As mentioned previously, I've been working on Rexy. Rexy is probably the least interesting of the builds on the docket, so in a way it's kinda a bummer that we're starting there. But whatever. As my wife's cousin's husband says 98 times a day, "It is what it is." Nice guy, but quite obviously something of a dullard. Anyway, so things were progressing quite nicely with Rexy, as all the little decisions I was making along the way seemed to be working out. Here's a picture of the progress to date.
That's about as far as I've gotten because - well, I thought I had a T-line barb in my big box of watercooling junk, but apparently I don't. So I've ordered one from NCIX. Don't you just love it when an entire build is halted while you wait for a $1.93 part? I expect to get it tomorrow, but tomorrow is a league night for softball, so I don't know how much juice I'll have left in the tank to work on it when I get back.
Anyway, some things I'd like to point out...
I took off and re-fastened the Apogee Drive logo on the waterblock so that I could mount it upside down. This loop is going to be almost as simple as one of those self-contained LCS units, so I wanted the barbs pointing directly towards where the tubing will be going out the back door to the rad.
I ziptied a Coolermaster R4-SPS-20AK-GP 80mm fan to the northbridge heatsink. Active cooling is a necessity here, and since I'll have a waterblock on the CPU, there won't be enough residual airflow to keep the chipset temps in check. I love this particular fan because it is just 15mm thick. Right now, I have it mounted on the bottom pointed up, but if I ever needed to put a GPU in the top PCIe slot, the thinness of the fan would enable me to mount it on the top either pulling air up or pushing air down through the heatsink. A regular 25mm-thick fan would have been too wide to offer that kind of flexibility here.
Cable management ain't too pretty, but hey - this is an Antec 900 we're talking about here, so cut me some slack. Also - this build is earmarked for the laundry room, so it's the only one that doesn't actually have any aesthetic considerations tied to it.
While I await my $1.93 T-line, I thought I'd also make a bit of progress on Suite300. I put some of the components on a test bench (as seen below) and am happy to report that the LSI 9211-4i and the ASUS P7P55 WS get along just swimmingly, thank you very much! I set up my RAID arrays and installed Windows. According to CrystalDiskMark, I'm getting:
On the 2 x Corsair Force 3 120GB in RAID0 (with Windows installed)
- Seq: 403.0 MB/s Read, 270.8 MB/s Write
- 512k: 364.5 MB/s Read, 270.6 MB/s Write
- 4k: 27.72 MB/s Read, 82.25 MB/s Write
- 4kQD32: 195.2 MB/s Read, 263.2 MB/s Write
On the 2 x Samsung F1 750GB in RAID0 (empty)
- Seq: 208.3 MB/s Read, 211.3 MB/s Write
- 512k: 49.68 MB/s Read, 85.01 MB/s Write
- 4k: 0.630 MB/s Read, 2.576 MB/s Write
- 4kQD32: 2.051 MB/s Read, 2.535 MB/s Write
No idea if those numbers are good, bad or ugly. But they seem fast enough to me. In the words of Farmer Hoggett, "
That'll do, pig. That'll do." Incidentally, that PNY 8800GTS you see me testing Suite300 with in the picture below
can be yours for just four easy payments of $10.00!
One last update, and I've saved the best for last. Frozen Q finally finished the pump tops for his new dual bay res, and I ordered mine today! I'm giddy like a school girl. It will probably be a while before it gets here (all orders are built by hand to spec), but it should look a little something like this...
I'm starting to get excited! I just love that thing!
