Initial Testing

A quick update. XP is now installed and drivers for the 9800 GTX and the sound card have been configured. Network is connected, although the ethernet cable I had is now not long enough and the Beast is at an odd angle to accommodate it.

The Logitech 5.1 speakers are connected - pics soon.

I installed AquaMark3D to run a quick benchmark once the graphics card was configured, to get a baseline for the stock system before I start overclocking - this was just over 184,000. Bit of an improvement on the 40K-odd I was getting on my old system!

I couldn't resist it - I had to install Call Of Duty 4 and have a quick play. Pretty impressive, smooth playing with all the graphics set to max and 4X AA. I didn't play around with the anisotropic filtering however. Found one bug or incompatibility or whatever. In single player, when the FNG is doing the cargo ship mockup and then has to exit the building, I got a nv4_disp stop error and BSOD every time.

Was using Forceware 174 drivers as delivered on the CD that came with the BFG card, so I grabbed the 177 drivers from the nVidia site and installed these. Since then (touch silicon) I've had no further crashes.

After some fragging I returned to putting the final touches to the case. I added 2 x 12" cold cathode UV lights positioned along 2 edges of the case and 2 x 12" CC red lights along the opposite edges. The cables for these are not really long enough to be able to hide the bulky black plastic invertor boxes, which is a bit of a shame, but c'est la vie. These were from Akasa and AC Ryan.

I also stuck 2 x 4" CC UV lights to the underside of the reservoir, but to be honest these were a bit feeble in comparison to the 12" jobbies.

The 5mm LEDs that I had bought to stick in the holes in the reservoir and the EK water block for the 9800 made almost zero difference and I decided not to bother with them, as they would just have added more wiring for a very small bling return.

The BigNG fan controller requires some serious planning. Even the base model has 4 analogue sensors and 2 digital ones, and the manual provides little help in deciding on the positioning of these. There are some recommendations from people on the manufacturer's website forum however, and I spent a lot of time here reading about what others had done.

I couldn't actually wire it up because my labelling machine had run out of batteries and tape at the same time and there was no way I was going to not label the sensor wires. But the plan is this:

Channel 1 - controls the 3* top exhaust fans on the triple rad
Channel 2 - controls the rear exhaust fan on the single rad
Channel 3 - controls the HD enclosure intake fan
Channel 4 - controls the small fan attached to the mosfet heatsinks on the mobo

(*) Will require 2 fan splitter cables

Analogue sensors will be attached to

A1 - the CPU (if I can get near this)
A2 - the top of the graphics card, near the GPU
A3 - the top HD drive of the 3 in the HD enclosure
A4 - the mosfet heatsink

Digitial sensors will be attached to

D0 - motherboard heatpipe
D1 - RAM heatsink

Channel 1 will trigger on the temps from A1+A2+D0+D1 (but not sure how yet)
Channel 2 will trigger on the temps from A1+A2+D0+D1 (but not sure how yet)
Channel 3 will trigger on the temp from A3
Channel 4 will trigger on the temp from A4

I will use PWM for the fans, unless this proves too noisy.

Next steps

1) Wire the BigNG up
2) Configure the BigNG drivers and software
3) Install some disk imaging software and do a backup
4) Find the best config file for COD4!