mcbeen.com

I took the 4870 back out of my machine tonight to get a closer look and the board and the discrepancy between it and the 4890. The components on my board are not missing any kind of heat sink material. They are fundamentally different from the four below them. So thats somewhat of a relief.

I also decided that even though having a cool CPU is nice… blowing large amounts of sub-zero air into my office was not. I went ahead and used the box the system came in, and made a nice fitting box for the fan set. I then reversed the top fan again, so the bottom sucks in cool air, then the top fan blows it back out. It raised the temps on the water system by about 10 degrees… but it also did the same for my office lol. I can live with mid 20’s idle, and low 40’s under load.

I’ve been going back and forth with Frozen CPU trying to see if I could get a return exchange on this block… we’ll see what happens. The good news it that they carry a block that looks like a perfect fit! If I can get a credit from them, I should be able to get it next week.

Also, I think I may have found a portion of my cooling issues on this card. If you take a look at these photos:

You can see on the right that two of the power supply transistors are missing their heat sinks. I never really thought about it until I saw a reference image for the 4890. I’ll have to see if I can get that corrected before tonights raids 🙂

FrozenCPU.com is the shit. They are responsive, helpful, and prompt. Always check them out first!!!

So far this project has been a complete success. I have a very stable machine now. Here was my final parts list:

ASUS P7P55D EVO
Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield 2.66GHz (Overclocked to 3.9 Ghz Stable, ~50C)
Thermaltake Ultra Extreme Rev C
120mm noctua cooling fan
SAPPHIRE Vapor-X Radeon HD 4870
LG DVD Burner Black SATA Model GH22NS50
ASUS USB-BT21 USB 2.0 Mini Bluetooth Dongle
Intel X25-M 80gb SSD drive

I don’t use onboard audio for my machines. I instead use an USB audio adaptor for my headsets. I may work on getting the onboard system working in the future, but for now I don’t have a use for it.

The machine is wicked fast, just as I hoped, and the video card appears to be working very well. All my games are playing great. Video transcodes are wonderfully fast.

I was able to confirm this morning with netkas that 4770’s are still not working with the latest driver sets. For now it appears I’m stuck in slow with my old 8600. We’ll see how long I can take it.

Got the machine working well now. I had to give up for now on my 4770, although I plan to work on it more after i learn a bit more about what is going on. I swapped out my wife’s nvidia 8600 for my 4770. Its a bit slower, but it works great!! I’m sure she won’t mind XD.

A couple more things I have noticed:

1) make sure you are running in the mode you expect (64 bit vs 32 bit) Many of the drivers only work in one or the other. You can verify this under system profiler–>software
2) pfix doesn’t work right. Make sure you repair permissions with disk utility.