Future build: Victor

[Versus]

lol

[k0ala]

you have leveled up in gaming nerdery and life skills, congratulations

[Eightball]

Thanks to Scar, who ran a CM SilentPro 600W to me, we have this:

New PSU

The cabling in the back:


All done, with lighting installed:


Also, Microsoft straight-up gave me a new product key when the one I had didn't work, lol

[Versus]

nd (to scar too)

[k0ala]

nd (to scar too)

[Didzo]

Stick the side on it and turn off the room lights. I need to see its red glow at its best.

:p

[Eightball]

Glamour shots.










Blue = Tango, Red = Victor

[Versus]

look at this nerd

[Eightball]

Transferring saves for GFWL is as horrible as ever. Took over an hour to get my GTA4 saves over, not looking forward to Resident Evil 5 or Dead Rising 2 (maybe I should just abandon them). Got a few more photos from the build that I haven't shared yet, I will upload those when I get back to the apt.

Next: Overclocking. Never done it before, and understand fairly little. My CPU is set to 3.4Ghz (3.8Ghz with Turbo, whatever that means), and I'm probably just going to push it to 4.0Ghz. I know HeK already got above that, but I'm a little wary stepping into a world I know nothing about. Also someone tell me: Is GPU overclocking software (EVGA precision, MSI afterburner, etc) the best way to OC your video card?

[HeK]

I have read a lot about MSI Afterburner. I use nVidia System Tools, from nVidia.

[Mission Difficult]

Transferring saves for GFWL is as horrible as ever. Took over an hour to get my GTA4 saves over, not looking forward to Resident Evil 5 or Dead Rising 2 (maybe I should just abandon them). Got a few more photos from the build that I haven't shared yet, I will upload those when I get back to the apt.

Next: Overclocking. Never done it before, and understand fairly little. My CPU is set to 3.4Ghz (3.8Ghz with Turbo, whatever that means), and I'm probably just going to push it to 4.0Ghz. I know HeK already got above that, but I'm a little wary stepping into a world I know nothing about. Also someone tell me: Is GPU overclocking software (EVGA precision, MSI afterburner, etc) the best way to OC your video card?

You should be able to get around 4.5GHz without going above 1.3 vcore on an Ivy Bridge. Stay away from auto overclock solutions that most mobos ship with. They seem to apply more voltage than necessary to get a stable overclock which leads to unnecessary heat. Right now I have a stable 4.4GHz with vcore at 1.27 vccsa at 0.9 ppl at 1.7. Under full load my cpu temps are in the high 40s, sometimes hitting 50. I wasn't able to get a stable oc at 4.5GHz without bumping my vcore to 1.3 and then the temps went up to high 60s, so I decided it wasn't worth another 100 MHz.

As for GFX overclocking, rivatuner has been pretty good for me but I imagine other software solutions will work well enough.

[Eightball]

Quick update, with some OC results.

Went to increase my CPU performance, ended up doing a conservative 4.2Ghz with +0.01V offset. I tried to reach 4.5, but anything above 4.4 caused windows to crash. I probably could have overcome this with greater voltage offset, but I think I'm comfortable with an 800Mhz increase.

Also OC'd my GPU using EVGA PrecisionX, 110% power target, +100Mhz GPU Clock offset, and +40Mhz Mem Clock offset. I hope this software doesn't have to be running 24/7 for me to reap this benefit.