joe307 Posted May 3, 2010 Share Posted May 3, 2010 Everything but the memory arrived today, so I took the day off work to play with my new toys! CPU: Intel Core i7 920 w/ Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus MOBO: Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 PSU: Corsair 650w VIDEO: EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX+ HDD: 3x WD 500GB Caviar Green 3GB/s CASE: Antec 902 Not shown here: 1x 250GB SATA 1.5GB/s, 1x 300GB SATA 1.5GB/s both from my old system. I haven't decided if I want to RAID5 the WDs or just RAID0 two of them for OS/Apps. I'm kinda kicking myself for not getting a SSD! First impressions: I love this case. This heatsink is HUGE!!! Antec 902: Controls on the rear of case for the top and rear fans: Control knob for each drive bay fan: The two lower drive bays are removable, have a removable dust filter for easy cleaning, and hold 3 drives each: Thoughts: This is the nicest case I have purchased! I didn't even know it had fan controls until I opened it up. I didn't see anything about them on the Newegg specs. I like the bottom-mounted CPU and the ability to route cables behind the motherboard to keep them out of the way. Unfortunately, with 5 SATA drives it got kinda hairy because the video card is so long it comes pretty close to the drives. If you are installing a similar system I recommend that you connect SATA power before you install the video card. I was going to remove the card but just ended up working around it. I may have gone a little overboard with routing wires to the back of the case because the first time I tried to put the back cover on it was being pushed out by all the cabling. I spread the cables out a little more so they weren't all bunched up and the cover closes much better. I wouldn't mind having an extra 1/4" back there though! Closeup of the i7 920: Cooler Master Hyper 212 beside a 3.5" drive for comparison: and mounted... The reviews I read on this said it cools extremely well but was a headache to install. I wasn't looking forward to the installation but it really turned out to be a breeze. There is a bit of space between the heat pipes and the spacer block (sorry, I don't know the technical term) so I had to use a little more Arctic Silver than usual to fill the cracks with the help of a razor blade. For anyone looking to buy one of these, make sure you have the tensioner turned the correct way. You will see on one side of the plate there is a little nub sticking up (see picture below) and there is a cutout on the tensioner that only lines up one way. If you are having trouble, just turn it around and try the other way and it should fit The PSU... I'm not sure why they put it in a bag! This thing is a little overkill on the cables for me since I am only using one graphics card. I tucked one of the PCI-E cables, an entire one of the 4-pin cables (they have 4-5 connectors on each cable), and 3/4ths of the second SATA power cable behind the tray (that may be why it got a little crowded back there... lol) Everything (except the memory) installed: Cables routed to the rear: I am pretty happy with the installation. Being able to route so many of the cables through the back of the case was making it look nice and leave plenty of room for good airflow until I started with all the SATA cables and power. I really don't like the IDE cable so I am going to try to find a rounded IDE cable that is long enough to route out of the way. I also need to get a firewire card. I have an external HDD and dual layer dvd burner that are both firewire. Eventually I would like to get rid of the internal DVD drive and just use the external (either that or buy a black one... my old drive is white...blech!) Thanks for reading this far! I will post more once the memory gets here and I can actually push the power button UPDATE: Snow Leopard installation went very smoothly using the aptly named Kakewalk! Overclocked to a stable 3.8GHz CPU temps are crazy high in OSX (70º C) GPU fan is stupid loud during boot UPDATE: After using d00d's DSDT my idle temps in OSX dropped to 46º C. Still not great but it's progress. Sleep works! Sound is broken Xbench and System Information: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mackilroy Posted May 3, 2010 Share Posted May 3, 2010 I've read a lot that says IDE drives don't play too nicely with a hackintosh – I went the SATA route personally. If you haven't decided on an install method, I'd recommend either Digital Dreamer or Kakewalk to install OS X. I used Kakewalk, and it was a breeze. What kind of RAM did you buy? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
georges_k Posted May 3, 2010 Share Posted May 3, 2010 I'll be watching your thread closely as I am thinking of getting about the same system. Keep up the pictures and the good work! How heavy was the parcel that came in to your house? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joe307 Posted May 4, 2010 Author Share Posted May 4, 2010 Mackilroy: Thanks for the heads up. It looks like the SATA DVD RW drives are pretty reasonably priced so I might just pick up one of those. Lord knows this motherboard has enough SATA ports! From what I've read on the forums for this setup, I decided to go with Kakewalk. It is good to hear that it worked well for you too The RAM is 3 sticks of G-SKILL 2GB DDR3 1333 PC10666. The 1600 was tempting but I liked the timing on these sticks (7-7-7-7-18). I think these will overclock without much fuss, but I don't want to overdo it. georges_k: Thanks, I have enjoyed building this one! The Antec 902 is 29lbs and the rest of the stuff was only around 10lbs. I was shocked the first time I picked it up after installing all the parts! My previous case (Lian Li) was brushed aluminum and weighed next to nothing compared with this beast. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sumobritches Posted May 4, 2010 Share Posted May 4, 2010 i did the exact same build as well except i have a GTS 250 GPU but that's not a big deal. did you get SL working properly? i've yet to try it since i gave up all hope about 6 months ago. any luck? keep me posted please. thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alitarbegshe Posted May 4, 2010 Share Posted May 4, 2010 Nice pictures! Am going to do a very similar build, just waiting for all the parts. Keep us updated on how things go Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ninetto Posted May 4, 2010 Share Posted May 4, 2010 What was the price tag on your rig in the end?... looks quite nice. I am really having a hard time to decide on a 1156 vs 1366 board.... But one potential big plus for the 1366: in the near future it looks like the the genius bios-modder, Carti will have a special Bios for this board, so not even any dsdt hacking will be needed, check out his blog at http://cartri.net/blog/269 good luck, ninetto Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
benraymond Posted May 5, 2010 Share Posted May 5, 2010 Very nice setup, thanks for sharing, nice photos. I'm thinking about the same CPU, board, and Cooler - wasn't aware that that cooler stuck out so far! Seems like a nice case - I'm thinking about the Silverstone Fortress 2. Good luck! Ben Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joe307 Posted May 8, 2010 Author Share Posted May 8, 2010 Snow Leopard installation went very smoothly using the aptly named Kakewalk! I was having trouble at first because I'm an idiot and was trying to use the legacy Kakewalk iso (I burned it on a Windows laptop because my PowerBook is running Panther and was too old to execute the Kakewalk.app) and the readme pdf explicitly said that the legacy iso didn't work on my board. After this blunder I drove to work and burned Kakewalk on an Intel Mac and it was smooth sailing from there. I must admit there was a window of time where I was having buyer's remorse. I wasn't having any success bumping the BCLK over 140, a HDD or something was making an annoying noise, and my Saitek USB keyboard doesn't work sometimes during boot until the OS loads (so I had to plug in a PS-2 keyboard to enter bios or choose another OS from the bootloader). Also I bought this RAM instead of the more popular ones on Newegg because of the fast timing, but when I would adjust the clock speeds in the BIOS my RAM timings would turn to {censored}. The CPU is running hotter than I would have hoped so I'm not sure if this cooler isn't sufficient or if it is a problem with my installation. I like this video card, but the GPU fan gets LOUD. Maybe I should have gotten the GT instead of the GTX+. Finally, I am disappointed that I couldn't get OSX installed on my RAID0 drives. I read that OSX doesn't like software RAID but the EX58-UD5 has an on-board hardware RAID controller, but when I tried to create a partition for OSX in Disk Utility, it just hangs up and I have to reboot. For now I am running OSX on it's own 500GB HDD and Windows7 is on the 1TB RAID0. After some googling and fiddling with the OC settings I am now pretty stable at 3.8GHz. I have been playing Dragon Age: Origins a bit and although it isn't really a high-end graphics game it looks great on the highest quality settings and everything loads super fast. I need to figure out why my temps are so high. In OSX i get 70C idle temps (not good!) and in Win7 Everest shows 39C CPU idle temp and 50-51C for cores 1-4. I ran the stress test in Everest for about 3 minutes and the CPU never went above 57C. So far I am super happy with everything except my temperatures. Video, sound, and LAN worked great out of the box in OSX. I was having the annoying beep/static when scrolling or resizing windows in OSX, but that went away when I installed all the drivers from the Gigabyte CD. I haven't tried sleep/hibernate yet and I still have some tweaking to do for OSX to recognize the virtual cores. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mackilroy Posted May 9, 2010 Share Posted May 9, 2010 Update to d00d's DSDT for the 930 and EX58-UD5. That dropped my temps by 20º F. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joe307 Posted May 9, 2010 Author Share Posted May 9, 2010 Thanks Mackilroy! I had read d00d's post a few days ago but was kinda overwhelmed with all the changes needed. After reading your post I went ahead and used his pre-packaged DSDT. My board had f4 BIOS so I had to flash it to f12. My idle temps dropped around 24C! I was trying not to use OSX until I got this straightened out because I didn't want to be cooking my CPU but now I don't have to worry! Cheers to d00d for his hard work Original post has been updated with temperature monitor, xbench, and system info! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mackilroy Posted May 9, 2010 Share Posted May 9, 2010 Glad to hear d00d's DSDT worked great for you. I haven't overclocked my own hack yet – I just have the stock cooler, and my case is pretty crowded as it is right now. To flash your BIOS did you use an old floppy disk or a flash drive? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joe307 Posted May 9, 2010 Author Share Posted May 9, 2010 To flash your BIOS did you use an old floppy disk or a flash drive? I had to use a flash drive. The Gigabyte manual said that you could flash it from the hard drive, but it kept telling me "No disk found" so I guess it was only looking for a floppy. Temps are lower and sleep works, but now my sound is broken Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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