EEVblog No Script, No Fear, All Opinion
60 minutes of Dave assembling his silent (low noise) Intel i7 3770K video editing computer. If you find that boring, don’t watch.
Please DON’T leave uninformed comments about needing a high end video card for editing and rendering. Read THIS first.
Coolermaster Silencio 550 case.
Asus Z77 motherboard
Coolermaster 212 Evo heatsink
Podcast: Download
No idea on how well it works but there are OpenCL builds of Handbrake that use the GPU for decoding and scaling/filtering:
https://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/HardwareAcceleration
https://build.handbrake.fr/view/OpenCL/
So if it used for the decoding part of the transcoding I wonder if that would speed things up at all?
You’re an FPGA wizz right? Why don’t you do a project designing a hardware x264 encoder? 🙂
Hey Dave. Instead of putting the fan on the opposite face of the radiator, you probably could have rotated the entire radiator 180 degrees. I wouldn’t be too concerned with air flow direction for the CPU fan. Anyway… just another option to consider.
Hello David,
Congratulations on your new PC.
I understand and respect your point of view about the PSU. But it is risky to use the power supply Corsair VS650, because PSU “cheap” can damage the MB, HD, etc. Because the ESR capacitors of the PSU increases over time and thus the great noise that reaches to the motherboard overheating the capacitors. The noise can also cause intermittent failure in the operation of the machine. Another problem is that many of them have low cross regulation.
If you allow me, I would suggest (when possible) using a PSU Seasonic X750 or a newer model. The X750 is not perfect, but it’s decent. You can see a review:
http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story&reid=192
I will not say that you will never have problems with a Seasonic because I saw a X750 crashing because of failure in a solder (SMD…), but it was easy to fix. This PSU Seasonic X750 is quiet and works fine.
Congratulations on your excellent web site.
(Sorry my bad english language)
Timi
Be careful of that SATA dock. If it relies on the disk connector without hosting the disk into a movable frame, it will wear the disk connector in a short time. SATA specification say the connector has a planned lifetime of dozens of insertion/removals. Yup, not thousands or hundreds: dozens! And yes, those SATA USB docks are dangerous too.
The I/O shield can be snapped into place without having the motherboard in place. There should be enough room to pivot and slide the motherboard in. I build and fix pc’s for a living so I get a lot of exposure to pc building.
Also with the thermal paste application, I have always liked the “pea” method for applying thermal paste and I have never had an issue.
One other thing that an argument at work was started over is when SATA cables were sold as SATA gen 3 capable. The SATA standard states there are no electrical differences between SATA cable generations. The standard suggests using good quality cables but there is no difference in the spec.
Other than that great job!
So how much you saved by not having a psu with japanese caps and MLC instead of TLC?
I don’t know about Australia but in germany you’d probably pay $40 more to get both. I don’t know the actual reliability figures but just going by the specs we could be talking 2x the lifetime easily. Couple more years without rebuilding or reinstalling stuff works for me if that’s the price.
Sea Sonic S12II-520Bronze 520W ATX 2.2 ab 57,98 eur
I have this one, it has nippon chemicon caps. It’s a very old model but back when it was released it was very highly reviewed in many sites. Though I do admit, trying to find it at this low price outside germany and maybe US might be harder. 520W is good enough for 6 HDD’s in a gaming rig. Only with multiple GPU’s you might need more.
For SSD. Plextor M5 Pro or Vertex 4 MLC NAND drives are about 30 eur more than the Samsung 840 TLC NAND drive.
The MB case plate snaps into the case before you install the MB. You should put the MB in first as you need access to screw holes and you may need extra support or to address shorting mounts. Then you add the CPU+Fan+..memory. While this was fun to watch you should leave this to the professionals. Sorry Mate you can’t be good at everything.
PS Ty-wraps are your best friend for airflow.
I think you should give more information.
Hi Dave, 37GB for a fresh win7 is kind of crazy actually…
And, most of it, must be assigned for hibernate and auto virtual memory..
The amount of disk space win7 assign(automatically) depends on how much physical ram the system has…the more physical ram, the more virtual ram win7 assigns! I always assign that manually rather than letting win7 to manage it…As the previous blog post said, 16GB is quite desent already, really no need of virtual memory, just manually set it to something like 6G or so, just in case lol~
PS: for me, i always get the max the sytem it can support. Why? Software based ram drive. For a 32GB ram system, i’d use about 20GB for ram drive..6Gbit SATA3? Why not 6GB+ lol? Though, won’t be very useful for rendering, but things like copy and paste, save/load, and all sorts of buffing/caching that don’t reside in physical ram.
For grater performance and longer life of the ssd, why not just disable the hibernate funtion…(just type “powercfg -h off” in CMD with admin privilege) Keeping this enabled can really consume all the capacity over time. (And the system protection–the useless restore function…i just stick with the “Backup and Restore” rather than keeping the built-in system protection running all the time monitoring disk activities)
Hey Dave, nice video and congrats on the new computer!
I had noticed you moved the fan to a “pull” configuration because otherwise it would’ve interfered with the memory. I just wanted to let you know that Asus’ recommended configuration for two memory modules on this motherboard (as stated in the manual) is to install them in slots DIMM_A2 and DIMM_B2, which are the two blue slots. This frees up room for you to install the CPU fan in a “push” configuration since the memory slot closest to the CPU (the black DIMM_A1 slot) will be unpopulated.
Keep up the great videos!
FINALLY….
Someone who actually gets the Anti-static precautions right for assembling a PC.
And yep dave the plastic is treated with an antistatic spray, no point in Intel going to the added expense of making it ‘real anti-static’ material…..
Hi Dave,
Congrats on the new PC!
I setup a similar ASUS motherboard, the P8Z77V-LE Plus, for HTPC system last week. In addition to what L-Train said above about installing the RAM into the BLUE slots, there is an additional step to get the RAM to run at full speed. Out of the box it will run at DDR3-1333Mhz speed. To get it to run DDR3-1600Mhz, you have to go into the Advanced settings in the BIOS. In the “Ai Tweaker” menu, change “Ai Overclock Tuner” to XMP (eXtreme Memory Profile). That will tell the BIOS to setup the RAM at DDR3-1600Mhz at boot time.
When you get around to overclocking the CPU, you will change that “Ai Overclock Tuner” setting to Manual to open up a whole bunch of additional settings. With it set to Manual, the Memory Frequency setting is the one that influences the RAM speed.
Cheers!
Hi Dave,
Why didn’t you use just make use of another couple of RAM slots instead of having trouble with CPU FAN? They should be as good as the other two.
Besides, I saw you’ve left no spacing between hard drives while the rack is half-empty. IMO, this is not the best cooling solution for HDDs, especially in enclosure with reduced airflow due to thick air/noise filters.
Hi Dave,
I saw your video and I got reminded what an awful amount of preparatory work it can be to assemble a pc to your wishes and fit your requirements. Defining the purpose of the thing, selecting the components to meet your “spec” and then also not to strain your budget too much… This can be a hard thing to do and eat up a lot of time searching for the right component at the right price. So, good job you’ve done there! 😀
But I noticed that the heatsink of your cpu cooler wobbled when you put on the side plate for testing. The culprit would be the sound damping foam here. So maybe you should be careful if you put on the side plate and the foam pushes the heatsink into one direction (and it actually stays there hold by the foam) you will apply strain to your motherboard and maybe damage the circutry near the cpu. This would be especially bad if you carry the pc around (like taking it home from work) and it gets shaken and the board is already slightly twisted by the heatsink… nearly everything could happen. Especially if the solder joints are not so good and made of lead-free solder.
Just a little something I couldn’t help to notice and starting to worry about 😉
Have fun with your new silent beast! 😀
Hello dave,
It seems you didn’t take advantage of the dual channel RAM, I may be wrong but it seems you put one ram in a black slot and the other one in the blue slot.
you should use only one color to use the full bandwidth.
Cheers,
Keep the good work
Laurent
One of the disadvantage that Dave adds on-screen text to the video via youtube rather than directly during video rendering to the video file itself…..
Yeah, Dave didn’t realize the dual channel setting but surely got it corrected afterward as people were blaming lol; so he mentioned that by adding a note via youtube…but people don’t watch it directly at youtube won’t be able see it 🙂
Dave,
Why did you go with the Samsung 840 SSD rather than spend a few extra bucks for the 840 Pro? The 840 is slower than the 830 (the previous generation model), so you could’ve gotten an 830 cheaper as most places are clearing them out. (The 830s I’ve seen were the 128GB and 512GB models – the 256GB 830 was considered the nice sweet spot so it often sold out way quicker).
Considering you have a way fast system, no reason it couldn’t have been just a bit faster 🙂
But yeah, it was obvious Dave didn’t read the instructions when he put together the PC.
The 840 was cheap. I don’t need “a little bit faster” for more dollars.
You will change your mind when you learn a thing or two about TLC NAND (vs MLC on the 840 Pro).
Dave, good to see you get out of your depth and rise to the challenge.
I am sure the Fanboi’s are only trying help?
Incidentally, HP specify in the server maintenance manuals you dump a cone of HS compound in the middle of the heat sink. The goo is then spread by the pressure of the heat sink. HP specify from 20-30 ml of compound depending on the HS/CPU.
However, the HP compound is a lot thicker cold, and there is less in the syringe. I believe too much goo and it becomes a heat insulator!
And, as you said, its only another bloody PC, albeit a nice one.
As always, delivered in the original Fanboi Dave style – Good stuff 🙂
–marki
Er.. just saw the video. You say the PCB is an 8 or 10 layer stackup. Did you know it’s probably 4? For years, it was always 4, but 6 is pretty common these days. Still, motherboard designers sweat blood to cut out layers in such a cost-sensitive market.
Here are some layer counts for Z77 motherboards, with some using 4 and some using 6 layers. I can’t find an answer for the P8Z77-V LX specifically, but it’s one of ASUS’s lowest-cost Z77 boards, and they have two other 4-layer Z77 boards on that list.
Quad-channel LGA 2011 board will use 8 layers, but only a very few very high-end boards use 10 layers.