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5 GHz of Silent Powa w/ 6950

Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2011 12:54 pm
by Rasterman
Here is my new build :) I wanted something that was better in every way than my previous desktop (P180 e6600 2.4GHz GTX 8800) and am more than pleased. Using the Lian Li A05NB my new system is literally half the weight of my previous system (19lbs vs 48lbs), and its much smaller, both bonuses. I did some small mods to the A05NB to make the airflow more efficient by buying 2 perforated covers and venting the front. With the case open on my desk all I can hear are the 2 92mm fans of the video card, and even they are quiet, after I put the sidewall on and put the case on the floor I can't hear it. I actually had to adjust the brightness/contrast of my Dell U2410 monitor because the loudest thing in the room was the back light transformer! After a search I found adjusting brightness up and contrast down fixes the problem.

I decided to go with 2 nexus fans on a u120e rev c at 530 RPM controlled by speedfan, needless to say at this RPM you can't hear them, AT ALL. I then have another nexus sucking air out the front. The PSU is fanless until it gets high load, but I have never heard the fan come one in it, even under full load. The SSD is of course silent :D The video card is the loudest thing the case by far, and when I mean loud, most people would laugh, after about 3' from it you can't hear it either. At stock the fans are 40% and audible, but simply using MSI Afterburner (like speedfan for video cards), you can set the fans to 25%, which is what I have them at.

I was going to vent the front with the same hole pattern as the 5.25 covers I bought, but after calculating I would need to drill over 500 holes I quickly changed that plan as you can see :D I thought about painting the nexus black in the front, or putting a grill so you can't see the fan, but currently I don't care too much. The front does need to be vented beyond stock as mentioned in another post.

As for overclocking I got very lucky with my CPU, after reading many forums, my CPU overclocks to a value that less than 2% of CPUs can. I did boot windows at 5.2GHz, and got it stable with prime95 at 5.1GHz but was approaching the limits of my air cooling due to the increased voltage, I then decided to settle on 5GHz as a nice round number before trying to get 5.2GHz stable and frying the CPU.

Intel Core-i5-2500K at 5.0GHz
MSI R6950 Twin Frozr II OC Radeon HD 6950 2GB
256GB Crucial C300 Real SSD
16GB CORSAIR Vengeance DDR3
ASUS P8P67 PRO LGA1155
Seasonic SS-560KM Active PFC F3, 560W
LIAN LI PC-A05NB
Thermalright U120E-Rev.C CPU Cooler Heatsink
3x Nexus BASIC D12SL-12 @ 530 rpm

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Re: 5 GHz of Silent Powa w/ 6950

Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2011 1:56 pm
by AgustF
Very, very nice build and some serious good OC results ! Thumbs up pal ...
I envy you ,, nice hardware you only one question you dont have a storage drive only the SSD ?

Re: 5 GHz of Silent Powa w/ 6950

Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2011 6:08 pm
by Rasterman
Thanks :D Yeah I wanted to keep the system as quiet as possible so I bought a Synology NAS and put 2 2TB drives in RAID 1. Speeds to it are around 20MB/s write and 35MB/s read, not great but doable. I think in the future I might move one of the drives to my computer and put it in my LOGISYS HD silencer, but only if it is absolutely silent, and then put the other drive on the network somewhere and just do a nightly auto sync to it for data redundancy. Its kind of a tossup though as I don't access the drive that much, the 256GB SSD is more than enough for all of my work data, games, and media. The biggest thing I have is HD video and I just keep that local when working on editing, and then it goes off to the NAS when I'm done with it.

Re: 5 GHz of Silent Powa w/ 6950

Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2011 6:54 pm
by Fire-Flare
Congrats on the speed, but isn't the processor melting? :lol:

I'm uneasy with any sensor reading over 60c.

Re: 5 GHz of Silent Powa w/ 6950

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2011 3:48 am
by frenchie
Congrats !! Nice numbers and nice build !

Re: 5 GHz of Silent Powa w/ 6950

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2011 7:38 am
by Rasterman
Fire-Flare wrote:Congrats on the speed, but isn't the processor melting? :lol:

I'm uneasy with any sensor reading over 60c.
Its idle most of the time 33C, when I'm working on my game its at maybe 30% load, so 40-50C, and when gaming maybe a little higher. Only under prime95 does it get as hot as that screenshot, which I only run to test stability, which is maybe a few hours one time.

Also the non reference design video card made a huge difference, I had a reference 6950 which idled at around 60C, now with this one it idles in the high 30s, what a huge difference, and its nearly silent at idle.

I just ordered a much better looking grill for the front, it should look much better, will post pics when done.

Re: 5 GHz of Silent Powa w/ 6950

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2011 9:04 am
by andymcca
Very nice! Do you use the NAS for all non-game data (documents, music, etc)? Edit: nevermind, just read the rest of your post. You have <256GB of total media + games? I went crazy and ripped every movie I ever owned :)

That video card is much cheaper than I expected! Oh, if only the linux drivers were better!

Re: 5 GHz of Silent Powa w/ 6950

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2011 10:29 am
by Rasterman
I have about 1.5TB of media and backups, but most of that is HD video I'll never use again, you can easily watch movies and music off the NAS, more than enough speed. It is easy to setup, uses low power, and has many features, you can also use it as a Time Machine backup which is nice. But for the money I would recommend simply getting a cheap netbook with USB 3, and putting an external usb 3 drive to it, much more expandable and will probably be faster, plus you can host games off of it, and it has a dedicated screen, keyboard, mouse, and battery backup.

Re: 5 GHz of Silent Powa w/ 6950

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2011 11:46 am
by ntavlas
That`s a great overclock along with a very neat build, congrats. Is there any cpu intensive task you do that prompted the oc or was it more out of curiosity? I`m guessing it`s the second :)

Just a word of caution, while the temps are perfectly safe even at full load, the high voltage could affect the longevity of the cpu. I don`t know if it will matter in practice since the cpu is usually the last component to fail, still, it`s such a great chip that I would want to keep it for a long time. If it can undervolt as much as it can oveclock it could become a great secondary pc once you retire it.

Re: 5 GHz of Silent Powa w/ 6950

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2011 1:10 pm
by Rasterman
Thanks for the comments :) I do coding/game dev on it, and all my games and workflow are single threaded, to speed that up GHZ is of the most importance. I read a lot of info about using high voltages, and no one could provide a solid answer, most of what I found is peoples guesses, and several people have said they ran high volts for years on older intels, since the cpu is cheap for me I went for it and will run it at 5ghz until it dies. I see no reason to ever undervolt it, maybe unless you wanted to run it totally fanless, but the nexus at 500rpm are inaudible.

Re: 5 GHz of Silent Powa w/ 6950

Posted: Fri Mar 11, 2011 4:24 pm
by shunx
I'm a fan of this video card and of your build. Do you know if the 6950 can drive 4 monitors simultaneously and independently, including one via HDMI which will also be the output for games? Much appreciated. Again, nice system!

Re: 5 GHz of Silent Powa w/ 6950

Posted: Sun Mar 13, 2011 11:19 am
by HammerSandwich
Nice system!

Those temps are perfectly fine for long-term use, IMO.

Any chance for power-draw measurements?

Re: 5 GHz of Silent Powa w/ 6950

Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2011 10:32 am
by Rasterman
My old system e6600 2.4ghz w 8800gtx
load 275w idle 235w w/ no GPU stress

new system
load 145w idle 60w (dont remember if it was gpu stressed or not, will do another test and post again)

since my system is at idle most of the time, that is a savings of $15/month in power! that is for 24h/day though, I sleep my system when not use so the actual savings are probably $5/month or so.

Re: 5 GHz of Silent Powa w/ 6950

Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2011 12:38 pm
by HammerSandwich
Thanks for those results. And there's NO way the GPU was also loaded at 145W... :D