HOW I´VE BUILT MY NEW PC FOR XXHIGHEND AND WHY I´VE CHOSEN THE COMPONENTS

[CoenP]

Thanks!

I have a different mobo but applied a lot if the same tweaks, though some are new to me. Setting number 5) did the same for me on the Atom d525 motherboard (current cpu has no HT), ht on may be speedier (slightly) but off sounded better.

Off course there is more. Do you use the disc on ide or ahci mode?

Just recently I switched over to a new casing since the huge Megahalems cooler (no fans here when going for ult sq) didn't fit in my old one. No surprise I had to change a few xx settings to get my sound back again.

Regards, Coen

[Nick]

Off course there is more. Do you use the disc on ide or ahci mode?

Coen hi,

Good to hear.

I tried ahci quite a while ago but it had a negative effect on sound quality. Then I found there was no way of swoping back to IDE drivers without re installing the OS. 

The linear supply for the HDD is worth trying.

Best,
Nick.

[CoenP]

I tried ahci quite a while ago but it had a negative effect on sound quality. Then I found there was no way of swoping back to IDE drivers without re installing the OS. 

That was my finding too. Getting the same conclusions on quite different systems stems hopefull for a general PC setup guide.

The linear supply for the HDD is worth trying.

I will take this tip seriously ! I have kilos of transformers etc lying around waiting for such a little project.

regards, Coen

[manisandher]

Nick, wow this must have taken you ages to work out. Anyway, thanks a lot for sharing the fruits of your efforts with all of us.

It's going to take me some time to try all of this out. And having bought a bunch of fans and HDDs, it's going to be a bit of a painful process stripping Le Monster down. (But hey, nothing compared to spending months sourcing a PMII and an expensive Weiss interface only to have the combo handily beaten by the original NOS1!)

Mani.

[Nick]

Mani hi,

I realise this would be quite a change for your build so I was giving some thought to how you could try this in an easily reversible way without screw driver work.

Perhaps you could try the following for the physical changes first;

1)   Pull all the fan headers for all the case fans off the mother board

2)   Pull the CPU fan header off the mother board and run it from a separate external 12v supply for now. Doing this will give a “CPU fan” Bios error, this can be fixed by setting the Bios (it needs to be done otherwise the CPU may be throttled down due to the lack of cooling status). I can point you in the direction of this Bios change if needed.

3)   Pull the power leads out of all of the RAID SDD DVDs etc and leave them where they are (SATA cables still connected should be ok).

4)   Use your supper fast HDD for OS, XXHE. Put some music on to this drive to try the config with before the RAID drives are powered down.

5)   The linear power to the single HDD is easy to setup if you have some old SATA power cables about and a suitable bench power supply. We can discuss this particularly the earth layout (it’s simple to set up). Is seems to be fine to power up the drive before the PC so I just switch the HDD PSU on at the wall socket that the whole system is connected to then boot the PC as usual with the drive already spinning.

6)   The Bios and OS tweaks are all reversible so these are easy to apply / dissapply.


Apart from the Linear supply on the HDD all of the above would then be easily reversible if the config does not give the SQ results but I think it should.

PM me when you get to step 5) and I will explain what I did (if you don’t have a supply to hand there is a Maplin one that works fine and is not too expensive to try).

Best regards,

Nick.

[juanpmar]

Hi Nick, congratulations for your new and fantastic music Pc. I wonder if you could upload some pictures to show us how it looks and if it is possible to explain how you built it up in an easy way for the people who are not so techies.

Best regards,
Juan

[Nick]

Hi all,



Here is the spec for my PC build. Thanks to Juan and Mani for their recommendations which helped to spec the build.

Juan, sorry no pics yet, see comments about the case below - its not pretty 

Processor

Intel Core i7-3930X Processor - 3.2GHz, Sandy Bridge, Socket 2011.

Processor provides physical 6 cores and up to 12 threads if hyper threading is used, I have it switched off. It will overclock to about 4.5Ghz with a good motherboard and supports quad channel memory access.

Motherboard

Asus P9X79WS Workstation Series Motherboard.

I think this board is a great spot by Mani, I was going to go for the Asus Sabertooth X79 board but the P9X79WS is a very nice if expensive board. The board’s Bios makes it easy to shut off none essential hardware for music and overclocking is very simple (The board and CPU achieve a 4.2Ghz CPU clock speed by clicking a single “auto tune” button).

Memory

G.Skill 16GB (4 x 4GB) DDR3 2133MHz DIMM CL11 Ripjaw Z.

I went for reasonably fast 2133Mhz clock speed as in the past faster memory has helped with sound quality. Also some benchmarks show lower density DIMMs achieving slightly higher memory read speeds. This amount of memory in the PC allows for SFS up to 470mb in XXHE (I have not tried any higher). If Peter swops to a 64bit version of XXHE that needs more memory the ASUS X79 WS mother board has another 4 DIMM slots so it would be easy to bring total memory up to 32mb.

The motherboard clocks this memory to its full speed.

Cooling

No case fans, CPU fans or video fans are used.

Zalman Resorator 2 Water Cooling (CPU and video card).

I really like this unit for providing fanless XXHE sound quality and silent operation. The water pump has its own separate mains connection and so doesn't  use the PC’s Power.

EDIT

the Resorator 2 needs a Zalman mounting clip kit to be ordered to fit the water block onto a socket 2011 motherboard. The kit is cheap but is not in the box with the standard water cooling system.

Storage

A single Seagate Barracuda 500mb SATAII drive.

This is the only drive used whilst playing music. The drive is powered by an linear power supply external to the PC. OS, XXHE and music are all on the same partition.

A Samsung SH-222BB SATTA DVD R/W. and OZ Vertex II SSD are fitted but power is always  disconnected whilst playing music. The DVD drive was selected only based on availability, I will have to see how it fairs when used to rip CDs.

Operating system

Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit sp1 installed directly from Microsoft DVD. No update's applied.     

Power supply

Corsair AX750, thanks for the recommendation Juan, a nice unit, silent operation in this PC (the fan never comes on) and good sound.

USB

PCIe USB 3 card with NEC chipset, USB 3.0 cable and adaptor to connect to NOS1 USB.

EDIT
Graphics

Radion HD5450

Its a passively cooled card as standard. I have watercooled it but really it doesn’t need this. It was selected as a low cost card which hopefully would not do too much damage (through hardware and driver behaviours) to music, it seems to work well in this respect.

Case

This is where it gets a bit embarrassing - A no-name pressed steel case (probably about £20 pounds or free from most house hold dumps :-) ). My excuse is that it doesn't help it sound quality so no money spent here.... yet.

Best,
Nick.

[juanpmar]

Thank you Nick, that´s a great work.

That cooling system is very interesting as it allows to turn off the fans, btw how do you turn on/off the hdd fans? just plugging and unplugging it?

What kind of power supply you use for this cooling system?
Could you put some links to the place where you bought it?

One more thing, how have you disabled totally the hyper threading?.

Sorry, too many questions at the same time.

Best regards,
Juan

[Nick]

Juan hi,

No problems re questions.

The Resorator 2 water cooling system comes as a kit with everything needed (except the mounting clip for a socket 2011 CPU this is ordered separately). The water pump is in the bottom of the radiator and has a 240v mains lead going directly to it. I plug the pump into the same socket block that the rest of the hifi is plugged into. This way as soon as the wall mains is switched on the pump is running before the pc can be booted.

http://www.quietpc.com/products/watercooling/reserator1-v2

http://www.quietpc.com/products/watercooling/zm-oc2011

The HDD does not have any fan at all. The disk itself is powered by an external linear power supply, this feeds +12v and +5 volts to the disk drive. Again the external linear supply is plugged into the same socket block at the rest of the system. When the wall power is switched on the linear supply starts and the disk spins up. Then I boot the pc when I am ready, the boot process does not mind that the disk is already spinning.

Hyper threading is usually something that can be enabled /disabled in the pc bios. This is where the Asus x79 motherboard turns it off.

Hope this helps,

Nick.

[PeterSt]

Guys,

As you know I'm always keen on first "anouncing" something, to only next start doing/making it. Usually it is about something which is not the most easy to accomplish, but by anouncing it in advance I sort of *have* to do it.

I was asked by something starting with 6 and ending with Moons to arrange for a nice - no, rather ultimate Win PC for XXHighEnd. Okay, so it had to be good ...

After days of searching for proper components I think I have it all together, ready to order all. But what was my challenge ?
Well, to squeeze a nice LGA 2011 based system with a 6 core processor into a slick looking "audio cabinet". I think I managed with something which is 14cm (5.5") tall (including feet).

Of course the main subject here is the processor cooling and getting rid of the heat in the cabinet, and, I settled for less than 20dB of (fan) noise (under full steam).

At this moment I could start laying out what I all will be using for it, but it is a kind of a moot thing because I don't know yet whether all is going to work as intended. The processor cooler might just not fit, or maybe I can't get rid of PWM regulation which all is based upon officially. If something doesn't work, I at least have a base to proceed upon and I can order new components with the physical stuff at hand.

Btw, of course I considered closed loop liquid cooling, but it comes with its own problems, like reliability and the physical mounting of the radiator/fan. So, it will be air cooled, and if something is a challenge in a 14cm tall cabinet and a 130W processor, it is just that. And remember, when the cooler fits into the height of the cabinet, it may not fit over the memory or other components, so even the choice of motherboard is important as is the height of the memory cards.


Another reason to now write about this, is because right after I finished selecting the components, Nick came up with the "whimpy" approach. Haha. I mean, besides all the very good stuff Nick came up with, nothing is more easy to clunk it all into infinite dimensions. So that came to me as "too easy" after my own hard work (well, that really is how it came to me). But ... after reading about Nick's setup, I really should incorporate a couple of linear power supplies for which (again) theoretically some space is left; The setup is based upon having USB3 external HDDs except for the OS disc and one other "special appliances" (0.9z-7) disc, while 4 3.5" HDDs can be in there. So there should be some space for a couple of transformers and sturdy PSUs.

If it all failed I'll let you know just the same ...
Peter

[gsuser]

Hello,
Why not trying a Xeon E5-2620 ? It has a slower clock speed, but a wider cache, a faster system bus and only 95 Watts TDP.
http://ark.intel.com/compare/64594,63697

[PeterSt]

To be honest, I never saw that Xeon coming. What at least *is* nice is that it's using the same socket.
Furthermore the 95W will emerge from the lower clock speed, and in my opinion the 130W processor will consume about the same when not used at full throttle (which it will only do in brief spikes once per XX seconds, were it about XXHighEnd usage).
Lastly, I didn't see the price of it yet (didn't look further either) but it should be more expensive I think ...

Something to consider at least !
Thanks,
Peter

PS: But with this Xeon around, I'd rather start looking for a dual socket board ....

[gsuser]

No, it's a hundred euros cheaper !
A pair of these could be nice on a Z9PE-D8 WS 

[juanpmar]

Of course the main subject here is the processor cooling and getting rid of the heat in the cabinet, and, I settled for less than 20dB of (fan) noise (under full steam)....

...The processor cooler might just not fit, or maybe I can't get rid of PWM regulation which all is based upon officially.

Hi Peter,

These fans could perhaps be useful for your project:

- http://www.noctua.at/main.php?show=productview&products_id=46&lng=en (This one could have some difficulties refrigerating cpus with more than 95W)

- http://www.noctua.at/main.php?show=productview&products_id=35&lng=en= (Maybe a little bit taller than you want)

- http://www.scythe-usa.com/product/cpu/120/scbsk2000_index.html (I´m using this one in my work pc and it is absolutely silent but I´m not sure if it could work without pwm)

Anyway, you must have your reasons to get a box with such a dimensions but if you could choose the box depending on the size of the main components, always thinking on reducing its size as much as possible, you could have an easier task.

Best regards,
Juan

[juanpmar]

Hi Nick,

I turned off the hyper threading so now only 6 cores are working. I´m not sure that it is faster with the flac tracks because it has to stop every 5 tracks. About if it sounds better without hyper threading I don´t know yet but it doesn´t seem something really evident.

Could you let me know if it is possible to buy a linear power supply to power the drive?, I think that here in the forum there are some posts about it, not sure though.

Best regards,
Juan