Building in the bird
8.
Hitting the optic nerve
I attached one of the Blackbird's
drive rails to the right-hand side of the optical drive, then slid the drive in
from the front until its bezel was flush with the bay and the optical bay cover
was able to close (image J). I then attached a SATA cable and another
SATA-to-Molex power adapter and slid the drive retention clip closed.
Image
J
The Blackbird shipped with up to two
slimline slot-fed optical drives, but the trays were designed for PATA drives
and have little panels that completely block the area where a SATA drive would
connect. So I'm leaving those empty for now. In the2008 Dream Machine, we put a
water-cooling radiator in there.
9.
Cool it!
With the Drives installed and powered, I once again placed the Blackbird on its
side, this time to mount the cooler. After applying thermal paste, I gently
placed the cooler onto the CPU, with the horizontal fin stack over the RAM (image
K). I placed the crossbar over the heat exchanger and mounted it to the
bracket with the two included spring screws (making sure to use the
AMD-specific ones). Then I attached the two 14cm fans, one to each set of fins.
I set the fan on the right-hand side to blow down toward the motherboard, and
the one on the left to push cool air through the left-hand fin stack and out
the rear of the case. This is especially important, as I've lost what ever
mounting bracket originally enabled us to attach a 12cm exhaust fan to the rear
of the case. I plugged the fans into the CPU FAN and CPU OPT FAN headers at the
top of the board.
Image
K
10.
Mounting the videocard
Last but not least: I mounted the videocard
into the top x16 PCIe slot on the motherboard and attached an 8- and a 6-pin
power connector (image L). I then bundled up all the rest of the power cables
and hid them behind the cover the Blackbird provides for this purpose. Then I
double-checked all my wiring and connections, closed the case, and powered up
my rehabilitated Dream Machine!
Image
L
I know why the Chromebird sings
Not gonna lie: The new build looks great.
It’s certainly one of the prettiest machines I've built to date. Can it compete
with our 2012 Dream Machine? Not even a little bit. My rehabilitated Blackbird
is a whopping 81 percent slower in Premiere Pro, 54 percent slower in
Stitch.Efx, 18 percent slower in ProShow Producer, 47 percent slower in x264
encoding, and 62 percent slower in Batman: Arkham City. That sounds pretty bad
until you realize that the 2012 Dream Machine has an eight-core Xeon and the
equivalent of four GTX 680s and costs $10,000. So it's over six times more
expensive than the Chrome bird (again, not counting the case or PSU), but it's
not six times faster. That’s cost savings there.
Against our $2,500 zero-point machine, the
Chromebird fares a little better. The zero-point has a six-core Sandy Bridge-E
chip with Hyper-Threading, and its 12 threads absolutely crush the eight I get
from my FX-8150, even at 3.8GHz. In the heavily multithreaded Premiere Pro, the
zero-point was over four times faster, while in ProShow Producer, the
Chromebird was only 24 percent slower. Stitch.Efx is one-third single-threaded
and two-thirds multithreaded, and the Chromebird couldn’t come close to our
zero-point there.
So am I surprised or appalled that a $1,500
Bulldozer build can’t beat a rig that costs a thousand dollars more? Nope.
Instead, I'm happy that I built what I set out to build: a kick-ass gaming rig
that looks amazing and performs well for the price, and a chance for the case
from one of our old Dream Machines to live again.
If I had to do it over, I’d opt for a
modular power supply and a 3.5-inch-to-2.5-inch drive bay adapter that’d let me
use the SATA backplane for the SSD. Blackbird owners’ forums indicate that Icy
Dock makes one that works. But I’m happy with the Chromebird as it is, and glad
I got a chance to make something beautiful that wasn’t quite as much work as
water-cooling this year's Dream Machine. This was almost a vacation in
comparison.
1. Even after four years and a chrome dip, the Blackbird chassis
manages to look classy
2. The Genesis cooler’s weird design helps with overall airflow in a
case without many intake fans
3. Most of the Blackbird’s thermal chamber dividers don’t work with our
new GPU and cooler, but the PSU cable cover still fits, for which we’re
grateful.
Benchmarks
Our current desktop test bed consists of a
hexa-core 3.2GHz Core i7-3930K 3.8GHz, 8GB of Corsair DDR3/1600, on an Asus
Sabertooth X79 motherboard. We are running a GeForce GTX 690, an OCZ Vertex 3
SSD, and 64-bit Windows 7 Professional.
