CoolerMaster Based LAN Party / Bedside Computer Endeavor Project - FINALLY

Finally I'm getting somewhere with my baby ITX Bedside / LAN Party Build with that Pentium G3258! I just need a storage drive then I'm good to go!

CPU: Pentium G3258,

I thought the Pentium K was something of a bit of a goof but for a LAN Party build, this is the perfect CPU to have as your heart. Overclocking will be the name of the game though for it's essential for an "acceptable or even a good gaming experience - LinusTechTips" on the freaking cheap. Once you crank speeds beyond 4.5 Ghz, most of the bottlenecks posed by the dual core processor will not be obvious anymore. And at that speed in terms of gaming, it can edge remarkably close to the even bigger Quad-Core / 8 Threaded Intel CPUs and the 8-core AMD CPUs.

Cooling: Intel Stock cooler.

This will be enough to cool it down but I may intend to replace with a good low profile CPU cooling since I plan to get it up to 4.5-4.6 GHz on this thing.

Case: CoolerMaster Elite 120

Nice CoolerMaster Case that I'm getting from a friend. Now I've been a big fan of the Elite 120 rather than the 130 because of its plain and IMO Flashier design for the front side of the case then the mesh grills on the 130. The only functional difference is the front USB Layout (1 x 3.0 and 2 x 2.0 on the 120, and 2 x 3.0 and 1 x 2.0 on the 130) which wouldn't mean too much jack. And of course the case being longer than the 110, I can fit a longer GPU should I wish to upgrade.

Motherboard: MSI Z87I LGA 1150 ITX

Overclocking ready motherboard, just needs a new BIOS, this I have ordered new from eBay. ITX LGA 1150 motherboard is what I need in this build. It has WiFi, which is nice which means I don't need to sacrifice a USB Port for a WiFi Adapter. It doesn't have eSATA compared to other competing Z87 ITX boards but that's one of the things which I never use at all.

It has been voted by TomsHardware as a Smart Choice for Z87I Board Options. So the link here is the article of the MSI Z87I.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/z87-motherboard-roundup,3656-14.html

The entire board is black mostly, so it'll complement the external color of the case well and most of the stuff which I stuff in will also be black.

RAM: 8GB GSkill Ripjaws RAM DDR3 1600 PC 12800

I decided not to go with Corsair Vengeance as my primary RAM after so many failures with it. Of a grand total of 6 Sticks or 24GBs that I have, Half of the entire batch failed. 1 of the RAMs though did last for 3+ years so that RAM was decidedly lucky. So I ordered a pack of 16GB of GSkill Ripjaws RED RAM, and half of it will be reserved for this build. I won't require anything faster than 1600 since the Pentium G3258 is limiting bandwidth to 1333 anyways. It should be fine however either way since I've been switching between 1333 and 1600 in my Sandy Bridge build and performance difference seems negligible if any.

GPU: PENDING: ATI Radeon 5850 / Palit GTX 970

Now I'm in a bit of a dilemma on what should I use lol. I do have an ATI Radeon 5850 in store that was supposedly dead but it works while I was diagnosing my computer for that dead RAM last month. So that could be an option. Also, I thought that having 2 GTX 970s was a little on an overkill side so I thought of using the Palit GTX 970 to match the black build internally. However, the resolution that had been planned is for a 19" Inch Monitor at 1440 x 900 as a bedside computer so even a single GTX 970 will still be overkill for this build. But, the option's there should I feel like it.

POWER SUPPLY: 650W CoolerMaster PSU

This was the old Cooler Master Power Supply that I was using in one point, made quite a bit of a grinding sound which was why I swapped that to the Corsair RM1000 in my main machine. However, this PSU for a bedside rig should work regardless.

Peripherals: CM Storm Devastator Mouse and KB Combo bought from Lazada

Budget Combo of Keyboard and Mouse. And personally I didn't care whether it was mechanical keyboard or what. And since this is a bedside computer, and I'm gonna use it when it's pitch black, I need some lighting. The mouse that will come with it will replace the Battlefield 3 Mouse from Razer since it was spassing out double clicks whenever I try to click once which is ultra annoying. This will complement the general theme of Red and Black pretty well in the system.

GTX 970 SLI Review (Follow Up): Scores and Overclocking Journey

Now, I didn't post up scores in my last post. I had to redo it after an unfortunate thing happened to my RAM. One of my Corsair Vengeance Sticks Died so I'm down to 8 Gigs. In the process I swapped the card positions around and instead of MSI being the Top Card, the Palit returned its position as the top card for Temperature Control, as I found that with the MSI at the top, the temps become quite unbearable. As soon as I took it to the bottom, the Idle Temperatures of the MSI 4GD5T Armor Edition GTX 970 dropped Drastically by 25-30 Degrees C to around 31-34 Idle. I was able to get a much more thermal consistency which lead to more consistent overclocks and increased headroom.

Now I did quite a bit of overclocking tweaking and some of the legends you see are GTX 970 OC, GTX 970 SLI OC 1 and OC2

So how I tweaked them as follows:

GTX 970 OC: +222 Core Clock, 100 Memory.
GTX 970 SLI OC 1: 180 Core Clock, 294 MHz Memory, GDDR5 is at 7.6 GHz
GTX 970 SLI OC 2: 180 Core Clock, 394 MHz Memory, GDDR5 is at 7.8 GHz. - Final Stable Overclock

7.8GHz on the GDDR5! Fully Stable. That's very nice on SLI Cards!
I did have a GTX 780 in occasional scores, just to compare how much of a performance difference I get since that card.

Configuration of my Test System:

Core i7 2600K at 4432MHz
8GB RAM at 1648 MHz
128GB OCZ Vertex 4
2TB Western Digital Caviar Green
500GB Western Digital Caviar Blue
Corsair P8P67M-Pro
Corsair H70
1000W Corsair RM1000
Fractal Design Define R3
GPU 1: Palit GTX 970 "Vanilla"
GPU 2: MSI GTX 970 4GD5T "Armor Edition"

Swapped my GPU Positions around. Now Palit is the Top Card, and MSI is the Bottom Card

SOFTWARE BENCHMARK SCORES
3D Mark Firestrike: Standard, Extreme, Ultra
Catzilla ALL Benchmark

Seeing about 50-65% increase scaling all around. Not a good proportion but you can't get everything. It does however respond extremely well once I start tweaking. I am real chuffed to get 16,000 on FS Standard after overclocking to its current speeds.  I only had tested Ultra on SLI GTX 970s as prior to installing the SLI Config, the Ultra Benchmark mode hasn't been released yet. Still the scores would suck if I were to test FireStrike Ultra on a single card so I didn't bother. The 4788 score which I did post previously came as a surprise, after the first overclock I hit, but since then even with all the tweaks I can't get to beat that score.

*Update! I hit a stable 4896 after dialling my OC Memory back a bit! It was a good score nonetheless, thought you should know!

METRO LAST LIGHT

1080 HD Maxed, No SSAA

1080 HD Maxed with SSAA

A Very demanding benchmark indeed. I was initially having problems benching Super Sampling a single Palit Card, it crashed if I applied an OC. When I did OC the SLI setup, I could launch this without a hitch, so yeah no OC Single Card results. The score gap widens as I tune my GPUs. Notice at stock, the GTX 970 already beats the already OC-ed Zotac 780 I used to have. There wasn't good scaling from stock GTX 970 to GTX 970 SLI,  Very likely due to drivers. But tweaking to OC 2 Clocks nets some noticeable performance gains, especially Minimum Framerates.

BIOSHOCK INFINITE:
Ultra DX11, DOF

I didn't have stock GTX 970 SLIs as I completely forgot about them. However, that said, adding a second card really bumps Maximum framerates through the roof. It does respond well to the hefty overclocks I added in any case.

VALLEY BENCHMARK

I did show scores on 5760 x 1080 on Valley and I did say that having that on 3 screens looks absolutely stunning. However I didn't have scores for a single card config. On 1920 x 1080p, the GTX 970 OC had been benchmarked way before. So for a more apples to apples comparison. Apologies, no stock scores!

CONCLUSION

Now Overclocking was an absolute dream, a score of 16,143 on Firestrike Standard and 22,211 on Catzilla 1080p is the sort of results that I really should have! Again, 2 GTX 970s really is a sweet configuration for its price. So if you have the time, spend 2-3 days tweaking here and there. Now the scores will be better if I had a better CPU as it's currently the bottleneck atm. 1080p overkill? Depending on the game, no. Not so much, I thought this will be overkill, but I pulled my statement.

I did try 8GHz on the Memory but it started to artifact by then. So for now I dialled my clocks a bit back to 7.6GHZ on Memory and +175MHz on the Core just to get more stability.

We're talking in total 3328 Maxwell CUDA Cores, whose shader performance is equivalent to 5293 Cuda Cores according to Game-Debate, and near 500GB/s of Memory bandwidth. The bandwidth though is not optimal, seeing that this is on a PCI-E 2.0 based board. That said, hopefully I don't have to upgrade my Video Cards for at least another 3-4 years down the road, when that happens I won't sell it but I'll delegate it to something else once the future architectures are worth diving into.

That said, one 970 is good. Two is even better for the price. A quick update when the GTX 960 was released, I made a point why the 970s are so successful at LinusTechTip's Facebook post of the GTX 960 SLI video. The 970 has been an ideal value for 1440p gaming thanks to double bus width and double memory buffer and 2 970s in SLI are the cheapest gate to playable 4K gaming at near Maximum settings. Gaming currently at 1080p is overkill but that's all I got for now.