Build for: Gaming/Multitasking/3D-Design/BluRay...

Damn....$7500 budget. FUN TIME!

1) Not sure about what exactly they do, but all settings related to software should be on the recovery image.
2) "DS Certified" RAM is still brand-name actually, and according to Alex, the difference from Corsair RAM isn't much.
3) Monitors aren't my thang
4) To maintain LC, you just need to occasionally top off the liquid. Not that hard.
5) Crates is insurance against UPS. It forces them to hand-carry it, and not kick it off the car of anything, seriously!
6) Warranty is great. But yeah, I think it's 5 yrs Labor coverage, and 3 yrs for defective part warranty.
7) The lighting is for if you have a side window in most cases, it makes the tubes for LC glow.
8) Noise suppression turns your case into a thermos, lol. If you want quietness, pick out some fans and ask them to swap em in.

Originally posted by Memento Mori 1) What does the Disabling&Tweaking Service actually does in practice and is it any good and what specific things does DS remove and disable in Windows 7 Ult OS?  Also, if its worth Tweaking from Factory... does it come pre-loaded on the DS Recovery DVD Image or not?

Drop the free OS tweak. The disabled services or visual effects are barely even a blip on the radar of an overclocked Core i7 processor and you can easily miss out on helpful or nice looking things by disabling them. Better to just tweak the OS to your preferences on your own.

2) Corsair Dominator DHX or Digital Storm No-Name RAM sticks for 12gb 1600Htz for best Performance/Latency?

The Dominator DHX may have slightly better timings, but not enough to warrant the extra +$242. The "No-Name" DS Certified memory is pre-tested Mushkin, Kingston, or Super Talent brand, and is an excellent value.

4) How to maintain the: H2O Stage 6 LCS? As I have never used Liquid Cooling before?!

I counter your question with a better question. Why bother liquid cooling at all?

Video cards cool themselves just fine with no aftermarket additions needed and there are some very excellent and capable CPU air coolers that will easily reach 4GHz to 4.2GHz with little fuss. LCing is more or less a waste of money, not enough gains to be had.

However your budget is unusually high, so I wouldn't scold you too much if you wanted to pick the Stage 3 or 4 LCing for CPU only, to push the 980X a little farther up to 4.4GHz. But again, either of the Noctua air coolers would easily get one to 4.2GHz, so eh.

5) If you guys have purchased: Lian Li P80b Chassis... Please tell me if that Outer Side Bracket for GPU support is any good enough for Shipping from Cali to Illinois? And should I get the Fastest Shipping in a Wooden Box or not?

Again I counter with a better question, why the Lian Li?

It's unnecessarily large for your needs and ridiculously overpriced. Save a whopping $327 (!!!) and get a HAF 932 or HAF 942. Both the HAFs are extremely large and offer much better air flow for a fraction of the price. The 942 also has a GPU holder give heavy GPUs extra support, since you mentioned that as a concern.

6) How good is the Warranty for 5 Years? (Sara said its actually 3 years "Parts" and 5 years "Labor" I think).

The 5 year limited warranty is 5 years for labor (they will do any upgrades or replacements for free, no labor fee) and 3 years for parts (part breaks, they replace it for free). For only +$199 it is certainly a great deal for the extra two years of parts warranty, especially on such an expensive rig.

8) That Noise Suppression Package... is it worth it or is it not safe and dangerous as I have heard (in relation to blocking the aluminum case heat dissipation)?

As long as you don't choose upgraded chassis fans the rig should pretty darn quiet by itself anyway, so the Noise Suppression Package is unnecessary and possibly detrimental to temperatures.

You didn't specifically ask any questions about it, but I warn against that video card selection. You most definitely don't want to be using two 5970s. They're terribly overpriced to start with but also ATI's quad-scaling is really terrible so they won't perform too great. And that's also a very overkill amount of power for even a 2560x1440 monitor anyway. Go with dual SLI GTX 480s. Along with that you can also scale the PSU back down to a 1200w or 1250w.

The Killer 2100 NIC is just a big fat waste of money, it is not going to help at all. If you want better internet speed you just have to pay your ISP more money for a better connection or switch to a better ISP. It isn't going to help with home networking speeds either.

The only thing Windows 7 Ultimate offers that Professional doesn't is multilingual support and encryption software. The only thing that Professional offers that Home Premium doesn't is access to XP Mode. I doubt you have any use for Ultimate's features, and if you don't think you'll need XP Mode either then drop down to Home Premium.

Anyway, use this as a baseline:

Ticket #423546, Price: $5065

Chassis Model: Special Deal Hot Seller - Cooler Master 942 HAF X
Exterior Finish: - Standard Factory Finish
Trim Accents: - Standard Factory Finish
Processor: Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition 980X 3.33GHz (Hexa-Core) (Extreme Performance)
Motherboard: ASUS Rampage III Extreme (Intel X58 Chipset) (Features USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s)
System Memory: 12GB DDR3 1600MHz Digital Storm Certified (Highly Recommended) (Hand Tested)
Power Supply: 1250W Enermax Galaxy EVO (Dual/Triple/Quad SLI Compatible) (Recommended)
Expansion Bay: - No Thanks
Hard Drive Set 1: Operating System: 1x (160GB Solid State (By: Intel) (Model: X25-M MLC Edition) (Extreme Performance)
Set 1 Raid Options: - No Thanks
Hard Drive Set 2: Multimedia\Data: 1x (2TB Hitachi/Seagate (7200 RPM) (32MB Cache)
Hard Drive Set 3: Backup\Misc.: - No Thanks
Optical Drive 1: Blu-Ray Writer/Reader (Burn Blu-Ray discs and play them)
Optical Drive 2: - No Thanks
Internet Access: High Speed Network Port (Supports High-Speed Cable / DSL / Network Connections)
Video Card: 2x SLI Dual (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 1.5GB (Includes PhysX Technology)
Add-on Card: - No Thanks
Sound Card: Integrated Motherboard Audio
Extreme Cooling: AIR: Stage 2: Noctua NH-D14 Extreme Performance (Does NOT fit on the regular EVGA X58 3X SLI)
H20 Tube Color:- Not Applicable, I do not have a FrostChill or Sub-Zero LCS Cooling System Selected
Chassis Airflow: Standard Factory Chassis Fans
Internal Lighting: Internal Chassis Lighting System (Red)
Enhancements: - No Thanks
Chassis Mods: - No Thanks
Noise Reduction: - No Thanks
Boost Processor: FREE: Stage 1: Overclock the processor between 3.3GHz to 3.9GHz (Cooling Upgrade Recommended)
Boost Video Card: - No Thanks, Please do not overclock my video card(s)
Boost Memory: - No Thanks, Please do not overclock my memory
Boost OS: - No Thanks, Please do not tweak the services on the operating system
Windows OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-Bit Edition)
Restore Kit: Digital Storm Specialized Recovery System (DVD Image Based)
Virus Protection: - No Thanks
Office: - No Thanks
Benchmarking: - No Thanks
Install/Test Game: FREE: Hot-selling game with a NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 or above graphics card
Display: - No Thanks
Surge Shield: - No Thanks
Speakers: - No Thanks
Keyboard: - No Thanks
Mouse: - No Thanks
External Storage: - No Thanks
Exclusive T-Shirt: FREE: Digital Storm T-Shirt - Black (Large)
Priority Build: - No Thanks, Ship Within 5-15 Business Days After Order Is Successfully Processed
Warranty: Life-time Expert Customer Care with 5 Year Limited Warranty

OS/apps and some games on the SSD, rest of the games/music/movies/media on the HDD. Others on the forum might give advise you against a RAID0 setup, but I say go for it if you want to. Just keep in mind that small file speeds won't benefit as much (only under heavy multi tasking or trying to access or write a large number of them at once), mostly only sequential speeds will see large gains.

Originally posted by Memento Mori Oh and BTW can anyone chime in on those gigantic monitors and what are your favorite ones for Gaming and HDR spectrum pallet for Photoshop and the LEAST Input Lag+Pixel Response Time?? Thanks.

If you buy a television and use it as a monitor, you'll have a laggy display (when I'm looking for monitors I look for 2ms, and, iirc, most tvs are in the hundreds). I recommend against getting a tv for a monitor for that reason.

Originally posted by Memento Mori Ohh so I'm not sure what to do now about GPU's! All I keep hearing is that Nvidia SLI 480's eat up much more Power under heavy loads and get way hotter then dual 5970? I'm probly not gonna keep the standard fans/heatsinks as I mensioned above for noise reasons, but if I did kept it, some people also supposedly say the 480's make more noise as well as an outcome? Can someone confirm this 3 negatives please?

No don't worry about it, the 480 heat/power/noise levels have be blown way out of proportion. They're definitely not very bad for its high level of GPU power. I just seen a recent compendium of heat/power/noise levels you can check for comparisons.

For reference Lilim's stock 480 in a stock HAF 932 idles at 32°C at 50% fan speed and reaches a max of 79°C at 79% fan speed.

Also keep in mind if you do end up LCing them then heat and noise levels are no longer an issue. As for power wise, based on the national average kilowatt per hour price the difference between a 480 and a 5870 is only gonna be like $1 a month. You would need a larger PSU to support dual 480s though, a 1200w or 1250w, whereas you could probably manage dual 5870s on a good 1000w. Not sure what kind of PSU you'd need for dual 5970s, but again those are badly overpriced and ATI quad-scaling is terrible so stay away from those anyway.

And CPU Heat sink from my old Desktop was a pain in the a** to clean up, I damaged the fins a bit too, so I think I have no choice but to get away from Air Cooling all together... but LCS is so pricey guhh! What to do? \(O.o)/

You'll still have to take some canned air to the PC to dust it every now and then, even with LCing.

Originally posted by Memento Mori Aight man, so... LC'ed 480's in SLI with 1200w PSU is a pretty good price to performance value, right?

For that resolution dual SLI 480s is a great price to performance value. But add in LCing and you throw price to performance ratios out the window.

Oh! almost forgot!!! What about RAM "Air fan kit cooling" or Asus MotherBoard LCing??

You can add the memory fan kit if you want, it's only $35, but neither is necessary. Definitely don't bother LCing the motherboard, the Rampage III already has great passive heatsinks that hold up to even extreme overclocking.

OMG you're a genius man! I'm so gonna go with the ASUS ARES 5870 Dual Cards 8gb GDDR5 Total VRAM (or am I wrong O.o) and special order the second one for it lol. Screw my Build-in Computer Desk Spot. I'm gonna put this sweet Chassis right under right side of my Desk.

Alright so I'm totally gonna do it and just like you said that HAF X 942 has this stupid 3 slot double-spaced bracket GUHH! Shame. The other Chassis from ehhh too confusing ahhh I'm loosing you bro! I would need to double check if other cases would work umm I'm not sure atm thou....
So Raven eh? That case; does it have a good enough Support Bracket for 3-slot wide spaced ARES GPU's? You seem to have this Chassis too right? I just checked on New-egg and it seems like it only has a typical 2 180mm intake bottom fans and ONLY?! One 120mm exhaust fan on TOP? (Is it just like Main-Gear Chassis?BTW) So I custom order the side Drilled Hole+Intake fan for the side, but wouldn't that like Unbalance the air pressure like ridiculously towards like oven like temps because of not having enough exhaust fans, or does it have more exhaust fans? And do you mean switch for New fans for Radiator on the outside for "LCS's CPU" Radiator or the Internal chassis fans switched to AP181? BTW screw Noise Output... I'll use earplugs lol so therefore can you Please recommend me whatever fans are the most powerful/best for cooling this behemoth safely!? You said either: AP121 or Gentle Typhoons or AP181 fans? *head explodes*

Correct me if I'm wrong please:
1) So all I do is tell Sarah that I'll send her my SSD's in Raid-0 for OS...
2) Then Utilize SilverStone Raven RV01?
3) Have them Cut a Hole in the side and put in Fully Volted AP181 fan 180mm?
4) Switch to DUAL AP181 Fully Volted Intake fans at the bottom? & Same for Exhaust fans on top???... but how many exhaust fans are there in Raven Case? and TOTAL fans incl custom side fan? or Gentle Typhoons fans?
5) I'll ask her then that I would use First ASUS ARES 5870 card and To Special Order the additional - Identical - Second - $1300 -> ASUS ARES 5870 card for 8gb GDDR5  of Total VRAM?

Ohhhh I'm definitely forgetting something! AHH, Hold On. 6:30 am dammit ahh!  ~_~)zZ
OH MY GUSH 4-SLI available?! how did i missed that option,  lol ... oh well, back to ARES Twins Ummm wait can't i just fit it in the first 3 PCI slots then the next 3 PCI slots then the 7th PCI slot for X-Fi Sound Card? or is it dependent on the freaking Raven Bracket position in relation to GPU's again? So then i put the Sound card in between the GPU's??
Auww man! NO LCS for this GPU's so it's seriously going to sound like a freaking rocket with that primitive GPU fan... there goes my "peaceful quietness" dream... 
Uh oh what about the Power Consumption and the 1500w PSU... do you really think its enough? Guhh I'm back to where I began... Loud, Power Hungry Beast of a GPU, at least it seeems like if i do those custom addons it should make it run NOT as hot right, is it tolerable as in stability wise? But then again I want to overclock it like you said... the GPU's Oh man!

Okay I misunderstood what you said, I'm going to ask someone from D.S... Sarah probably, hopefully she dealt with such cards and maybe even they can ehhhhhh LC them *crosses fingers* :P Oh wait she did say something about dual GPU's needing to be next to eachother so umm its going to either be a perfect trifecta (Case Brackets<>PCI slots<>LCS placement) or a total failure and where do i stick my Sound Card now? ahhhh! Wait is EVGA MotherBoard any good, I never owned one before... EVGA Classified SLIx4, I heard it runs hot supposedly from New-egg reviews... so i might get an LC Block on it too eh?


Edited by Memento Mori - 20 Jul 2010 at 8:16am

And just noticed that you never really saw what the heck an ARES was. LOL. Or did you? Whatever.

Links for the 3.5kg/7.8lb card coming up....LOL... :

Asus Page
http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=bGf2f0s2zeWhT0w8

Review
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/ARES/1.html

Again, hold that trigger, wait for other's opinions FIRST. I don't like it when other people don't have a chance to speak their mind, heh. The CrossFire'd ARES is just my personal opinion, and to support it, the Raven case and Asus boards are necessary. If a SLI 480 build seems like a better choice, then none of it is necessary. Pretty sure I'm gonna get shot down on the dual ARES though, LOL.

EDIT : JUST FORGOT. Dang, I forgot to add on that 5 year warranty. Do me a favor and remember to add that, extra $200 though. Another couple hundred for the wooden crate, and it still snugly fits into that $7500 budget. Fixed link w/5 yr warranty

EDIT : Forgot to mention two things on that post. Yeah, the Creative sound card will be sandwiched between the ARES. Sorry, it's the only way! The classified 4x-sli won't fit on the Raven. The Classified 3x SLI won't cut it, bad slot spacing. The Rampage III Extreme is the only offered option that'll make everything fit.

EDIT : Finding so many things i didn't address. The card holder on the HAF X is great. The only thing is, it fits standard size two slot cards like a regular 5970, or a GTX 480, etc. This ARES card is a monster at 3 slots, so it won't fit on the HAF X's holder. Which is why I can't rely on it to support the card and prevent it's 7.8lbs of might from tearing off the PCI-E slot. 'Nother thing, see that "Estimated Ship Date : 8/4/10"? Yeh, prepare to die waiting for the beast when you order it


Edited by ablahblah - 20 Jul 2010 at 8:47am

Yeah, quadding these things is a leeetle bit tricky. Needs specific driver support and specific settings. And it has some pretty dang good overclocking potential, a 25% overclock already at stock (no modification, regular cooler)! As for LC, man, it'd be sooo freaking sweet to go and LC these bad boys. Maybe a 5970 block would work. Whatever, ask DS.

The ASUS Rampage III Extreme is the only motherboard with the right PCI-E slot schematic to make this work. 7 slots will take up the entire dang thing's space for expansion. Very tricky to find a motherboard layout that'll support it correctly.

Oh, and BEFORE I get killed for suggesting the ARES. I suggested the ARES being aware of how horrible a usual 5970 is. This ain't no 5970 lol. Dual 5870's, no setbacks. It might be able to compete with 480s, it runs cooler than 480s, actually uses LESS power than 480s, though noise is the issue. Might be possible to LC em, which is again why I suggested em.


Edited by ablahblah - 20 Jul 2010 at 8:49am

EVGA 4x SLI will NOT fit in this chassis. It's bigger than E-ATX, which is already I think the biggest international case standard. Only a few specially designed cases will fit it, like the Lian Li PC-P80 or the HAF X. But again, I wouldn't personally ship any ARES in a case besides a Raven. Too risky of it tearing the PCI-E slot clean off. Seeing as there are only three cases are Raven, and that the Raven 1 is the only practical one for airflow and liquid cooling in this situation, I'm sticking with the Raven 1. The EVGA 3x SLI Classified will fit, but there's a sliver of doubt that it might or might not fit. Look at it.


I was thinking the Creative card would go at the end, one ARES right next to it, reaching to the next PCI-E slot (red), skipping the middle black PCI slot, and having the last ARES on the next PCI-E slot (red) branching off JUST reaching the edge of the motherboard. It'd stuff the fan right next to the case wall though, bad airflow.

Now look at the Rampage III Extreme:

I can stuff an ARES at the PCI-E slot at the right (red), put the  Creative card at the middle black PCI-Ex4 slot, and sandwich it with another ARES directly to the left of it. It'd just nicely jam right before the edge of the motherboard, leaving some breathing room.


Edited by ablahblah - 20 Jul 2010 at 9:20am

I'm looking at Raven RV02... semms like it would work better, whachya think?
Revolutionary 90 degree motherboard mounting from RAVEN RV01
Three 180mm fans for unprecedented positive pressure and stack effect cooling
Supports liquid cooling radiator mounting
Motherboard back plate opening behind CPU area for quick cooler assembly
Supports 11” wide ATX motherboard
Supports EIGHT expansion slots.
Updated hard drive suspension system to prevent drive noise

Ah! I think you guys are right, I should just get the Lian Li Chassis and Asus Rampage III Extreme because i just measured the size of my empty space under the desk and its a no go (i would destroy my knees next to this case)... still going to have to fit it in between ~10" of desk space. hmm so many choices lol
EDIT: but wait. the v2 adds one more slot opening and seems like it has more internal space as well as it adds a 3rd intake fan at the bottom and thats it lol but still i dunno, man.

EDIT2: ARES has 40nm chip... hence the HUJ power consumption i guess and well also the dual cores, ehh :\


Edited by Memento Mori - 20 Jul 2010 at 9:48am

I am a professional cg artist.  I use maya, modo, zbrush, cs4 suite daily.  DO NOT GET ATI VIDEO CARDS.  They are great for gaming but Nvidia is the way to go for 3d creation apps!  Go with the 480.  On a side note, sli will gain you nothing in the aformentioned apps, only gaming will see a benefit.

monitor.. Dell 3007 good, 3008 bit better, also the HP 3065 is good. The HP is what I use for a gaming monitor ATM.

Why not just get a new desk?  You seem to have a huge budget for this.  

LOL make the 30" fit! you will not regret it. I have 9 monitors at the house currently, and there is a reason I game on that one.

Okay so I'm doing some further research for Best 30" Gaming Monitors and came across this HARDOCP Forum post.
I modified the post with links to Newegg and Amazon.
Post #16 from "Vega". He seems to know what he's talking about, I think...
ACTUAL PANEL MODEL #... is in parenthesis>>>

This is a list of 30" IPS monitors that have NO SCALER... leading to around 15ms or less of INPUT LAG and the panel used:

Dell 3007WFP-HC (LM300WQ"3") http://www.amazon.com/Dell-3007WFP-HC-30-Inch-Widescreen-Monitor/dp/B001AO2QLG/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1279674881&sr=8-3

HP LP3065 (LM300WQ"3") http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824176071&Tpk=HP%20LP3065

LG W3000H (LM300WQ"5") http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824005115

Doublesight DS-305W (LM300WQ"3") http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824185012&cm_re=DS-305W-_-24-185-012-_-Product


This is a list of 30" IPS monitors that HAVE a SCALER... leading to 25ms or more (even up to 50ms range) of INPUT LAG and the panel used:

Dell 3008WFP (LM300WQ"5") http://www.amazon.com/Dell-UltraSharp-3008WFP-30-inch-Widescreen/dp/B001JI92KQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1279675713&sr=8-1

NEC LCD3090WQXi (LM300WQ"5") http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824002419&Tpk=LCD3090WQXi


This is a list of 30" PVA monitors which are generally slower then IPS due to the technology, generally in the 30ms or more (even up to 50+ms range) of INPUT LAG and the panel used:

Samsung XL30 (LTM300DS) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824001266&cm_re=Samsung_XL30-_-24-001-266-_-Product

Samsung 305T (LTM300M1) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824001098&cm_re=Samsung_305T-_-24-001-098-_-Product

Gateway XHD3000 (LTM300M1) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824113013&cm_re=Gateway_XHD3000-_-24-113-013-_-Product

His Post Continues...

      Alright so I don't understand something, they're all talking about increased INPUT LAG when the SCALER activates to scale and convert to a different resolution BUT what if I would always be using the Native 2560x1600 resolution? Then will this be an issue and would it even affect me or the scaler just won't turn on and therefore not increase the input lag in Native Res??
And I suspect that NONE of those panels are 10bit like the new Dell U2711 (2010 edition) is right?

But then, there are those 1080P120Htz panels !!! Dammit my head hurts now!


Edited by Memento Mori - 20 Jul 2010 at 10:07pm