New toys arrived yesterday

Lelisevis · Aug 25, 2007, 04:13 PM

Well at last I have finished my monster build. In the post yesterday I added the final touches:

Enermax Galaxy 850W - Wow how huuuuuge is this powersupply. Had 30 mins of panic as I struggled to get it into the thermaltake armor case. It's not lack of space as I have tons of clearance it's the weird side mounting system. If any one tries this configuration then the trick is to go underneath from the inside. I have enough power and cables to run 3 systems with this monster.

Next up is:

Thermalright Ultima 90i and AS5. Being new to Intel socket 775 with a quad core Q6600 I was astounded at how poor the fitting sytem was for the stock heatsink. I had not confidence that a slight knock would'nt see flames ripping through my sytem from a cooked CPU. After trawling the net I stumbled upon the new Ultima 90i, massive cooling potential from a relatively small heatsink. It only seemed fair to treat my heatsink with the best so I used AS5 for the first time. I'll let it all bed in before posting results but initial fitting has seen a 5-10c drop across the cores.

The thermalright comes without a fan so next up was

A Noctua NF-S12 - Whats more to say, it's a 120mm fan that spins at 1200rpm and you could walk round with one strapped to each ear and still not hear them. Fixed it to the Ultima with the included clips.

Finishing the purchases is

OCZ 2GB PC2-8500 1066MHz SLI-Ready Edition Dual Channel DDR2

Been a Geil fan for years but this stuff was on a really good deal and I want to see if the SLI profile has an effect. Looks pretty impressive although at the moment i'll hold my hands up and admit im fighting with my mobo bios to get everything set up and running correctly. I see another late night afore me

. Oh the joys of being a nerd.

Edit - added some benchmarks. First heres what i've tweaked

CPU at 311x9 = 2.8ghz stock voltage
Ram Stock 1066mhz
Gfx @ 560mhz core and 1800mhz Memory

Still plenty of playing room but heres some results

**ChaosMinionX** · Aug 25, 2007, 06:28 PM

Will you be entering the fastest rig?

zaim · Aug 25, 2007, 06:55 PM

pics pics pics!

Lelisevis · Aug 25, 2007, 08:15 PM

Pics added apologies for the quality.

New one to me coming from Abit boards but im used to putting the RAM in slots next to each other irrespective of the colour scheme. With this board it will not boot unless the slots are in identical colour slots i.e white or blue. Is that correct?
Bios and settings are way more complicated with Asus and Intel chips than with my old solid AMD system..........but not as quick

. I can quite easily hit 13000 on 3dmark06 and thats without any major tweaking. Tiny bit on the gfx cards and tiny bit on the processor and pow 13k.
With the stock cooler I only went as high as 2.6ghz, gonna give the AS5 a week or two to settle then i'll be heading to 3ghz

**ChaosMinionX** · Aug 25, 2007, 08:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lelisevis

Pics added apologies for the quality.

New one to me coming from Abit boards but im used to putting the RAM in slots next to each other irrespective of the colour scheme. With this board it will not boot unless the slots are in identical colour slots i.e white or blue. Is that correct?
Bios and settings are way more complicated with Asus and Intel chips than with my old solid AMD system..........but not as quick

. I can quite easily hit 13000 on 3dmark06 and thats without any major tweaking. Tiny bit on the gfx cards and tiny bit on the processor and pow 13k.
With the stock cooler I only went as high as 2.6ghz, gonna give the AS5 a week or two to settle then i'll be heading to 3ghz

Meh crank it out to 3.6ghz

that cooler can handle it.

RaveneR · Aug 25, 2007, 10:34 PM

looks a beaut, even your camera is good, such fast shutter speed...

PangingJr · Aug 25, 2007, 10:43 PM

now, i'm just wondering, between the Ultima-90 and the new HR-01 PLUS (i used to have HR-01 old model and it worked quite well) which would be the better cooler?

Lelisevis · Aug 25, 2007, 10:52 PM

Ultima 90i seems to be winning so far, in some cases returning temps on par with the extreme 120. I've dropped at least 10-15C using core temp and thats after 1 day. It can only get better.

Ran 3dmark after raising core to 2.7ghz, gfx cards still stock BFG OC clocks of 550mhz core and 1700mhz mem.

I already know the gfx can handle 600 core and at least 1900 mem but im going to leave that until I get the cpu to 3ghz

.

zaim · Aug 26, 2007, 06:51 AM

ahhhhhh fuck yeah! sick photos man... wait till you overclock your cpu and gpu, the 2~3k boost you'll get on 3dmark =)

Lelisevis · Aug 26, 2007, 06:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RaveneR

looks a beaut, even your camera is good, such fast shutter speed...

Cameras only a tiny little 4 megapixel Canon QV-R40, it's been a hell of a camera and has been all over the world tucked in my pocket. Sticking with the Canons my wifes gonna buy me a Canon EOS 400D for christmas, that'll be a whole new monster.

As for the PC those North and Southbridges get bloody hot, im talking skin blister hot. Any idea what the stock NB and SB volts should be so I can manually set them. If you look closely at the pics you can just make out a tiny fan i've attached to the passive cooler to help a little, got it set at 60% fan load so it's silent, personally im not a huge fan of passive cooling systems, i'd have liked to have seen more time invested in quiet air cooling rather than fancy heatpipes.

>GSXR<mrbusa · Aug 26, 2007, 08:00 AM

Default SB voltage is 1.5 and should be fine for any overclock.
Default NB voltage is 1.25 and you have to set this according to many factors.

I cannot say this enough.
The auto settings of a motherboard are there for one reason and one reason only...and that is so the board will boot for the first time with a huge variety of hardware. Once the board boots and detects your hardware you should set everything manually that you know or can find the value for. I am talking about critical hardware related settings, not IDE detection or other various settings that are detected by the BIOS from the devices firmware.

Lelisevis · Aug 26, 2007, 08:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by >GSXR<mrbusa

Default SB voltage is 1.5 and should be fine for any overclock.
Default NB voltage is 1.25 and you have to set this according to many factors.

I cannot say this enough.
The auto settings of a motherboard are there for one reason and one reason only...and that is so the board will boot for the first time with a huge variety of hardware. Once the board boots and detects your hardware you should set everything manually that you know or can find the value for. I am talking about critical hardware related settings, not IDE detection or other various settings that are detected by the BIOS from the devices firmware.

Cheers, this will help out loads. Default on the NB rose to 1.50 at one point which panicked me a bit, I dropped it manually to 1.35 but with your info i'll take it down a bit further which can only help with temps. SB looks about right for mine.
If it's not to much trouble kind sir would you make a list for me of all the volts you are running in the bios so I can compare them. Also any idea what the stock voltage is for a Q6600, i've been searching but have seen various replies. My goal is to run it 24/7 at 3ghz which i'd imagine will need a bit of extra voltage, any idea what would suffice.

Really appreciate your input

PangingJr · Aug 26, 2007, 09:08 AM

Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q6600
--------------------------------------------------------

Core Stepping: B3
CPUID String: 06F7h
Thermal Design Power: 105W
Thermal Specification: 62.2°C
Core Voltage: 1.100V-1.372V

Core Stepping: G0
CPUID String: 06FBh
Thermal Design Power: 95W
Thermal Specification: 71°C
Core Voltage: 1.100V-1.372V

Processor Spec Finder

Quote:

Definitions
---------------------

Stepping: Throughout the life of a processor life cycle, the processor may go through several steppings or versions. Newer steppings typically have some type of improvement over previous steppings of the processor.

CPUID String: A four character string that can be used to identify the features of the processor. The first character is typically a 0 and the second and third characters represent the family and model number. The fourth character represents the processor stepping. For example, if you find one processor with a CPUID String of 0672 and a second processor with a CPUID String of 0673, both processors have the same family and model number of 67, but with different steppings. This sometimes has an "h" at the end of it to denote hexadecimal notation.

Thermal Design Power: (Also referred to as Thermal Guideline) The maximum amount of heat which a thermal solution must be able to dissipate from the processor so that the processor will operate under normal operating conditions.

Thermal Specification: The thermal specification shown is the maximum case temperature at the maximum Thermal Design Power (TDP) value for that processor. It is measured at the geometric center on the topside of the processor integrated heat spreader. For processors without integrated heat spreaders such as mobile processors, the thermal specification is referred to as the junction temperature (Tj). The maximum junction temperature is defined by an activation of the processor Intel® Thermal Monitor. The Intel Thermal Monitor’s automatic mode is used to indicate that the maximum TJ has been reached.

Core Voltage: The specific voltage that the processor will need to run properly. This is the voltage level that your motherboard needs to supply.

Lelisevis · Aug 26, 2007, 02:09 PM

Put some benches up top. Let me know what you think or if you spot any problems I may have missed.

Lelisevis · Aug 27, 2007, 05:32 PM

Ok so im slowly raising the voltage as my ultimate goal is 3ghz, in the bios i've raised it to 1.3v (cpu-z shows 1.248???), temps are 50c 100% load all 4 cores prime 95 at 2.8ghz. Would I be ok running this voltage 24/7 or is just a benching voltage?
Tried prime 95 at 2.75v and 2.8ghz but it gives in at 25mins or so with a failure to return interrupt request on secondary processor.

Im slowly getting to grips with these intel processor setups but you get a lot more conflicting info than with AMD processors. Enjoying the whole learning process though.

One other thing while I remember, I currently have my Ram at 1066mhz CAS5, I know AMD systems liked lower latencies, would I be better off dropping to 800mhz and CAS4? Havent tried raising the clocks yet as I want the cpu stable first.

Many thanks Lel

>GSXR<mrbusa · Aug 27, 2007, 06:31 PM

CPU-Z sucks at detecting voltage with the c2d chips. Use a program like Everest or even the Asus PC probe, latest version. Mine is at 1.35 and CPU-Z says 1.32 idle and during load so I don't know what this number represents.

Lelisevis · Aug 27, 2007, 06:39 PM

Yeah I was guessing CPU-Z was out. How's that new Beta bios working out, Do you have a changelog for it? Most of the recent changes just seem to be support for the 1333 bus and no new features or fixes. I've downloaded it im just waiting for feedback on it to settle down, seems mixed at the moment with some people rolling back for stability.

>GSXR<mrbusa · Aug 27, 2007, 09:02 PM

That 0803 bios hasn't been beta for awhile now. I just didn't update my profile. Most of the fixes in the newer bios are indeed for the 1333fsb chips. Finding an actual changelog on these bios are far and few between. I have found some info and the new 0805 bios says enhances overclocking capability and ads some new legacy usb device support for an asus keyboard and razor mouse. I have tried every bios since 0602 and at the same overclocks with each bios I have slowly but surely been able to lower voltages and tighten timings.
ftp://dlsvr02.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/s...%20SLI%20Plus/