Full Name: Guy Hauldren
Country: UK
City/State: London
Handle: Guyblin
His machine was inspired by Vadim's Cepheus, and his desire to build an upside-down motherboard layout in a split-level case. It was also to see whether someone like himself who didn't know much about building computers 12 months ago could build a "Dream PC". This is his fourth PC he has ever built: “Honestly, less than 12 months ago I didn't even know what AGP and PCI-E were and was incredulous that people water-cooled PC components!” – Guy Hauldren
How does your rig differ from Vadim’s system?
It differs mainly from the Vadim system in terms of the water-cooling. I have a 250mm tubular reservoir feeding two Aquacomputer (Liang) pumps. They start off each having their own loop of a 120mmx240mm rad and an 80mm each, and then the flows join and pass through an additional 120mm rad, and through the CPU clock (Innovatek G-Flow) and both graphics card blocks (Danger Den). There's an 11mm OD Tygon loop off this main loop that goes through a flow sensor, and then the mosfet and two chipset blocks (all Innovatek G-Flow - the main board isn't a Black Pearl - but looks the part!).
Why did you choose to go with dual pumps?
The idea of the dual pumps going through one loop is that a) they combine to keep a decent flow and b) the system has some 'redundancy' if one pump fails. With stop valves you can isolate the problem pump and remove it without even really stopping the machine. Plus of course if one pump goes down there's still liquid passing through the system. There's also a level sensor in the reservoir so that the machine can ATX-line-break if there's a leak and I'm not around.
What game are you currently playing? Why?
I've been playing World in Conflict, Call of Duty 4 and of course Crysis, which although I can run at Very High everything and run at 1680x1050, I can't turn on any AA! I play stuff online and offline. Medieval 2 is still a favourite too. I also use the system for my work - building 3D models from laser scan data.
What was the biggest/toughest problem you ran into and how did you fix it?
Probably the Vista 64 install in fact! You actually need to install it with 2GB only and then run a hot-fix (simple update won't do). So it was a bit of a pain to take off the memory cooler and fiddle about. Apart from that it was just a case of a few leaks from fittings during leak-testing, but nothing a bit of plumbers tape didn't fix!
THE SPECS:
Motherboard: EVGA NVIDIA 680i SLI
Graphics cards: (2) BFG NVIDIA 8800 GTX OC
Case: Lian-Li (Custom)
PSU: Enermax Galaxy 1KW
RAM: 4GB OCZ 1066 running at 960Mhz (1044mhz @ 3.48Mhz setting)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 overclocked to 3.2 GHZ and to 3.48GHZ for benchmarking.
CPU Cooler: Innovatek G-Flow
HDDs: 2 Western Digital Raptor 150GB in (RAID 0); 2 Samsung Spinpoint T166 500GB (RAID 1)
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