My Aurora R1 Upgrades

Hey guys I figured it was time I made some changes to my Aurora R1 and wait it out a bit longer to see what Ivy Bridge-E would have in store for us. Here are some of the upgrades I made to get more life out of my system. The first thing I did was get a Samsung 840 Pro Series SSD. The only problem was the R1 did not have a Sata 3 controller, so I wasn't getting full read/write speeds. I ended up finding a pci express sata 3/usb 3 dual controller. This gave me both usb 3 and sata 3 speeds for one card. Only potential problem was I had to sacrifice a PCI-E x16 slot, so no dual video card options. This was okay for me since I already had thrown in a single gtx 680 which more than met my gpu needs. With the SSD installed and running at sata 3 speeds, I next went to upgrade the ram to the full supported 24 gbs of ram. I used G skill ripjaw series ram. Next thing to upgrade was the CPU. My original configuration was the i7 920. I was luckily able to track down a i7 980x in really good condition, and for a really good price so I popped that bad-boy in. While putting the cpu in I also added a 120 mm Corsair fan in front of the radiator to push air in. For the original fan that was attached to the back of the radiator I switched it to pull cold air in as opposed to the original exhaust set up it had. To exhaust warm air out of the case I ended up taking the top cover off the aurora- which was really easy by just pushing in 4 pins, and then ended up dremeling the plastic housing in areas to accommodate a 120 mm exhaust fan and a 92 mm exhaust fan. To control the 3 new fans I mated them to a Lamptron touch in one of the front bays. With the new cpu and thermal paste put in, I turned the cpu on and saw it breathe life once again. My temperatures dropped drastically with the new fan configuration. At stock clocks I was running at 24 C on the highest core at idle temperature, with the cores reaching 60 C under Prime 95. After about a week of letting the Arctic silver 5 settle in I decided to overclock the CPU with the stock oc profile in bios. Running at 3.8  vs stock 3.3 my temperatures under idle on the warmest core are 29C, and with prime 95 I saw shoot to just under 68. I am happy with the set up, and when it comes time to really do an overhaul to the new enthusiast architecture, I will be able to reuse my SSD, fan controller, and fans.

Cheers

-Uji