Setbacks on the Reiter rig and the Oh Baby! post

I was expecting to be finished the Reiter rig by now but it seems that the Gigabyte board I am using doesn't like overclocking much at all. Bit disappointed about that but luckily I can rectify the situation. I have decided to pickup a E6600 to go into the Gigabyte board running at stock speeds and then am going to use the E6300 in another board that will go into the Reiter rig. I am probably going to use an ASUS P45 chipset based board now instead as I know that they have pretty decent overclockability. Will have an update on this again in the future.

As for the Oh Baby! rig post, it has been taking a lot longer than I expected to write it all up. 100 pictures will do that to you though. Still working on getting everything written up and ready to go. Bit disappointed that I couldn't have it up earlier but I'll keep working on it till it's ready.

Overclocking the Gigabyte GTX 670 OC Edition

So I've finally managed to put away a some time to write this post bit by bit so that I can have more time to work on the Oh Baby! rig post. I've managed to benchmark the overclock on six games that have actual benchmark programs built into the game. The games are Mafia II, Just Cause 2, Far Cry 2, Dirt 3, Dawn of War 2: Retribution, and Batman Arkham City. It is a bit odd how all the games happen to be sequels, but it seems more like a coincidence rather than anything else. One thing I like to look at is if the games are V-Sync stable. When I say this I mean averaging at 60+ FPS consistently. The reason I prefer V-Sync is because with this card it can cause tearing in the screen very easily if the FPS is much too low or very high and takes away from the visual experience. I recently downloaded the newest beta nVidia driver (306.02) as it has some minor improvements for the GTX 600 series cards. 


Click Here To Read More

An update on the Gigabyte GTX 670 OC and the Oh Baby Rig

I've been meaning to do the Oh Baby! rig build post for a while but haven't managed to get to it yet as it's got  approx 90 pictures of building content so it's been on the backburner for a bit. As for the Gigabyte GTX 670, I popped in MSI Afterburner and overclocked the GPU to 1147MHz Core Clock and 1850MHz Memory Clock (3700MHz effective). I have yet to load Arkham City back up to do another benchmark, but considering it's performing at almost stock GTX 680 clocks, it should be a fair bit of an improvement over the out of the box clocks. I have yet to see if I can push the clocks any higher in terms of the core clock, but I know that with the memory clock of 1900MHz the card will crash, so 1850MHz seems like the stable limit for the most part. I may explore overclocking the core clock more though in the future, but for now it certainly is a good set of numbers. I also scaled back the Power Limit from 100% to 98% just so it doesn't overpeak the core clock. Hopefully I can get to the benchmark and Oh Baby! rig post by the end of this week though so stay tuned.

Gigabyte GTX 670

So I ordered a Gigabyte GTX 670 OC version (model number GV-N670OC-2GD) off of NCIX last week for 450 dollars after tax. It was a great deal cause I got free shipping, and 2 free games (Mafia 2 and Borderlands 2). For that price how could I go wrong? I needed an upgrade from my singular GTX 460 (if you read in one of my previous posts, I mention how my SLi config got ruined because one of my 460's died) so I decided to step up from it I would need a new 6xx series card. GTX 680's are a bit too overpriced in my opinion, and even though the new GTX 660 Ti's just came out and are 100 dollars cheaper, I wanted the 256-bit bus vs the 192-bit bus that the 660 Ti provides. That way I can be sure that I'll have a GPU that will perform rather excellent for the next couple of years. It's a shame I still have a sandy bridge processor (so I can't utilize PCI-E 3.0 speeds) but I'm sure the card will still perform extremely well.


Click Here To Read More

MSI Z77A-GD65 Motherboard

So I've been meaning to do this sooner but here we go. A brief overview of the MSI Z77A-GD65 motherboard. I won't be going too in depth as to absolutely everything thing on the board (with pictures anyway) but I will try to cover as much of the specifications as I can. First off, this is a Z77 chipset motherboard (which is the newest LGA1155 chipset revision as to this date). I have a personal preference towards MSI boards nowadays simply because I like their ease of access to overclocking, their UEFI interface on their BIOS, Winki (which is currently version 3 as of this article), their Military Class setup for all their components on their boards (uses solid capacitors, super ferrite chokes, highly conductive polymerized capacitors, and DrMOS), has PCI Express 3.0 on all their Z77 boards (has been available since their Z68A boards that were G3 labeled), and best of all, a CMOS reset button on the rear of the board. The CMOS reset isn't available on all of their boards unfortunately, but the Z77A-GD55, Z77A-GD65, Z77A-GD80, and Z77A-G45 (the Z77A version not the Z77MA version) all contain this button (which is located between the top USB/PS2 ports and the digital audio ports). I find this button useful because if you have a bad overclock and it doesn't get to the point where you can boot into the BIOS you can simply press this button with the system off and unplugged. Without having to open the case you have already reset the bios to defaults. Pretty handy I think. Some other manufacturers have also started putting this on their boards which is great, but I would still rather prefer MSI's other offerings. As for the Winki (currently version 3), if you're curious as to how it works or what it has for features, check out the dedicated page on MSI's website HERE.


Click Here To Read More

Corsair Carbide 300R Mid Tower ATX case

So I've decided to start the posts about my friend's Oh Baby! computer by talking about a couple of the parts that are used in the build. Firstly I will be talking about the Corsair Carbide 300R Mid Tower ATX case. The rig cost 65 dollars (not including tax or shipping and on sale from 90 dollars at Newegg.ca) not including a 15 dollar mail-in rebate. I don't like to rely on mail-in rebates as the deciding factor of price of the rig because sometimes the mail-in rebate does not get fulfilled. For a 65 dollar rig that is normally 90 dollars, I expected a bit more from Corsair on this one. There's a few things missing that should have been included with the rig especially considering it's price range. That being said, it does still have some very nice features to which I will be going over in this overview of the Corsair Carbide 300R Mid Tower ATX case. 


Click Here To Read More

Final parts are here

Got the final parts today for the Oh Baby! rig today. What came in the mail today was a Corsair Carbide 300R case, an Intel Core i5 3570k, and a LG DVDRW drive. Soon to follow is going to be a post containing me building the rig.

The Corsair Carbide 300R box, i5 3570K, and LG DVDRW drive (in OEM packaging)

In other news, currently my overclock on that DFI LanParty rig is unstable, doesn't seem to want to pass Prime95 right now. Going to take some fiddling to figure out why it's not stable, but I know that it's fixable. I'll post an update when I manage to get around to fixing it.