bonestonne wrote:oh sweet. it'll be good to see how barcelona and penryn compare.
Yep, I'm waiting with baited breath.
bonestonne wrote:just constantly looking at that rig makes me think spagetti dinner. even just one SCSI chain is a nightmare [i've never managed to get it to work myself though].
SCSI ain't so bad... You just have to make sure your jumpers are configured correctly and than you're fine.
bonestonne wrote:the only changes i'd make would be flipping the PSU over and mounting it higher if theres room for the 120mm? fan above it. i'd also reverse the airflow from front to back, only because i'd worry about those CPU's kicking too much heat onto the drives.
I did want to have the PSU configured like that, but in order to mitigate some of the noise from escaping through the blowhole I decided that it would be best to drill the hole as far back as I could get it... To keep the hole looking clean I opted to drill from the inside, which left the PSU tray a bit in my way.
My airflow is bottom to top, not front to back, because I felt it was best to work with convection... If this was a rackmount case then I would have had ALL of the fans blowing front to back. However I have it setup so cool air is blowing directly on the most critical areas... Two 80mm fans in the lower back blow cool air onto the CPUs and memory, two 80mm fans in the front blow cool air on the lower drive bay and one 120mm fan blows cool air on the upper drive bay. To pull the hot air out I have one 120mm fan on the top, two 80mm fans on the uppermost back (just above the PSU) and the PSU fan blows out as well. so that ends up being a pretty well balanced system considering that convection is helping pull the hot air to the top as well. I personally feel very confident in how I designed the airflow... However, IF I was to change anything, I would change the airflow and fan side of the front CPU such that the hot air from the back CPU was not getting sucked into it, but there isn't as much space on that side and pushing air through a sink is better than pulling, so that's how I'm probably going to keep it, unless I get a compelling reason to change it.
bonestonne wrote:i would have picked a case with more 92 or 120mm fan mounts than 80, only because of my bad experience with Antec Tri-Cools in another case i have...that i recently stopped using for the time being.
Well, I used the case from my last system to save a bit of money. It's still pretty much one of the largest cases out there, and for what I'm packing in there IMHO it needs to be that large.
bonestonne wrote:but no matter what its a nice build for so much packed in....
Thanks!
bonestonne wrote:i'd also remove the audio cables from the optical drives to the sound card. with windows XP all audio data is carried through IDE or SATA cables, so the audio output on the drive really doesn't do much of anything. only exception would be if it was one of those fancy drives that could play CDs without even needing your computer to be on, in which case it would probably be needed.
I had no idea that was true... I just moved from Windows 2000 Pro and this was the first time I'd ever had a system on XP (I'm actually running XP x64 Pro). So I really don't need those, eh? If not then I'm definitely taking that crap off... I already have enough cables to get in my way in there.