided I wanted to try some additional heatsinks to see if they make any difference. I also installed several on the mosfets on the board.
I haven't benched with the AKIMBO coolers yet, but will later today or tomorrow. Games look amazing and the cards are staying around 65 under load where I was hitting 80 before.
-----
Last Updated: May 11th, 2008
Alright, so I've finally decided to do it. I've been beating around the bush trying to pick out parts for a new desktop. I bought a case over a year ago and 2 500 GB drives to run a file server. This past August I got a few parts to upgrade from a celeron based server to a Pentium 4 based one. More ram, faster processor, new motherboard, and it was all good.
Not 1 month later, my Alienware's motherboard died. Big surprise! (It's a 7700 and the most common component failure.) So after 4 months and 2 repair depot trips they finally got the right part installed, but managed to scratch up my case work pretty good. Gouges in my grips, 4" scrapes on the underside panels. I was not a happy camper
but at least it worked again.So I'm a college student, and need to send it back to be repaired, but didn't want to part with it since I game with buddies and actually do the occasional assignment on my machine. So I decided I had until my warranty runs out in November 2008 to build a new "primary" computer and then I could send the AW back without worry.
So here I am. I'm saving up for a lot of other things in life, but I decided I'm tired of waiting for the next processor or graphics card or motherboard to come out. I'm done waiting, and here it is. I've decided to pull the trigger:
To be Delivered:
EVGA 132-CK-NF78-A1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard
$259.99
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor
$219.99
G.SKILL 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1000 (PC2 8000) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory
$114.99
Koutech IO-RCM620 USB 2.0 3.5"/5.25" Card Reader
$14.99
GIGABYTE ODIN GE-S800A-D1 ATX12V / EPS12V 800W Power Supply with Software Control
$229.99
EVGA 512-P3-N802-AR GeForce 8800GT Superclocked 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card
$249.99
Total: $1,089.94 + Shipping: $4.99 = GRAND TOTAL: $1094.93
For what I just bought, I am very happy with the price. Not only was shipping a measly five bucks, but I had $85 of instant rebates in my cart. Awesome!
I'm sure a few of you are scratching your heads (
) wondering "this isn't everything for a new PC...."Well, here's a list of what I already have that will go to the new desktop.
Gigabyte 3D Aurora (Original generation) black full ATX case
Thermaltake V1 Heatsink
Two (2) Black Sony DVD+R Burners 20x
MERC Zboard
Logitech MX1000 Wireless Mouse
Logitech X-530 Surround Sound Speakers
Logitech G25 Racing Wheel
Two (2) Western Digital 500 GB SATA II Hard Drives
Four (4) Western Digital 400 GB SATA II Hard Drives
Cooler Master 4 in 3 Bay Converter With Fan
SIIG PCI SATA RAID card
Viewsonic 20.1" LCD DVI / VGA Monitor
I also have a 2 port USB PCI card that I might throw in the case.
I think these parts (old and new) will give me a beast of a desktop, and a second 8800 GT later on will push it over the edge.
Processor Consideration:
My original configuration called for a Q6600, but after Wolfdale came out the price wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Not only was it cheaper, but the stock clock rate was 3.0 instead of 2.4. Additionally, wolfdale is 45nm and thus can overclock much farther than the Kentsfield core Q6600. After reading an article on Tom's Hardware, I decided Dual Core would be just fine for my purposes. Quad would be awesome, but I just don't need it.
Graphics Card Consideration:
This was the real kicker. When the 8800 GT came out, I was hooked. It out performed the 8800 GTX, was a fraction of the price, and was only a single slot cooler. I was sold. The new 512 GTS is nice and all, but I can't justify the price, plus I want to be able to use my other ports. A 9 series GPU would be great, but I told myself an 8 series would be awesome to have when the 7900 GX2 came out.... It's a never ending loop and I'm done playing the waiting game.
RAM Consideration
I have zero (0) [none] {zilch} experience with G Skill RAM, but several members here in the AW section (Boyd, Huli, Shazza) have reassured me its a decent brand. It is supposed to have 5-5-5-15 timings at DDR2 1000Mhz, which should overclock to 1066. Four gigs of this for $115 was just too good of a deal to pass up (given it works). If I need, I will RMA it and choose another brand, but I'm optimistic. Another 4 gigs will be added down the road when it becomes necessary (or really cheap
).I will update this log as time goes on, but please feel free to leave comments or suggestions. I've done builds before, but not of this caliber, and I have much more experience this time around.
*** I am putting out an official request for help with cable management. It is my weakest part of the build process and will be crucial to setup correctly. Any and all tips/tricks/experiences are very welcome!
***------
>>> February 1st, 2008 <<<
I received 4 of 6 parts today from UPS. The 780i, G Skill RAM, card reader, and E8400 were delivered. The Odin PSU and 8800 GT are scheduled for Monday delivery, but luckily I am replacing desktop parts and have a PCIe-X 16 card to use along with a Thermaltake 500 watt PSU. I'll update this thread fully over the weekend with pictures of the un-boxing and initial build.
Quick Update: I've pulled the old board, and cleaned off my Thermaltake V1 Heatsink in preparation to mount it on the new 780i. Gotta look up the dual core procedure on AS5's site first...
Everything is looking good and coming together well!
Another Update: Got it together and first boot was at 12:40 EST. The PSU I'm using only has 4 pins instead of 8, so I'm not going to do much in the way of overclocking until my Odin comes on Monday.
-----
>>> February 2nd, 2008 <<<
Goings-Ons from last night: I picked up 1 of 2 packages from a buddy's house last night around 8:00pm. It snowed and sleeted all day, so UPS was running behind. The other package (8800 GT and Gigabyte Odin PSU) is in Ohio with a scheduled delivery for Monday.
Initial Unboxing:
Unpacking the Core 2 Duo:
Unpacking the Card Reader:
Unpacking the RAM. I don't know if you can see it, but that's a big white glow-in-the-dark G Skill sticker. No idea what I'm going to do with it.
Motherboard straight out of the box. Don't think I could get it all to fit back in if I wanted to.
All of the motherboard parts laid out, surrounded by the other parts I'd already unboxed. Thought this was a pretty cool shot.
SLI bridges and the various cables the motherboard shipped with. I was quite impressed I was shipped a floppy, IDE, and 6 SATA cables. EVGA rocks!
Motherboard unpackaged with the chipset cooling fan installed.
G Skill RAM out of its box and ready to be installed.
G Skill RAM installed on the motherboard.
Core 2 Duo E8400 ready to be dropped in the socket.
780i with E8400, 2 x 2GB G Skill RAM, and the chipset fan installed.
Corvette Case (Gigabyte 3D Aurora)
Front Panel open with 1 DVD drive and Cooler Master cage installed.
Other side of the case, with the C6 flags. I have plans to add more badges and graphics.
The old parts still in the case. Figured I'd show you all just HOW BAD my cable management skills are. As Shazza posted below, I went with #8: Cram it all in and close the door!
The old motherboard removed.
PCI cards and graphics card removed.
Pentium 4 570. After removing the V1 I wanted to see how my Arctic Silver 5 job turned out. The chip idled at 29 degrees C, so I must have done something right.
Cleaning the V1 in preparation for the E8400 and 780i.
Installing the V1 on the 780i.
Over a finger's width of clearance between the chipset fan and the V1. I figured it would all fit, but I was worried it would be a lot tighter than this.
First real problem of the build: I couldn't get the SATA between the mobo and my HDD cage, forcing me remove the mobo, connect the cable, and then drop the 780i back into the case. It was a real waste of time, but turned out just fine in the end. I especially like the corkscrew effect it now has to loop under the HDD cage.
Full stack in the 5.25" bays.
Mobo and 1 500 GB drive installed, no power cables have been connected yet.
Both 500's in the case, with data and power running to them. Front panel buttons have been connected, along with USB and 1394.
I can finally connect both DVD drives. (Last build in this case had my OS drive and a single DVD drive on the IDE channel.)
Booted on the first try!!
-----
>>> February 3rd, 2008 <<<
Well, I've made several replies to my own thread and thought it was finally time for a full-fledged update to the original post. After I did the build (using a XFX GeForce 6200 with TurboCache and a Thermaltake 500 Watt PSU) I overclocked the RAM just a tad to 1066. It is rated for 1000Mhz. I loaded windows and in the course of loading various programs or formatting hard drives, I kept getting blue screens. I increased voltage and they occurred less often (every hour, depending on what I was doing). The 4 400GB drives I have are set up for RAID 0. They were formatted into a 1490 GB array on my old motherboard, and you can't transfer a RAID array like that to a new motherboard. This required me to back up all the data on the array (1.06 TB), reconstruct the array on the new motherboard, then reformat the array and copy all the data back over from the multitude of drives I backed it all up to. I finally clocked the RAM back down to DDR2-1000 last night and copied a lot of data back over to the array. The computer stayed on for over 10 hours through the night and all my data was copied by the time I woke up. I installed Office and a few other things and I've rebooted several times for those installs and windows updates. No problems at all from the RAM, but I can't figure out why it can't handle a 66Mhz overclock. I'm still blaming this on my power supply, but I'll just have to wait until my Odin comes tomorrow. On a side note, I did have a blue screen occur because of Nero 7, but I hadn't applied the updates/patches for it and windows error reporting pointed to that as the root cause. I ran the updates and have had no more problems.
The power supply I'm currently using (from the old build) can be found here.
-----
>>> February 5th, 2008 <<<
The other desktop parts came in yesterday. This included my Gigabyte Odin 800 Watt power supply and an EVGA 8800 GT Superclocked Edition graphics card. I pulled out my old power supply, and moved my GeForce 6200 TurboCache down to one of the other PCI-e x16 slots to use for a secondary monitor.
New parts.
Unboxing the Odin. This power supply is one of the most well-packaged electronics parts I have ever had the pleasure of opening. It was double boxed, with slot tabs on both boxes, and ever side of the inner box was lined with Styrofoam, for protection during shipping.
[u]Extra power cables come neatly packaged in a pouch. This are the extra cables that correspond to the cable management feature on the Odin.
The whole Odin package: Unit, extra cables, power cord, and thermometers.
The 8800 GT unpackaged. I guess I go too excited and forgot to take a picture of it still in the box.
Behold: The EVGA 8800 GT Superclocked Edition!
Re-wiring the case with the Odin.
Thermometer in the RAM heatsink.
Thermometers in the Graphics Cards.
My best attempt at the main wiring bundle...
Finally got an 8 pin connector to the CPU.
After installing and updating the graphics card drivers, and setting up all the alarms in the power supply control software, I ran 3DMark06 and 05 at stock settings (E8400 at 3.0Ghz, RAM @ 1000Mhz 5-5-5-15, and the 8800 at stock settings). Here are the scores:
3DMark06: 12073 3DMarks; 2762 CPUMarks
3DMark05: 18646 3DMarks; 11287 CPUMarks
----
>>> May 11th, 2008 <<<
Right after I got this build finished, work got really busy as I was assigned to work on another vehicle at a different plant, and it required me to be on the road more, with less time at the plants and more work to do. At the end of March I left work to go back to school for the summer term (April to June) and obviously got really busy there too. So to update everything, the system is running beautifully. My RAM problems were fixed with a BIOS update, and I've had no other hardware issues. I'm currently running XP 32 bit, XP 64 bit, and Vista Ultimate 64 bit using BCD to control the boot environment.
A few weeks ago forum member Hulioni sold me his EVGA 8800 GT Knockout card to pair with my superclock card. The day the package arrived, EVGA released the first edition of their Precision software, specifically aimed at tuning and overclocking nVidia graphics cards. I had a test in every subject that week, but I found the time to at least set up SLI in XP 64 bit (The O/S I have all my games installed under - I use 32 bit for general apps and dual monitors).
Dual 8800 GT's (Top is the Knockout, bottom is the Superclock):
Installed in the Aurora:
Once I reinstalled drivers and enabled SLI I ran 3dMark06 and obtained a score of 17,530. Both cards were clocked at Knockout speeds, and my processor was running at 4.0 Ghz.
After playing games for the next few days, I noted very high temperatures - into the 80's, and decided to look into alternate cooling methods for the cards. I had seen the AKIMBO versions of the 8800 GT's for sale at newegg, but a google searched revealed EVGA would sell you the coolers directly and you could change them out yourself. This seemed like the perfect solution for me and further reading showed temps could drop up to 25 degrees centigrade and it wouldn't void your warranty (link). So I ordered 2.
The AKIMBO coolers feature a dual slot cooling system opposed to the stock single slot system that I currently had. The AKIMBO coolers also come with a top side heatsink/heatpipe attachement and of course a dual slot bracket.
The AKIMBO coolers arrived May 8th and I installed my 2 while a friend installed a cooler on his single 8800 GT. (Nothing like the buddy system when you're doing something for the first time). We followed EVGA's AKIMBO cooler installation pdf here without any problems.
The AKIMBO parts with the Knockout card:
The first size comparison:
The AKIMBO cooler right out of the box:
AKIMBO reverse side heatplate and dual slot bracket:
The Knockout split open:
The Knockout all cleaned up:
I decided to Arctic Silver 5 the memory and chip of my 8800 GT's for even better cooling. Thus I removed the thermal pads from the AKIMBO cooler and used alcohol to clean the thermal paste for the copper heatsink:
AS5 on the chips:
Assembled:
Now for a few shots showing the AKIMBO'd Knockout next to my still-stock Superclock:
Comparisons:
AKIMBO'd SLI 8800 GT's installed in the Aurora:
Here are a few pictures of the mess we made. We went through 50 Q-tips to clean off 3 8800 GT's.
I also have been monitoring temperatures of my northbridge and decided I wanted to try some additional heatsinks to see if they make any difference. I also installed several on the mosfets on the board.
I haven't benched with the AKIMBO coolers yet, but will later today or tomorrow. Games look amazing and the cards are staying around 65 under load where I was hitting 80 before.
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Last Updated: May 11th, 2008
. I tend to get in a hurry the first few times so I picked 8 
