Waaaaaa! Even with the Gigabyte 3D Mercury's PSU mounting extension, there's no way the extra-long Ultra X3 is going to fit in this case. See the pic below. (when I figure out why there's no photo insert option in the editor now) The cooling stuff simply takes up too much room at the top of the case. Major bummer. I've already sung the praises of the Ultra's high-quality connectors. If you can fit one, buy one.

The shorter Thermaltake ToughPower W1033 will have to fill in and it's no slouch, but the connectors aren't quite as nicely finished. It's also not as sexy appearance-wise. That's right, I'm all about the shape consciousness.

As you might have guessed, it's time to put the components in the case. Got the QX9650 this morning, but we're still waiting on memory. Right now there's two 1GB sticks of Corsair 2000MHz. By the way, your 790i Ultra SLI manual may say that you must put memory in slots 2 & 4 if you're running over 1800MHz. That's true, but what they meant to say is that you must have modules in those slots, but you can have them in 1 & 3 as well to run 4GB at the faster speeds. There's a big debate here over 4GB of 2000MHz as opposed to 8GB of 1600MHz. We're thinking more is better in terms of WorldBench but we'll see on Monday.

I forgot the cardinal rule of system building and piled everything (not literally) in the case and pressed the power button. You guessed it, nothing much happened outside of a few beeps. Actually, it may have been that I switched the CPU and didn't test it. I pulled everything out and put the board on the table and after a few tweaks and clearing the CMOS, everything was happy again.

I'm about to bag it for today and head home. Currently the BIOS system monitor is running (44c for the QX9650 with the Zalman fan in lieu of LC) with both SSDs, the two Sony BluRay drives, and a GeForce 7800GT in place of the two 9800 GX2s. I'll add one component at a time until I've got everything up and running again.

That FB DDR2 800 memory on the D5400XS ran super hot. This Corsair DDR3 2000MHz, is not even close. Could be partly that the motherboard design isn't as cramped. This 790i is pretty nice, though I wish it were a bit thicker and didn't flex as much. Those 9800 GX2s weigh a ton. I'm using every mounting point and glad the 3D Mercury chassis has a support pad in the middle of where the board lies.

More tomorrow.

Cheers, Jon