Neuromancer i7 Upgrade
November 14th 2009 – Adam Bauman

 

A short while ago I came across a killer deal on an Intel i7 920 and motherboard, since my machine hadn’t been updated in a few years and it was almost my birthday I jumped on it. After a bit of shopping I came up with all the components I needed and did the upgrade one night after work. Overall I’m very happy with the i7 platform, this machine has proven to be quite powerful and very fluid.

There have been a couple of small issues since the build, the biggest was a rash of hard locks while gaming, after some monitoring I found that the motherboard’s X58 IOH was running at temperatures of 80c and above. My initial thoughts were that lapping the heat sink and replacing the cruddy thermal tape with some quality silver paste would recitify the issue, it wasn’t until I started sanding that I found out how bad the bottom of the heat sink actually was.

The unit was machined with a large concave bump in the middle so that it was only contacting the chip underneath on the edges. Once the bottom was planed flat and re-attached IOH temperatures dropped between 40-50c and the system has been dead stable since.

The only other issues have been related to the Crossfire configuration of the two ATi Radeon 4850s. Under most circumstances the cards have been performing very well, but there have been occasional display corruption issues when initially starting a game that persist until I quit and startup the software again. These are far and few between but annoying when they do occur. In the future I’m planning to replace both cards with a single, more powerful GPU.

 

Check out the gallery below to see the whole build!

 

Opening the patient	Case stripped down and ready	Bowl of screws	Ballin' PSU
Old 430w Antec next to new Corsair 850w	Corsair H50 hardware	The brains, i7 920	Feeeed meeeee
Cat trap, good thing for fan filters	Rebuilt forward fan assembly		H50's stock block plate
Corsair H50 Lapped	Core components loaded	Almost there!	All done!