Green Machine Upgrade for my Son: i7

[crtecha]

Haha I didn't know he was only 5. Are you going to show him how to Assemble it? When you make the video you should see if your son can do a video review. I think that would be awesome to see.

 

[crazy pyro]

I was lucky to get a PII system at that age and it still performed like crap.

 

[CyberDruid]

He started with a 100mhz Pentium (coppermine) that we OCed to 133. Talk about hot. Average idle was 100C. We modded his first case together when he was 2.

He's been running an ES 520 on an Abit Fatal1ty AA8XE that OCs to 4.2 ghz for about 2 years now.

Since he's not a gamer per se he's been making do with a ATI 13XX something I found laying around...but recently that strted corrupting the video signal so I popped in a ZoTac 8800GT and that worked okay.

The last rig he put in the motherboard, RAM, CPU and HDD. I had to do the HSF since it was a bit difficult.


He is fairly excited about the upgrade...but not as excited as we are I guess he's got a lot of other interests besides PCs.

 

[crazy pyro]

Can you please adopt me CD, my dad won't even let me build a rig, had to get the local PC shop to put it together.

 

[CyberDruid]

Man I could have my very own sweatshop of adopted children. This could work....

 

[crazy pyro]

Thanked for comedy value!

 

[crtecha]

hahahh im all for it. Is payment for said work sick PC gear?

 

[CyberDruid]

I'll have to think about this for a bit ....

 

[Thrackan]

Sign me up for that!

...wait, can you adopt a 25yo?

 

[CyberDruid]

Done

Everything I needed arrived today and we got the rig together and I gotta say the Mugen is doing a great job. 30C idle.

The Xclio has short cables...especially the 8 pin so I had to get inventive with routing that...otherwise I managed to get most ofthe cabling the way I'd like it.

I made three of these when the A900 first came out. I sold the Blue one and gave the Red one to my Brother in Law.

And my Son wanted the Green one

The Xclio 750

Installing the PSU. THere is a hole in the bottom ofthe case and tall feet so the PSU canbe flipped and the cables routed up the blindside panel.

The Brain

The Cooler

The Base of the Mugen is flawless

As big as it is it's not as heavy as it looks.

There is room for an additional fan up top on the Mugen but the RAM is too tall for a fan on the front.

PSU Vent

I made three of these too

 

[DR.Death]

nice man

 

[CyberDruid]

Just finished installing XP pro SP2 on a 500GB partition and now I am installing Vista 64 Ultimate on the other half of the Samsung F1.

So far so good.

 

[EnergyFX]

heh heh... cool dad! You get a bucket of cool points in my book CD.

 

[steelkane]

Awesome setup dad,, I built each of my daughters a pc, I know how good it feels to see them enjoy a good Rig. Really nice project,, thanks for shearing CD.

 

[Thrackan]

I have to say including your kiddo made this the coolest build log I've seen to date

 

[exodusprime1337]

WOW that is effin awsome. i wish i had the skills to do something like that to my 1200. very nice kudos to you man.

 

[CyberDruid]

Thanks guys

 

[lemonadesoda]

CyberDruid

I've got a much better idea for you. Give him your OLD, OUTDATED, SLOW AS A TORTOISE Dual Xeon 5470 snailtrail, and get yourself a pimpout super-whizz-dooper dual Nehalem-EP.

There. Bet you are thinking about it

 

[lemonadesoda]

Holy schamole! That Mugen is huge (never seen one b4)

 

[CyberDruid]

Yes it's a real brick of fins. The packaging is very well thought out and keeps it from getting damaged unlike the ThermalRite coolers which I've always had arrive with damaged fins. It's not as heavy as I thought it would be for as big as it is.

For 1366 the Mugen 2 kit provides a speciual driver to take the socket clamp off the board so you can take off the stock Intel backing plate and replaceit with the Mugen backingplate. THis mates up to the socket clamp perfectly and then you put the mounting clips onto the Mugen with the provided screws and then you attach it using the 4 provided screws from the backside of the mobo...which is different.

ANyone that has one of these should consider cutting a hole in their mobo tray right behind the cooler so you can take it off without having to pull the board.

I found that once the cooler is in place it is almost impossible to access the two screws for the little external heatpipe cooler on the X58 UT.

Also because it issowide I could not fit a fan on the front with the G Skill Balck PI...the coolers on the RAM in the two slots adjacent the CPU would hit the fan.

Lucky for me it's an Antec 900 so I aimed the air to flow upward and out the top

There is enough room for me to set another fan on top. I have a 1900 RPM S Flex that I may use when I am OCing.

But just like all the other HSF MFRs Mugen neglected to include any extra fan mounting clips.

Again luckily I can just lay a fan on the top

But what the hell is the deal with that? THey are nothing more than some bent wire...would cost pennies to include two extras.

 

[CyberDruid]

First "issue" arises

Well the Audio Driver will not install in Vista. Yep. $300 board and no Audio.

There's a hotfix on the DFI site, It won't install either

Claims there is insufficient storage

Yeah I guess 3GB of RAM and 1TB of HDD space just isn't enough for the 735KB Hotfix to install.

I hate stuff like this.

I'm downloading the Audio driver directly from DFI in the hopes they fixed it and it will install...but at 39KB/s DL speed it's taking forever...

 

[Fitseries3]

i always seem to run into some crap like that too.

on audio drivers i always end up throwing 20 different drivers at it until it works.

 

[CyberDruid]

lol

the cable to the Bernstein audio module was unplugged...

Everything is working fine now.

 

[eidairaman1]

i always seem to run into some crap like that too.

on audio drivers i always end up throwing 20 different drivers at it until it works.

it was 2 years since i updated the driver on my Sound card, the second one works well but it put in its own service which if you try to disable Windows Audio Service it disables the Creative Audio Service.

 

[CyberDruid]

Oh yeah that's the best the update that totally screws up something.

Well I've putin 24 hours now at 100% load and the temp with all the fans just barely turning over is pretty decent.

The adjacent exhaust on the case, S-Flex FDB and additional S-Flex FDB I added today are all between 900 and 1000 RPM. The other case fans are even lower. CPU 45C, PVM 52C, Chipset 50C. I can live with that.