My first build and overclock

[theburan]

So, it's been about a year since I first ordered all the stuff for my current computer, and I've just about tweaked it to where I like everything.

Now, I've only been tweaking it for about 7 months or so, on and off, because the first 5 months or so were spent rmaing various parts to find the defective one (it turned out the ram AND the video card were bad).

So, originally, i had these parts ordered

Intel e6300
Gigabyte p965 s3 rev1.0
2x1gb of Mushkin DDR2-800 ram
Thermaltake minityphoon cooler
FSP epsilon 700w psu
Xclio case (had a nifty 250mm fan... more on that later)
Pair of lg dvd drives (one burner, one not)
Siig floppy/card reader combo
Soundblaster Xfi xtreme music
Windows Xp
BFG 7600gt
WD 74gb raptor (8mb cache model, got it cheap on clearance at bestbuy)
samsung 320gb hardrive (spinpoint P, I want to say).


So, after putting everything together, I ran into some problems. First, the 250mm fan on my case didnt work. Which was nice, cause my heatsink interfiered with it anyways. Later on, I would find out that the wire going to the fan controller had come loose in shipping, and just needed to be resoldered. (that case is now holding a friends computer, and doing quite nicely there).

Second, the computer wasn't stable at all. Ran memtest, checked out fine, no matter how long i ran it or what test I ran. (memtest lies!). But, I trusted memtest, and started rmaing other parts first. First the mobo.... and i wound up getting a mobo that WAS bad. Rma's that a 2nd time, but the 3rd board was the 3.3 revision, much nicer. Some solid state caps on the board, little better layout. Also rma's the processor, video card, and the ram. I figured out the video card was bad by letting a friend test it, and I rma's the ram because well, it was probably bad, regardless of what memetest said.

In that time, I also replaced the case with an antec 900, and the heatsink with a scythe mine rev b., with a scythe sflex 120mm fan on it. I also wound up installing vista 32, since I reinstalled xp so much it stopped activating, and I got a free upgrade for vista when I purchased xp (and trying vista was less painful than calling microsoft....), and then added another 2 gigs of mushkin ram and installed vista64. I also modded a 120mm fan to put on the side of my case, I had to cut one corner off of it so that it didn't interfere with the fan on my heatsink. I've also replaced the lg drives with a pair of asus drives that are SATA, and I sleeved all the loose fan wires and whatnot with black sleeving to make it look nice. I also had to open up my psu at one point to retrieve a screw that fell in ( I can't get lazy and work with my computer standing up with this case... only complaint I have about the antec 900) And I got an 8800gt for 250 bucks the week after they came out (bestbuy to the rescue again). And I added a 500 gig hard drive, a samsung spinpoint t.

So, now I have:

Intel e6300
Gigabyte p965 s3 rev3.3
4x1gb of Mushkin DDR2-800 ram
scythe mine rev b with 120mm fan
FSP epsilon 700w psu
antec 900 case
Pair of asus sata dvd drives (one burner, one not)
Siig floppy/card reader combo
Soundblaster Xfi xtreme music
Windows vista 64
BFG 8800gt
WD 74gb raptor
samsung 320gb hardrive
samsung 500gb

So, once I got it working, I started overclocking it.

and this is what I wound up with:

Starting at 1.86 ghz, I took it up to 3.01 ghz, 430mhz fsb. Ram is running at 860mhz, and at 1.9v instead of it's rated 1.8. Everything else is at stock voltage (unless my mobo is lying to me...) Also, it runs pretty cool and whatnot, under 30c while in the bios, at or under 30c while idling, about 41c when under a full load. i've had it post at 3.5ghz, and I've had it run sorta stable at ~3.2ghz, but at both of those points my ram just can't handle it, I dont think. That ram just doesn't overclock all that great. I think i could get a teeny bit more out of everything, maybe up to 440 mhz fsb at least, but I havent had the time to try the steps between 430 and 450. The ram is also running at 5-5-5-12 timings.

Also, the video card is overclocked from 625mhz to 670 mhz, with it's ram oc'd a hair to 930mhz (the ram on my card doesnt like overclocking, at all....), and the fan is upped to a steady 43 percent, via rivatuner.

Also, superpi just doesnt like vista on my computer... i thought I had the right version, but it would always crash, even before I overclocked. Orthos runs nice and happy now though.

I'd love to through a wolfdale and some better ram into this computer to see what I could do, but it's just not worth the money. I am seriously thinking about replacing all the fans in the case with yate loons, since xoxide has them on sale for 4 bucks a pop (and the scythe fans I want are still like 12+ bucks, even on sale), and some ccfls for light, instead of the lit fans. We'll see how this paycheck goes.

here are some pics:

Very first build, original case and stuff.

outside of that case... no 250 mm fan. That case kinda fails without that fan in the side.... (it's got a better home now, cooling a socket 939 computer my friend got... that side fan does wonders with his 1800xt's in crossfire.


These are the newest pics I have, but they are still before I added the 3rd harddrive and sleeved everything, and I cleaned it all up a bit. I'll try and add those pics eventually.

i also have an older socket a computer that I put into a clear case... still need to add some finishing touches to that though.

[drew and not u]

Looks good. Did you have any problems getting your 12-pin CPU connector to reach in that case?

[Yellowhello]

Looks nice. Great background BTW.

[theburan]

I did have to run the cpu connector across the mobo, and around the video card... it was sort of a tight fit. Eventually, I want to rerout it either under the motherboard, or dremel a hole in the case and run it on the complete other side, were my excese cables are. But it was the perfect length to just snake around the gpu and the ram.

[polobunny]

Originally Posted by theburan

I did have to run the cpu connector across the mobo, and around the video card... it was sort of a tight fit. Eventually, I want to rerout it either under the motherboard, or dremel a hole in the case and run it on the complete other side, were my excese cables are. But it was the perfect length to just snake around the gpu and the ram.

Don't forget to grab a 4pin 12V extension, mine was too short on my OCZ GameXStream 700W. ;)

[theburan]

did you run it under the mobo or something then? Because I know the fsp and the ocz should be pretty much identical.... but it seems like if I ran it under the mobo it'd have less distance to cover. (then again, just because the psu is the same inside, i guess the wire lengths dont have to be)

Then again, it might not be shorter, I'd have to think about it more (too busy not studying for may calc test...)

[theburan]

Ok, I cleaned everything up today when I installed my new cooler and reseated my old one. Ran the cpu power under the mobo, didn't even need an extension, also just did some general zip tieing and stuff, got it as clean as possible (kinda hard to do, all 6 bays are occupied, 3 hd's, 2 dvd drives, and a floppy/card reader, so there were lots of cables, lol.)




Now I just need to do a little fine tuning, try and get every last mhz out of this ram (the ram hits a wall before the cpu does, in my case....)

[Parker]

Very nice mate! Your set up looks very nice!

BTW, how does that CPU cooler perform?

[theburan]

Originally Posted by Parker

Very nice mate! Your set up looks very nice!

BTW, how does that CPU cooler perform?

It's pretty awesome. With the stock fan it's one of the quietest coolers out there, frostytech.com was really impressed with it. And with the addition of the 120mm fan (which is pushing ~65cfm), it's keeping my cpu at 30 or 31 c idle, and about 41c under load (even though the cpu's been clocked to 3.01ghz, it's still running at stock voltage, so it's not putting out too much heat, lol).

Wound up being pretty expensive though, the cooler itself runs about 40 bucks if you're lucky, but once I added the fan (which will cost at least 15 bucks normally), it's about the same price as a tuniq tower or other high end cooler.

And it uses pushpin... so that's both nifty, since it's easy to take off, and to put back on... but they're pushpins.

I used to have one of these: Newegg.com - Thermaltake CL-P0268 92mm CPU Cooler - Retail, which was terrible on in my system. It just wouldn't make good contac (the mounting system also used the pushpins, but just the way it all went together, it just failed....). It's got a better home now, in an amd system (sold it to a friend for cheap), and it's working really well there... kinda wish it had worked for me though. It really was cool looking.

[gvblake22]

Could you please resize your pictures to nothing more than 800x600? Thanks!