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Well, I had some issues with my wife's system locking up once every several days. Hard lock or shutdown. I figured it was time to make some changes, and have some fun doing it. I didn't want to go too nuts, as I already had a working i5-2500 processor, 8GB of working DDR3, and I knew a number of the parts in her system were just fine, so I went hunting for used-but-nice gear.

Mainboard. I wasn't looking for anything near this fancy, but I found a sweet deal on someone selling this puppy with one bent pin: an ASUS Maximus V GENE. Ten painstaking minutes with a fine-bladed hobby knife, and we're back to mint condition. With an onboard USB3 header to match her existing Lian Li case, a real Intel NIC, and all the toys you can find in a micro-ATX board, how could I resist?



Next - Aww, idin't it cute? I really like EVGA's small Geforce 750Ti. I wanted it as much for great video playback and Folding@Home scores as anything else, and purchased used on Ebay, you can save $40-50 off new or more if you look around.



I changed the heatsink out for a Thermaltake NiC L31, a pretty decent sized tower that doesn't cost a lot and still fits a 120mm fan into a MicroATX case (140mm high). I then swapped her power supply. After looking at the prices, I found that great power supplies used aren't worth it, even decent new ones that aren't top end (read, 450-550w 80Plus Silver or Gold modular) cost a lot, like $75-100. I ended up finding a liquidator selling new Seasonic 1000w Platinum units for 40% of retail cost, bought one for myself, and gave her my Seasonic X750 Gold. And here we go (yes, I have to do more cable cleanup, but I'm load testing first) --meet SIREN.



Crucial M500 240GB SSD (in an IcePack from a WD Velociraptor to easily adapt it to the case), ASUS DVDRW, and a USB multi-memory card reader. Oh, I put in all Scythe Gentle Typhoon 120mm fans as well (got a deal on several of them open box). I almost had more fun building this one than my rig. Now, if I could only find someone getting rid of a 3770K for cheap...

Looks like a nice little system. though I would get a nice and quiet 80mm exhaust fan for the rear fan port since you have nothing in right now. Maybe a 17db 14$ Noctua redux fan or whatever fan you prefer to pull some of the heat out the CPU generates before it starts bouncing around inside the case before the top fan grabs it.

vargis14 wrote:

Looks like a nice little system. though I would get a nice and quiet 80mm exhaust fan for the rear fan port since you have nothing in right now. Maybe a 17db 14$ Noctua redux fan or whatever fan you prefer to pull some of the heat out the CPU generates before it starts bouncing around inside the case before the top fan grabs it.

I wonder - with these kinds of cases and CPU coolers, how effective can pointing the CPU fan toward the back vent be? I seem to recall Dell using this sort of design for years - they only had a heatsink on the CPU, and then there was a fan shroud, with a 92mm (or whatever) fan on the back of the case. And then you have SFFs like the HP 7800 thru 800g1 (not sure about earlier models), which put the CPU toward the front of the board (proprietary), have only a heatsink, and then a fan shroud (with an intake fan at the front of the case). Plus the outtake fan on the PSU - and that's it. Though obviously those don't have a terribly powerful GPU.

Air is going to flow out that back vent anyway. That's why you have big fans pushing air in at the front of the case. The case is pressurized, so the air flows out the hole in the back.

That's a nice motherboard. It seems to be light on RAM in the photographs.

I looked at doing the fan in an updraft configuration. It will work on this board, but I'm waiting to ensure everything is stable before I do it, as I'd like to do some comparison testing.

The Thermaltake is already 5-6C cooler at idle than the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro (rev. 1) that it replaced. There were only a few tower units that would be low enough to fit in the case. Deepcool had a nice looking unit I decided not to go with as I didn't think it would be an improvement. Noctua has one model that would have worked, but the price was more than double of the Thermaltake (yes, a nicer unit, but not that much more so). I'm also curious whether the fan would last as long in an updraft configuration as it would in the conventional mounting position.

I do wish Lian Li had used a cutout for a larger fan in the back. The rear vent there isn't worth doing. It will give a bit more air at a lot more noise. The PC-A04B is an updated version of an old design; updated enough to have USB3 and a number of good things, but with some of the caveats of Lian Li cases (not that durable because, aluminum) --that small rear vent is one of them. I'm sure they could have made a cut for a 92mm fan for sure, maybe larger, though I don't know how it would have affected structural integrity.

If I had been doing a little more of a makeover, I'd have replaced the case with a Fractal Design ARC Mini R2. That would have been another hundred bucks though, and this case works reasonably well. The exhaust fan is a bit higher RPM than the intakes, so it can keep up. I'll be working on tweaking the fan speeds to make it a little quieter yet next; ASUS has very nice fan control and tons of headers on this board. Maybe someday when I have the time, I can look into what it would take to enlarge the fan cutout on the back.

LoneWolf15 wrote:

The Thermaltake is already 5-6C cooler at idle than the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro (rev. 1) that it replaced. There were only a few tower units that would be low enough to fit in the case.

I believe that you've done satisfactorily with your CPU cooler selection. The $24 Arctic Freezer i11, the $28 Silverstone Argon AR02, the $21 Cooler Master Hyper TX3 or $45 Hyper D92 are all relatively-short 92mm tower coolers.

Try out the Asus thermal control software for your motherboard. You'll find that it is highly configurable, with programmable curves for each fan output combining multiple temperature sensors.

Yep, I was playing with the control software last night. The one thing I'd wished for was the highest minimum RPM I could set in the BIOS was 600rpm. This is still below the noise floor with the Gentle Typhoons, I'd like to go a little higher (around 800rpm), which would still be quiet, with improved airflow.

The RAM is two G.Skill 4GB DDR3 modules. They have no heatspreaders, so they don't show up well in pictures. The wife really doesn't need 16GB of RAM, though if I found a deal on two more 4GB modules inexpensively, I'd consider it.

My one peeve I have to work out at the moment is that the board insists it can't detect the CPU fan if I enable monitoring for it, though it's spinning up. Probably something minor. Interestingly enough, just running the newest 3DMark for burn-in, the final tests rated a fair amount higher than with the H67 board I removed from the system; I wonder if ASUS has that funny little trickery going on with the turbo switch that has been discussed in some reviews. Ranked the system in 45th percentile as opposed to 33rd before for the end results.

You probably need to run the "Thermal Tuning" routine in the Thermal Radar software to allow the motherboard to test each of your fans. After that, it will let you set lower rpm thresholds depending on what each fan can handle. For your CPU fan monitoring, you may need to change the alarm setting in the BIOS to a lower rpm. It defaulted to what the stock Intel CPU cooler needs. Your larger aftermarket CPU cooler doesn't have to spin as fast as that to work.

Well, I thought I knew the answer to the performance difference in 3DMark, and I was right.

Changing to an ASUS board means ASUS behavior. One of their common behaviors under certain settings is to force all of the CPU cores to their Turbo Boost max. Meaning that the i5-2500 (non-K) has had all of its core multipliers boosted to 37x or 3.7GHz (default being 33x, 3.3GHz) for normal operations.

In this case, it doesn't bother me --the board and CPU have been a rock solid combo over the past 48 hours, and it means getting a CPU speed boost without buying a new processor. Even under heavy load (75-100% CPU for a period of 10-15m) the processor temperature hasn't gone over 54C for anyone core (according to CoreTemp), and has often been lower (49-52C). It's a good thing to know though; I haven't had an ASUS mainboard since late Athlon XP days.

I do like the Gene's design and BIOS setup. If I convert my own system down the road to mATX, I could easily see myself going that direction.