Case + GeForce FX 5950 Ultra

[aen]

Right now my case is an Antec PLUS1080AMG, which is a great case. However, I ran into some trouble when I bought this 5950u.

Basically, the board fits in fine, but there's a power connecto on the very end which must be plugged in for the board to perform at top speed. This is a problem because I have 3 hard drives in a bay right across from it -- it's hella hard to get the 5950u in there without jamming it fairly hard up against the cabling of the drives. There is another bay ABOVE this one, which I could move them all into (the bay has a nifty frame that's actually holding the drives and ejects, so I could relocate it pretty easily), but that bay is above the grill on the front of the case, so I'm thinking I wouldn't be getting very good airflow from my fan at that point (also mounted directly into the ejectable frame.)

Has anybody had a problem like this before?

Will it hurt my airflow that much being above the grill?

The drives I have are all WD, one 120GB and two 200GB. They can get pretty damn hot without fans since the drives are in constant use (file sharing, etc.) I've kinda been leaning towards a full-tower case, since I also have nine 5 1/4 SCSI drives (all of them Seagate Cheetah 10K RPM 20GBs -- those get ridiculous hot.) Obviously I wouldn't be hooking them all up at once without additional power, but I do like the idea of a pretty manly amount of space where I can hook up just about anything with ease. Nothings incredibly difficult to hook up in my current case, but a few things are close quarters, in addition to the 5950u.

Anybody have suggestions on a quality full-tower case?

[Gotfolk]

Chieftec cases are great have had no probs with room to move around, I have one just like Tekime but mine is blue.

[Tekime]

Lian-Li PC-70 is about 10cm greater in depth, but I'm not positive the setup would afford you a full 10cm more room.

The PLUS1080AMG is basically a branded Chieftec Dragon - if it's like the normal Dragon there should be an 80mm fan mount on one of the drive carriages to cool your 3.5's, but it might be tough getting three drives and a fan in there comfortably.

You could think about moving one of your hard disks to a 5.25" drive cooler (something like this), and with the freed up space slap something like this on there. Then you could move your drives up out of the way but still keep them nicely cooled.

I'd definitely consider a PC-70 or even a full-tower Dragon to take advantage of those SCSIs though.

[aen]

Hey, now that's slick! I should get a couple of those so I can put a SCSI into one and then use that drive for all my file sharing downloads. Of my IDEs, I'd probably slip my boot drive into one as well. Those two are the main drives I'm most concerned about, my boot drive for obvious reasons, but the file sharing drive because it's in use almost 24/7.

So how cool can you get a drive with a heatsink and some good fans? Is there like a certain temperature you need to hit to have drives "respectably" cooled? :-) I'm definitely starting to become interested in cooling things down as much as possible, but without getting too complex ala water cooling or what have you.

[Tekime]

Ooh, sweet avatar.

Well, my two Maxtor 40GB IDE's barely put out any heat so I haven't experimented very much.

But according to WD those 200s are rated up to about 55c operating temperature, which is darn hot for a hard drive. I'd say mid-30's would be a respectable goal, but those puppies could put out a lot of heat for all I know. There's also a feature built into many hard drives called Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.), which can report on stuff like temperature and drive health. Again, I haven't experiemented with that much but it could be an easy way to monitor your disks.

BTW, you have a TON of nice drives! Almost give Mantra a run for his money. (Although I think he tops 1TB hehe)..

Thanks!

Yeah, I had originally striped the two 200GB drives, that was pretty sweet for a while there. Just about everything loaded up lickety split. Then I started to have problems with corruption after I filled it up about halfway. This was about a month or so down the road. I found huge threads on the problem, which wasn't very heartening.

However, recently I read up quite a bit on my motherboard. I was having a lot of problems with hanging/freezing in cutting edge games like UT2K4 and FarCry. Lots of threads on this as well, most of them suspecting AMD + GeForce + DirectX + XP. Anyway, I came across some important info which I had apparently never known before concerning RAM on this KT400 -- if you are using DDR400, which is the fastest it supports, you are only supposed to use two slots. I had 1.5GB of the stuff, so there was one problem. Even stranger however, is that if you're only using two sticks, you're not supposed to use the middle slot. That was an eye-popper for me. So I take the extra stick out from the middle slot and ever since I haven't had any problems with hanging/freezing! Crazy stuff.

So my theory now is that maybe the botched RAM setup was contributing to my hard drive corruption somehow. Possibly during my frequent defragging sessions... I would assume RAM is being used heavily there, not sure. I'd love to get those drives striped again though, minus the recurring corruption!

Yeah, I'm not doing too shabbily on the hard drive front! Most of my friends and family can't comprehend why I would want so much space, but it makes a great video library. Pretty much instant access to anything. No fumbling around for discs, or *gasp* tapes. It's too bad I might not be buying too many more niceties for a while. Finally quitting my job to take a much-needed vacation! Gotta stockpile some dough.

I was wondering what that S.M.A.R.T. stuff was! I enabled it in my BIOS once, and all it seemed to do was add an extra 20 seconds or more to my boot time! I'll have to do some reading on that and see how to get myself set up. This KT400 comes with some nifty software that monitors the CPU and chassis temps, which I really like. I really want to get one of those gizmos that tells you all the various temps on a little LED display on the front of your box, just like that hard drive cooler you linked to.

[aen]

Woops, that was me, of course. ;-)

[Tekime]

Originally Posted by Anonymous

...I had 1.5GB of the stuff, so there was one problem. Even stranger however, is that if you're only using two sticks, you're not supposed to use the middle slot. That was an eye-popper for me. So I take the extra stick out from the middle slot and ever since I haven't had any problems with hanging/freezing! Crazy stuff.

Sounds about right for Via. KT266 had major issues with just about everything on the first release; the KT266A fixed a lot of them, but I never actually got a KT400. Went right to my nForce2 rig(s). Actually, now that I think back, when I first got my 8RDA+ I could barely boot when I used DIMM slot 1 - got the grating EPoX siren along with the ominous FF code on the readout they include on the mobo. Been using DIMM 3 ever since and this rig is OC'd to the hilt about a year later.

So my theory now is that maybe the botched RAM setup was contributing to my hard drive corruption somehow. Possibly during my frequent defragging sessions... I would assume RAM is being used heavily there, not sure. I'd love to get those drives striped again though, minus the recurring corruption!

Sound theory. Messed up RAM can cause corruption quite easily, especially if it's throwing minor errors that the CPU can clean up, but still gets written to disk on direct writes from memory. I had a RAID 0 setup on my KT266A Soyo Dragon setup a long time ago and even with two 40GB Maxtor 7200's it was a lot faster. I was fortunate to never have any serious problems, except the time I roasted both drives with a SuSE Live CD (my own fault for not RTFM though... ). RAID 0 rocks though!

Yeah, I'm not doing too shabbily on the hard drive front! Most of my friends and family can't comprehend why I would want so much space, but it makes a great video library. Pretty much instant access to anything. No fumbling around for discs, or *gasp* tapes. It's too bad I might not be buying too many more niceties for a while. Finally quitting my job to take a much-needed vacation! Gotta stockpile some dough.

Nice!! I just quit my job too, and it feels AWESOME! Scary, but awesome, hah

This KT400 comes with some nifty software that monitors the CPU and chassis temps, which I really like. I really want to get one of those gizmos that tells you all the various temps on a little LED display on the front of your box, just like that hard drive cooler you linked to.

I wouldn't trust the onboard temps to very accurate (CPU/case as reported by the mobo that is). They are known to be up to 15c off in either direction. They are still useful to a degree, as they can still be consistent and if your comp is stable when it says 45c, who cares if it's 42c or 48c as long as it's stable and the reading is consistent? On the other hand the DigitalDoc5 is a decent, reasonably priced monitoring unit with about 8 thermistors to monitor temps. Pretty sweet little device overall.