i7 built...

After long months of funding and selling of my old rig, finally got a chance to built a new Intel Core i7 rig. The Core i7 are Intel's latest Quad-Core microproccesor based on Nahelem Microarchitecture. Unlike its predecessor the new i7 chip no longer rely on the ancient front-side bus that connect all of the current-gen intel CPU cores. Instead, cores will connect and communicate via a high speed interconnect, also noticable changes are outs of the needs of external memory controller, which Intel relied on gluing two dual cores chip together under the IHS to make its quad core cpu in the past, now they are placing all four cores on a single die.

The most noticable changes and significant improvement for the i7 are the built in memory controller. Instead of memory access going from CPU through Motherboard Chipset, now with the IMC, it eliminated the needs of front side bus and external memory controller, the result is dramatically lower latency compare to the older Core 2 and P4 based system.

The i7 CPU is designed to be very wide chip of capable of executing instructions with far more parallelism than previous designs. But to keep the chip feeding, the i7 feature an intergrated tripple channel DDR3 controller.
Another feature of the new Core i7, the Hyper-Threading. The Hyper-Threading partitioned the CPU's resources so that multiple threads can be executed simultaneosly.

With an improved loop detector routine, the i7 will save power and boost performance by detecting larger loops and catching what the program asks for. Besides that Intel also polished its branch prediction algorithms, Branch predictions are those yes/no questions faced by the CPU, if the CPU guess wrongly, it has to drain its pipeline and restart the process. So with the improved algorithm, its offering incredible performance improvement. (Reduced delays in fetching data with the new IMC and Branch Predictions algorithm)


References from Maximum PC issue Dec 2008.


Enough of Crapping, lets show off some of my built.

The spec of my built is:
Intel Core i7 920
Asus P6T
TeamXtreem DDR3 1600 CL8 x 3
GeCube ATi Radeon 4850
Corsair TX750W PSU
Lian Li PC-A6010 Casing

Cooling Gears:
CPU:
D-Tek Fuzion v2, Swiftech MCR220QP, Swiftech MCP-650, Swiftech Micro Reservoir.
GPU:
Scythe Musasshi

The overview of the new system.

The internal view of the system.

The top view of the system.

Cooling Concept of My Built

The case cooling are base on passive air cooling concept, which a case cooled by more intake fan then output fan. The blue arrows in the picture above represent cool air or cool liquid while the reds represent hot air or hot liquid.

In genaral, Liquid Cooling consist of several components, they are Waterblock, Pump, Reservoir or T-Line andRaditator. The waterblock are cooling plate that transfer heat into the loop from the Intergrated Heat Spreader of CPU or GPU. The pump are moving the liquid inside the loop and the Radiator transfer the heat from the loop into the air with the help of cooling fans. The reservoir and T-Line basically are for bleeding purpose.

So how a liquid cooling system works ? From reservoir or T-Line, the liquid sucked into the pump, then pumped into the waterblock and absorb the heat from the CPU or GPU or other components, depends on what block we are using, then the heat were released to the air around by the help of cooling fan by radiator then the cooled liquid move back into the Resevoir/T-Line.