Finished My Haswell Build

[Roman2179]

Finished my Haswell build this past weekend. Finally replaced my aging Xeon workstation from the Core2Quad era. So far, the impressions are very positive. From the few things I have tried, it is considerably faster but I have yet to do any benchmarks to get actual numbers. Onto the parts list!

Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD4H
Intel Core i7-4770K
Cooler Master Hyper 212
Corsair Vengeance 2x8gb 1866
Asus GTX660 DirectCU 2gb
Samsung 830 128gb
WD 1tb Black
PCP&P Silencer MKIII 750watt PSU
FD Define R4 Case

The SSD was an extra drive I had laying around, it didn't make sense to order a new SSD since I had one that was functioning perfectly.

Eventually I will end up getting a 32gb of ram but that will wait for the time being. Still trying to decide what I want to do with video though. I don't play enough games to warrant getting a much higher end card but wouldn't mind a little bit more performance, so I am thinking I will pick up another 660 for SLI if I can get one for a good price. Thoughts?

Any ideas on how high I can overclock on air? Ideally I would like a stable 4.2 on air but well see how that works out. This should be an adventure either way, I haven't overclocked anything since the P4 days.

So far I only have one picture of the system:

All feedback is welcome.

Thanks for reading.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Nice picture! My best OC advice is to get a carbon-copy of BallaTheFeared's haswell chip, which can get to ~5 GHz on air.

I don't play enough games to warrant getting a much higher end card but wouldn't mind a little bit more performance, so I am thinking I will pick up another 660 for SLI if I can get one for a good price. Thoughts?

I tend to think that SLI/Xfire is usually more trouble than its worth unless you're in specific conditions like very high resolutions (1440, 1600, eyefinity). And even then, only once you've hit like GTX 760/770/780 or HD 7950/7970 performance levels on a single card. Basically, I am confused as to what situation you're in where you don't want a higher-end card, but you're willing to drop additional funds on more cards; if you don't play enough games to warrant a higher-end card, it would seem that you also don't play enough games to warrant SLI 😉

 

[Roman2179]

It's more of a general laziness with dealing with selling my current card. Though if I want to get any decent money for it, I should probably sell it as soon as possible.

 

[Roman2179]

Here are few more pictures of the build:

Here's how I secured all of the wiring in the back:

Bonus picture, my ESXi server:

Haven't started overclocking yet but I will as soon as I finish setting everything. Really curious to see how far ill be able to push it with just a Hyper 212.

All feedback and questions welcome.

Thanks,
Roman

 

[Rvenger]

Please raise those PCs off the carpet. You are starving your power supplies for air and asking for issues.

 

[adnank77]

Lovely build, but don't you think 750w is an overkill?

 

[Roman2179]

I got the power supply on sale and with a rebate but it's nice to have some headroom in case I end up going with a dual video card setup in the future.

I'll be putting in hardwood floors soon enough, so that should solve the air for the power supplies problem. In the meantime, I do need to put something down there to lift them up a bit.

 

[Knavish]

Please raise those PCs off the carpet. You are starving your power supplies for air and asking for issues.

Wouldn't moving the PC away from the wall do more for airflow than picking it up off the carpet? I've seen some high end (and noisy) fans spec'ed as providing X CFM with an obstruction (wall) no closer than Y inches from the back of the fan.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Looks very nice, thanks for the pics.

 

[mfenn]

Wouldn't moving the PC away from the wall do more for airflow than picking it up off the carpet? I've seen some high end (and noisy) fans spec'ed as providing X CFM with an obstruction (wall) no closer than Y inches from the back of the fan.

Moving them away from the wall would be good too, but that doesn't address Rvenger's point. The OP really needs to get them up off the floor because the PSU intakes are completely blocked.

 

[mfenn]

I tend to think that SLI/Xfire is usually more trouble than its worth unless you're in specific conditions like very high resolutions (1440, 1600, eyefinity). And even then, only once you've hit like GTX 760/770/780 or HD 7950/7970 performance levels on a single card. Basically, I am confused as to what situation you're in where you don't want a higher-end card, but you're willing to drop additional funds on more cards; if you don't play enough games to warrant a higher-end card, it would seem that you also don't play enough games to warrant SLI 😉

Agree 100%

 

[Roman2179]

I got them off of the carpet today, went to home depot and bought two small shelves 9.5"x24". I set the shelves on the carpet and put the computers on top. Cheap and effective until I get hardwood floors down. Also moved them away from the wall by another two inches or so.

The only OCing I've done is getting it up to 4.2 which made little to no difference in load temperatures. But since I'm going out of town for next week starting tomorrow, more serious OCing will have to wait till I'm back. Maybe I will be and to get a stable 4.5-4.6 on air, who knows, we'll see. I'll OC the video card at that time too, hopefully that gets some good results.

As for reasons for considering getting a second card, more CUDA cores may prove to be useful for some of the rendering/encoding that I'll be doing. I'll just need to figure out if it's worth it as far as performance gains go.

Thanks,
Roman

 

[mfenn]

As for reasons for considering getting a second card, more CUDA cores may prove to be useful for some of the rendering/encoding that I'll be doing. I'll just need to figure out if it's worth it as far as performance gains go.

CUDA programs have to be explicitly coded to work with multiple cards, so it's doubtful that it'd even work out of the box. Even if multiple cards do work, you're already hitting significant diminishing returns in most programs with even a single GTX 660, so adding another is kind of pointless.