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i7 Build, Quad Crossfire, Case Advice?

Nickel

Nickel

New Member
Joined
Feb 20, 2009
Messages
13 (0.00/day)
Location
Apparently so...London
Here she is:

850W Be Quiet Dark Power PRO BN075 Modular
Intel i7 920
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5
6GB (3x2GB) Corsair XMS3 DDR3, PC3-12800 (1600MHz)
Two 1GB Sapphire HD 4850 X2
Antec Nine Hundred Two
Zalman CNPS9900-LED PWM Tunnel Flower Cooler
LG GH22LS30 AUAU 22x DVD±R
1TB Seagate ST31000333AS Barracuda 7200.11

£1501

My main worry is if the case will be big enough. If you got any suggestions, do share
 
STAY CLEAR of the 7200.11 DRIVES..

Get a 7200.12 or WD BLACK.

Case shouldn't be an issue.
 
Case is fine, nice build.
 
Great, thanks for the advice
 
Do you plan to watercool? If so also take a look at the coolermaster cosmos S..thats what I own and love it!
 
Antec 1200 is decent too
 
How are you going to keep those two 4850 X2s cool?

I have almost the same case and motherboard with the Antec 900 and the DS4 model of the Gigabyte board you are gettting and in my experience it will be almost impossible to keep the first 4850 X2 cool without horrible noise from the first card and high heat. They exhaust air into the case and it will sound like a wind tunnel in there when the fans kick in. My suggestion is to get a beefier power supply and get a 4870 X2 to place in slot 1 with a true dual slot cooled designed that sucks heat out of the case and pair that with a 4850 X2 if you want quad crossfire. That will give you a lot of performance with a bit more power draw. I just don't think it is a good fit to use two 4850 X2s unless you can separate them further away in a slot 1 and slot 3 format with an extended length crossfire cable. MSI shipped them with their K9A2 Platinum 790FX motherboard. Even if you have the longer crossfire cable that is not possible with the UD5. It just won't fit because slot 3 is all the way on the bottom of the case and the card will hit the power supply. To go 4850 X2 in crossfire you have to consider its cooling style and the sheer monstrous size of the cards.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ShowI...TE GA-EX58-UD5 ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail
 
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Yeah My 4870x2 shoots the air out of the back of my case it's really nice.
 
freaksavior said:
haven't had issues out of my 7200.12,11, or 10.
Click to expand...

7200.10's were fine.

7200.11's perform like garbage and their firmware issues *which can be fixed* cause the drives that are in otherwise perfect shape go into a protection mode and lock up. I was wondering why I had exactly 121 Seagate 500/750/1tb ES.2 and 7200.11 drives go bad that were all less than 30 days old! To top it off their initial "fix" for it was BAD and destroyed MORE drives.

7200.12's seem to be getting some performance back, but not with multiple access they stink the place up.

But now I'm very weary of Seagate until they prove they are back on top of their game... Especially being they dropped quality lately and then instead of fixing it decided to back off their warranty down to 3 years again.
 
Oh shit i have a 7200.11 for my OS, works fine, going from ATA to SATA i wouldn't realy care, I do have a WD Black for everything else, and let me tell you that thing is a goddamn tank, very fast for a 1TB harddrive, I would recommend getting a few of those.
 
MadClown said:
Oh shit i have a 7200.11 for my OS, works fine, going from ATA to SATA i wouldn't realy care, I do have a WD Black for everything else, and let me tell you that thing is a goddamn tank, very fast for a 1TB harddrive, I would recommend getting a few of those.
Click to expand...

Your 7200.11 is just fairly slow, but I would check the firmware revision to make sure you don't have the bad firmware. You can get all the info you need on seagates site.
 
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Wile E said:
Ummm, seagate themselves admitted some 7200.11 drives have firmware issues. It's a confirmed fact.

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board...&thread.id=9060&view=by_date_ascending&page=1

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931
Click to expand...

Yes, I know, 3 months ago, I have 3 of the affected drives. But I am talking about the present, not the past. If he had a time machine and was going back in time to buy the drive, I would be worried, but not today.
 
newtekie1 said:
Yes, I know, 3 months ago, I have 3 of the affected drives. But I am talking about the present, not the past. If he had a time machine and was going back in time to buy the drive, I would be worried, but not today.
Click to expand...

That's a lot different than saying "there are no firmware issues". There's less of a risk now, but the risk isn't zero. Yes, it was fixed, or can be fixed with a firmware update if you get an affected drive, but the fact remains, there are possible firmware issues. So yes, there are, in fact, firmware issues. The buyer needs to be aware of those facts.

It wouldn't stop me from buying one at the right price, as I'm not afraid of a little flashing, but it can be scary for the uninitiated.
 
newtekie1 said:
There are no firmware issues, and performance is right on par with other drives of the same class.
Click to expand...

My raid array in my 5 Dell 1900's that recently went from ES.2 drives to WD RE3's, they are almost completely the same drives as the 7200.11 and Black.

I gained a pretty decent amount of through put when multiple systems are accessing the drives, and way more when they are doing simultaneous write/reads.

Now, as I said before, they only really fall behind on multiple access, but I have also beyond the firmware issues found them to be by a good margin far less reliable....

I ran WD drives up until their quality fell, switched to Seagate and the problems started with those with the 7200.11s and ES.2s, so much to the point my distributor has all but stopped carrying them. I still get the 7200.10's in smaller drives and still buy their notebook drives, but for large drives and server use, I will not touch their 7200.11s, can't say anything on the 7200.12s yet obviously.

Personally, I just can't run a drive that is known to have or has had issues in my system, losing drives sucks, even if you do backup, which I'm sure almost all of us have had to deal with in the past.

This is my experience, others will very, most of mine is dealt with in servers, network storage, and DVRs for security systems, I would give it a good 60% RMA rate at some point within the warranty period, generally within a year of the install date for the last year.
 
Wile E said:
That's a lot different than saying "there are no firmware issues". There's less of a risk now, but the risk isn't zero. Yes, it was fixed, or can be fixed with a firmware update if you get an affected drive, but the fact remains, there are possible firmware issues. So yes, there are, in fact, firmware issues. The buyer needs to be aware of those facts.

It wouldn't stop me from buying one at the right price, as I'm not afraid of a little flashing, but it can be scary for the uninitiated.
Click to expand...

In the present day, the risk is essentially zero. The firmware issues only affected a small number of drives that were sold last year, unless you manage to find some very old stock that was sitting around on the shelf for about 3 months, you don't have to worry about it.

I can recommend with confidence the 7200.11 drives, with no worries of the firmware being an issue.

@Niko: Your server experience doesn't matter here. The drives might fall behind in high traffic server applications, but he isn't putting it in this situation, so what does it matter? You might as well say a Prius sucks at racing, the Pruis isn't a race card, so it doesn't matter.

Anyway, enough with the drive, he gets the point, he can make the decision himself.

More on topic now, avoid the HD4850x2. Driver support sucks, and the 1GB model only has access to 512MB. If you are going with an x2, get one with 2GB of RAM so it will have 1GB usable.
 
newtekie1 said:
In the present day, the risk is essentially zero. The firmware issues only affected a small number of drives that were sold last year, unless you manage to find some very old stock that was sitting around on the shelf for about 3 months, you don't have to worry about it.

I can recommend with confidence the 7200.11 drives, with no worries of the firmware being an issue.
Click to expand...

It very likely will not be an issue any longer, although it is something if you were to purchase one that is very well worth checking before using it too much.

I just find it very discerning that they would screw that up so bad.... Really bums me out especially because my dealer charges me about 10-20% more for equal size WD drives...

I should have noted that I meant in multiple access, although I do get a slightly noticeable difference on my tech machines also which just swapped out their ES2's for RE3's, more or less when moving large files around and doing a few things at once.

Standard throughput on single task and benchmarks they are very close.
 
newtekie1 said:
More on topic now, avoid the HD4850x2. Driver support sucks, and the 1GB model only has access to 512MB. If you are going with an x2, get one with 2GB of RAM so it will have 1GB usable.
Click to expand...

I heard ATI has started their driver support on the 4850x2... and I have never heard of the "only 512MB acessed"... Will look at it... but doesn't that mean it will be fixed? because all I know is that 4850x2 is incredible performance/price... so is 4830 xfire :p
 
newtekie1 said:
More on topic now, avoid the HD4850x2. Driver support sucks, and the 1GB model only has access to 512MB. If you are going with an x2, get one with 2GB of RAM so it will have 1GB usable.
Click to expand...

The new drivers support it blah blah, I'm getting tired of saying that :p
 
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