Here's my new rig, a decked out Cosmos 1000 feat. the usual suspects with some twists.
Hardware:
ASUS P6T Deluxe
i920
12gb Corsair 1333
2x ASUS 9600gt passive
4x WD10EADS
2x Intel X-25E in raid 0
Enermax modu 82+ 625
Zalman MFC1+
Noctua NH-U12P
Handful of Scythe SY1225SL12M
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Mods:
Cut out most of the fan stamps with a clipper and put vinyl sealing around them.
Added a fan to the front of the hdd cage to blow on the video cards. I stood it off with a series of nuts, grommeted the top and bottom.
Cut wire holes in the mobo tray for video power, mobo power, psu fan monitoring. For the aux power, I de-pinned an extension cable and ran that behind the back bar, then ran the psu to that. The back of the Cosmos 1000 is a not perfect because a bar becomes flush with the back between the mobo and designated cable holes, so running cables behind and across it causes the back of the case not to close. It closes fine now.
Drilled a new hole in the Zalman MFC1+ for recessed mounting. Door wont close unless you recess it.
Used the included 7v resistors from the Notcua HSF for the the rear and top exhaust fans. The Zalman gives me 5v/~700rpm, but with the resitors it's a little quieter. These fans start with the resistors and with the Zalman all the way down! I have them set to just before they turn red, which is less than 5v with the resistors.
Gasketed the back exhaust and bottom intake. I was trying to isolate a vibration issue, but it turns out that was coming from the Comsos' included bottom plastic fan bracket. I recommend tossing that and screwing the fan directly into the bottom of the case.
I mounted the SSDs with this bracket, buy. There aren't many mounting options for 2.5" in the Cosmos because the hdd cage uses bottom mounts. This is one of the few brackets that has them. I ended up needing to space the drives off the bracket with some gommets and extened screws (M3 IIRC), because the included IDE adapter (which I removed) is mounted on raised metal.
Software mods:
I've been keeping track of the software mods I've done that pertain to having 12gb of ram and a crazy fast, but small c:.
disable scheduled defrag of c:
disabled hibernate
set volume shadow copy space to 4gb
set pagefile to 900mb
enable write cache in intel storage matrix (make rocket go now). This doubled transfers in HD Tune from ~250-300 mb/sec to 500mb+/sec, read and write.
browser.cache.memory.capacity to 250000 (undid, firefox sluggish after awhile?)
symbolic link google earth cache to o: (a tb drive)
browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to 20
fdm hdd write cache to 800mb
I have 19gb free on my c: now with most of my stuff intalled. VS2008 and CS4 each took about 8 minutes to install!
The system is very fast, quiet, reliable, and never slows down because it never pages. I'm very happy with it. Running Vista 64. It's my main rig and I use it for programming and basically 5/8 of my life.
idle temps, 70f ambient:
gpu: 54c
gpu: 55c
system: 48c
cpu: 39c
hdd: 37c
hdd: 42c
hdd: 37c
hdd: 35c
I got the fans, cables, hsf from http://www.jab-tech.com/ . Highly recommended. Fast shipping and they sent me free stuff with my orders! A tin of chocolate penguin mints and a small led flashlight. Newegg wanted way too much for shipping for the accessories.
Pics:
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