Thread: Three new (well two new and one serious upgrade) builds

No UPS here. Waiting for the USPS to get it to my APO. I could have used the European version of Newegg and used Deutchpost but the euro conversion rate sucks right now. I live in Germany but I get paid in dollars.

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So I went ahead and installed the R290 without the water cooler in my current rig. I set the fan speed to 80% and the target GPU temp to 90C° That is one loud card under load. It goes back to silent after a few minutes when you quit playing a game but I think I will be very happy I decided to water cool it. The performance is unbelievable. Even with my current CPU bottleneck I can play games at max details and everything is butter smooth. No driver issues for me do far but I am a bit miffed that only the beta Catalyst drivers support it currently.

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The noise was too much for me to approve, but adding the water cooler should help that.

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Originally Posted by HeavyG

The noise was too much for me to approve, but adding the water cooler should help that.

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Yeah, I cannot wait to do that. I always play with headphonse so I can't hear it when I play but everyone else can I have to wait until the new mobo finally arrives first though since I will have to redo everything in the case. I am cooling the R290 with an Accelero Hybrid and the i7 with a Coolermaster Seidon 240. Silence is golden but I will have to redo pretty much everything in my case for it to all fit. I will put up some pics when I have it all the way I want it to be.

Did a Mini-ITX build with an AMD A10-5800K. I have to say... I am a bit disappointed thus far. This thing runs HOT! I really should have looked at an A8 5500, but I found the 5800k for $10 less than the 5500, and it came with a free game.

Either way, the stock heatsink had to get tossed in the garbage immediately. I don't know how they can think that it can effectively cool any sort of 100w processor. I purchased the Noctua NH-L9a to cool this bad boy down. It made a pretty big difference, but still not the temps I was hoping for. Since this is PC is really just a device to stream media to, I went ahead and underclocked it by 400MHz, so it is running at 3.4 GHz, and I disabled the turbo on the CPU, so it doesn't up clock any of the cores.

This allowed me to adjust the voltage ranges. Stock voltage was 1.30-1.35v depending on the state of the processor (turbo active or non active). I have voltages set so that it will not exceed 1.20v. It us running SOOOO much cooler, but at the cost of a bit of performance, but I am okay with that for the purpose of having a near silent media streaming PC in the bedroom. There is nothing worse than watching a suspenseful movie and all of the sudden your fans spin up to full speed. Talk about a buzz kill. Now it is pretty much silent all the time.

Newegg boned me a bit. My motherboard has been reshipped but they are out of the Radeon that I ordered so they refunded that. I ordered this stuff before Thanksgiving and I won't have it in 2013. Lame.

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Originally Posted by Gumby

Newegg boned me a bit. My motherboard has been reshipped but they are out of the Radeon that I ordered so they refunded that. I ordered this stuff before Thanksgiving and I won't have it in 2013. Lame.

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Get a GTX 770 instead.

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Originally Posted by HeavyG

Get a GTX 770 instead.

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This.

The Asus with the Direct Cu coolers run quiet and cool. Killer cards.

Nah, just going to reuse a GTX 560 and save a few bucks

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Mobo finally arrived yesterday. Building the thing this weekend. I will post some pics when it's done.

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