Memoirs Of A 2900XT CrossFire System :: Building The Perfect 2900XT Beast

My friend Tom or MaxGyver as we call him starts to delve through the parts and begin the assembly of the CorssFire beastie. This was a real challenge as installation of the Swiftech H20 system had to be done in a very custom manner. The motherboard was easy to install as the motherboard tray is removable on the CM Stacker 320. Installation of the APOGEE GTX CPU block to the Asus motherboard was also very easily done, which is to be expected with Swiftech products in general as they are designed very well.

We tried installing the water cooler where the rear fan would be placed but we had success in this as my CoolerMaster contact Bruce gave me a case not ready for water cooling. Never to be swayed in the face of disaster and after complaining enough to make any old lady cringe he was able to mount the radiator at the top of the case. Where a fan usually goes up on the top underside of the case old reliable Max successfully mounted the Swiftech H2O radiator. This was really the most difficult task of the whole build.

The CoolerMaster case in every other respect is awesome, but it would have been nice to get the CM Stacker that has the holes for a liquid cooled systems tubing. The tool free design of the case offers users an unsurpassed level of ease and an extremely ergonomic and safe building block for their custom PC. The case had absolutely no sharp edges or any cheap feeling parts; everything was above standard in that aspect. Quality does have a standard and its nice change getting to work with equipment that meets and exceeds that standard.

Using the Real Power Pro proved to be a valuable thing as the system would not post with the 850W one we use in our lab. The Real Power Pro PSU offers very flexible and easy to hide cables that work nice in a custom built system that offers excellent air flow and less constriction. The Swiftech H20-80 was integrated using a upgraded CPU block and the flow tubes were not a problem to install after the little radiator dilemma. We ran the system after filling the reservoir fully installed in the system, which shows our trust in how well Swiftech makes their systems as liquid leakage is a real bitch.

Installing the CrossFire cards no longer requires that asinine external cable and now uses its own proprietary card connections in the SLI fashion, which is much easier and efficient than the dongle anyways. The power requirements on the pair of 2900XT 1GB cards are quite high and require both a 6-pin and 8-pin power connection to work properly. This is over the top stuff here, and makes NVIDIA's SLI power requirements dull in comparison. These are very power hungry VGA cards for a fact. The cards also unfortunately run a bit hot as well so we used all the available fan slots in the locking door and filled them with fans to better cool the 2900XT VGA cards. This did work for keeping the cards stable at stock gaming settings, but for overclocking it left a wide margin for improvement as the cards just got too damn hot.

Even though we did not take any shots of them the Western Digital 10,000 RPM SATA150 Raptors played a major role in the building of this system as they are the fastest Non-SCSI based drives available. WD provides some interesting blue cables, but we omitted them for the ones that came with the Asus Blitz motherboard. We only water cooled the new Intel QX6850 Core 2 Quad Extreme as there were no readily available solutions for the cards when we built and tested this system. Danger Den just released a set of water blocks for the CrossFire 2900XT cards that would added a bit of headroom for them to be overclocked. The best cooling you will get with any liquid cooling solution is a few degrees below the ambient room temperature in any case. I have a high electric bill as I live in a hot little town known as Lost Angeles, and its hot here so my air conditioner is on almost constantly all summer in an effort to beat the heat. This system was really cool to see come together and now it is time to see how well it plays games and runs in Windows Vista.