Nibblers:

I've had one of these for years. I like it because with it you can cut a hole in the middle of a piece of material without starting the cut on the edge then cutting over to your hole although you have to drill a small hole inside the perimeter of your hole to start the cut.

Amazon also sells the AK327 and this one probably others too. A rotary saw in a Dremel works well too but it's more expensive.

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

Well, my new rig is busy making a bigger contribution to GPUGrid. I even have the old rig upstairs running with a GTX 460…

I have a problem. The new rig is fan-noisy with just two CPU cores active, running the acemd.814 code. An ear inside the case tells me it’s the stock CPU cooler. I guess that chickening-out on the EVO cooler was not a good idea!

ASUS doc tells me the CPU warranty is void with a non-stock cooler. What to do? …

Tom

You can experiment a bit with the fan settings in Thermal Radar or chose another preset cooling mode. Or turn the "turbo" mode of in the BIOS. As you can see the AMD is running at higher speed, if that is lower is is cooler and uses less power, and thus has the little fan make less rotations (not spin that fast).

You can put on another cooler if you want, the new CPU coolers from Be Quit are very good.
ASUS don't care what you use to you cool with, its the manual of the CPU that says that you need the stock cooler to keep the warranty. But if you keep the stock cooler, than no problem you can send that in with the CPU if needed.
But the change that you ever need to do that is very very small.

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Greetings from TJ

I shall be back here soon with a plea for help on the BIOS of this beast I've bought...

In the meantime, if you've been following this thread, you will know I suggested to my son that his Santa contribution could be a GTX 770. Didn't work! I got an Amazon gift certificate for €50... She who holds the purse strings saw how disappointed I was and has agreed to fund the balance! Bingo!!!

My first thought is to put the 770 in my old i7 PC. It has a 620 watt PSU - is that enough? But I don't know how long I can keep up the pretense that it must be on for file transfer purposes...

Has anyone had experience of squeezing three wide PSUs into a Sabertooth 990FX R2.20 mobo (four PCIe slots) inside a Cooler Master HAF 932 Advanced case?

Has anyone had experience of squeezing three wide PSUs

Make that GPUs...

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620W is absolutely enough for one GTX770.
It should be possible to put 3 GPU's on the Sabertooth, but with very little space in between and the fan of one GPU will such in warm air from the other card.
I have space for it and my case is somewhat shorter then yours. However it could become very warm then and the CPU cooler will make even more noise.

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Greetings from TJ

Tomba, if you need help optimizing your BIOS settings on the Sabertooth MB, just let me know, I'm running 4 990FX chipset motherboards (2 Asus M5A990FX Pro R2.0 and 2 Asus Crosshair V Formula-Z). I'm going to be upgrading the other 2 to Formula-Z MB's soon because they let me run 32GB of 1866 RAM with lower settings and they are much more stable because the memory slots have their own 4 pin power connection straight from the PSU. The PCIe slots also have their own 4 pin Molex connection too, my TDP hardly moves on my GPU's. If your interested, just let me know, I have a tremendous amount of experience with that chipset.

TJ is right... with 3 cards in the case you're going to have cooling problem and/or a noise problem. That's why Retvari recommended cards with radial fans if you intended to put 3 on 1 mobo. Cards with radial fans blow the heat out the back of the case. IIRC, your cards have axial fans which blow the hot air at the card beside it or the CPU and leave the hot air inside the case.

Fortunately there are various solutions:

*wear ear plugs
*banish the rig to a different room and access it remotely
*increase the airflow into the case and between the cards
*decrease the temperature of the air going into the case
*a combination of 3 and 4

Try removing the case side cover and laying the case down on the closed side. Less hot air will collect in the case that way. Or remove the side cover, leave the case standing up and position a large, mains powered fan so it blows air into the case.

After experimenting with PC cooling for many years, I guarantee to you that the most effective way to increase cooling is to reduce the temperature of the air going into the case. Nothing else even comes close.

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

Tomba, if you need help optimizing your BIOS settings on the Sabertooth MB, just let me know

Thanks for that, flashawk. I think I need your help!

Found some ASUS Windows apps, one of which gives me this opening bid:



Looks like the stock cooler fan revs are high. I was wondering if I could down-clock the CPU to reduce the heat but I have no idea how to do that.

Note that fan 4 --- the top fan --- is not running; . I managed to break a blade with my fingers while it was running (ouch!). A replacement is on its way.

I was a bit surprised to see the temp difference between my two GTX 660s; 57C vs. 43C. One is brand new and short, the other 2+years old and long. I think the old one is in PCIE-1.

Do you see anything here I should worry about?

Thanks, Tom

TJ is right... with 3 cards in the case you're going to have cooling problem and/or a noise problem. That's why Retvari recommended cards with radial fans if you intended to put 3 on 1 mobo.

Please tell me about cards with radial fans. Who makes them?

I did reduce the fan noise by installing the case-supplied cover that funnels air from the front fan, through the hard disks and onto the GPUs. And I reckon that if I put the PSU at the top of the case I may just have room for a third GPU. We shall see, and hear!!

Tom

In the following pictures, the axial fans are those with propeller type blades, radial fans are those with squirrel cage impellers.

axial fan vs. radial fan

Radial fans generally move more air for the same size fan but they're usually louder. I prefer them because they blow the air through the heatsink fins then immediately out of the case. Axial fans are usually quieter but if they were installed to blow air out of the case they would take up a lot of room.

Also, axial PC fans suffer from a cooling shadow directly behind the motor whereas radial fans are able to deliver airflow all over the cooling fins which tends to make them more efficient wrt size.

All of the video card manufacturers offer models with radial fans as well as models with axial fans.

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

Hi Tomba, not many of us AMD guys that have experience with the Asus software don't use it, it reads the motherboard thermistor built in to the AM3+ socket, it's not accurate and reads 10°C to 12°C too high. Programs like AMD Overdrive and HWiNFO64 are both great programs for accurate readings. In fact, they guy who wrote HWiNFO32/64 crunches here at GPUGRD.

As for the video cards, you might want to look at the "blower" type fans, they do a great job blowing all the hot air out the back of the case. This is an example of a blower card, it's like a squirrel cage or what you might find in a swamp cooler. Anyway, there's a bunch of stuff we should go over for the BIOS settings that will really help your crunching times. You can PM me if you like and take a look at my crunching times, my GTX780 times are pretty good, I keep getting errors from the SANTI's if I don't watch them like a hawk.

I use the Asus software. The Al Suite 3.0 for Intel based CPU's is quite handy whit predefined Fan Control settings or change it manually, per fan.
Indeed I heard that Asus reads the temperatures to high, but I have installed and tried all I could find to measure temperature and they all differ, so it makes its hard to decide who has the proper reading. The differences however is no more than 3 or 4 degrees Celsius. If the builder of the MOBO can't be trust, who can?
But if Asus reads 10°C to high then Tomba's and my systems are running cool. Even 17°C cooler then my system with liquid cooling.

At flashawk, your times are good (your 780 is faster then my 780Ti), so it can not harm if you could quote some AMD BIOS settings for us to see if it could help others as well.

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Greetings from TJ

Hey TJ, the AMD software I linked in my previous post is made by the manufacturer of the CPU, I don't see how you could go wrong. HWiNFO32/64 gives me identical temps as AMD Overdrive, they are both reading the "on die" thermistor that is built into the CPU, you can't get more accurate than that. The Asus software doesn't read the on die temperatures for each core, that's one way of telling what's being read when you see 8 different temps along 8 different speeds and multipliers and 8 different voltages.

I was able to change my multipliers through the Overdrive software and raise my speed to 4400MHz without raising the voltage, I kicked it up and ran the AMD stability test for 3 hours without issue. I then ran Intel's CPU/RAM burn in test for 2 hours with the same results, pretty nice. If you guys want advice on BIOS settings, I'll do it for you but only through PM's, it keeps trouble makers and trolls from butting in and causing distractions. Don't get me wrong, I'm not mad or bitter, in fact, this is a pretty easy going forum with a lot of affable folks, it's just something I learned over a decade ago to make things go smoother.

Besides, I'm not in to handing out information to folks who hide their computers and don't post in the forums to give feedback, I'm not trying to offend, it's just the way I feel. I will help anyone if they ask for it and if I can't, I'll point them in the right direction, I've never been much good at putting together a "How to" for that stuff. I guess I should learn to but one thing I have done is very heavily research almost all of the BIOS settings, one good resource is the ROG forum at Asus because all of the 990FX chipset motherboards have the same BIOS settings, the lesser boards just omit certain things.

As for the video cards, you might want to look at the "blower" type fans, they do a great job blowing all the hot air out the back of the case. This is an example of a blower card

OK. I got it now!! Thanks !!!

Today I ordered from Amazon France the PNY "blower" version of the GTX 770, and I persuaded them to take back my ASUS 660 and replace it with the PNY "blower" version. They even sent a no-cost-to-me mailing label for the ASUS return! What service!!

I have to say that I've been very happy with ASUS GPUs over the years and I'm sorry to now be switching to another vendor. I hope it works out...

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I belief you flashhawk and I understand your ideas about the BIOS.
Tried HWiNFO64 at once and indeed reads much more temperatures then I have ever seen, also of Intel CPU's.
And I know that AMD Overdrive is made by AMD and can be trusted.
But Thermal Radar is made by ASUS who also made the MOBO and these temperature readings are a bit different (higher). That gave me worries, as I know to little about that. All I want is that my systems which run 24/7 do so for hopefully 5 years without overheating. Perhaps I am over cautious with high temperatures.

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Greetings from TJ

I don't think you understood me TJ, maybe or maybe not. The Asus AI suite reads the temperature from a probe in the "socket" below the CPU, it's attached to the motherboard outside the CPU chip, it will never give you an accurate CPU temperature unless your interested in what that dead air space is under the CPU. If you remove the CPU, it's under the sliding bed that you drop the processor in to, Overdrive reads the 8 thermal probes built in to the silicone of each processor die.

Like this

This shows HWiNFO32/64 CPU-RAM information

That was one of my air cooled rigs with 2 GTX780's, these next 2 are liquid cooled (same rig)

This shows power consumption, HWiNFO64 CPU temp, PSU voltages

Yes I thought I understood you flashawk, but with your latest technical explanation it is total clear to me now. Thanks for that.

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Greetings from TJ

I can't remember who it was that said that knowledge is power, the more accurate information you have the smoother the decision process is and you won't second guess your self. Software like AI (witch isn't all bad) is 90% responsible for giving OEM air coolers a bad name (AMD and Intel), people think they're junk when in reality they are adequate in a positively ventilated well engineered case.

If you trust your tools, you can make split second well informed decisions and start a routine that will help in the long run. Sorry about being so pushy about that software, Asus really should put a pop-up disclaimer in there and explain exactly what's being measured. Years ago, the CPU makers didn't put thermistors (for lack of a better word) in their processors, the motherboard manufacturers put them in the middle of the ZIF socket. You could see them, they were usually white or powder blue little beads, I thought they were the coolest things sense canned beer.

Us older folks remember them and recognize them as a hold over and don't give them a second thought, the younger crowd thinks of them as something they can use. I guess the MB makers just don't want to let go of them because they had temp probes first. I remember Abit and Iwill both dropped them (those were my favorite MB makers and I think Intel did too with some 440BX boards). Now everything is point and click, I still keep forgetting I can use my mouse in the BIOS, I still use the arrow keys.

My - this has been a busy thread! Since I started it, here's where I'm up to...

My new build is chugging away merrily 24/7, with 2xASUS GTX 660s, and upstairs my old rig is, sometimes, getting bonus credits via its GTX 460.

Tomorrow is promised my PNY GTX 770, which I shall install in my old rig for the time being, replacing the GTX 460.

The replacement for my broken case fan arrived today, and the PNY 660 is slated for arrival Jan 3. By then I will have the PNY 770 and two 660s, one (new) PNY and one (old) ASUS, the PNYs exhausting out the back of the case as recommended here.

Plan then is to move the PSU to the top of the case and see if I can fit three wide GPUs in there. After all, the mobo has four PCIe slots. We shall see what transpires....

Wish me luck :)

My - this has been a busy thread!

Because we've covered many of the things one needs to consider when building a computer for crunching. There is no single recipe to follow when building your own. There's lot of options, lots of things to consider. In exchange for doing that extra work you end up with a high performance rig at a very attractive price.

And thanks to input from flashawk we will now avoid the "bad" temperature reading software and not become worried over what are basically inaccurate temperature readings. That's essential stuff when building your own. Thanks flashawk :) BTW, the expression "knowledge is power" probably grew from Diderot's, "To ask who is to be educated is to ask who is to rule."

Plan then is to move the PSU to the top of the case and see if I can fit three wide GPUs in there. After all, the mobo has four PCIe slots. We shall see what transpires....

Wish me luck :)

It's not a matter of luck, it's a matter of skill and knowledge, but good luck to you anyway.

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters