VirtualRain

My Latest Blog: Nehalem News

2008-04-24T12:38:00.000-07:00

I've just launched a new blog site that will capture information and news from around the web related to Intel's upcoming Nehalem microprocessor.

http://www.nehalemnews.com/

For those that don't know, Nehalem promises to be the most innovative CPU from Intel in over a decade (since the Pentium Pro). For the first time, an Intel CPU will include an on-die memory controller offering superior memory bandwidth and dramatically reduced latency.

The Nehalem News blog will link to news, information, reviews, and overclocking tips and results from around the web.

Check it out and post some comments in the related forums!

RainMaker Featured on Million-Dollar-PC.com

2008-04-13T23:45:00.000-07:00

I'm honored that my recent PC project, RainMaker has been featured on the ultra-exclusive showcase site, Million-Dollar-PC.com. In the words of the MDPC founders... "Million-Dollar-PC.com (MDPC) is a collection & gallery of some of the world's most beautiful computer systems."

What a privilege and an honor! Thanks MDPC!

Link to RainMaker's MDPC showcase

MDPC Home Page

Project RainMaker

2008-02-22T10:27:00.000-08:00

Project RainMaker, is my latest home PC build project. It was an incredibly ambitious project, and as a result, took me nearly a year to complete. It employs water cooling on every major component in the system including: CPU, Graphics Cards, Chipset, Mosfets, Power supplies, and the PhysX processor as well. The water cooling is implemented in three separate loops to provide for maximum cooling performance and therefore maximum overclock headroom on all components.

After several months of putting the polishing touches on this project, I've finally got around to annotating some of the pics I took during the build for those of you who might be interested in seeing something a bit different with a Lian-Li PC-343B Cube Case.

The key mod I've made here is in converting the motherboard tray to a horizontal configuration and implementing the aforementioned cooling system in a fairly unique manner.

My key design goals when starting this project were:

Build a chassis complete with cooling that would last several generations of electronics
Build something that would stretch my capabilities as a hobby PC modder
Build a completed system that was as good if not better than something a custom mod shop would build or a high-end system builder in terms of aesthetics, servicability, and modularity.
Build a cooling system that would pass the XtremeSystems test of no-compromise performance
Build a system that was challenging and agressive and could stand up to the scrutiny of my peers

The following are just a couple of sample pictures. For a complete set of pictures please visit my build log on XtremeSystems.org

(click to enlarge the following pictures)

System Components:

System: DFI 680i LT Motherboard, G0 Q6600 Quad-Core Processor, Mushkin PC2-8500 2x2GB RAM, 2xEVGA 8800GTX Graphics Cards (Volt modded) in SLI, Dell 30"/20" monitors, X-Fi Sound Card, 4x74GB Raptor HD's on Areca 1210 RAID card, Vista x64 Ultimate OS
Cooling: (with Aquaero Control)
CPU Loop: Apogee GTX Block, PA120.3 Radiator, DDC Ultra Pump
GPU Loop: EK Full cover blocks x2, PA120.2 Radiator, DDC Ultra Pump
PSU Loop: 2xAlphacool watercooled PSUs, Alphacool chipset blocks, Alphacool PhysX block, PA120.2 Radiator, DDC Ultra Pump
Case:: Customized Lian Li PC-343B Cube
Current OC: 3.3GHz (366x9) @ 1.425Vcore RAM: Linked 1100Mhz 5-4-4-12 2T

Links to More Pictures...

The Finished System

The Build Log

Water Cooling Tubing Review

2007-09-01T01:08:00.000-07:00

Thanks in large part to Gary at SidewinderComputers.com, I am able to bring you this review of 18 different types of water cooling tubing. Gary provided me with a couple of feet of most of the tubing in this review from his rather extensive collection available online. I also procured a few different types myself that Sidewinder does not carry such as Primoflex and Masterkleer.

The 18 different types of tubing reviewed include a variety of thick and thin-wall 1/2" tubing, a selection of 7/16" tubing and some 3/8" tubing. The tubing reviewed is pictured below (with larger tubing on the left and smaller on the right).

My review is broken down into four general sections as follows:

General Description
Clarity
Bend Radius & Resistance to Kinking
Barb Compatibility

General Description:

The basic brands of tubing evaluated here include:

Tygon R-3603: Clear laboratory grade tubing available in a wide range of sizes
Tygon R-3400: Black UV resistant tubing available in a few sizes
Tygon R-1000: Clear soft vinyl tubing
Duralene PVC: A less expensive clear PVC tubing
Primoflex: Available in UV reactive colors (blue, red, green, and clear) - soft and flexible
MasterKleer: Inexpensive, ubiquitous, clear 7/16" ID 5/8" OD tubing

Note that Tygon, Duralene, and even MasterKleer are made by Saint Gobain Performance Plastics.

Where to buy: All of the Tygon/Duralene products are available from Sidewinder. MasterKleer is available from almost any water cooling shop and as far as I've seen, Primoflex is only available from Performance PC's.

Pictures:

The following picture shows the 1/2" tubing selection reviewed here. Note how the tacky silicone like texture of the Primoflex is a dust magnet. The colors of the cut cross-sections are indicative of the overal tint of the tubing.... that is, the Primoflex has an almost purple hue, while the R-1000 has a yellow tint and the Duralene has a very slight blue tint.

The next picture shows the 1/2" thin-wall tubing and 7/16" tubing selection. Again note the color of the cut cross-sections which are exagerating the tint of the tubing.

The next picture shows the small bore 3/8" tubing selection. Note the relative thick walls of the Primoflex in this picture compared to the others.

Durometer:

McMaster has a great description of Durometer hardness and an excellent picture...

Durometer is the international standard for measuring the hardness of rubber,
plastic, and most nonmetallic materials. The hardness of a material is its
resistance to surface penetration. Harder materials have more wear resistance,
but they are also less flexible.

The tubing in this review can be ranked as follows from hardest to softest:

Tygon R-3400: Rated durometer of 64
Duralene: Rated durometer of 55 but this is definitely wrong... more like 60
MasterKleer: Very close to Duralene... estimate it to be 60
Tygon R-3603: Rated durometer of 55
Primoflex: Estimate it to be about 45
Tygon R-1000: Rated durometer of 40

Here's a picture showing the effect that durometer has on kink resistance or allowing the tubing to maintain it's tubular shape in relatively tight bends. In this photo, all three types of tubing have the same dimensions (ID and wall thickness) but dramatically different durometer ratings. As you can see with this tight radius, the high durometer R-3400 is able to maintain its shape without kinking while the lesser durometer tubing cannot.

Durometer is something to pay attention to when choosing the right tubing for your application. In some cases, you can use thinner wall tubing with a higher durometer to maintain the same kink-resistance as a thicker softer tubing. However, a very stiff composition such as the R-3400 will place a lot more tube torque on your blocks than softer tubing.

Clarity:

In this analysis, I used pieces of red heat-shrink to demonstrate the clarity and/or tint of the tubing. Pay attention to any change in hue of the red heat-shrink and the clarity of the letters on the heat-shrink wall.

In the following picture, you can see the difference in the major brands of tubing in the 1/2" thick-wall category. Note how the Primoflex clear is not really clear. It's actually very opaque and has a slight purple/blue tint. The Duralene is very clear but has a slight blue tint that turns the heat-shrink color slightly pink. Both brands of Tygon are similarly clear but the R-1000 does have a slightly yellow hue.

In the next picture, you can see the difference in clarity in the medium sized tubing. Note that MasterKleer is aptly named as it is the most clear in my observation. It has absolutely no tint and is very transparent. However, as many people know, MasterKleer does not stay clear very long... after 6 months in a loop consisting of a 10:1 distilled:Pentosin coolant mixture, the Masterkleer is anything but clear (second picture below). The others are similar to their larger versions above.

MasterKleer after 6 months in a loop:

The smaller tubing samples all exhibit the same clarity attributes of their bigger counterparts...

Bend Radius and Resistance to Kinking

Most tubing in this review has a bend radius in the 1.5" to 2" range, which of course translates into bend diameter of about 3-4". Perhaps coincidentally, this also corresponds to the distance between barbs on NB/SB blocks on a typical Intel motherboard. Since the point at which a tube starts to kink is a very subjective measure, I decided to take another more objective approach and allow you to judge for yourself. The collection of photos below were all taken in an identical way and then combined in Photoshop for easy comparison.

The testing simply shows how well the various tube samples hold their shape when subjected to barb distances of either 4 or 3 inches. The test jig is rather simple as shown in the photo below... An MCW-30 with an appropriate barb is clamped to the bench with the barb centered over the 1" mark on the ruler. I then adjusted the tube to the 4 or 5 inch mark on the ruler as shown and took a photo of the tube's shape so you can gauge how it behaves with a 3 or 4 inch barb-to-barb distance respectively.

Using these photos and knowing the barb-to-barb distance you have to work with, you can easily assess whether your desired tubing will hold its shape sufficiently to your satisfaction or not.

The first photo below shows how the various thick-wall 1/2" tubing performed with a 4-inch bend. Note how all the samples don't show any signs of kinking.

The next photo shows how the various thick-wall 1/2" tubing performed with a 3-inch bend (likely exceeding their rated minimum bend radius). All the samples are showing some signs of flattening but are still usable except for the R-1000 which has almost fully kinked due to it's very soft durometer.

The next photo shows how the various thin-wall 1/2" tubing performed with a 4-inch bend. Note that the extra 1/32" wall thickness on the R-3603 in the top pic allows it to maintain it's shape while it's slightly thinner wall counterpart just below is fully kinked. This illustrates the importance of wall thickness in bend radius.

None of these samples could avoid kinking with a 3-inch bend so that photo is ommited.

The next photo shows how the various 7/16" tubing performed with a 4-inch bend. The R-3603 with 1/8" wall (top) has a slight kink while the Masterkleer with similar wall but higher durometer is not showing any deformation at all just like the thicker walled R-3603. The thin-wall R-3400 is starting to noticably flatten at the apex. At any rate, all of the tubing in this situation could be used without much restriction.

The next photo shows how the various 7/16" tubing hold up under a tighter 3-inch bend. Now the 3/8" ID and 5/8" OD Tygon and Masterkleer samples are both showing signs of flattening at the apex while the thicker wall R-3603 holds its shape nicely. The thin-wall R-3400 has collapsed comletely at this bend radius.

The last photo shows how the various 3/8" tubing holds up under a 3-inch bend. Here, the Primoflex is looking very good while the others are noticably flattening at the apex. In fact, it should be noted that the low durometer of the Primoflex also allows it to easily manage bends in multiple planes.

Overall, the best tubing for kink resistance is one which has the thickest walls in proportion to it's diameter with the highest durometer being a second consideration. Thus the Tygon R-3603 7/16" ID with 11/16" OD (1/8" wall thickness) provides the best kink resistance of the tubing suitable for 1/2" barbs. For 3/8" tubing, the Primoflex 3/8" ID - 5/8" OD (1/8" wall) is by far the best choice for kink resistance on tight bends.

Barb Compatibility

As most folks know, 7/16" tubing fits snugly enough over 1/2" barbs that it forms a water-tight seal without the need for clamps. The picture below illustrates the difference in how snugly 1/2" and 7/16" tubing fit over a typical 1/2" barb.

For those people considering compression barbs, such as those made by Koolance (which I am very partial to) you should note that you can only use thin-wall 1/2" tubing with their 1/2" compression fittings. You can also use 7/16" ID - 5/8" OD but it fits so snugly it will be frustrating and possibly damaging to get tightened or untightened. I really recommend 1/16" wall thickness tubing with Koolance 1/2" compression fittings which really limits your tube routing to large bends.

The 3/8" Koolance compression fittings are compatible with all 3/8" ID - 1/2" OD tubing.

AC Power Consumption (680i, Quad, 8800GTX)

2007-06-10T01:46:00.000-07:00

I recently picked up an AC power meter and set about measuring the power consumption of Project RainMaker's bench setup (quad-core system) as well as my old AMD X2 system. The results were surprising!

Here's the latest bench setup... (excuse the mess)

(click to enlarge)

It includes the following:

DFI NF680i LT
X3220 OC'd to 3.6GHz at 1.55V
Single SATA HD and SATA Optical Drive
DDC-2 Pump
4x120mm Fans
Corsair 520W PSU

For graphics cards, I have an old POS MX4000 PCI card (seen lying on the anti-static mat above) and my recently purchased volt modded 8800GTX (installed in the pic above). I tried the power draw with both cards as you can see below.

I also tested the power consumption of my 2-year old 24/7 AMD X2 system with 7900GS for comparison.

(click to enlarge)

Here is a description of the tests (note I rounded to the nearest 5W):

Boot: The maximum observed power draw while turning the system on and booting Vista. FYI... The maximum draw appears to be when the graphics drivers load in Vista after the scrolling progress bars disappear.

Idle: This is the draw after Vista has booted and all HD activity has stopped.

Sm FFT: This is loading all cores (2 on the AMD System and 4 on the X3220) with PRIME 25.2 Small FFT. Max power draw remains steady and doesn't fluctuate at all during this test.

+3DM06: While continuing to run PRIME in the background, I launched 3DM06. The max power draw I observed was during the initial graphics sequence where everyone is still in the landing ship. The rest of the time, the power consumption may be lower by 10-20W. I could not run this test on the POS MX4000.

Comments:

Given that Jonny has measured the efficiency of this Corsair PSU at about 80%, and the peak AC draw with the 8800GTX was 575W, that means the PSU was delivering about 460W DC. That's alot!
The 8800GTX adds an additional AC draw of 115W (92W DC) over a mundane GPU even when it's not doing ANYTHING. I haven't even started to leverage the volt mods and overclocking much yet. Although I should point out that the BIOS currently on my 8800GTX does not have 2D clock settings so the core and shader are running at full speed which obviuosly increases the power draw during idle.
Given that the final system will include 4 raptors, an Areca RAID card, an X-Fi, another cooling loop with DDC pump, and misc. lighting, there is no doubt that a 500+W PSU is NOT up to the task.
While my new quad-core system is at least double (if not triple) the performance of my old AMD system, it doesn't come cheap... It consumes over double the power at load!

If you are interested in what I used to test... it's a simple energy meter purchased at Canadian Tire for $25, similar to the Killawatt device that's ubiquitious in the US. It stores the max power and current, includes an overload warning, a feature to set and monitor energy costs and a battery function to maintain collected data even after it's disconnected from the power.

DFI NF680i LT: Tips, Tricks, and Known Issues

2007-06-06T01:18:00.000-07:00

This article will be an ongoing list of tips, tricks, and known issues related to the DFI NF680i LT motherboard and overclocking the NVIDIA 680i in general.

It is compiled from forums that I frequent. I'll keep this blog post as up to date as I can. Please comment on any further tips, issues, or inaccuracies please!

DFI NF680i Overclocking Tips:

Tony's Overclocking BIOS Guide

Can be found on the TheTechRepository.com.

If you are overclocking a quad-core, then Kris' article on GTL at the TTR is essential reading also.

Note that the GTL reference voltage settings are mis-labeled in BIOS... the three settings are actually for CPU Core 0/1; CPU Core 2/3; and NB. There is some information on the Club Forums as to how the GTL values may translate into real-world values.

Tony and Kris also have a lot of excellent articles on memory overclocking, straps, 1T vs. 2T, GTL, etc. Check them out.

DFI Club NF680i Information

A comprehensive thread with links to a lot of relevant articles and information can be found as a sticky on the DFI Club Forums.

Victor Wang's Overclocking Tips

Victor Wang has done his usual magic, overclocking the boards to Xtreme levels and had these tips to share from his thread on XtremeSystems...

1) Do not disable EBD and VT in cpu feature.
2) NB and PWM must have active cooling, especially when running Quad-Core.
3) When running C2D, you do not have to change the GTL settings.
4) See the thread for info on his GTL and voltage settings.

Cjosephmo's High FSB Overclocking Tips:

Some good tips posted by cjosephmo over on the DFI Club Forums...

I noticed that the difference between BSELECT 6 & 7 (or 350 and 350 cpu strap respectively) is that 6 is locked on 350 and 7 is 350 but also somehow automatically adjusts internal chipset latencies as the fsb rises. 6 does not. You need to use 7 or Auto for fsb's far above 350. I have not been able to boot with anything else.

Voltage changes on the NB change latencies on the chip making RAM and other chipset related things change in performance. I bench 11733 READ in everest with 1.39v NB and 9700~ with 1.30v. The more voltage you give it, the higher it performs. It has still been unnecessary for me to go above 1.42 for stability.

If the board does not post even after a cmos clear, it's usually because you have higher end ram that requires more voltage. You can either mod your bios to default at a higher voltage Or you can try this semi consistant method:
Remove all but one stick of RAM, clear the cmos and upon the first boot, hold the power button for a little bit longer than normal (about 2 seconds). This will usually work for me.

NOTE: On my processor/board BSEL has no effect on performance except that BSEL7 will not boot.

Pedro Rocha's Memory Overclocking Tips

Pedro has some memory bandwidth optimization tips in his mini review on XS...

- Always use yellow slots for much higher bandwith
- If you use the orange slots with 1T you can OC the memory a bit more (5 to 10Mhz) you will loose on bandwith
- At least in the orange slots if you use more than 2.55v real VDim (around 2.67 set in bios) the board will only detected 1 stick of DDR2 (see capture above)
- As always bandwith depenpends on cup multiplier / strap - for my QX6700 the sweat spot seems to be 11x - do some testing with your cpu by comparing everest mem read.

NOTE: I was not able to gain anything by using the yellow slots with my memory. See my related article.

DFI NF680i Tips and Quirks:

BIOS POST Codes

Not sure why this isn't in the manual but the post codes are here on the DFI Club Forums.

Vista and Speed Stepping

With BIOS settings at default, even with C1E disabled, Vista will want to utilize speed stepping to down-clock your CPU when idle. You can stop Vista from doing this by setting your power profile to "High Performance" in Control Panel > Power Options.

Measuring vDimm / vCore

Flytek was kind enough to provide a picture showing the necessary DMM measurement points for vDimm and vCore on this board. Be careful and poke your board with DMM probes at your own risk! The pic can be found in his post on Xtremesystems.

Voltage Accuracy

Using the DMM measurement points above, I measured both CPU VID and VDimm and found that although what you set is NOT what you get, the BIOS readings at the bottom of the Voltage settings screen are accurate.

I also compared NB voltages settings to BIOS readings and found a consistent 0.12V droop at all mid-range NB voltage settings. This is significant as the NB voltage setting is very misleading.

Full measurements can be found near the bottom of this page.

Air Cooling?

Ensure the PWM area is getting good airflow. This has been causing lots of issues for people overclocking.

Jobeo got a Tuniq Tower fitted on his board complete with the audio module and stock NB heat sink (but as he mentions, be sure to fit those components first). See his thread on the DFI Club Forums.

For the NB Heatsink, only use a TINY amount of TIM if any at all. The surface of the silicon is glass smooth and the area is so small that only a pin-head of TIM is really required.

Most agree that the best orientation of the NB heatsink is to mount it such that the upright portion is closest to the CPU stocket instead of the PCIE socket. This ensures the heat pipes terminate directly above the NB chip.

If you are looking for a fan to clip on to the stock NB heatsink... the clips are designed for a 60x60x10+mm fan (a 10mm is a bit too loose and a 15mm is simply too thick to use with the stock clips). Pics and info here on the DFI Club Forums.

More info on air cooling alternatives in this thread at the Club Forums.

Craig from XS has some great tips for mounting the stock NB heatsink:
- Mine must have been stuck on wrong then as my triangle bit was near the PCI-E slot & if you fitted the heatsink tower to PCI-E slot the you ended up with a triple foam pad thickness PCI-E side & double on the CPU side.
- I took my triangle off & tested the board & I then realised the 680 chip is not in the centre of the 4 hook mounting but rather its off centre toward the CPU socket & logically I figured the NB heatsink heatpipe would be better over the chip than off to the side so I rotated the heatsink.
- My temps are way better tower to CPU socket rather than tower to PCI-E.

NOTE: Normal NB Temps while overclocking should be around 50-deg.

Water Cooling

MIPS has an excellent set of water blocks specifically designed for this board.

The Swiftech MCW-30 will also fit on both the SB and NB although tube torque may cause it to perform poorly by tilting the block off the surface of the NB. Be sure to use a shim or at least keep the padded stock shim in place to reduce this as much as possible and avoide having the block short out one of the adjacent surface mount components.

Dimensions for NB and SB Heatsink Retention

If you are considering an aftermarket NB/SB heat sink or water block, The NB uses loops which form a square that is 50x60mm. The MCW-30 will fit on the NB using the supplied wire-clip hooks.

The SB uses push pins which have a center-to-center distance of 53mm. The MCW-30 will also fit on here without interferring with either adjacent x16 PEG slot.

Flashing BIOS

It's important to note that you should NOT load previous bios settings from CMOS Reloaded after flashing the BIOS. The old settings may not map to the new BIOS correctly resulting in unwanted effects and possible damage. Make sure you copy your favorite settings down before flashing so you can reset them.

At this time, Winflash does not work on Vista x64. It throws an error saying "Onboard BIOS not Award BIOS".

You can flash the BIOS using a floppy or using a bootable USB flash stick. If using a USB flash stick, be sure to edit the autoexec.bat file that accompanies the BIOS file and flash utility to set (or simply remove) the drive/path reference to AWDFLASH.

Board Shutting Off? Possible reasons why...

There is an automatic temperature shutdown feature in BIOS called "Shutdown Temperature" under the PC Health Status section of BIOS. This temperature corresponds to the first temperature reported by Speedfan (Temp1). If this temperature reaches the value set in BIOS, the board will shut itself off. You may misinterpret this as a crash... this is not the case!

I've found with my quad-core at high OC while stress testing with small FFT's that I can easily hit the default BIOS shutdown temperature after 5-10 minutes. Simply increasing it a notch or disabiling it while stress testing is all that's needed. Be sure to set it back later so you can protect your CPU from damage.

In the 521 Beta BIOS this option is disabled by default.

Other reasons for the board shutting off under load that have been confirmed by others include:
- Having SB Voltage over 1.74V was the cause of repeated shutdowns after 20+ minutes of PRIME by C-N on XS
- Lack of adequate cooling on the PWM heatsink has been known to cause hard shutdowns under severe loads. Ensure that your CPU heat sink is not significantly warping the motherboard causing the PWM heat sink to loose contact with the underlying components... either add some additional TIM, thermal pads, or ideally get a backplate if you are using an aftermarket cooler.

Monitoring Voltages/Temps

BIOS, Speedfan, and SmartGaurdian all pull monitoring values from the ITE SuperIO Chip the IT8712F which includes voltages and a few temps (CPU, NB, and SB).

Note that the temp in BIOS called "PWM Area" is mislabled... this is actually the NB temp. This has been fixed in the 521 Beta BIOS.

The CPU temp pulled from the IO chip should not be trusted... CoreTemp is the best source of true CPU temps. Both Everest and Speedfan also pull the same data from the same registers as CoreTemp so you can use Speedfan or Everest to do the same thing. With Speedfan, you simply need to add a 15-deg C offset to the reported values to make them match with Coretemp (it's built-in offset is not correct but the values from the registers are).

Speedfan can see Vcore, the HT Voltage, and the NB Voltage but initially displays them as Vcore1, Vcore2, and 3.3V... simply rename them with the proper labels.

Unfortunatly Speedfan current doesn't seem to report the VDimm or SB Voltage, but not a big deal. It also can't control the fans which is a shame... you need SmartGaurdian for that (why is it so damn ugly!).

SmartGuardian's "Chipset" is actually the NB temp while "System" is the SB temp.

Hopefully a future version of Speedfan will offer more comprehensive monitoring of this board. I've logged an issue with the developer of Speedfan.

General 680i Overclocking Guides:

EVGA 680i Overclocking Guide

Although the DFI boad is completely different from the EVGA product, this article may have some relevant information for you as background if nothing else.

It can be found here on the EVGA forums.

This guide was compiled by a Danish fellow affiliated with www.hwt.dk known around XS as Illuminati.

680i RAM Timings Guide

Illuminati also compiled this excellent RAM Timings guide for 680i overclockers... available on XtremeSystems.org or on the EVGA forums. Again, this guide was crafted with the EVGA board in mind, but the information may be relevant for DFI boards as well.

Kunnak's ASUS 680i Tips, Glitchs, Things to Know and More

This article is also based on a board other than the DFI, in this case the ASUS P5N32-E SLI, and may also be of limited use to DFI owners. At any rate, some information here may be relevant.

Found on XtremeSystems.org.

Installing Vista x64 with 4GB of RAM:

A lot of people (including those with EVGA boards) report having trouble with BSOD during Vista x64 installation with 4GB of RAM. This happened to me also. It turns out this is an issue with Vista and there is a patch available. More info is available in MS KB article 929777. A work around is to remove memory from the board so you have 2GB or less when installing Vista x64, then apply the patch after installation before adding back your additional RAM.

Kudo's to "nugzo" on XS for pointing this out.

DFI NF680i LT Issues:

If anyone has solutions or work-arounds for these, please comment.

On-Board RAID

There may be a problem with RAID performance (with this board and/or 680I chipsets in general). It needs to be tested by more people before we can conclude anything, but Raju's initial test was not showing great performance. Something appears to be limiting throughput.

Enermax Galaxy PSU

One person could not post with the Enermax Galaxy 1000W PSU (EGX1000EWL). Confirmation here. At least one other person has had no problems with this PSU and board combination.

UPDATE: It appears the 4+4 connector is the one to use... the 8-pin ATX connector can cause a no-post condition as reported on XtremeSystems.

nTune

Currently nTune is not able to read a variety of voltages and some system bus information from this board.

Temperature Monitoring

Currently only CoreTemp can be trusted. There are apparently issues with SmartGuardian and even DFI's own BIOS reading. Everest works but the values are labeled incorrectly. Since Speedfan also supports CoreTemp you can use it (although it will require offset adjustments as noted below).

Speedfan

See monitoring above.

Speedfan's core temperatures need to be corrected by 15-deg. C to match CoreTemp.

Speedfan does not report the CPU fan speed correctly. It also does not report other fan's correctly, nor can it control fans (use SmartGuardian for fan control).

The temperatures reported by Speedfan are in this order: CPU (?), NB, SB, ACPI (useless), Core Temps. Voltages are (in order) Vcore, HT, NB, and then as labeled.

WinFlash

At this time, Winflash does not work in Vista x64. It throws an error saying "Onboard BIOS not Award BIOS".

GTL BIOS Settings

Note that the GTL reference voltage settings are mis-labeled in BIOS... the three settings are actually for CPU Core 0/1; CPU Core 2/3; and NB. There is some information on the Club Forums as to how the GTL values may translate into real-world values.

Processor Multi

Prior to the 521 Beta Bios there is no option to adjust multi's on non-extreme quads or access multi's above 10 on extreme processors. This has been fixed in the 521 Beta BIOS... Use 2CTST for non-extreme processors (including Q6600) and the 4CTST for all extreme processors.

BIOS Voltage Settings

I've found that the BIOS voltage settings (particularly at more extreme values) consistently undervolt significantly. For example, setting CPU VID to 1.60V in BIOS will actually translate to 1.53V. Setting NB Core to 1.6V results in 1.47V. Don't just assume that what you set is what you get.

Check out this screen shot for an example of what I mean.

Update: I compared NB voltages settings to BIOS readings and found a consistent 0.12V undervolt at all mid-range NB voltage settings.

Here are my full measurements:

CPU VID:

BIOS...
Set: 1.6000V
BIOS Reading: 1.53V
Fluke DMM: 1.54V

Windows (Idle)...
Speedfan/SmartGuardian: 1.55V
Fluke DMM: 1.56V

Windows (PRIME Small FFT)...
Speedfan/SmartGuardian: 1.49V
Fluke DMM: 1.50V

Overall, BIOS readings and Speedfan/SmartGaurdian are close enough to actual Voltages to consider them legit.

VDimm:

Set: 2.34V
BIOS: 2.27V
SmartGaurdian: 2.27
DMM: 2.28V

Again, BIOS readings are close to actual. Droop under load is about 0.01V.

NB:

Since I don't have a DMM measurement point for the NB, I just checked a variety of settings and BIOS/SmartGuardian readings...

Set / Get

1.60 / 1.47
1.57 / 1.45
1.54 / 1.42
1.51 / 1.39
1.48 / 1.37

There is a consistent undervolt of 0.12V on the NB... If the BIOS reading is correct (as it was with Vcore and Vdimm above) then this is very misleading... keep this in mind when overclocking to a high FSB.

High VDimm after CMOS Jumper Clear

One user on XS has fried his RAM and board after clearing CMOS using the jumper... it came back from CMOS clear with VDimm at 3.04V. People have had consistent success using the reset/power switch to clear CMOS rather than the jumper. Perhaps using this technique can help save BIOS issues like this. YMMV.

CPU Throttling even with C1E disabled

If you are experiencing C1E throttling with your CPU, and have C1E and power profiles disabled (Vista) then you may want to check out this thread at DFI Club as the problem is still open as of the last update to this blog post.

BIOS Change Log:

This is a list of BIOS changes that have been reported informally by users.

BIOS 521

Moved to non-BETA status on June 6th. The 2CTST version should be used with all non-extreme processors (including Q6600) while the 4CTST version should be used with Extreme processors.

PC Health and Status:
- Temperature shutdown defaults to disabled
- NB Temp correctly labeled
- New option for CPU temp offset

FSB:
- Multi option is now available for both non-extreme quads and extreme processors.

No performance improvements have been reported with this BIOS.

Helpful Links:

DFI:

DFI Global Website
DFI Club Forums
DFI NF680i LT Product Page (North America)
DFI NF680i LT Manual (direct link: 12MB)
DFI NF680i LT Official BIOS Page
DFI NF680i LT Beta BIOS Page

NVIDIA:

NVIDIA Drivers
NVIDIA Overclocking Guide (direct link: 16MB)
NVIDIA nTune Software and Guide
NVIDIA Networking Guide (direct link: 784K)

Forums:

Other Resources:

TheTechRepository.com (excellent articles on all aspects of overclocking)

DFI NF680i LT Memory Slots (Orange or Yellow?)

2007-06-05T23:48:00.000-07:00

It's been reported that you should use the yellow slots for increased memory bandwidth and the orange slots for higher clocks with 1T (Link - see post 30/31). So I tried running my Mushkin PC2-8500 2x2GB kit in both the orange and yellow slots to see if there was any truth to this... well, here are my results...

(click to enlarge)

Comments:

Strangely, I could not get the board to POST with the RAM running at 1T in the yellow slots.
At 1100MHz running 2T command rate, there was no difference between the yellow and orange slots with my memory.
Oddly, when switching RAM between slots, the board requires a CMOS clear to POST. Then after adjusting settings (loading from cmos reloaded profiles for example) and rebooting, it would hang on POST code #75 for 2 minutes before rebooting normally. I'm not sure why it does this, but be patient when it appears hung.
As noted in my earlier memory overclocking article, 1T is marginally faster at 800MHz than 2T at 1100MHz (at least according to Everest... Sisoft Sandra has 1T slightly slower).

Memory Overclocking on the DFI NF680i LT

2007-05-24T21:22:00.000-07:00

I recently spent some time overclocking my Mushkin PC2-8500 2x2GB sticks on the DFI NF680i LT. Given my current max stable overclock is at 400x8, I decided to try and get the lowest latency at 1T that was possible at a 1:1 DDR2-800 speed and then focus on using unlinked mode to get the highest MHz possible out of this RAM at a 2T command rate.

Interesting Observations:

4GB vs 2GB: I was expecting the 4GB kit to be much less cooperative than a typical 2GB kit, but I was pleasantly surprised that at max rated voltage of 2.3V, this RAM can both run well at low latency at 1T and high MHz at 2T with relative ease. Vista x64 loves RAM and it's working smoothly so far. The only hiccup I had was during the Vista x64 install... See my Tips/Tricks article for more info.
1T vs T2: As you will see, 800MHz at 1T is faster than 1120MHz at 2T. I could maintain 1T at 2.3V up to 900MHz but the performance suffered running out of sync. I really need a BIOS that allows me to set the x8 multi on my X3220 so I can try to run 450x8 and increase memory performance by running 1T at 900MHz.
CAS: Even increasing the voltage above rated values would not allow the machine to POST with CAS3 with this RAM. CAS4 is the sweet spot for low-latency... CAS5 at high MHz.
Testing: Memtest+ 1.7 is a great tool for testing RAM, but it takes about 45 minutes to do a full pass with 4GB. As a rule of thumb, I always test any RAM overclock with a pass of Memtest before booting Windows and have never had a corrupt OS as a result. Of course, once in Windows, Super Pi and Everest are great quick benchmarking tools.
Voltage: As with most Voltage settings in BIOS on the DFI NF680i LT, the DRAM Voltage needs to be set higher than actual... usually by 2 steps... that is on my machine setting 2.38 = 2.30 actual. Under load Vdimm will only droop about 0.01V. I verified SmartGuardian with my DMM and it was usually within 0.01V as well.
Timing Guide: I used Illumanati's 680i RAM Timing Guide in establishing my baselines. I'll repeat his advice here for the benefit of everyone else along with my own comments...

Illumanati's RAM Timing Guide:

tCL:
Large influence on stability / Medium influence on bandwidth
From CAS 5 to 4 results change ~5-10mb/s. The same change will most likely be seen when going to CAS 3.
This timing is widely seen as most important (Command rate disregarded).
Recommendation: 4 for normal usage, 5 when oc'ing. Tweaked: 3.
[VR: As mentioend above CAS3 = No POST!; CAS4 at 800MHz; CAS5 at 1120MHz]

tRCD:
Medium influence on stability / Large influence on bandwidth
tRCD going from 4 to 3 gives ~15mb/s. From 5 to 4 also yields 10-15mb/s.
This timing is considered second important after CAS, but actually it's more important on 680i/DDR2.
Recommendation: 4 for oc/normal usage. 5 if you want to push mhz. Tweaked: 3
[VR: Used 3 at 800MHz and 5 at 1100MHz]

tRP:
Medium/small influence on stability / Small influence on bandwidth
Results vary close to nothing when changing from 3 to 4 to 5.
Still this timing needs to finish its cycle before a new one starts, so dont set it higher than 5.
Recommendation: 4 for oc/normal usage. 5 if you want to push mhz. Tweaked: 3
[VR: I used 3 at 800Mhz and 5 at 1100MHz]

tRAS:
Small influence on stability / Small influence on bandwidth
tRAS seems to act differently on integer/float results. Integer, going from 15 to 10 changes by ~5mb/s. Float doesnt change.
tRAS is an "end-timing", so dont go to high. And not lower than what tCL+tRCD equals.
Recommendation: 12 for oc/normal usage. 15 if you want to push mhz. Tweaked: 8
[VR: At 800MHz I tried 6 and 8 with no noticable difference in SuperPI or Everest. I think at 6, the RAM/NB is ignoring this setting as this is less than tCL+tRCD; At 1100MHz I used the Mushkin SPD value of 18]

tRRD:
Small influence on stability / Small influence on bandwidth
tRRD of 2 didnt change the results. Nor did a tRRD of 4. This is a delay-timing so a too low value may result in recalculation.
Recommendation: Auto for oc/normal usage. 4 if you want to push mhz. Tweaked: 2
[VR: Used recommended values of 2 at 800MHz and 4 at 1100MHz]

tRC:
Medium influence on stability / Large influence on bandwidth
This timing is quite surprising. Going from 30 to 21 gave ~90mb/s. From 23 to 21 gave ~15-20mb/s.
tRC is last timing before ram burst (data transfer).
Dont set too high. And tRC should be greater than tRAS + tRP or you might get corruption.
Recommendation: 21 for normal usage. 30 if you want to push mhz. Tweaked: 15
[VR: I tried a variety of tRC values from 1 to 12 at 800MHz... it made little to no difference and I suspect ultra low settings are being ignored by the RAM/NB anyway. At 1100MHz, I used the recommended value of 30]

tWR:
Small influence on stability / Small influence on bandwidth
Small change from 6 to 3. Setting timing too low will cause ram to fail switching to "read mode".
Recommendation: Auto for oc/normal usage. 6 if you want to push mhz. Tweaked: 3
[VR: I tried values from 3-5 at 800MHz with little to no difference. I used 6 at 1100MHz]

tWTR:
Large influence on stability / Small influence on bandwidth
From 10 to 8 didnt change results. 6 would lock up the system. This timing gives no bonus but affects stability a lot. Use with care.
Recommendation: Auto for oc/normal usage. 10 if you want to push mhz. Tweaked: 8(7)
[VR: I tried 7, 8, and 9 at 800MHz with no difference. I used the recommended value of 10 for 1100MHz]

tREF:
Small influence on stability / Small influence on bandwidth
Changing to 3,9us didnt show improvements in benchmark. It also didnt seem to affect stability. tREF was important with DDR1.
Recommendation: Auto for oc/normal usage. 7,8us if you want to push mhz. Tweaked: 3,9us
[VR: I tried setting this to 3.9us in BIOS but Memset showed it at 7.8us so I wonder if BIOS was ignoring my setting? I ended up just leaving it at 7.8 for both 800MHz and 1100MHz]

Command Rate:
Settings are 2T/1T. You probably already know a lot about this timing.
The 680i struggles running 1T above 800mhz. So do the ram - atleast 2,2v are needed.
This timing gives a great boost to bandwidth, but is fairly hard to attain.
I wont recommend any setting regarding this timing. You need to find what mhz you get with 1T, then find mhz with 2T, then compare benchmarks.
[VR: 1T was easy to achieve at 800MHz and was actually stable up to 900MHz. Obviusly, 2T was used for 1100MHz.]

Screen-shots and Benchmarks:

(Click any pic to enlarge.)

800MHz 1T BIOS Memory Timing Screen...

800MHz 1T PRIME stable for 9+hrs...

800MHz 1T Everest Benchmark Results...

800MHz 1T SuperPi 1M...

800MHz 1T SuperPi 32M...

1120MHz:

1120MHz Everest Benchmark... (note higher latency and lower bandwidth than 800MHz at 1T)

1120MHz SuperPi 1M...

1120MHz SuperPi 32M...

Stable Overclock on the DFI NF680i LT

2007-05-16T10:19:00.000-07:00

After taking a few different approaches to overclocking this board/CPU combo, I finally arrived at a 8hr PRIME stable overclock... (click to enlarge images)

With tweaked memory for low-latency (4-3-3-8 1T)...

GTL

An interesting fact is that my stable GTL settings are radically different from the recommended values. I initially discovered this by accident... I originally tried a GTL 2/3 value similar to GTL 0/1 out of frustration and thinking (now erroneously) that perhaps the two GTL settings should be similar.

Later, when I was trying to get Vista to boot at 3.8GHz for fun, I tried every GTL value (changing by 10 and then 5 and then 2) to narrow in on GTL values that would just allow Vista to boot at 3.8GHz... this reinforced my earlier findings... at high FSB overclocks, GTL 2/3 for me had to be close to GTL 0/1. While I'm certain this is not the case for others, it definitely worked out for my particular CPU/board combo.

My situation is most certainly an endorsement for having GTL tuning... since without the ability to tweak GTL values significantly like this, I would not have been able to make this overclock stable. Although without another board without GTL tuning (i.e. the EVGA 680i) to evaluate this theory, I will never really know for sure.

Voltages

In some cases, there is a significant difference between what is set in BIOS and the actual voltage.

Here are my voltage settings, and the actual values reported by BIOS:

CPU VID: 1.6V / 1.53V
DRAM Voltage: 2.34V / 2.30V
NB Core Voltage: 1.74V / 1.6V
SB Core Voltage: 1.62V / 1.58V
HT Link Voltage: 1.60V / 1.58V

The NB is particularly bad as it is off about 0.12V at most settings.

Note that water cooling is essential for running these kinds of voltages on a quad-core.

BIOS Settings

Disabled full-screen logo to better see POST information...

No change...

No change...

Disabled IDE as I have a SATA optical drive...

Not using RAID...

Disabled all other devices...

Set to S3(STR)...

No change...

Set temperature threshold to maximum value as I was tripping the thermal shutdown at default settings...

See my comments on voltages above...

Run linked/synced for best memory performance...

No change... it's apparently important to leave these settings as is for overclocking...

Memory timings (I'll have a new blog post on memory overclocking soon)...

Not using the SI RAID controller so disabled it...

Overclocking Fun at 3.8GHz!!!

2007-05-15T22:41:00.000-07:00

For fun, I decided to see how high this board/CPU combo could go to just boot into Vista x64 (which can be a stability test of it's own!).

I maxed all the voltages in BIOS, set the FSB at 425x9 and tried to boot Vista... No go! After about 50 reboots, trying nearly every GTL setting there was, I finally got it to boot long enough to take this screen shot (click to enlarge).

It crashed immediately upon starting OCCT. :)

Apogee GTX on the DFI NF680i LT

2007-05-12T21:10:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd pop a few pictures in here of my bench setup for Project RainMaker... an X3220 on a DFI 680i LT -- using an Apogee GTX a DDC Ultra, and a Thermochill 120.2 with a couple of YL SL's on cooling duty.

I'm currently finding the OC on the bench (or the dining room table as it were) before I put it all in the Stacker.

Ultimately, I'll be cooling the NB, SB, and a GPU (TBD) via second loop. The equipment shown here will be my "production" cooling loop for the CPU.

Load temps under 4 instances of PRIME95 range from 58 to 63-deg C depending on the size of the FFT being executed! Idle temps are around 43-deg C. This is at a toasty 1.5 Vcore running 400x9 MHz.

The Apogee GTX is a sweet looking block. The Scythe backplate is also a nice addition... very solid... you can get it here. I had to modify it slightly as you will see below, cutting out some of the insulating sticky layer to work around some surface mount components that were under the backplate in one corner. I also had to bore out the holes to accept #6 screws for mounting the GTX.

Here you can see the backside of the motherboard... note the small surface mount components towards the upper right mounting hole... (remember, click any pic to enlarge)

I cut away some of the sticky insulating layer and used electrical tape as an insulator instead...

Here you can see how the cut-out fits around the surface mount components...

Here is the Apogee GTX mounted to the motheboard...

Here you can see how the backplate keeps the motherboard perfectly flat...

Finally, here's the cooling loop on the bench (er dining room table)...

Initial Overclocking on the DFI NF680i LT

2007-05-11T12:02:00.000-07:00

Here are my initial overclock results using what I would call the brute force method... pretty much max out the voltages and go for broke. At this point, I'm only overclocking the CPU... I'm keeping RAM underclocked so it's not contributing to any instability. I'll get to RAM overclocking once I've determined my max CPU overclock.

The next step with the CPU overclock is to scale back voltages one at a time to see what the overclock is sensative too... Allowing me to then understand what will need to be increased to go even higher.

UPDATE: This OC errored out Prime95 after about 10min... so it's not stable yet. I'm still tuning it.

Windows Screen Shot (OCCT Stable)...

Note that Load Temps ranged from 58 to 63-deg C.

BIOS Settings:

Project RainMaker: Benchtesting DFI 680i

2007-05-05T17:14:00.000-07:00

Well, the time has finally arrived for me to switch over to C2D after a couple of years on AMD X2. The new rig consists of the following components:

DFI 680i LT Motherboard
Intel Xeon X3220 Quad-Core CPU
Mushkin PC2-8500 4GB Kit (2x2GB) 5-4-4-1
Areca 1210 with 4x 74GB Raptors (which I reviewed here)

(Click images to enlarge)

For bench testing, I'm using the following scrap parts:

Corsair 520W PSU
EVGA MX4000 PCI GPU (What a POS... LOL!)
Old HD
SATA Optical Drive

I decided to hold off for a couple of weeks before buying a graphics card to see how the R600 plays out and how it affects pricing on the 8800GTX.

Cooling will ultimately be H2O with dual loops: a dedicated loop for the CPU using a Thermochill 120.2 and an Apogee GTX; a secondary loop for the chipsets, GPU, and water cooled PSU also running through a Thermochill 120.2. Both loops will be powered by a DDC-Ultra pump.

Anyway, enough blabber, here are some pics...

X3220 (L640F058)...

4GB of Mushkin RAM...

Stock Intel cooler for initial DOA testing (Note the warping of the motherboard... Not good!)

Assembled board with HSF and LanParty NB cooler...

The bench setup...

Using a 120mm fan for the NB for now...

The bench setup...

Did an initial pass in Memtest at SPD timings and a few hours of Orthos at stock settings to ensure everything is working to spec...(Wow... that sucker gets hot with the crappy Intel HSF on there!)

Areca RAID Controller and Performance

2007-04-28T23:56:00.000-07:00

I recently acquired an Areca 1210 RAID controller for my PC. Areca is a relative newcommer to the RAID storage scene compared to industry stalwards like Promise, Highpoint and 3Ware. However, it seems Areca has made a name for themselves with their extreme performance PCIe SATA RAID controllers that appeal to both IT professionals and computer performance enthusiasts alike.

In this article I will provide a brief overview of the product and a variety of benchmarks to compare the Areca's RAID0 performance with my motherboard nForce4 RAID controller.

Areca 1210 Features

Some of the key features of the Areca 1210 include:

PCI-e x8 bus
256MB On-board DDR-333 SDRAM Cache with ECC
4 SATA-II interfaces
Intel IOP 332 I/O Processor running at 500MHz
Write-through and Write-back cache support
Support for RAID 0, 1, and 5 support
Staggered hard drive spin-up
Full BIOS configuration control
HTTP Client configuration control for remote/Windows management (screen shot below - click to enlarge)

What separates the Areca controller from all motherboard and many other add-in RAID controllers is the 256MB of cache. This, as you will see, offers a huge advantage in burst as well as general usage since the controller can use this relatively large cache to buffer write backs and also use it for read-ahead caching.

Compatibility and Other Considerations

One of the main questions I had before purchasing this card, was would it work with my motherboard. Here's what I learned that may be helpful to other prospective buyers:

The Areca card has a physical x8 connector and will therefore physically slot into any x8 or x16 connector on your motherboard. The card will also negotiate available bandwidth from the bus so if the slot only has 1, 2, or 4 PCI-e lanes associated with it, the card will use whatever it can up to it's native 8 lanes. Areca confirms that there is a serious performance issue when using the card with a single PCI-e lane (capping throughput at 100Mbps) so be sure you have at least 2 or more lanes available to the card. Having said that, it's not necessary to go out of your way to run the card with a full 8 lanes... Consider that a single PCI-e lane is capable of 250MB/s of throughput in each direction, and you can see that even with 4 Raptors the card will not saturate 2 lanes.
Not all PCI-e x16 connectors on your motherboard are created equal. With my motherboard which has two such connectors for SLI, they either run in x1 and x16 mode (for single graphics cards) or in x8/x8 for SLI. Hence, I had to enable dual graphics cards in my BIOS to get the appropriate lane configuration for my connectors. Some SLI boards may not even support anything other than a graphics card in the second slot so investigate that with your board manufacturer before making any decisions. Most NF4 and P975/965 and newer motherboards should work just fine with the Areca card in the second x16 slot but try to confirm with Areca or your motherboard or with other users via the forum links below before you make a purchase.
If you are the owner of a ASUS A8N-SLI Premium like I was (at the time of this review), there is a known problem with running the Areca in the secondary PEG slot. Not surprisingly, it's a BIOS issue that ASUS never bothered to fix during the life of this product. At any rate, it required that I move my graphics card to the secondary PEG slot and install the Areca in the primary slot... a bit of hassle given my water cooling loop configuration, but once that was all sorted out, everthing worked like a charm.

Other questions and considerations you may have as I did:

Battery backup is not required to enable write-back caching. This does leave you exposed in the rare circumstance where your PC might suffer a power loss with unwritten data still in the cache. For home users, unless you are in South Carolina during a hurricane, the risk of loss is probably insignificant to justify the battery backup option and even a cheap UPS should put you at ease if this is really a concern. Areca does sell a batter backup option, but it is rediculously overpriced.
The controller comes with both a HSF (heatsink with fan) and a passive heat sink. The fan was clearly audible in my PC (which is water cooled and therefore fairly silent) so I replaced it with the passive sink. I have good airflow directly over the expansion cards and motherboard which is indicated as a prerequisite for using this heatsink configuration. It gets very warm to the touch further reinforcing that requirement.
Vista signed drivers are available for both x86 and x64. The only caveat with x64 is that as of this writing there was still no support for the HTTP management console in Vista x64 requiring that all configuration be done in BIOS. I'm not a fan of the HTTP management console as it requires an additional service to be running on your machine and changing my RAID configuration is not something I do often enough to need a GUI to do so.

Physical Product

The box and contents are shown in the pics below (WD Raptor not included!).

(As with any pics in this review, click to enlarge)

Besides the card itself, you get a passive heat sink, a half-height card bracket, a very good manual (unusual these days), driver CD, and 4 long SATA cables with right angle connectors on one end.

It's clear that Areca has it's focus on the IT market and not the average modder, because the location of the SATA connectors on this card is an absolute nightmare for trying to keep cabling unobtrusive and clean... The connectors are on the top-edge of the card near the bracket!

You can see in the next picture where the SATA cable connectors are... hardly an ideal location! I would have much preferred they be at the end of the card.

A good thing is that the card is only half height and not much longer than a x16 PCI-e slot connector. While it still may interfer slightly with aftermarket southbridge coolers, you can see from the following picture that at least I was able to maintain the use of my MCW-30 water block on the NF4 chip. (However, as noted above, this configuration was temporary as I later needed to swap the Areca and GPU).

BIOS Configuration and Drivers:

The installation and setup is very straight-forward and all options are very well explained in the accompanying manual. The basic install steps are:

Install the physical card and connect your drives to the SATA ports on the card
Boot your PC and wait for the Areca BIOS screen which will appear after your normal POST screen - Press TAB to enter BIOS within 5 seconds
In the BIOS configure your array or JBOD as you wish... be sure to enable write-back cache and read ahead caching for maximum performance. You may also wish to turn off array truncation if you are using matched disks to avoid loosing a bit of space (truncation will truncate all disks to the nearest 10GB that will fit on the smallest disk). For my Raptors this reduced a 148GB dual drive array to 140GB.
Reboot your PC and be sure to setup your machine BIOS to adjust the boot order if necessary.
Install your OS. With Vista, you can install the RAID drivers from a USB memory stick (Yay!) instead of a floppy. However, before installing Vista on a RAID array, make sure all your other drives are disconnected from your system otherwise you risk running into the issue I had.

After an initial test to ensure the card was working properly, I removed it and swapped the fan based heat sink for the passive one. The heat sink is retained to the card by a pair of push pins with a thermal adhesive pad between the IOP core and the heat sink. I removed the thermal pad from the passive sink and instead used some higher performing Chomerics T412 thermal tape instead.

RAID0 Benchmarking:

I ran a limited series of benchmarks comparing the Areca 1210 to my motherboard nForce4 RAID controller with the key objective to ensure the card I purchased was working to spec and that it was indeed faster than on-board RAID as so many had claimed. Note that I was not attempting to prove or disprove the merits of RAID0 with this testing - that's been debated at length like a religous argument on many forums and I wasn't about to digress to that.

The test system consists of my now old 939 platform:

AMD X2 4400+ OC'd to 2.65GHz with 2GB of RAM
My bloated Windows XP SP2 image (using Acronis True Image Home 10 to rebuild the partition after each array reconfiguration - an amazing program that deserves a review of it's own)
4x Western Digital 74GB Raptors with SATA-I interfaces, 8MB Cache, Firmware FLA2
I used a typical industry stripe size defined by the simple formula: 64K/#drives... so for the dual drive arrays, I used a stripe size of 32K and for the 4 drive arrays, I used a stripe size of 16K.

The drives were mounted in a CoolerMaster 4-in-3 drive cage as shown below. I then ran the benchmarks on both 2 and 4 drive RAID0 arrays running off either the NF4 or Areca controller.

HD Tach and HD Tune

HD Tune and HD Tach both report similar metrics. I used the long bench test on HD Tach.

Average STR:

As you can see the NF4 controller did NOT play well with the HD Tune benchmarking utility at all. It's results were terrible. Here are the HD Tune curves for the NF4 and Areca RAID controllers... note how the NF4 curve is a terrible saw-tooth.

The NF4 controller also didn't play well with HD Tach's long bench with 4 drives. Look at the bizarre HD Tach curve below. This was repeated on numerous runs. The short test in HD-Tach produced a smoother curve but the average STR was not much better.

Obviously, HD Tach is not widely regarded as an accurate RAID benching utility but it can be somewhat indicative of underlying problems. I don't know what the underlying problems with the NF4 controller are, but there is definitely something not right with it since the Areca performed exactly as expected under both benchmarking tools.

Burst Rate:

Here's where the 256 MB of onboard cache on the Areca really come into play... That's a nearly three-fold improvement in burst rates! Note that HD Tune is more conservative with it's burst rate metric but the difference in controllers is equally staggering.

Random Access Time:

These WD Raptors have individual seek times of 4.6ms so it's not surprising to see that increase in a RAID0 array (since both drives need to seek to the right sector). The latency for the Areca is about 15% less, I'm guessing due to the cache or improved disk control algorithms.

CPU Utilization:

CPU Usage as reported by each tool during benchmarking is interesting but hardly reliable, especially on my system where I didn't go out of my way to shutdown every background service or program.

IOMeter

The next set of benchmarks I ran were using IO Meter where I ran a 2 minute write and 2 minute read test on each array configuration. Both controllers were very competitive in these metrics and requires no further comment.

DiskBench

DiskBench is a simple utility that times the creation or reading of files from the disk system. It is highly sensitive to caching so I did the tests by rebooting between creations and reads and used file sizes that exceeded cache size for the Areca.

Diskbench timed the duration to read a 1GB file from the array (analogous to perhaps a large Outlook PST file) and the creation/writing of a 500MB file (perhaps analogous to writing a large compressed video file to disk). The results were then converted to net transfer rates in MB/s.

As you can see, the Areca card generally performed significantly faster than the NF4 controller. Read performance with NF4 did not scale very well going from 2 to 4 drives whereas the Areca controller's read performance scaled well. In fact, the Areca could read files faster from just a dual drive array than the NF4 controller could from a 4 disk array! As for write performance, the Areca has incredible write performance regardless of # of drives because of the write-back caching feature. Again with the NF4, the write performance lagged the Areca considerably and did not scale with added drives in the array.

Real World Applications:

I was as curious as anyone, to understand how the Areca and it's great benchmarking performance translated into real-world performance gains.

Starting XP:

I used a stop watch to time the loading of my bloated XP SP2 install. I started the timer as soon as the post screen disappeared and the stopped it as soon as the disk thrashing subsided after the desktop appeared. I would say the times recorded below are accurate within +/- 2 seconds to be realistic.

Load Level in BF2:

Loading a level in BF2 can appear to take an eternity, especially when you are trying to get one of the last slots on a loaded server. I thought that many people could relate to this benchmark so I timed the duration to load the Dalian Plant level in a single player BF2 game from the time you select the map to the time it says "Join Game". Again, I would say my stop watch accuracy is perhaps +/- 1 second on this.

As you can see, loading XP was really within the margin of error for all RAID0 configurations. This is probably explained by the fact that loading XP is not just about disk performance but is a function of your overall system, especially your CPU and memory but even things like getting an IP address from your DHCP server can affect Windows load times.

BF2 was more interesting... The Areca dual drive array, NF4 four drive, and Areca four drive arrays all scored almost identical, but clearly beat the dual drive NF4 load time. I believe this illustrates that level loading in BF2 can be disk limited with slower disk systems (perhaps single disks and the dual drive NF4 array) but after a certain point, disk performance plays no role in the level loading performance, as again, the CPU and memory take over as the bottleneck. Thus it may be the case that going from on-board RAID to an Areca could save you 10-15% in level loading times, but that would require more exhuastive testing to be sure.

Conclusion:

These are all the benchmarks I had time for. I'm sure if I ran some benchmarks with large media files, I would find a significant gap between the Areca and the NF4 in these particular applications. As it was, with highly CPU intensive file loading operations like the OS and a game level, the Areca controller really doesn't buy you much (at least on a system like mine).

Is it worth buying? If you are an extreme preformance enthusiast and someone who takes pride in benchmarking their system, or you work with large media files, then absolutely. If you are just an average gamer and home productivity user, you will not likely reap any rewards from such an investment.

Future Considerations:

Now that I have Vista running, I want to redo some of these benchmarks to see what changes under Vista (i.e. how does Superfetch change things). I'm also building a quad-core rig soon and as part of that will install Vista on a small partition on the 4 disk array to see if any further gains can be had from "short-stroking". I'll report back when I've got some additional results.

Links and More Information:

Areca Home Page (the Areca KnowledgeBase has lots of useful information and is updated regularly. Areca is also surprisingly responsive to questions.)
XtremeSystems Storage Forum (Areca is becoming very popular here)
2CPU Storage Forum (heavy IT focus but lots of Areca users here)
StorageReview (heavy IT focus but lots of storage experience here)
Xbit Labs Areca 1220 Review

Air Flow vs. Water Flow (is more better?)

2007-04-13T23:44:00.000-07:00

I ran a simple experiment on my dual pump system, comparing delta-temperatures (air to CPU) at idle and load in four different configurations:

Quiet (pumps and fans both undervolted to ~ 7V)
More Air Flow (pumps undervolted but fans running at full speed)
More Water Flow (fans undervolted but pumps running at full speed)
Noisy / High Performance (both fans and pumps running at full speed)

The chart below reveals some interesting facts...

Note: Delta-T is the difference in temperature between ambiant air
(being passed over the radiators) and CPU temperature. Lower is better.

Conclusions:

As expected, running both the fans and the pumps at full speed provides lower delta-T's than running them undervolted.

Also, not surprising, is the fact that increasing fan speeds (while keeping the pumps undervolted) provides a noticable increase in cooling performance.

The interesting revelation here, at least with my configuration, is that running the pumps at full speed without additional air flow only serves generate more heat in the loop and actually performs WORSE!

The conclusion is that (at least in my case) increasing water flow without a proportionate increase in airflow, may actually hurt temperatures.

It's also interesting to note that you can actually gain a lot of peace and quiet by undervolting your fans and pumps at idle while still providing more than adequate cooling. Even at load, the undervolted components may still provide enough cooling perforamnce to not affect your overclock.

Supporting Research:

Here are a couple of other more thorough analysis that offer similar conclusions:

Cathar on ProCooling: How much pump is enough? How much is too much?
CoolingMasters.com: Choice of a pump on the thermal level

Testing Details:

The cooling loop with which this testing was done is illustrated below.

The pumps used are DDC Ultra's with Alphacool tops, one of which is using the Alphacool Res and the other which has a slightly modified top inlet (bored out to 9.5mm). The pumps produce about 1.5 lpm of flow at 3000 RPM through my fairly restrictive loop at 7.5V and about 4 lpm of flow at 4000 RPM at 12V.

The radiators are a pair of Black Ice GTS 240's run in series. I suspect these highly restrictive rads are part of the problem, but without being able to test an alternate rad, I can't know for sure.

There are two 140mm Yate Loon fans per radiator which spin at 700 RPM undervolted and about 1200 RPM at full speed.

The blocks are an Apogee (CPU), MCW-60 (GPU), MCW-30 (chipset), and an MCW-30 equivalent for cooling the PSU.

More information on the system is here.

The Load temperatures were obtained by running Dual Prime on my X2 4400+ for one hour. Idle temperatures were observed after the system had sat idle for a couple of hours. Temperature readings were taken from Speedfan which displays both AMD core temperature as well as the "ASUS" CPU temperature which, on my system, are unusually similar at load but core temperature is actually below ambiant at idle (so I used the "ASUS" CPU reading at idle).

The full set of temperatures (air, water, CPU, etc), is shown in the table below for reference. (click to enlarge)

Voltage to the fans and pumps is controlled by my Aquaero system, with the pumps each being driven by their own custom pump control MOSFET circuit, detailed here.

Vista booting from the wrong drive?Installing Vista on a RAID array?

2007-04-05T13:24:00.000-07:00

When I heard that Vista allowed RAID drivers to be installed from a USB device during the installation (instead of a floppy), I rejoiced, thinking that Microsoft had finally seen the light. However, there is a potentially critical flaw with Vista's install process that can hamper your Vista installation on a RAID array...

It seems that if there is any other non-RAID HD connected to your motherboard during the early stages of the Vista install, Vista will secretly choose to install the boot partition on that drive, even if you choose to install the system files on your RAID array. The safest way to avoid this, is to simply ensure that only the drive or RAID array you want to install Vista on is connected. Disconnect all other hard drives from your system during Vista install, or potentially risk the same issue. Why it does this, I don't know.

Here's exactly what happened to me:

In my system, I have an Areca RAID controller with four Raptors connected to it in a RAID0 array. I also have a 500GB data drive connected to one of the motherboard nForce4 SATA connectors.

When I installed Vista and got to the step where you indicate which drive to install Vista on, I proceeded to load drivers for the Areca from my USB stick (yay!) and then selected that array for Vista to install to.

When the installation was complete, I removed the install DVD from my optical drive and went about my business of installing updated drivers and applications.

Alarmingly, on the first reboot, I got the dreaded "No System Disk Found - Please Insert Disk and Restart"... Crap!

It took me a long time and two or three re-installs of Vista to figure out what it was doing. I couldn't understand why it would reboot fine to the Areca array during installation, but as soon as I took the DVD out of the drive, it would no longer boot.

In fact, with my BIOS setup to boot from devices in this order:

CDROM
HD (Areca RAID Array)
HD (SATA Data Drive)

and with any bootable media in the optical drive, I could boot Vista from the Areca simply by ignoring the "Press any key to boot from the DVD drive..." after POST.

However, if I removed the bootable media, or changed the BIOS boot device order, it wouldn't find Vista. It's still a mystery why my BIOS worked this way, but by at least being able to boot through this workaround I was able to figure out the problem. I also give credit to the wisdom on [H]ardforums where folks were having similar issues.

As mentioned at the top of this article, it seems that Vista had secretly installed the boot partition to the 500GB data drive, while installing the system parition (correctly) on my RAID array.

This was evidenced by looking at the partition layout in Vista's storage manager. It should look the way it does in the following picture with the Active, System, and Boot partitions all on the desired drive. If it does not, you will need to do a repair.

The Solution:

Fortunately, the Vista repair process is greatly improved over XP. You simply boot from the Vista installation media, select your language preferences, and then select "Repair" from the next step.

Of course, if you are solving the same problem I had, then you need to disconnect your other hard drives before doing the repair.

I also had to run the repair twice. The first time, it automatically detected a problem with my boot manager, but failed to repair it. The second time I ran the repair process, it gave me a menu and I manually selected "Startup Repair" which did the trick.

Worst case, I suppose, is that you have to reinstall Vista (without any additional drives in your system).

Reference:

Here is a great Microsoft Technet reference on how the Vista Recovery Environment works.

There is also a set of command line tools you can use if the GUI based RE solution fails which are fully documented in this Microsoft knowledgebase article.

Finally, if you want to understand the role of the Boot and System partitions in more detail, you can read about that here in this Microsoft knowledgebase article.

Recent Water Block (GT/Fuzion/Storm) Test Results

2007-03-11T16:13:00.000-07:00

I've been compiling a list of independent (largely informal) test results for the new crop of CPU water blocks that have recently arrived on the scene. They appear to have dislodged the venerable Swiftech Storm from top spot on the podium. Their large thinner bases, combined with their higher flow, larger internal cooling surface area, and maximized turbulace appears to be netting folks anywhere from 3-10 degree improvements in CPU delta temps under load.

Unfortunately, due to the variables in mounting and even variations in temperature results from one run to the next, its impossible at this time to declare one block difinitively superior to another.

Check out the test results for yourself at the XtremeSystems Liquid Cooling Forum.

I personally like the looks of the recently announced Swiftech Apogee GTX (but expect it's performance to be very similar to the Apogee GT)...

Water Cooling a CoolerMaster Stacker 830

2006-10-23T22:53:00.000-07:00

My key consideration when selecting a computer case for this water cooling system was that it have sufficient space to mount everything internal to the case while keeping the installation elegant and minimal. Therefore I spent considerable time looking at different rad mounting alternatives and the pros and cons of each given my interest in minimizing noise and doing something unique. I realized that in order to minimize noise, I would need to employ a rad/fan configuration that would maximize airflow through the chassis to minimize the need for any additional fans. I thought if I could utilize the fans that are needed for the rads to cool the rest of the chassis, I would be ahead in terms of reducing noise.

My Case Choice: Coolermaster Stacker 830 (Black)...

Ultimately, when the Coolermaster Stacker 830 became available in black, I was really drawn to the challenge of utilizing that quad fan side panel to mount a pair of dual rads. This was appealing to me for a few reasons (1) it was a very unique approach (2) mods would probably be minimal (3) the fresh air drawn into the case interior through the side panel would also ensure the entire system remained very close to ambiant temperature - particularly given the 830's outstanding ventilation all around.

Before I get into the details of my installation, here are my thoughts regarding each of the common internal rad mounting configurations...

Top-mounted Rad: In this configuration fans draw air down through the top of the case. While this is a very common practise, likely due to the ease of modding the top of the case, I don't think its ideal from an airflow perspective. In effect, the fresh air being blown into the case is "fighting" the natural tendancy for hot air already inside the case to rise and be exhausted out the top. I'm sure that whether this is a significant problem or not depends largely on the ventilation design of the case and the exhaust strategy.

Front-mounted Rad: In this configuration, fans draw air through the front of the case. This is also a very common practise, again likely due to the fact that little or no mods are required. This configuratin has great airflow (in fact it aligns with Intel's ATX spec). The only problem is the consumption of drive bays and/or the limit to rad size as a result. I definitely considered cases for this kind of installation including the Thermaltake Armor, many Lian Li models and several stacker models.

Bottom-mounted Rad: This configuration is obviously the opposite of the top mounted configuration but has the advantage of better airflow characteristics as it draws cool air upwards into the case while hot air is presumably being exhausted out the top/rear. The only potential issue with this configuration is the clearance under the case to allow for sufficient airflow as well as the space between any expansion cards on the motherboard and the bottom of the case for the rad/fans. In the end I didn't really consider this configuration seriously.

Side-mounted Rad: This configuration is not very popular likely because it would require heavy case modifications... IF the case can even support such a configuration. The Coolermaster Stacker 830 and it's recent derivatives are perfect for this kind of mounting configuration with it's quad fan side panel. My concern was whether there was enough clearance between the fans and the PCI cards to mount radiators in between...

As mentioned, one of my chief concerns was whether there was enough space between the fans and the PCI cards to mount rads... I took a risk and ordered the case as no one online would provide a measurement. It turns out there is just over 30mm of space to work with... just enough for some low profile rads! :)

The following diagram illustrates my intended loop design given this case choice...

The Coolermaster Stacker 830 also has a number of other features which I found advantageous...

Removable motherboard tray that can be reconfigured for normal or inverted mounting or for BTX applications. This is important to me because my computer sits on the right side of my desk and I would prefer to access it via the right side panel and not the left.
Extremely open design with excellent ventilation and large top blow-hole vent will allow for adequate heat exhaustion without fans with major components being water cooled and the quad fan side panel blowing cool air onto the motherboard.
Front door that is highly ventilated that can be taken off and/or swapped from one side to the other.
Top-front mounted power/reset button and front panel controls for easy access without opening the door.
Included a 4-in-3 drive bay device for mounting multiple hard drives in an isolated drive cage that could then be loaded in any 3 of the 9 drive bays giving me maximum flexibility in how I utilize my drive bays and where the hard drives could be placed.
Large vertical space on either side of the drive bay stack for running cables up and down the chassis - keeping them out of the main compartment.
Sufficient space behind the motherboard tray for running cables to keep them out of sight and improve the aesthetics of the main compartment.
Sufficient space for any size of power supply (there is enough room to mount dual ATX power supplies in the space provided).

Case Mods:

Even with all the great assets of the 830, it still needed some major/minor modding to get it primed for Project Waku...

Added Lian Li casters (black) to the bottom of the case. They are countersunk to the actual bottom so that the skirts cover the wheels nicely but still give it about 1/2" of clearance to roll....

Drilled out a 1" hole using a metal hole-saw on the top for the fill port. The 830 actually has the black top and then another aluminum top underneath that both had to be drilled out for the fill-port...

Since I plan to use the column of space along the left side of the drive bays for cable management, I drilled out a number of 1" and 1/2" holes along the left drive bay areas for cables to enter in/out of that area from the motherboard compartment and various drive bays...

I also drilled out a 1" hole with grommet for the P4 power cable which can be routed behind the motherboard tray and now come through this hole and be attached to the motherboard with a minimum of cable clutter...

Painted the rest of the chassis black. (Coolermaster was clearly too cheap when it came to anodizing the black chassis components). In the pics you can see my wooden computer used to do proof-of-concept assembly, testing, and tube routing, length determinations...

Radiator Mounting:

They have a slim profile as mentioned above
They have tapped G1/4 BSPP threads allowing fairly universal fitting selection
They have pre-tapped M4 mounting holes for 120mm fans
In tests, they performed admirably compared to many other rads

Some excellent information on rads with test results are here...

No mounting hardware could be on the inside face of the rads as there wasn't enough clearance for any additional mounting gear otherwise it would interfer with the motherboard and PC inside.

In some of these pics, you can see the wooden computer I constructed from 1/4" MDF to test fitment, etc.

DDC Ultra Pump Review and Flow Testing

2006-09-29T00:35:00.000-07:00

The perfect water pump for a water cooling loop would be one that has high flow, high head pressure, very low noise, minimal heat dump (in other words, high efficiency) and was small and looked cool. Fortunately, the perfect pump is readily available and made by Liang... it's the 18w DDC pump!

Industry guru "Cathar" recently had this to say on XtremeSystems...

"For pumps, I'd been pushing hard both on-line over at Procooling, and behind the scenes with a number of industry players. While I never spoke directly to Laing, quite a fair bit of feedback and suggestions did flow from me to them through different channels, and now we have the Laing DDC+, which if you read my specs for the "perfect pump" over at Procooling, the DDC+ is almost exactly what I was pushing for. With the after-market 1/2" tops, the 18W DDC+ is exactly what I ever envisioned the ideal PC water-cooling pump to ever be."

As Cathar suggests... Alphacool has developed a cool looking plexi top that increases performance significantly. Other companies have made similar tops (i.e. Radical and Petra).

Other benefits of the Alphacool DDC Ultra include:

5mm LED drilling
G1/4 BSPP threads
Rubber isolated 3.5" drive bay mounts
Available matching reservoir

Some excellent reviews and data on this pump include:

Petra's Top and Pump Performance Comparison on ExtremeSystems
Pump Selection Guide at ExtremeSystems
Danish co. H2Okoeling.dk's Test Results as ExtremeSystems
Petra's Head Pressure Test Results on [H]ardForums
Coolmeister's Pump Perforamnce Test Results on Bit-Tech.net
Andersson.j's modded Alphacool Top on ExtremeSystems
Sneaky's modded Alphacool Top on ExtremeSystems

There are numerous reports that the Alphacool reservoir impeedes perforamance and makes bleeding difficult. In fact, in the following graphs borrowed from H2Okoeling.dk, it's clear that even with the reservoir top (denoted by AGB) it's still a very capable pump and significantly out-performs the D5.

My own test results also showed that the impact on flow was negligable as long as there was absolutely no air in the reservoir during operation. Thus I decided to combine the reservoir with a more functional DangerDen Fillport and Res.

However, given the unique design of my loop and some of the high restriction elements in it (as you will see as this blog unfolds), I decided that a second pump would likely improve flow rates significantly. Using a second pump also provides some redundancy allowing me to maintain use of my system in the event a pump fails and I need to RMA it.

Reliability and robustness of these pumps seems to be the only potential fault. Numerous people have complained of premature failure of the pumps. I therefore plan to exploit an automated system shutdown process in the event of a loss in flow that I'll describe fully in the monitoring and control post when I get to that.

Pump Mods and Installation:

On the main pump with the res, I bored out the top inlet to 3/8" (9.5mm)
I found that air was getting trapped in the Alphacool res cap so I filled it with epoxy
I installed the main pump in a Coolermaster 4-in-3 drive bay box using the included isolation mounts thus double isolating the pump from the chassis
Installed a pair of Blue LEDs in the plexi top.
I finished the install of the main pump assembly with a plexiglass front panel to minize noise and improve aesthetics.
I left the secondary pump unmodified and mounted it in the top blow-hole area of the case on its side so it takes input directly from the output of the first pump.

Installation Pictures:

The DDC Ultra with res attached (note epoxy filled res cap)...

The DDC pump, res and Remag flow meter assembly to be inserted in 4-in-3 drive bay...

Pump installed in drive bays with plexi front...

Due to the inaccessibility of the Alphacool Res, I used a Dangerden Fill-Port res as the main bleeding mechanism for the loop. I modified the res by adding some low density aquarium sponge to the top 1/3 of the res to trap air as dual pumps will quickly froth any air in the loop unless otherwise trapped like this. Since the res is normally designed for a T-Line application, I modified it to include an inlet port that comes directly from the PSU water block. I drilled a hole, tapped it to G1/4 and then epoxied the fitting in to prevent cracking or leaks since the curved surface prevented the normal application of a rubber o-ring to seal it.

Fill-Port Res and 2nd Pump installed in blow-hole (just forward of PSU)...

View of 2nd pump and res from the side and below...

Pump Flow Testing:

I performed my own flow tests using a pair of buckets to confirm that my pump was performing to specs and to test the impact of some elements of my loop on flow. The results are interesting.
The test rig was extremely simple...

The red bucket is full of water and an open-ended piece of Masterkleer 7/16" tubing is inserted well into the bucket. The other end is attached to the inlet to the pump. Another length of tubing on the outlet of the pump terminates in a ball-valve (allowing me to prime the pump by shutting the valve) that empties into the graduated blue bucket. The time (as measured by a stop-watch) for the pump to fill the graduated bucket from 2l to 6l (or pump 4l of water) was measured and then converted into l/m in the chart below.

All of the devices tested in the chart below, were simply attached either to the pump outlet directly or to the drain end of the outlet tube.

It was very disheartening (although not unexpected) to see the impact on flow of the crappy Innovatek flow meter 2.0. As others have reported, this thing is a flow killer and a waste of money! I later included a Remag flow meter in the loop but haven't yet measured the impact on flow.

The Black Ice GT (240) rad was also more restrictive than I would have liked, but again, it's not unexpected (more on that on my post regarding the rads).

A pleasant surprise was that after modding the top inlet to 9.5mm it allowed the addition of the reservoir with no impact on flow performance. Even without the modded top, the reservoir was not a major detriment to flow... however, it was vital that the reservoir have absolutely no air in it (making it useless as a bleeding tool). If even the slightest bit of air was allowed in the reservoir it would cause cavitation and flow rates would plummet.

Water Cooling Fittings and Tubing Size

2006-09-19T22:11:00.000-07:00

Choosing the proper fittings and tubing size for water cooling can be intimidating. Most fittings are referenced by their nearly medieval plumbing nomenclature, making them difficult to dicipher by the average computer enthusiast.

I'll attempt to explain some of the differences in various fitting types and make a quick recommendation with respect to tubing size.

Tubing:

Before getting into the details on fittings, it's important to know what tubing size you plan to work with. Water cooling tubing in North America, is specified by it's inside diamater (ID) and comes in 1/2", 7/16", or 3/8". Larger diameter flows better but is bulkier and has a larger bend radius than smaller diameters.

Industry guru Cathar had this to say about tubing size, which I completely agree with...

"Been rolling the whole tubing size idea around in my head, and thinking about trade-offs and the like.

I like the idea of 3/8" ID tubing, but I just can't shake the feeling that for >4LPM that it starts to become an increasingly significant source of restriction for those who wish to make use of strong pumps capable of pushing the higher flow rates. It's not that 3/8" tubing is bad at all for coping with moderate flow rates, it's just that it could be better. For example at 6LPM, 7' of 3/8" ID tubing is offering pretty close to 1mH2O of pressure drop all by itself.

But 3/8" is attractive because it's very light, and it bleeds air-bubbles fast.

1/2" tubing is fat and unattractive. Unless flow rates are getting past the 6LPM mark, air-bubbles don't bleed very well. It's heavy, and it requires fairly thick walls (1/8") before it can turn good radii without kinking, but this wall thickness comes at a cost of making it stiffer to turn, thus putting more leverage on the water-block's all important thermal contact. However, it takes around 13.5LPM before 7' of 1/2" ID tubing offers 1mH2O of pressure drop, so really it's almost overkill.

So I looked to the middle-ground, that being 7/16" (~11.1mm) that has 3/32" wall thickness for a total of 5/8" OD. Per length of tubing it's about 2/3's the weight of the 1/2" ID (3/4" OD) tubing. Being a thinner ID it is able to be bent into tighter radii without kinking, allowing for the use of the 3/32" wall thickness, which means that it also becomes easier to turn those radii. It offers 1mH2O of pressure drop at 9.5LPM for a 7' length, which pretty much puts it still as a very attractive offering.

Then I took into account stretching the 7/16" ID tubing over 1/2" OD fittings (barbs) with 10mm ID orifices. Due to the "lip effect" the 1/2" ID tubing actually offers nearly 3x the transitioning resistance at fittings as the 7/16" tubing whose ID more closely matches the ID of the fitting. Over a typical full system when fitting resistance is taken into account, the 7/16" ID tubing offers almost the same amount of tubing + fitting resistance as the 1/2" ID tubing.

Results were obtained using the pressure drop calculator from http://www.pressure-drop.org.

This all got me to thinking that really what us 1/2 inchers may really want to be doing is fitting 3/32" thickness walled 7/16" ID tubing over our 1/2" barbed systems, and pretty much be enjoying no extra system resistance, but gaining the benefits of lighter tubing that is easier to bleed (bleeds very well at a predicted ~5LPM), easier to bend, isn't as bulky, "hangs" less off water-blocks, and is significantly cheaper due to less wall material being used."

7/16" tubing over 1/2" barbs has the additional advantage that it forms a perfectly water tight seal without the need for clamps of any kind (although clamps are still recommended to prevent accidental tube/fitting separation).

You can buy 7/16" tubing at Jab-Tech or Petra's.

Fittings:

Wondering what threads you water cooling gear has? If it's not specified, it may be listed here on the XtremeSystems forum sticky.

Tapered Threads:

Pipe fittings generally come in two variations, tapered threads where the base of the thread is wider than the end, and parallel threads. With tapered threads, both the male and female ends are tapered and thus form a very tight seal as the fitting is tightened. This kind of thread is not common in water cooling but some online retailers sell tapered fittings which won't work well at all in parallel threads.

Notation for these threads are:

NPT: National Pipe Tapered Thread
BSPT: British Standard Pipe Tapered Thread

Note how the threads taper from top to bottom on this NPT fitting...

Again, avoid these kinds of fittings in water cooling systems.

Parallel Threads:

Obviously are parallel and are the most common in water cooling gear. However there are variations of this style of thread as noted below:

NPSM = National Standard Free-Fitting Straight Mechanical Pipe Thread (19 threads per inch at 1/4)
BSPP = British Standard Parallel Pipe Thread (18 threads per inch at 1/4)

Note that since the threads per inch are similar (19/inch for NPSM and 18/inch for BSPP) these two types of fittings are interchangeable where thread depth is less than half an inch. This applies to all water cooling fittings and gear meaning that BSPP fittings can safely be used in NPSM blocks and vice-versa.

Here is a good resource on thread standards.

Seal and Tightening:

Parallel threads generally rely on a rubber O-ring for a water-proof seal. The O-rings provided with the barbs mentioned below are ideal. The O-rings that came with my swiftech blocks are too large to be used with G1/4 barbs and I was unable to repurpose them when I switched all my fittings over to nickle plated brass G1/4 high-flow.

As for tightening the fittings, I find that "hand tight" provides a leak-proof seal. Perhaps another half turn with a wrench or socket wouldn't hurt. As long as it's not so tight that the O-ring is deformed you should be good.

Plumbing tape is generally not required. If it has an O-ring use it and forget the plumbing tape. If it doesn't have an O-ring, first ask yourself why, and then if there's simply no way around it, use plumbing tape.

If you are putting a fitting into a curved surface such as a res (i.e. a Dangerden plexi res) then you will need plumbers tape because an O-ring can't seat against a curved surface. I have such a res and actually epoxied the threads before attaching the barb for a more permanent seal.

Now for block fittings, there are a few considerations:

Material: Plastic vs. Metal

Plastic fittings can be nylon, poly(something), or acetal. Most Swiftech stuff comes with platic barb fittings. The main consideration in using these kind of fittings is that if you are using the above recommended 7/16" tubing over 1/2" barbs that are plastic, you will NOT be able to easily remove the tubing once it is on. In fact, you will probably have to heat up the tubing to get it soft enough to put it on and then you will likely have to cut it off.

Metal fittings are typically nickel plated brass. They look good and have the aforementioned benefit of allowing 7/16" tubing to slide onto 1/2" barbs forming a good leak-proof seal (even without clamps) yet the tubing can still be pulled of with some force without damaging the fitting or tubing.

Design: Barbs, Perfect Seal, Push-to-Connect, Compression

I don't have experience with the push-to-connect or compression style fittings. my advice on this is to use the Dangerden high-flow 1/2" barbs with G1/4 BSPP threads on as much of your gear as possible.

EK also makes similar barbs but the flanges on these barbs are wider making them inappropriate for use with many Swiftech blocks.

There is also a 9/16" version available for anything with those threads. The high-flow barbs are actually bored out to the maximum possible bore of about 7/16" making them a perfect match for that tubing. And, as I said above, the nickel plated brass allows the tubing to be slipped on and off without damage yet forms a great water tight seal without clamps.

I would avoid the perfect seal fittings if you are using 7/16" tubing... I expect the lip would make it near impossible to get the tubing over and the turbulence caused on the inlet side would hurt flow.

Good places to buy are:

DangerDen
Petra's Tech Shop
Performance-PC's (in fact, I ordered a lot of my stuff through here and the DangerDen high-flow 1/2" fittings were included with most of my gear)

Finding other G1/4 fittings:

Outside of the common barbs mentioned above, finding British threaded fittings in the US/Canada can be a PITA. None of my local plumbing suppliers even know what G1/4 BSPP is. Naturally most american fitting suppliers carry NPT or NPSM fittings. If you want a good selection of G1/4 fittings, I definitely suggest:

Farnell Export (a UK based company with excellent e-commerce site and UPS next day delivery).

I needed some odd fittings: G1/4 to G3/8 adapters for my Remag flow meter and some good G1/4 elbows and these guys had it.

Here's a pic of the elbows which are great from the perspective that they have an 11mm ID (high flow) and are more of a smooth 90-degree bend than some typical milled elbows. While no one wants to use elbows in their loop if it can be avoided, sometimes they are a god-send for tricky tube routings.

You may need these couplers, if you want to use the elbows above...

I bored mine out to 3/8" at a machine shop (you could probably do 7/16" if you have a good machinist).

I had to steal some O-rings from some of my high-flow barb fittings to mate the couplers.

Coolsleeves:

Coolsleeves are a useful product that wrap your tubing with a plastic spring like coil to prevent the tubing from kinking through tight bends. Coolsleeves comes in a variety of colors and sizes to match any application.

Here is an appropriate use of coolsleeves (considered tight spacing to maximize the bend radius)...

Here is a more relaxed spacing (limiting the effectiveness)...

Here is an application of coolsleeves that is doing absolutely nothing (due to the huge spacing in the coils) to prevent the tubing from kinking...

My Previous System

2006-09-09T16:39:00.000-07:00

Here is an overview of my previous system (before I added my GFX card to the loop), however stay tuned for a series of updates as I build a new quad-core rig...

PC Components:

Asus A8N-SLI Premium,

AMD X2 4400+

OCZ PC-4000 DDR 2GB

EVGA 7900 GS KO

2x74GB Raptor Raid0

Water Cooling:

Swiftech Blocks (Apogee, MCW-30, MCW-60)

Dual Black Ice GTs (2x dual fan rads)

Dual DDC Ultra's

Alphacool Watercooled PSU

Aquaero for monitoring/control

4x140mm ML Yate Loons

Case:

Customized Coolermaster Stacker 830

Current OC:

2.65GHz (265x10 Vcore=1.475V, RAM 1:1 @ 3-4-3-8)

My First Water Cooling Build

2006-09-04T00:26:00.000-07:00

Here are my thoughts regarding each of the common internal rad mounting configurations...

Top-mounted Rad: In this configuration fans draw air down through the top of the case. While this is a very common practise, likely due to the ease of modding the top of the case, I don't think its ideal from an airflow perspective. In effect, the fresh air being blown into the case is "fighting" the natural tendancy for hot air already inside the case to rise and be exhausted out the top. I'm sure that whether this is a significant problem or not depends largely on the ventilation design of the case and the exhaust strategy.

Bottom-mounted Rad: This configuration is obviously the opposite of the top mounted configuration but has the advantage of better airflow characteristics as it draws cool air upwards into the case while hot air is presumably being exhausted out the top/rear. The only potential issue with this configuration is the clearance under the case to allow for sufficient airflow as well as the space between any expansion cards on the motherboard and the bottom of the case for the rad/fans. In the end I didn't really consider this configuration seriously.

Side-mounted Rad: This configuration is not very popular likely because it would require heavy case modifications... IF the case can even support such a configuration. The Lian Li V2000 is an obvious choice for a case and Voyeurmods.com previously sold a custom water cooled model with a quad heater core (pictured below) that initially caught my attention...

Another case design that calls out for side mounted rads is the Coolermaster Stacker 830 with it's quad fan side panel. My concern was whether there was enough clearance between the fans and the PCI cards to mount radiators in between...

My Case Choice: Coolermaster Stacker 830 (Black)

Ultimately, when the Coolermaster Stacker 830 became available in black, I was really drawn to the challenge of utilizing that quad fan side panel to mount a pair of dual rads. This was appealing to me for a few reasons (1) it was a very unique approach (2) mods would probably be minimal (3) the fresh air drawn into the case interior through the side panel would also ensure the entire system remained very close to ambiant temperature - particularly given the 830's outstanding ventilation all around.

As I mentioned above, one of my chief concerns was whether there was enough space between the fans and the PCI cards to mount rads... I took a risk and ordered the case as no one online would provide a measurement. It turns out there is just over 30mm of space to work with... just enough for some low profile rads! :)

The following diagram illustrates my intended loop design given this case choice...
The Coolermaster Stacker 830 also has a number of other features which I found advantageous...

Removable motherboard tray that can be reconfigured for normal or inverted mounting or for BTX applications. This is important to me because my computer sits on the right side of my desk and I would prefer to access it via the right side panel and not the left.
Extremely open design with excellent ventilation and large top blow-hole vent will allow for adequate heat exhaustion without fans with major components being water cooled and the quad fan side panel blowing cool air onto the motherboard.
Front door that is highly ventilated that can be taken off and/or swapped from one side to the other.
Top-front mounted power/reset button and front panel controls for easy access without opening the door.
Included a 4-in-3 drive bay device for mounting multiple hard drives in an isolated drive cage that could then be loaded in any 3 of the 9 drive bays giving me maximum flexibility in how I utilize my drive bays and where the hard drives could be placed.
Large vertical space on either side of the drive bay stack for running cables up and down the chassis - keeping them out of the main compartment.
Sufficient space behind the motherboard tray for running cables to keep them out of sight and improve the aesthetics of the main compartment.
Sufficient space for any size of power supply (there is enough room to mount dual ATX power supplies in the space provided).

Case Mods

Even with all the great assets of the 830, it still needed some major/minor modding to get it primed for Project Waku...

Added Lian Li casters (black) to the bottom of the case. They are countersunk to the actual bottom so that the skirts cover the wheels nicely but still give it about 1/2" of clearance to roll.

Drilled out a 1" hole using a metal hole-saw on the top for the fill port. The 830 actually has the black top and then another aluminum top underneath that both had to be drilled out for the fill-port.

Since I plan to use the column of space along the left side of the drive bays for cable management, I drilled out a number of 1" and 1/2" holes along the left drive bay areas for cables to enter in/out of that area from the motherboard compartment and various drive bays.

I also drilled out a 1" hole with grommet for the P4 power cable which can be routed behind the motherboard tray and now come through this hole and be attached to the motherboard with a minimum of cable clutter.

Painted the rest of the chassis black. (Coolermaster was clearly too cheap when it came to anodizing the black chassis components). In the pics you can see my wooden computer used to do proof-of-concept assembly, testing, and tube routing, length determinations.

Reversed the side fan tray door so instead of being hinged towards the rear of the case, it is now hinged at the front. This was a critical mod for my rad mounting as it allows the rad inlets and outlets to be out of the motherboard area and closer to the front of the case which will still allow the door to be opened even while the system is running without excessive lengths of tubing.