The Kentsfield Build

After sitting down at my parents old AMD 939 system and seeing it's sluggishness, I decided to build them a new system for Christmas 2013 that would be much more responsive and perform more on par with newer generation systems but at a lower budget. Here are the specifications:
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Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 @ 3.0GHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EP43T-UD3L
Memory: Corsair XMS3 2x4GB @ 1333MHz
Heat-sink: Zalman CNPS10X Performa
Power Supply: Antec HGC-520 520W
Graphics Card: XFX HD 4670 1GB
Hard Drives: Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB
Optical Drive: LG DVDRW
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Case: Antec VSK-4000 with 3 Bitfenix Spectre Pro 120mm fans.
Other: 3.5" Black 10 in 1 Card Reader
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I didn't go with the most absolute newest generation system as my parents aren't using the PC for much more than printing documents, using it's storage, looking through the internet and checking emails so I went with a bit more of a budgeted approach while still allowing the system to be a quad core setup. I originally was going to use a Bitfenix Merc Beta case as the rig for this system, but as explained in the Mercenary v1 post, NCIX didn't have any in stock so I switched to the Antec VSK-4000 which is a nice clean looking mid-tower rig. Unfortunately I don't have a large amount of pictures to document the system build (considering it was built as a surprise) but I will try to cover what I can about the build.

Front of the VSK-4000 box

Top of the VSK-4000 box

Back of the VSK-4000 box

On the box there are three different versions listed (VSK4000, VSK4000E, VSK400B) but I have yet to find a difference between the three cases. Most likely just a location difference. It's a very plain traditional case with a nice sleek external look. The system did not need to be overly fancy looking as it's not a bling piece or anything like that, it's there for functionality and cooling performance.

The VSK-4000 rig out of the box

The VSK4000 is a very plain and to the point designed rig. On the front of the rig there are vent holes cut out on the outer edge on both sides for the front intake fan so that it's less airflow restricted. The front I/O is surrounded by a piano black trim to offset it from the smooth matte finish of the rest of the case. The front I/O is comprised of a power button and LED, a reset switch, a HDD activity LED, two USB 2.0 ports, and the front headphone and microphone jacks. I would have liked the power and reset switches to have icons on them but larger switches are generally purposed for power and smaller are usually the reset switches. The LEDs are fairly bright, would have preferred them to be frosted so they aren't quite so blinding, but a bit of clear frost nail polish or a thin piece of paper attached to the actual front from the inside can make for a good diffuser. The side panel can house two 120mm fans if one chooses to do so (also able to hold smaller fans as well) but I will only be mounting one fan on the lower portion of the venting as the heatsink for the system will be taking up the upper portion. There are no fans at the top of the case as that is where the power supply is mounted.

The rear of the VSK-4000 rig

Heading to the rear of the case, one can note that the chassis frame is bare metal, which as a budget case is usually a common occurrence. The rear fan can be either a 120mm fan, a 92mm fan or a 80mm fan. One thing I did like to see is that they did include 2 rubber grommets for liquid cooling, but the location of them seems a bit too low on the case to be of much use if one were to liquid cool using this rig. As this rig is a standard mid-tower ATX case, it has the standard 7 expansion slots to which you could mount your applicable expansion cards. The system comes with 4 silver anodized thumb screws installed to hold the two side panels onto the rig. I have since replaced them with 4 black thumb screws to go more with the aesthetic of the side panels to give it a bit more of a clean look.

The VSK-4000 with the back side panel removed

As you can see with the "rear" side panel removed, there is a fairly large CPU hole cutout to allow the user to install an aftermarket heatsink after the motherboard has been installed. There is not much for cable routing as the rig has a top mounted power supply so all the excess cabling gets hidden in the 5.25" drive bays usually. That being said, there is a couple of loops to tie some smaller cables to the case so they aren't loose if you have some running through the backside. In the lower left of the picture you can see there is a black panel piece for some of the 3.5" HDD bays that can be removed to allow for larger graphics cards to be mounted into the system if you were to have one that long (such as an old HD5970 that was a beast in length). Just pop a couple screws out (which are thumb screws) and remove the plate and you now have a larger space to allow for longer expansion cards. The plate is only on one side of the bays, the other side is a solid piece as you will see later. The drive bays are not tool-less, so you will need a screw driver and screws to mount your drives using the holes that are on both sides of the bays. One thing I do like about cases that do have this sort of traditional mounting setup is that they usually will have holes for various sizes to allow you to align the drive correctly to the front for the external bays, but they also have slide bar tops to allow for more fine tuned alignment if your DVD drive is an odd shape or something like that. You can also see the mounting holes for the front intake fan. You can mount a 120mm, 92mm or 80mm fan utilizing the appropriate holes located on the front.

The VSK-4000 with the main side panel removed

Removing the main side panel window brings us to the rather plain ATX case styling. There's not much to discuss, the case has four 5.25" and six 3.5" bays (one of which corresponds to the 3.5" front panel bay). There is a metal divider on the 3.5" bays so that if you need to remove that side bracket (as discussed above) for GPU clearance, you still have 2 bays to install 3.5" HDDs. The front panel 3.5" bay is located just under the 5.25" bays and has a bit of an indent to allow it to align correctly while still being a part of the 5.25" bays. The motherboard tray uses the standard brass screw-in standoffs which are included along with the required screws to mount the motherboard to the tray.

The front panel headers for the VSK-4000 rig

The case comes with the standard setup for front panel headers which consist of one USB 2.0 header, one front panel HD audio header (no AC97 support), the reset and power switch headers, and the HDD and power LED headers. The headers are all black with black wiring which is nice but seems a bit lost for a stealth look when the case frame is silver.

The front of the VSK-4000 with the front panel removed

After removing the front bezel it reveals all the removable bay barriers and the mounting points for the front mounted case fan. I have a sneaking suspicion that the rig frame is utilized for multiple generations of Antec rigs as there are 2 removable 3.5" bay barriers even though the front bezel only supports the top 3.5" external bay. The top most 5.25" bay comes with the barrier pre-removed as that is for clearance of the front panel connectors and control board. If you want to install a CD drive you would need to use the second bay down to have it fit into the top most bay on the bezel. There might be space in the top 5.25" bay to install a 5.25" to 3.5" bay adapter and install a HDD while still having space for the front panel cables but I cannot confirm as I do not have any spare adapters to test this theory with.

A close up of the front panel fan mounting area

Another interesting thing that would lead me to believe that the rig frame is utilized for multiple generations of Antec rigs is the cut out for front panel connectors. As discussed above the front panel connectors on the VSK-4000 uses the top 5.25" bay so the cutout seems unnecessary for the VSK-4000. I have installed the front 120mm Bitfenix Spectre Pro fan using the anti-vibration rubber mounts included with the fan. There is also a grounding wire attached to the front of the rig using a standard case screw as can be seen in the upper right of the picture.

A bunch of parts for the Kentsfield rig

The fans for the Kentsfield rig

Now onto some of the stuff used for the internals of the build. To go with our Core 2 Extreme processor, I picked up a CNPS10X Performa for cooling, 8GB of XMS3 RAM, a new keyboard (which just also happened to come with some spare speakers and a spare mouse which are always handy to have), four Bitfenix Spectre Pro 120mm fans for additional cooling of the case, a LG DVD-RW (in the red bubble wrap), and some SATA cables (as the motherboard didn't come with any). I remember the days when DVD-RWs used to always come in boxes with extra throw away cd's and unnecessary junk so it's always nice to see just a bubblewrapped OEM DVD drive whenever going to build a new rig that needs a disk drive. The Bitfenix fans we are using are just the solid black versions (BFF-SPRO-12025KK-RP) with no LED lighting as it's completely unnecessary to have LEDs in the windowless rig.

The GA-EP43T-UD3L equipped with the XMS3 RAM

The motherboard I chose for the build was the Gigabyte GA-EP43T-UD3L as it supports DDR3 RAM (the XMS3 installed) while still utilizing the LGA775 socket. This was designed during the transition period from DDR2 to DDR3 and near the true end of LGA775 before the new chipsets and sockets were to arrive on the mainstream market.  The board does have dual BIOS as a feature, but it doesn't have a hardware dip-switch or anything like that to switch between the BIOSes. As such it's kinda a tacked on feature that seems a bit lost, but I guess if you have a BIOS straight up fail to flash or if it gets infected (BIOS viruses aren't very common anymore) there is a backup. The board comes equipped with a gigabit ethernet port, which is common nowadays but is always a plus (unlike many earlier motherboards on the LGA775 platform that only came with 10/100 ethernet ports equipped). The board isn't the most high end considering it only has 4 power phases, but that is enough for the somewhat mild overclocking performed for the platform. The board also comes equipped with solid capacitors (it was just starting to catch on during this time) which allows for a bit better longevity of both the capacitors and the board itself.

The QX6700 installed onto the EP43T motherboard

The Core 2 Extreme that I picked up from eBay was in pretty good condition, with not much for blemishes on the heat-transfer plate. The QX6700 has an unlocked multiplier which makes overclocking a bit easier to tune to get the most out of the CPU. The CPU comes clocked standard at 2.66GHz, but we will be squeezing 3.0GHz out of it utilizing a combination of an increase to the base clock (to 333MHz) and the multiplier set to 9x.

The parts installed into the VSK-4000 case

Unfortunately I didn't get many shots of the individual parts being installed (as I was in a bit of a rush to get it all installed into the rig) but here we can see all of the parts installed in which includes an Antec HGC-520 PSU, and a XFX HD4670 GPU from their previous PC as they were sufficient for the use of the new rig. The heatsink fits in perfectly with a bit of clearance between the tips of the heatpipes and the side panel which is great. It also happens to perfectly be aligned with the rear 120mm fan (which I have switched the original Antec fan out for one of the four Bitfenix fans).

Alternate shot of the internals of the Kentfield rig

As this case is a "traditional" ATX based case, there is no real cable storage/routing built into the rig. Most of the cables were just simply "stored" in the 5.25" bays but the overall motherboard area is kept fairly clear of cabling and unnecessary clutter to allow for maximum airflow inside the rig. The HD Audio front panel header on the motherboard is next to the rear I/O so the cable looks a bit odd running across the entire motherboard but this was before motherboard manufacturers truly understood optimization of the placement of the front panel headers.

The Kentsfield rig deployed

The final product of the Kentfield build looks quite clean on the outside (aside from the obvious dust buildup on the side). There is a lot of dust in the area, so the side panel kinda acts as a bit of a vacuum unfortunately. It's very minimalistic look allows it to look quite slick and professional while still having good airflow and containing an effective set of hardware for day to day use. After boxing up the system, I booted it up, went into the BIOS, set the system to 9x multiplier and 333MHz system clock to give the CPU 3.0GHz and set the RAM to 1333MHz with timings of 9/9/9/27, then went back and adjusted a few settings manually on the voltages to get a stable run of IntelBurnTest on very high settings (which took about a half hour to run and utilizes 4GB of RAM to run the stress process) with no issues. The system also runs pretty cool which is also awesome. The Kentsfield rig never reaches 60 degrees under load in a 20 degree celsius room. There was a hiccup a while back, but that was because of a power outage causing the system to somehow lose the overclock settings (which has since been rectified). 

At this point the Kentsfied rig been running with 3.0GHz on the CPU clock and 1333MHz on the RAM for about a 8 months with no issues and performs quite well. Even with just a mechanical HDD everything is fairly responsive. The only thing really "dragging" the PC down is the GPU, but considering it's not meant for gaming the HD4670 will suffice for internet browsing and basic PC use. Overall the build went pretty smoothly after a few initial hiccups and tinkering to increase system stability. And for a total price of about 400 bucks to upgrade from an old 939 AMD CPU to a beast of a LGA775 system running DDR3 is pretty good to breathe some life into the rig (400 bucks for the CPU, motherboard, RAM, case, fans, CD drive, and heatsink). Nowadays though, the LGA1156 socket motherboards and CPUs on eBay are really coming down in price which allowed me to upgrade my Mercenary to V2 status which we will be covering in a future post.