Hey Next Benchers! VoodooDan here.
It’s no secret that Valve’s Left 4 Dead ranks as one of the best first-person shooter games for 2008. I clearly remember when I first played Left 4 Dead at Showdown LAN in 06. After two years of waiting for its full release, I finally got to play the demo, and have to say that Valve and Turtle Rock did a fantastic job on this game. The AI is fantastic, and the replay-ability is unparalleled.
Obviously, I’m a huge gamer, and since it was released I’ve wanted to get a customized Blackbird chassis painted by the talented folks in the Voodoo Paint Shop. So, after getting the ok for the project and agreement from the Paint crew, I decided to go with a Left 4 Dead theme.
I started by asking the crew in Canada to take a look at the cover art and go with the color scheme of the game. They are the artists, so I asked them to go for it, and man did they ever!
What they came up with for the paint job for my dream system was so far beyond what I expected. The rig was painted with dark green with light green highlights on the ribs, and red for the grating on the front and top—the overall quality of the paint job was just simply awesome! They also did some custom side panels with 4 scrapes, blood splatters, and a bloody hand print that looked fantastic. Even though they are not on the Blackbird in these images, I still have them proudly displayed in my cube at work. The side panels shown are actually skinned with images I made and sent to Skin-it.
For the internals, I had already done an upgrade to my bird with i7 on an Intel board with 4870x2 cards, but I have had such good luck with my EVGA boards, that when I did the hardware transfer, I decided to go with the EVGA X58 MB. I did this not only because of the general stability I have had on the EVGA boards I have used in the past, but it also had 6 DIMM slots compared to the 4 on the Intel board so I was able to fully use the 3 Channel DIMM setup with 6 2Gig sticks for a total of 12Gigs of RAM.
The cooling solution is the Original Blackbird LC system that I and a couple folks in the lab here in Cupertino customized by cutting off the original tubing, and replacing them with 1/4" green UV reactive tubes, and Green UV reactive coolant.
I wanted more glow to the internals of the bird to get that "zombie" feel, so in addition to the LC system I pulled apart my Corsair memory cooler and replaced the fans with green UV reactive fans. There is a small 4" UV light next to the 51/4 DVD to light them. The last lighting addition was 2 12" green cold cathode lights that I had to remove the protective covers on to get them to fit on each door to help light up the side panels.
Overall the system is fantastic, and came out even better than I expected. I have just started overclocking and have gotten the i7 965 extreme up to 4.13GHz with it very stable and running 45 degrees idle, and ~50 - 55 degrees under load.
I still feel like there is some room in the chip, and when I get the time to do some more overclocking, I’ll post any further progress in the forums. Current high benchmark is 26,766 on 3DMark 06.
I can't thank our partners (Skinit, Valve, EVGA, ATI, INTEL, Corsair) and the folks up in Calgary enough for a job well done!
Salut!
VoodooDan
p.s. Here are more photos of the rig for your enjoyment.
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