ABS Ultimate X9: Core 2 Extreme Hits a Speed Bump

Internals and Construction

As we saw from the rear view, ABS has basically included everything the typical gamer could dream of putting in a top-performing system. With all of the features and components, many systems can and do suffer from cable clutter. Thankfully, ABS has done a decent job at keeping most of the cables tied down and out of the way.

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With the water cooling adding additional tubes to the internal clutter, it's no small feat to maintain a tidy appearance. The end result isn't the absolute best cable management that we've ever seen, but it's more than sufficient and helps in keeping the system properly ventilated. The top area nearest the power supply still has an abundance of cables, but with the required power connections for the HDDs, ODDs, water cooling, fans, GPUs, and motherboard it's difficult to completely eliminate that. The only drawback to having all of the cables tied down and out of the way is that it can make things difficult if you ever need to perform maintenance on the system. Unfortunately, we had to do just that.

When we first received the system, we began conducting our typical stress testing and benchmarking. Several days into the process, the Enermax power supply blew up with a loud pop and a bright flash. The smell of burning electronics filled the room, and we were afraid to find out what had just happened to the powerful system sitting on the floor. Thankfully, a bit of investigation helped us to discover that the only failed component was the power supply, and ABS quickly sent out a replacement.

Unfortunately, replacing a power supply is perhaps the most difficult component to remove from a system -- especially when most of the power cables have been zip-tied into place. Given that the Enermax Liberty PSU is a modular design, we hoped to leave most of the cables in place. However, the original PSU and the replacement PSU were slightly different revisions, with the included cables having a filled-in prong on the power connectors with the new version, so we were forced to replace all of the cables. The good news is that we gained a greater appreciation for all of the work that ABS put into wiring the system and keeping everything tidy. The bad news is that all of the zip ties simply made our job more difficult, and it took a couple hours to get everything more or less back to the original state.

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When we say "more or less", we're probably closer to less than more, as the cables never really did look as good as when the system first arrived. We neglected to get pictures before the PSU swap, however, so the cables in the provided images represent our attempt at getting things back in place. The wiring was better before we messed with it, but we didn't have the patience/skill to get the cables back to the original state.

What about the blown power supply? For now, we just have to chalk it up to random bad luck. It appears that the replacement is a later revision, so it's impossible to say how old the original PSU was and what might have been done to it before the system arrived at our location. Even the best power supplies do have periodic failures, and even at full load the power draw of the system is far lower than the rated 620W of the Enermax PSU. We also have to take some consolation in the fact that the PSU did its job properly, failing in a spectacular flash of light and smoke but making sure that nothing else in the system was damaged. The replacement PSU has been running without any difficulty under similar stress conditions for several weeks, so we are optimistic that this was simply a fluke incident.

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Returning to the internal construction, one area that does cause us some concern is the location and mounting of the water reservoir/pump. It is rather hard to reach, given the tubes and wires that pass nearby, and it occupies the space that would otherwise be used for 3.5" external drives. As it stands, you cannot put a floppy drive into the system without relocating the pump and reservoir. ABS does give you the option of adding a floppy and/or 3.5" flash memory reader, so perhaps they would install the pump and reservoir in the spare 5.25" bays in such a configuration. We would prefer that the pump be placed there regardless of whether or not a floppy is installed, as even with the death of floppy drives there may be other devices that will work better in a 3.5" bay. As for the pump, it is basically velcroed and wedged into place. The plastic reservoir also doesn't appear to be particularly durable, and we have read reports online of people cracking the reservoir when using mounting screws (which might explain the velcro used by ABS). We did not experience any leaks or other difficulties with the water cooling system, but the smaller tubes leading to the graphics cards seem to be less than optimally effective.

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Normally, you want a single circuit for the water to travel through, thus guaranteeing adequate flow to all components. ABS takes a different route, and has a pair of small 3/8" tubes that branch off the main line to cool the two GPUs. We did experience a few crashes (complete system reset without warning) after many hours of intense gaming while the CPU was also under 100% load (two instances of Prime95 running alongside a game, to really stress the system), which seems to support the idea that the GPUs could use additional water flow. The crashes were pretty random in nature and only occurred after extended stress testing, and not always even in similar circumstances. We also experienced a few cases of slight graphical corruption, notably in F.E.A.R. and Quake 4, where green speckles appeared around the screen. As it stands, we have to conclude that the GPUs are getting too warm, due to inadequate water flow. It shouldn't require a massive change for ABS to improve the GPU cooling, but it is unfortunate that a high-end system with water cooling experienced any sort of instability.

Without further time and testing, we can't say for certain that the GPUs caused the reboots/crashes -- it could be the CPU overclock as well, or may a combination of the CPU OC and GPUs. We also only experienced four crashes total, three in Titan Quest v1.08 and one in Serious Sam 2.068, and at least TQ is a recent enough release that there could be other bugs contributing to the instability. However, we didn't experience any crashes with the CPU set at stock speeds, and they also didn't occur except when gaming with the CPU under heavy load. We would qualify the system as 99.9% stable, which means if you play games while for example running Folding@Home 24/7, you might get a periodic crash/reset, particularly during the summer. If you tend to game in 2-3 hour sessions or you don't run other CPU-intensive tasks in the background, you probably won't ever encounter problems.

The biggest issue right now is stability, and we feel ABS should tweak the water cooling to improve cooling for the GPUs. While we were able to deal with the few crashes we experienced, and playing around in the BIOS seems to have improved matters, the typical consumer looking to purchase such a system is far less likely to know how to address instabilities. Enthusiasts and overclockers are used to troubleshooting crashes, but they usually build their own systems to begin with.