Post A Pic Of Your Pc Here :)

spirit

Moderator
Staff member
OK so in 2011 when I was 13 I built my mate this PC. It was kind of low end with a Phenom II X4 840, 4GB RAM, HD 5670 and so on. He recently bought the alpha for PlanetCoaster and surprise, surprise, his 5670 could barely play it at 1080p on low. So, on a tight-ish budget, he bought a Corsair CX600M PSU, 8GB of RAM and a used MSI Radeon HD 7950.

He messaged me on Saturday to say 'JASSSOONNN IT'S HERE COME AND FIT IT!' but I had gotten completely drunk the night before and I was hungover so we had to wait until Sunday. I went round to put it together and I had forgotten two things: firstly, how small his case was, and secondly, how huge those MSI 7950s were! You can see where this is going! Yes, the 7950 didn't fit in his case because some hard drive rails were in the way. We could've just bought a bigger case, but we are practical men (with no money!), so carefully using a drill, a hammer, a coping saw and some pliers, we managed to remove the hard drive rails and fit the 7950 inside the case. :D

It works great! It even looked pretty good once we removed the sharp bits of metal! The game plays smoothly at 1080p at max settings too, so he is pleased!



Original hard drive rails still in place.




Hard drive rails removed but some sharp bits left over. We used a drill to literally drill through the rivets holding the metal in place (cheap case!) because we didn't have pliers strong enough to remove them.




Removing the sharper bits with a coping saw!






Finished! The power supply barely fit, we had fun getting that in! Had to break off quite a lot of plastic inside the case using a hammer in order to get that in.

He can only have one SATA device though because the 7950 covers three of his four SATA ports on his motherboard. You just have to love cheap mATX motherboards! ;) So obviously he has his hard drive plugged in and he had to sacrifice his DVD drive.
 
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spirit

Moderator
Staff member
Right angle SATA cables won't work for him to get access to the other sata ports?
I don't think so. The 7950 completely covers them! Also, the ports are facing downwards towards the bottom of the case, not outwards towards the front.
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
@spirit My 390 snickers at your puny 7950. :p


81IffpDrdML._SL1500_.jpg


In all seriousness though you're right, those cards were huge. My 7970 was almost as long as the 390, which in itself was bigger than the 7990 even!. That 7950 looks to be similar to my 7970(s).

To AMD's credit, or discredit depending, those Phenom's still game alright in comparison to the Vishera chips. Particularly if you crank them up.
 

spirit

Moderator
Staff member
@spirit My 390 snickers at your puny 7950. :p


81IffpDrdML._SL1500_.jpg


In all seriousness though you're right, those cards were huge. My 7970 was almost as long as the 390, which in itself was bigger than the 7990 even!. That 7950 looks to be similar to my 7970(s).

To AMD's credit, or discredit depending, those Phenom's still game alright in comparison to the Vishera chips. Particularly if you crank them up.
Not my 7950 but yeah they are big! In 2011 I used an MSI TwinFrozr II GTX 560 Ti for a build I did for somebody else and this 7950 (with a similar cooler, looks like this 7950 has the TwinFrozr III) dwarfs that. It's definitely bigger than the MSI GTX 970 I used for a client's machine last year and my MSI GTX 760 (both with the newer 'Gaming' coolers from MSI - are they still TwinFrozrs?) I'm not sure if it's as big as my old Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 though - that was a big card! I was amazed at the size of the PowerColor R9 390 when I built @SpriteMidr's PC - huge! High-end Radeons are always big cards! :D
 

beers

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Staff member
I never understand what the point was for those triple fan heatsink designs. Totally unnecessary.
MOAR FANZ

Eh, I think even Accelero and similar do them with the aftermarket coolers. You can pump some serious GPU core voltage without even worrying about it.
 

spirit

Moderator
Staff member
Here are some photos of the PC I did in November 2011 with an i3 2100 and an MSI TwinFrozr II GTX 560 Ti just so you can compare it to the size of the MSI TwinFrozr III HD 7950. Big difference!







And yes @Darren with this 7950 and the upgraded RAM (from 4GB to 8GB) I reckon this PC will last him a little while. He doesn't do much gaming on it, more of an Xbox guy unfortunately, but maybe now he has more power he will do more PC gaming? Kind of hard to play games on a 5670! This Phenom II X4 840 is still going strong and it wasn't even one of the high-end 9xx chips! I think the next thing he is after is an SSD. He'll probably want a 500GB one given that he can only have one SATA device! :p Or we might remove his sound card which he doesn't actually need and put a SATA 6GBps PCIe x1 card in there. His board is only SATA 6GBps.
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
I never understand what the point was for those triple fan heatsink designs. Totally unnecessary.
It's totally totally not. My 390 runs noticeably cooler than my friends MSI 390 (dual fans). Like 5-8oC cooler at load, if not more. That's pretty significant, and those MSI coolers are one of the better ones too. I was able to clock mine higher due to thermal headroom that he didn't have.

And come on! It's an AMD card. It would burn the house down otherwise, don't ya know? :p
 

spirit

Moderator
Staff member
I'm pretty sure the PowerColor R9 390 in @SpriteMidr's PC is also a three-slot card. I remember remarking about the sheer size of it when I was building the PC! :D

Mind you, every time I see a high-end Radeon whether it be an old HD 5870, a kind-of-old HD 7950 or a brand new R9 390 I'm always like 'woah so big!' :D
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
I'm pretty sure the PowerColor R9 390 in @SpriteMidr's PC is also a three-slot card. I remember remarking about the sheer size of it when I was building the PC! :D

Mind you, every time I see a high-end Radeon whether it be an old HD 5870, a kind-of-old HD 7950 or a brand new R9 390 I'm always like 'woah so big!' :D

As small as the RX 480 (PCB length in particular), the high end Polaris GPU's might actually be of somewhat reasonable size, but then again probably not. :D

Nvidia's flagships are huge too. 980 TI STRIX.

asus_gtx980ti-3--1280x1024.jpg
 

Intel_man

VIP Member
My statement blanket covers any video card with the triple fan designs. If EVGA's 980 ti kingpin can manage with a dual fan setup... the triples are just a bit over the top.
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
My statement blanket covers any video card with the triple fan designs. If EVGA's 980 ti kingpin can manage with a dual fan setup... the triples are just a bit over the top.

I don't quite follow. I just said that my triple fan card runs cooler than an identical card with a dual fan design? Yeah it can manage, but if you can get cooler temperatures out of a triple fan setup, why wouldn't you? Also more fans = more airflow = lower overall fan RPM = less noise. My Sapphire is definitely quieter than the MSI 390 too.
 

spirit

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Staff member
Haven't actually seen a modern NVIDIA flagship in the flesh, the highest-end one I've used is the GTX 970 from MSI which was a pretty big card but probably not as big as the 980s and 980 Tis were.
 

SpriteMidr

Active Member
I'm pretty sure the PowerColor R9 390 in @SpriteMidr's PC is also a three-slot card. I remember remarking about the sheer size of it when I was building the PC! :D

Mind you, every time I see a high-end Radeon whether it be an old HD 5870, a kind-of-old HD 7950 or a brand new R9 390 I'm always like 'woah so big!' :D
Two slot :)
 

Intel_man

VIP Member
I don't quite follow. I just said that my triple fan card runs cooler than an identical card with a dual fan design? Yeah it can manage, but if you can get cooler temperatures out of a triple fan setup, why wouldn't you? Also more fans = more airflow = lower overall fan RPM = less noise. My Sapphire is definitely quieter than the MSI 390 too.
I get where you're coming from with that logic of more fans = more airflow, but it seems to me from the reviews I've seen, it's not as significant as it should be.

You could even argue that under load, the triple fan design would be louder because that's more fans @ 100% rpm. I can see the triple fan would run at lower rpms when the load is not as high and at the lower temperature ranges. But once it reaches a certain temperature, the triple fan setup would be louder.

Overclocking proved both easy and fruitful. For a 24/7 stable overclock, we were able to set the GPU core to 1300 MHz base/1401 MHz boost/1515 MHz actual boost. As is typical with Hynix memory, it too overclocked quite well and landed at 2000 MHz (8000 MHz GDDR5). If you’re wondering what PrecisionX and the Classified offers as far as overclocking options, the voltage can be set up to +50mv, power target to +115%, and temperature target to 91 °C. At the overclocked settings we used, we never ran into any throttling issues.
  • Base Clock: 1190 MHZ
  • Boost Clock: 1291 MHz
  • Memory Clock: 7010 MHz Effective
  • CUDA Cores: 2816
  • Bus Type: PCI-E 3.0
  • Memory Detail: 6144MB GDDR5
  • Memory Bit Width: 384 Bit
  • Memory Speed: 0.28ns
  • Memory Bandwidth: 336.5 GB/s
evga_gtx980ti_classified-45.jpg


What I'm trying to say is, pushing OC beyond the numbers you're typically going to get with a dual fan cooler, you should really be going liquid. Going triple fan air cooling is a bit overkill.

You can read all about the performance of that card in the article. Neat read though. Not like it matters now that the 1080's released. :rolleyes:
http://www.overclockers.com/evga-gtx-980-ti-classified-graphics-card-review/

To put it into perspective, here's Asus' triple fan GTX 980 Ti STRIX DCIII OC
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/09/01/asus_gtx_980_ti_strix_dciii_oc_video_card_review/1

The OC that they managed with that card is on par with eVGA's classified and the temperatures they were getting is very similar. (The Classified was around 5 degrees hotter than the Asus one)

1440939750KGqumUdZsR_4_10.gif

1440939750KGqumUdZsR_11_2.gif



tl:dr The triple fan design vs dual fan design isn't all that different.
 

Darren

Moderator
Staff member
I get where you're coming from with that logic of more fans = more airflow, but it seems to me from the reviews I've seen, it's not as significant as it should be.

You could even argue that under load, the triple fan design would be louder because that's more fans @ 100% rpm. I can see the triple fan would run at lower rpms when the load is not as high and at the lower temperature ranges. But once it reaches a certain temperature, the triple fan setup would be louder.



evga_gtx980ti_classified-45.jpg


What I'm trying to say is, pushing OC beyond the numbers you're typically going to get with a dual fan cooler, you should really be going liquid. Going triple fan air cooling is a bit overkill.

You can read all about the performance of that card in the article. Neat read though. Not like it matters now that the 1080's released. :rolleyes:
http://www.overclockers.com/evga-gtx-980-ti-classified-graphics-card-review/

To put it into perspective, here's Asus' triple fan GTX 980 Ti STRIX DCIII OC
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/09/01/asus_gtx_980_ti_strix_dciii_oc_video_card_review/1

The OC that they managed with that card is on par with eVGA's classified and the temperatures they were getting is very similar. (The Classified was around 5 degrees hotter than the Asus one)

1440939750KGqumUdZsR_4_10.gif

1440939750KGqumUdZsR_11_2.gif



tl:dr The triple fan design vs dual fan design isn't all that different.


It looks badass as shit.

/argument
 

Intel_man

VIP Member
Personally, I would like to see more vendors come out with single slot flagship cards that's ready for liquid cooling. Those look the most badass.
 
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