How to make a PC go wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
The Chameleon's hardware spec was always going to be a bit of a no brainer. Take the fastest AMD processors on the market, pair them with the best Socket 939 SLI mainboards they have available, add one or two GiB of low-latency DDR memory, drop in a pair of GeForce 7800 GTXs and a five drive disk setup and cool it all in relative silence with some excellent water-cooling kit. The problem is the X2 has been in short supply until recently, 7800 GTXs have only just shown up and their new water-cooling plans can only come into place when the hardware actually arrives!Scan's creation plans for the Chameleon have included performance and environment testing way before it goes on sale, to make sure everything works together in terms of heat, power and noise. That means bringing the new chassis up with components that adequately simulate the final spec in those respects. With the 7800 GTX box in mind, with either X2 or Athlon 64 FX, Scan have been using Athlon 64 FX-55 and dual 6800 Ultras until recently. With the FX-55 hotter and more power hungry than FX-57 and 6800 Ultra hotter and more of a juice guzzler than 7800 GTX, they fit the bill just nicely.
The obvious CPU and GPU power in Chameleon would be useless without memory and storage subsystems to back them up. To that end, Scan have specified a Netcell 3-port hardware RAID3 (RAID5 with parity data on a single disk) controller which doesn't need a driver. The hardware advertises itself to the OS as an already-supported disk controller device, the OS using an existing driver to work with the board. The 3-drive array on the Netcell, which can rebuild itself on the fly without any downtime or performance drop (according to the literature), is setup as the data partition for the user to store critical data on. A two-drive RAID0 array on the NVIDIA disk controller provides the platform for the OS and programs to run from.
Using 74GB Raptors everywhere results a 146GB OS volume in RAID0 and a 146GB RAID3 protected volume for data. Memory wise, Scan have chosen a 1GiB size via two Corsair XMS3200XL Platinum 512MiB sticks for pre-testing, although it's likely that 2GiB will end up being the recommended configuration for the final Chameleon spec. All another pair of sticks would add is power draw and a little extra heat, although for performance testing they'd have been useful. Until now, 1GiB has been the test configuration.
Cooling the hardware on the Chameleon is the job of a Dangerden setup custom fit to the case using their own spec for radiator mounting out the back of the chassis (which has a couple of minor issues that I can see in the engineering sample, which I'll discuss in a bit), and a custom reservoir mount. The Dangerden hardware, with blocks for CPU and both GPUs, is mainly for noise profiling, before Scan move to a new setup based around Swiftech components and a tweaked radiator mount.
That has a current knock-on effect for the mainboard choice, with the Dangerden CPU block they use not fitting their target mainboard for the final Chameleon, DFI's nF4 LanPartyUT SLI-DR, causing the prototype to contain an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe at the moment. They're flirting with a current air-cooled Chameleon prototype using the DFI, but it's incomplete at the time of writing.
As of a few days ago, the working performance system with watercooling, which is being used for final performance numbers should the customer spec 6800 Ultras, is fitted with an Athlon 64 FX-57. It's as close to the final specification Chameleon as Scan are looking to get, with 1GiB of memory. The system is running correctly from the NVIDIA controller and the Netcell has passed stress and rebuild testing. So where does that leave Scan in terms of finishing the Chameleon off? And can I get away with typing more text without showing you a single picture of the thing?
It turns out that Scan were happy enough with the hardware to not only let me look at it and discuss possible options and improvements, but to benchmark it and take some pictures too. So without further ado, pics of the system and some performance figures using the current system spec.
