The GPU

It wouldn’t be too far off base to say that much of Morbo was built around the graphics card. It set requirements for space, cooling, motherboard I/O, and power supply. Again, I got really lucky with this one. The MSI GTX 580 Lightning was released about a week or two before I was ready to order my machine. I could go on and on about this card, but if you want to read a good review, here you go.

Basically, the MSI Lightning is an overclocked GTX 580 that is designed to be even further overclocked by enthusiasts – it even has support for liquid nitrogen cooling. It has a completely custom PCB, with different/better video ports, an enhanced power distribution layer, and that fantastic Twin Frozr III cooler. Basically, it’s an overclocked card that is actually cooler and often draws less power than a reference GTX 580. And this card is quiet. Really quiet. Even with Furmark running and the temperature peaked, basically all I hear from the card is the whoosh of air. No fan noise, no coil whine. Just air. And did I mention that it sports a rather nice black, grey and red design, complementing everything else in my system?

View from under the 580.

This card does come with some requirements, however. It takes two 8-pin PCIe power inputs. It needs a power supply that can handle at least 600W, just for one card. Finally, and this is a big one, this card does not vent all its exhaust out the slot at the back of your case – it will vent a lot of hot air directly into your case. This was a big factor in deciding to go with the HAF X, ’cause its high airflow and four giant fans were capable of dissipating all that heat quickly enough.

Cooling considerations

This naturally brings us to a major part of the consideration when building this machine, even if it’s something that can’t be pegged to one particular component. You see, cooling a box like this isn’t a matter of simply buying one or two heatsinks and some fans; it really requires a holistic approach. So many considerations went into the cooling of this system, it’d take me forever to talk about them all. Major items, like the type of case, were of course considered, and from there it was easy enough to decide to fill the HAF X with all the fans it’d take. Big fans, though, quiet fans. But I wanted a positive pressure case, one with more fan air pointing in than out, so that the air would leak out all the holes in the case, keeping all the intake air filtered, reducing dust, which will keep it cooler in the long run.

The HAF X’s side 200mm fan, blowing directly on the graphics card.

Even the orientation of the power supply was considered, as having it intake air from inside the case would disrupt the ideal airflow and reduce the positive pressure somewhat, so I have the PSU drawing air from the bottom of the case, from outside. I’ll discuss the PSU separately a little later in this post. Then, I had to decide if I wanted the CPU heatsink fans pointed up, venting out the top of the case or pointed backward, venting out the back. I went with rear-facing fans, due to space constraints with the RAM that I mentioned in the previous post. I removed the stock 140mm rear exhaust fan and replaced it with an identical fan to the CPU heatsink fans, ’cause it was quieter, matched the other two, and looked better.

Fan controller

Then, a fan controller was needed. I wanted something simple, something cheap (my budget was already pretty filled with other stuff), and something that looked half decent. I went with the FAN-ATIC, which matches the aesthetic of the HAF X wonderfully. It’s a simple analog controller, with a full power setting, a low power setting, and an off setting for each channel, controlled by beefy toggle switches. All the case fans are driven by the FAN-ATIC, and the fans on the Venomous X Black are controlled by the motherboard. This way, the GPU- and CPU-specific fans are automatically speed controlled according to temperature, and I can control the case fans manually, mostly to control sound. To be honest, these days I just leave all the case fans on the low-power setting and everything is still fine. This case breathes very nicely.

The FAN-ATIC fan controller, above the optical drive.

Power Supply

For power supplies, my big decision, after determining capacity, was between modular or non-modular power supplies. Modular power supplies have removable cables, instead of that huge rat’s nest of cables you get with a non-modular supply, that has to be crammed somewhere in the case, which is annoying, especially when the cables aren’t being used to power anything. As a result, modular PSUs can actually help your cooling situation slightly, because you won’t have any unnecessary cables impeding airflow. The other advantage is that if I wanted to go with a higher capacity PSU later on, I can unplug all the cables right at the PSU, swap the new one in, and I’d be done in under five minutes. This is much, much easier than rewiring all the power cables behind the machine, unplugging every component, and plugging them all back in again.

My choice of power supply was pretty easy. The Corsair Pro Gold AX850 is a fantastic unit. It’s made by Seasonic, who are generally regarded as the cream of the crop when it comes to PSUs. If you look at the graphs for this unit, where you would typically see jumping lines showing the noise across the power bus, this one basically shows flat, clean lines. It’s fully modular, has a nice black finish, and I got a good price on the unit. What really sold me is Corsair’s fantastic service. I think I may talk about this more in a future post, in an ‘intangibles’ section.

Sorry, no shots of the PSU. Here’s one of the cooler, GPU, RAM and fans.

Hard drives

This was a fun one. I needed lots of space, and lots of speed, but low noise. The fastest 7200RPM hard drives on the market were the Caviar Black line of drives, but they were famous for having a rather loud, clicking noise when they were in action. I didn’t want 10k RPM drives either, ’cause I didn’t want that whine, or the added cost or power consumption. I settled for two Hitachi Desktar 5K3000 units, which spin slightly slower than 7200RPM, but are a lot quieter than the Caviar Blacks. I knew I wanted a RAID0 partition for speed, and a RAID1 partition for reliability, but that would normally require two drives each. Enter Intel’s drive controller in the Z68 chipset. This hardware and software combo, called Rapid Storage Technology, lets you create two types of logical arrays on top of two physical drives, so it let me get everything I wanted.

Some math here: 2TB drives give you about 1.8TB of usable space each. I took 400GB from each drive and assigned them to a RAID0 stripe, giving me 800GB of fast, but unreliable storage (losing either drive would mean I lose the entire array). At the same time, the other 1.4TB on each drive is assigned to a RAID1 mirror, meaning I also have 1.4TB of slower, but reliable storage (losing a drive means I still have a copy on the other drive). This is a fantastic system, as there are only so many SATA ports on a motherboard, and this keeps power consumption and cabling to a minimum, too. Basically, all my software and work files are on the RAID0 volume for speed, and are backed up to the larger RAID1 array for safekeeping.

The two HDDs in their slide-out trays.

Solid State Drives

What modern machine is complete without an SSD? While their price per gig is much higher than that of HDDs, their speed is just too seductive to do without. As this was for a machine I’d be using day in and day out, I wanted the OS and FSX installed onto an SSD to make life slightly less painful. After comparing prices and reading many reviews to gauge performance, I went with a Crucial M4 128GB SATA3 SSD for my OS/FSX drive. Turns out, this was a rather lucky decision, as almost all the other SATA3 SSDs on the market at the time used the Sandforce controller, and this controller turned out to be a nightmare, requiring many drives to be returned to their manufacturer, due to crashing and other issues. The M4 SSDs used a different controller, and have had no problems whatsoever like this, to my knowledge.

I quickly realized after benchmarking that while a RAID0 array of HDDs can be fast, recording FRAPS footage to them just wasn’t as fast as I would have liked. Seeing as I liked the M4 so much, I got another one, purely for recorded video. That alone bought me around 5FPS, which is fantastic, ’cause recording FSX video with FRAPS simply destroys your framerate when recording at full FPS and full resolution.

A Crucial M4 in its slide-out tray.

As a result of this setup, with OS and FSX on one SSD and recorded video going to another, the HDDs are barely even used at all when flying, helping reduce the noise, while of course increasing I/O speed. I know many people will scream that one shouldn’t run FSX and the OS on the same drive, but in my opinion this is much more of an issue when running on spinning HDDs, as seek latency will kill you, but on an SSD it just really doesn’t seem to matter that much.

I’d also like to point out that on many P67 and Z68 motherboards, not all SATA3 ports are equal. You’ll have some from the chipset, running off the Intel controller, and possibly some others running off a Marvell controller or similar. While SATA3 HDDs can’t really saturate the SATA3 connection, except for peaking now and then, SATA3 SSDs definitely can. This is important ’cause the Intel-controlled ports have the full SATA3 bandwidth available to them, while the Marvell controller is connected to the rest of the system via the PCI bus, and as a result might limit your potential SSD performance. For this reason and others, I generally recommend only using the Marvell ports if necessary, and if you do need them and don’t require the Intel controller for its RST functionality, use the Marvell controller for the HDDs and the Intel ports for SSDs, if you want to eke out every last scrap of performance. I haven’t kept up too much on newer motherboards, and some gaming/enthusiast boards may have other ways around this, so your mileage, as always, may vary.

The 3.5″ drive bays and the giant 240mm red fan cooling them.

Next Up

Now that I’ve covered all the major components inside the case, I’ll discuss the external devices hooked up to Morbo, then I’ll continue with some other topics like multi-monitor requirements, whether or not to assemble your own machine, cable management, lessons I’ve learned, and maybe a few other things. If there’s something in particular you’d like to know about, ask away in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer you.

Throttle On!

Jordan Krushen

Photos by Valerie Wyns

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