It's Here..

markel

Member
My Story -

Ordered my PC on March 30th. At 16th day of production I called to ask what component was causing the hold up. They were waiting for the 120GB Intel 330 SSD. I went to the configuration page to see what else was available and selected the 120GB 520 SSD which flagged up as £5 cheaper. I called PCS and was told yes, that was the case and the 550 was in stock so changed the order to that. This £5 paid for the Silver Warranty upgrade.

Got an e-mail and text on Thurs 26th to say delivery will be today 09:45-10:45. The van came at 09:55.

Initial impressions were it's a lovely looking case, Smart and not over the top. One downside if I want to be pickey is the cables at the back. There are 2 running from USB ports which then dissapear inside the case to, I believe, the front USB ports. These outside cables look, in my view, a bit amateurish. In this day and age could this not been wired internally? On arrival the blank over the 2nd DVD Drive bay was missing and found between the CPU Cooler and GPU but that was easily retrieved and replaced.

No problems on start-up apart from the Windows product number not being inside the Win7 DVD cover so had to go crawling around the back of the PC to write the serial number down. Only one glitch in the first hour of use, GPU-Z crashed to a red screen which stayed on despite ctrl-alt-del but a restart solved that.
All in all It's a lovely well put together machine (apart from those wires at the back. Its quiet and smooth. First benchmarks are Aquamark 167,233* 3D Mark 11 X3290. 3D Mark 2001 55740.
And here's some pics-

DSCF0662.jpg


Those USB Cables -

DSCF0650.jpg


* Yes I know Aquamark is an old benchmark but have been using it for years so had to run it on this machine.
I have some overclocking questions but I'll ask them in another part of the forum.

Spec -

CORSAIR OBSIDIAN SERIES™ 650D GAMING CASE
Overclocked CPU Overclocked Intel® Core™i7-2700k Quad Core(3.50GHz @ max 5.00GHz)
Motherboard ASUS® P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3: PCI-E 3.0 READY, SLI, CROSSFIREX***SPECIAL***
Memory (RAM) 16GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (4 x 4GB KIT)
Graphics Card 2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 680 - 2 DVI, HDMI, DP - 3D Vision Ready
Memory - 1st Hard Disk 120GB INTEL® 330 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 500MB/sR | 450MB/sW)
Change to: 120GB INTEL® 520 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 550MB/sR | 520MB/sW)
2nd Hard Disk 1TB 3.5" SATA-III 6GB/s HDD 7200RPM 32MB CACHE
Power Supply CORSAIR 650W ENTHUSIAST SERIES™ TX650 V2-80 PLUS® BRONZE (£69)
Processor Cooling TITAN FENRIR EVO EXTREME HEATPIPE CPU COOLER (£39)
Warranty 3 Year Standard Warranty (1 Month Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Change to: 3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) (£5)

Processed Date 30-03-2012
Pre-Production Date 03-04-2012
Build Date 23-04-2012
Test Date 24-04-2012
QC Date 24-04-2012
Awaiting Dispatch Date 25-04-2012
Dispatch Date 25-04-2012
Who Worked on This Order?

Built By Cihan Yucesoy
Tested By Zbear Ramzan
QC'd By Adnaan Marban
Packed By Anthony Cunliffe
 

Rakk

The Awesome
Moderator
No problems on start-up apart from the Windows product number not being inside the Win7 DVD cover so had to go crawling around the back of the PC to write the serial number down.
This is normally how its done with OEM versions of Windows, the activation key sticker is always on the machine and teh key is not inside the DVD box since the Windows license is restricted to said machine.

All in all It's a lovely well put together machine (apart from those wires at the back. Its quiet and smooth. .
Glad you like it :)
 

markel

Member
Yep, Those points were just being picky. I love it.
Thank to PCS for answering my questions in plain English when I called up.
 
I must say I agree with markel the wires at the back are certainly ugly and looks very unprofessional (and loses 2 USBs at the back?)
It has in fact put me off ordering myself!
How would you avoid this happening? - it certainly caught markel by surprise.
 
I must say I agree with markel the wires at the back are certainly ugly and looks very unprofessional (and loses 2 USBs at the back?)
It has in fact put me off ordering myself!
How would you avoid this happening? - it certainly caught markel by surprise.

Yup, case manufacturers are, unfortunately, rather slow on the uptake of USB3 and making it easier to implement in a build. The pass-through cables you're seeing allow for the case's front USB 3 ports to be used. Granted the routing of the two in the picture could be far better. The case in question looks to be a 650D which has pretty much the same internal dimensions and layout as my 600T's. I just routed my two cables through the 8 pin at the top of the case, around the back of the mobo tray and through the optical cage. It won't be hard for Markel to re-route should he so choose.
 

markel

Member
Thanks for the info on how you routed the cables. I'll make a note of it and do it once the PC is sorted. Unfortunately my first day excitement is now moot after some problems. The PC was not overclocked, as ordered - it was set at stock 3.5GHz. an Hour and a half on the phone and we realised that turbo mode wasn't enabled. Got that working and the CPU showed 4.8GHz - brilliant. Unfortunately whatever we did has halfed my benchmark results and most games stutter along when yesterday they were smooth as a smooth thing.
 
Thanks dazzzlerdee
but I'm confused - as usual - why is the case at fault, it has USB3 on the front (one in fact. The MOBO has 4 USB3 ports, two at the back and two mid-board. So I still don't understand the problem and how do you avoid it?
Probable me being thick again.
 

markel

Member
Here's an update to my PC - I'm happy with it again now. After the lengthy chat to Mustafa on Tech support we discovered turbo mode was not enabled so the PC was stuck at 3.5GHz. After enabling it the PC showed 1.6GHz normally which rose to 4.8GHZ during benchmarking. Result. Till later that night I ran some 3DMark tests which came out way below even the 3.3GHz tests (P5406 in 3DMark 11 as appose to P9450 the day before). For some reason after a few restarts and not being used all day as I was in work, I put it on this morning an it's running sweet. Crysis2 gives 90fps as does Flight Simx.
I also asked about the CPU Cooler. The Titan which I had in my spec was out of stock so rather than hold up the build they put in the xigamek which they assure me is better, for no extra charge. As far as the USB's are concerned there are 2 x USB3 and 2 x USB2 on the front panel. I'll post a pic later when I've resized the photo. I still don't like the idea of those 2 wires in the back but as you can't see them I can live with it.
Thanks to everyone for your comments on my postings.

Edit to add pics


DSCF0725.jpg


Excuse the mess, I use this as a store room for now. The case is a nice size as I said, and not too over the top.


DSCF0723.jpg
 
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