System Build 2013: case optimization completed, and a video card!

Last I had left the system build progress, I had assembled everything except the video card into the case. I knew that the hardest part of the build would be cable management, but since my sleeved cables hadn't arrived yet anyways I decided to defer any semblance of cable management until later. Using whatever cables I had on hand, I assembled the rat's nest to at least get everything up and running:



Sure, it looked a bit untidy but at least I could start optimizing my fan speeds. The 200mm Cooler Master in the front spun very slowly at the "standard" duty cycle assigned by the motherboard- in fact the BIOS actually red flagged the fan as spinning too slowly. I manually assigned it to spin at least 80% of its max speed at all times- since it's such a big fan the noise difference was almost imperceptible. Everything else seemed very happy at stock values and my CPU was idling right around 30 C, which is right where I want it to be. At this point I wouldn't mess with any overclocking just yet, though I made sure my RAM was running at the right timings and took care of other little details in BIOS.

Once my sleeved cables had arrived, I set about making everything just a bit more tidy:



A key component was still missing, though! I had finally tracked down the card I wanted, an EVGA superclocked GTX 780 with ACX cooler. I had read that it was on par with Nvidia GTX Titans (Spoiler: It straight up beats them at Unigine valley in my rig) so at least until something more awesome came out, I would have a real bruiser of a single card setup.

In it went, and now it was looking quite pretty on the inside with the nice sleeved cables and matching SATA cables:



Of course, the finishing touches still had to be applied. There was still plenty of cable management to be done fitting everything on the other side of the motherboard- the 650D gave reasonable space but I still feel like I could have used just a hair more room back there, considering how stiff and unyielding brand new Seasonic power cables can be. Wrangling them proved to be a bit difficult, but with a little patience (and enlisting Emily's help again) the cables relaxed enough to fit inside the side panel without bulging it outwards.

A dust filter from DEMCiflex to keep the dust out of the top facing radiator was a sound investment- it simply sticks on with a magnetic rim and though it seems somewhat floppy and flimsy off of the case, once mounted it is rock solid and works so incredibly well that even after a few weeks you can see rings of trapped dust that it prevented from going into the case- a quick vacuuming tidies it all up and you're good to go in just a few moments!

The last finishing touch was overclocking, and unfortunately the results were rather disappointing, though not entirely unexpected considering my choices. The Haswell architecture has a dynamic voltage that allows the processor to run at very low voltages when it is not under heavy load- in fact at idle it runs in the neighborhood of 0.7V! The downside to this feature is that your control over the voltages is limited such that you can't actually set a voltage maximum(!). For the average user running at stock clocks, it's a non-issue. From a heat dissipation standpoint for overclocking, it is a big, big no go. The clock targets are easier to set this time around, but that dynamic voltage is really what ended up giving me a hard ceiling of 4.0Ghz with it enabled. Anything above a 4.0Ghz turbo results in the Vcore kicking up to something absurd like 1.3V or more, which even a CLC isn't going to be able to dissipate well. Of course, I could have easily gone to a higher clock with a manual voltage, but then I give up the low end efficiency, and that seems silly since the computer isn't running games or benchmarking every waking second it is on. Right now, writing this entry with Mumble, Steam, and Firefox open but generally idle, I am only drawing 63W of power according to the readout on my surge protector/UPS. Since the CPU isn't really the bottleneck anyways I'm more than happy to live with the lower OC and better efficiency at idle.

So there we have it, the system build 2013 is complete!

To recap, the system has the following specs:

Corsair 650D Case
Asus Z87-A Motherboard
Intel i5 4670K CPU
Corsair H110 CPU Cooler
8GB Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR3 1600 RAM
Seasonic X650 Gold Power Supply
EVGA Nvidia GTX 780 Superclocked w/ ACX cooler
1x Sandisk ReadyCache 32GB SSD
1x Samsung 840 Pro 128GB SSD
3x Western Digital Red 1TB Hard drives in RAID 5


All said and done, I busted my $2000 budget by about $70, but it was with ancillary items like the sleeved cables and the dust filter.