Well, as usual, I like to document my builds, mods, and upgrades.  As many of you know, I tried out the 2600K and the ASUS Z68 Pro and was satisfied generally but found it had some unpleasant quirks.  I also said that once X79 was available from EVGA, I'd upgrade to it immediately and that it would be a great product.  I think I'm right and this thread will document that.  So, without further ado, here we go!

1. EVGA X79 SLI Motherboard
2. Intel Core i7 3930K
3. G.Skill 4x2GB DDR3 1866 MHz CAS 9 RAM
4. EVGA Superclock Heatsink+Fan

I'm also going to skip my usual Prolimatech Megahalems and Shin Etsu and try out EVGA's cooler, fan, and EVGA's Frostbite Thermal Grease.  I'll also be swapping my rig back from blue theme to red theme in the process.
 
I don't know when EVGA started doing this, but I like how some of the additional headers have caps on them so prongs aren't sticking up willy nilly.

 
So, here's my Danger Den Torture Rack with the old mobo, ram, cpu, and heatsink removed, pardon the dust, it can be a bit tough to keep clean.  Also, don't joke about me doing this on the floor, on carpet.  I wanted to hang with my wife since I travel so much during the week.

 
Here's another shot of the board prior to installation:

 
Here's a closeup of the socket... massive.  The retention system is very strong as well.  Almost surprisingly so.

 
Motherboard and CPU installed:

 
The EVGA Superclock Heatsink is pretty massive, much larger than I thought it would be.  I appreciated how smooth the surface was for a heat-pipe direct touch solution.  As you'll see in a second, there's just enough clearance for the mem sticks.  I should also add that installing the heatsink with the new socket was easier than installing a Prolimatech Megahalems thanks to the no more backplates and the bolts screwing into the socket plate itself.

 
Here we are wired up, cables semi-managed, and fired up:

 
And from high-above the gleaming beacon of logical utopia:

 
So that's the rebuild itself.  As soon as I can, I'll be posting benches and OCing it a bit.
 
Some initial reaction thus far:

• I really like the board so far, but I'll still be stepping up to the FTW for the 300% more gold, POSCAPs, disable switches, etc.  But let not your heart be troubled about this board.  It is excellent quality.
• The UEFI BIOS is well laid out and not clumsy like the ASUS can be functionally despite the lack of graphical delight.  It is feature rich and highly configurable but easy to navigate and utilize.  I also find that it has excellent descriptions compared to the older BIOS used which often left much to be desired as to what each option was.
• I haven't gotten my RAID0 SSD stripe working yet because when I try to install Win7 from a DVD it whines about a missing required CD/DVD driver but when in AHCI mode it works dandy.  I'll retry using a USB stick soon as RAID0 is tiiiiight with SATA III compatible SSDs.
• My wife said she preferred the blue theme I used to have over the red.  I told her it was the color of love.  She's still unimpressed.  I only added this bullet to appear objective in my bias for EVGA product quality.
• The debug LCD was relocated to the rear of the board and may help some, but I'd prefer it near the top right, personally.  Why, you ask? ...
• Because the on-board power, reset, and clear CMOS buttons were relocated to the top right of the board putting them within easy reach in my Torture Rack.  Great job on this EVGA!
• Finally, as a small note about ease of initial start up/configuration, the keyboard and mouse may not initially work because not all USB ports are initialized so you sometimes have to play around to find the ports that work.  I started with the board's top most ports and had to move them to the middle.  Then the Win7 installer didn't recognize them so I had to move them back to the top and it worked again.  I'm sure this will get sorted a little better with the BIOS update too.

All in all, I'm very pleased so far and looked forward to cranking things up!

Reserved...

Git R Done!  let see it up and going..

I think this needs to be in mods rigs so I'll move it there. This is going to be one great looking mod I'm sure!

very nice , i am jealous..lol wish i could afford to upgrade mine right now..looks good...cant wait to see it finished

Pictures!

Pics up!
 
OC and benchies to be added tomorrow!

Im looking forward to the benchies :D

kram36
Nice!

Only thing I don't care for is to get x16 you have to have the vid cards next to each other. Not sure why it's done that way on this board and not like the X79 FTW board?

Looking forward to your oc'ing and benchmark results.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of that either. The SLI boards seem to be this as my P55 SLI was this way too. That's one big reason I go to the FTW as well.

nice job.

Nice!

kram36

mwparrish
Here's the 2nd run with the CPU OC'd to 4.6 GHz @ 1.4v and the GTX 580s at 925 MHz -- what I would consider an average users OC.  

Here's the uploaded result: http://3dmark.com/3dm11/2228831

You sure the cpu was at 4.6Ghz on this run?

Here is my 970 at 4.6Ghz. Your test eats my graphics scores up, but the cpu portion my score is better.

http://3dmark.com/3dm11/954516

 
As a matter of fact, I just realized this myself.  I figured out that fiddling with something turned off Turbo in BIOS so I was sitting at 3.2 constant... I'm about to re-run this and update.

That's better, can't wait to see an actual 4.6Ghz run.

Nice work!

mwparrish

Here's the actual 4.6 GHz run.  Finally got things locked in.  Now I need to work on running the 580s harder.  It's been awhile.



http://3dmark.com/3dm11/2244288

Very nice. That gave my i7 970 at 4.6Ghz a good old butt kick'n.