Stage 1 - Air cooling
Stage 1 - Air cooling
We've covered most of the technical specifics. It's time for this article to convert into a huge photo shoot. As explained we tested at three levels, air, liquid and LN2 cooling. This is the first stage, air cooling.
Component usage throughout this article:
- EVGA SR-2 motherboard
- CPU: Intel Xeon x5680 x2
- MEMORY: Corsair Dominator GT 12GB
- GFX CARDS: GeForce GTX 480 x4
- HDD: OCZ Vertex Turbo and Western Digital VelociRaptor
- PSU: Antec 1200 watt power supply x2 and a Corsair 850 Watt power supply
- Cooling: Two Intel stock 980x fans / Koolance ERM-3K4U water cooling system connected to 4 GTX 480s
- Subzero cooling: 1 Dragon F1 Extreme Edition for cpu 0 / 1 Koolance LN2 pot for CPU 1
- 4 Tek-9 6 Slim GPU coolers by Kingpin cooling.
Here we have the SR-2 installed with one GeForce GTX 480 which is already on water-cooling. The processors used are however cooled with the Intel reference heatpipe coolers.
Already an awesome sight for sure. A tad noisy though! In the first run of overclocking (and we'll show you results on air/liquid/LN2 based overclocking later in the article) we reached 4400 MHz on both six-core processors.
Here we reach the stage where we slowly progress towards liquid cooling. The GPU blocks for the GTX 480 cards have arrived as well and as such we insert all four cards. Next page... liquid cooling. And again, we'll show you tests and benchmarks later on in the article.
