Sprocket Redux

[clocker]

Well, Sprocket and I got tired of waiting for Richard Avedon to arrive so I took the pictures.
As usual, they are crap, but we'll have to make do.

The front bezel...

From the top we have:
-four black knobs from the Sunbeam fan controller (the only unit worth a tinker's damn, IMO)
-Two Bulgin anti-vandal switches (red is power /on and blue is reset/ HDD activity)
-three 120mm Aerocool "turbine" fans (mediocre fans in fact, but silent and exactly the look I wanted...actually they inspired this whole endevour)
-Plextor 716SA DVD-RW (with an alloy Coolermaster faceplate)

Next, a side view...

Here you see the beauty (i.e., "coverup") panels in place.
Personally I find the motherboard area to be the only visually interesting part of a PC's guts, everything else being boxey and strewn with wires, so I made up some plexi panels and bolted them into the chassis (Coolermaster has literally riddled the Stacker with very nice threaded inserts- if you want to screw something in, chances are CM put an insert right where you need it).
The main reason for the panels is to cover up the unsightly wiring.
The Seasonic S12-600w is an excellent PSU but has the absolute worst rat's nest wiring I've ever encountered. The lines are either too short (ATX) or too long and the connector spacing is weird. Definitely a candidate for major surgery of the harness.
Which I shall do as the chassis gets powdercoated.

Now the waterloop...

Many new components this go-round...
-CPU block is a Swiftech Storm G5.

-Radiator/shroud/fans are a Weapon 342 kit which lays on the casefloor over the good sized vent hole Coolermaster thoughtfully provided. The plexi floor plate to which the radiator is affixed rests on 1/2" rubber weatherseal to raise the face of the rad off the intake opening for better flow (the floor hole is about 1" too narrow along each side of the radiator length but I didn't want to cut it open). This rad is single pass which places the barbs at opposite ends of the unit which cuts down on the amount of tubing used a good bit. Shorter, oddly enough, in this case is better....

-GPU is now covered with a Swiftech MCW50 which seems to work very well.
The odd "press fit" barbs give me the creeps, but no leaks yet.

-Pump is the same Polarflow unit I had before and is mounted directly to the radiator inlet..out of sight, unfortunately.

A slightly different shot...

Depending on how she looks with the interior black, most of the plexi panels will probably disappear (not the main bay mount panel though..I quite like that one), but I'll see when I get there.
I'm hoping to time the powdercoating process (@ one week turnaround) with the arrival of the new DFI Expert motherboard...I may add the nothbridge into the waterloop and that way I can keep downtime to a minimum (teardown on Sprocket is a bitch...).

As per usual she's a work in progress.

[S!X]

I like the idea of a case on wheels, its sexy.

[clocker]

I like the idea of a case on wheels, its sexy.

Really?
Sprocket's wheels will be coming off next week when the new base is completed.
It's design shall remain a secret...mainly cause I'm not sure I can pull it off.

Prior to my final concept what I thought would look really cool was replacing the wheels with tank treads.
Big honkers...preferrably running the length of the case.
Dunno why that idea had such appeal, but I toyed with it for a few weeks.

One of Sprocket's glaring deficiencies has always been her off road performance.

[S!X]

I like the idea of a case on wheels, its sexy.

Really?
Sprocket's wheels will be coming off next week when the new base is completed.
It's design shall remain a secret...mainly cause I'm not sure I can pull it off.

Prior to my final concept what I thought would look really cool was replacing the wheels with tank treads.
Big honkers...preferrably running the length of the case.
Dunno why that idea had such appeal, but I toyed with it for a few weeks.

One of Sprocket's glaring deficiencies has always been her off road performance.

Tank treads! What a genious idea!!!! (btw, check your pms).

[clocker]

Running well.
This is Sprocket's best performance at such an elevated speed (nearly 2.7GHz) and is due mostly to a BIOS flash and my (slightly) better understanding of the bewildering RAM settings offered by DFI.

More and more I grow convinced that my bottleneck is the Winchester's memory controller.
A coworker runs a 3700 San Diego and two identical sticks of Patriot RAM (they were mine originally- remember when Sprocket sported 4x512?) on a Gigabyte board. He was able to jump from the stock 2 GHz to 2.6 without changing the RAM timings at all. I conclude that the RAM has way more headroom (especially if the timings are relaxed) than I'm using, so it must be the Winchester's on-die memcontroller that is holding me back.
That's my theory now at any rate.

My next experiment is going to involve the HDDs.
The RAID array performance does not change significantly from two disks to four, at least not enough to justify the cost and added complexity.
So I'm gonna break the array (bye, bye Windows!) and put two drives back on the nVidia controller in RAID 0 and put two on the SI3114 controller as RAID 0 also.
This leaves me with two open ports on the nVidia controller for the 120 Seagate and the Plextor DVD-RW which is a very good thing.
Why?
Because the nForce 4 chipset presents SATA drives to Windows as IDE devices ( a feature Singaboiy would appreciate right about now, I'll bet) so you need no special drivers or install routines ( the infamous F6 floppy dance)- they just show up as regular drives.
During this last install, the Plextor, which is my only optical device, was controlled by the Silicon Image chip and it hated it.
I finally cobbled in an old IDE ROM and installed from that.
After Windows was in place I was able to configure the drive and it now works fine, but the install was a pain ( and I do this a lot!), so I'd prefer to relocate to the painless nVidia controller.
We'll see how that works out.

On a side note...
Just for grins I'm experimenting with two new pieces of software...the Opera browser installed in a RAM drive.
It seems shockingly fast, but I also discovered that Comcast has upped my speed again so I'm not sure ...


Finally, Sprocket achieved a personal best at PCPitstop...

She got game.

She got video, too.
Not sure how much is due to the new cooling or adjusting the PCI-E bus (up 1 MHz to 101), but I was able to clock my 6800GT up to 428/1.18 (stock is 350/1GHz) and get this...

I'd really, really like to break 80K...

[Gripper]

May I just say "Wow",didn't quite grasp everything,but it looks brilliant and is inspiring me to tidy up the inside of my case,as it is "A rats nest" as you so elequontly put it

[clocker]

Sprocket thanks you.
The funny thing is, I don't even have a windowed sidepanel so none of this is normally visible.

It's just our little secret.

[ApacNTS]

it's kinda like popping open the hood of your newly upgraded car, noone expects to see something to clean and pristine, so when they open her up they are like "wow". she's turbocharged

[ready1]

[clocker]

My cover is blown.

Damn.