initial impressions of the rig

Received it this afternoon and of course, been getting it "just right" installing all the apps, games, and such..

I will have a full review within 2 days done once i can get benchmarks run as well as some real time testing done.

Initial impressions though:

packaging: outstanding job with the packaging. There wasnt a single scratch on the rig and everything was very secure in the box. Everything was included in the order as well as the Tshirt that the wife promptly stole.

Exterior: Almost flawless... not a single scratch. It is really something that has to be seen to be apreciated. I am VERY glad I waited for the paint finish... its one hell of a job! The only discrepency I found was 2 small cracks on the plexiglass where the screws are located, neither of which were larger than 1/4 an inch.

Interior wiring/cooling: WOW.... Awesome job on both... the wiring and cooling were done really clean and no kinks in the cooling lines. Only hiccup was the wiring of the sound card... the pop up external port on the casr was wired to the sound card and when I tried to use the mic (plugged into the card itself)... it would NOT work no matter what I did. I Then popped off the connector to the card and it worked fine... There was a second connector sitting beside the other one and I tried that one and the mic  worked just fine with both the back of the card and the front case connector. Front USB ports work and the only one I haven't tried was the firewire which I will do tomorrow.

Functionality/speed: Everything ran perfect from the first push of the power button. As far as speed goes, the qx 6850 was overclocked to 3.67 and the ram is running at 1066 (I have the 1250 speed, gotta look into it)
I was expecting a slightly higher overclock but it is not really an issue.. a few hundred MHZ wont do much as far as real world performance goes. The video cards were both running stock speeds even with water cooling as well.

Overall: VERY IMPRESSED by the quality. The few hiccups are minor and it runs extremely fast. COD4 demo ranged from 110-150 FPS at max settings... made me very happy

I will have a full review w/pics in a few days.

Only thing pressing is I would like to look into getting a new plexiglass window. Cracks are small now but dont want them to grow.






 

I have a ton of games I need to install... gotta get vista 32/64 installed correctly first. The tri-boot setup had a couple hiccups yesterday (dual boot went fine) so thats what I need to get fixed tonight. Also need to get into the BIOS and get my memory runnning at the right speed. (99% sure I know what needs to get changed) Once that is done the games will get on there and the benching will begin.

The eVGA 680i motherboard currently does not like to work with both a 1333MHz FSB CPU and ram running at 1250MHz (Even with the P31 BIOS update). It has to do with the FSB:MEM ratio and memory holes within the actual chipset design.

Edited by Alex - 31 Oct 2007 at 2:47pm

Cool. See how high you can push it, I am very interested in your findings!

Alex, you wrote: "The eVGA 680i motherboard currently does not like to work with both a 1333MHz FSB CPU and ram running at 1250MHz (Even with the P31 BIOS update)....  What we do is, reduce the ram to 1066Mhz and make your timings from 5-5-5-18-2T to 4-4-4-10-2T. This makes up for the difference in 1250Mhz and 1066Mhz. In our tests, running the ram at a lower latency increases the overall system's performance. We have seen better benchmark scores with lower latency ram at 1066MHz than 1250MHz with higher latencies."

Thanks for the explanation, Alex. Since the PC2-10000 mem is a costly upgrade and generally for the enthusiast, wouldn't it make sense for DS to place an explanation on the configuration page as to what exactly the customer is purchasing? And accompanied by appropriate benchmark scores? It was not mentioned at the time I purchased my system--either by the rep or in subsequent written communication. To discover an issue now, on this forum of all places, is really inappropriate, don't you think?

Alex, can you post the benchmarks?

BTW, Ed, your rig, as pictured earlier, looks BEAUTIFUL--and soooo glad your intial impressions are of the same high quality workmanship others have expressed. 

THE WITCHER arrived 10 minutes ago by UPS--now all I need is my new system to play it on.

Originally posted by Kelly Sherlock, this is something we just found.  Some systems work with it and some don't.  There's no real common denominator except the ram/cpu combos.  So when we tried the different timings, those problems started going away.  I think you're right that there should be a more uniform method of explaning our findings, but unfortuntately, they don't apply to everyone.  so we post our findings here in the forums.

Edited by Jingping - 31 Oct 2007 at 5:32pm

Alex, the only thing I noticed when I got my rig, which I didn't mention because it was so petty, was that I too had a cracked corner on the window of my Extreme case.  As a matter of fact, since I've had it now, that corner is only there because the screw is tacking it to the side panel.

I don't want to be a heavy on you guys, but do you think you could send me out another clear panel also?  I'm very reluctant to ask this... but I did.

Thanks buddy!