I’m new to overclocking, and in general to building computers. I started out with computers on a Vic-20, progressed to a Commodore 64, a Commodore 128D, and then finally made the jump to IBM clones in mid-90′s, when I got a Gateway 2000 P5-133. It came decked out with a 133 MHz Pentium processor, 32MB RAM, an MGA Matrox Millenium graphics card, and Ensoniq Soundscape soundcard. It wasn’t until my forray into the IBM clone/Windows OS world that I began learning how the internal components ticked. The Gateway was a good PC for my needs, except for the CD-ROM drive that had to be RMA’d 3 times before I got a working unit. That was my very first forray into replacing PC components. Everything else about that computer worked fine up until the day it completely died, which was sometime around 2002 or so.
Then I got a laptop from Gateway, to replace the dead P5-133 with Windows 95 OS. In came the Gateway 400SD4 with Windows XP and a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 CPU. Also included were 512 MB RAM, ATI Radeon M6 graphics, DVD-ROM, and enough heat to burn my legs if I set it on my lap when wearing shorts. It was never really decent for gaming, even with everything set on low it tended to struggle.
It was time to buy a desktop to supplement the laptop, so along came a Hewlett-Packard machine with Windows XP, a 3 GHz P4HT processor, 1 GB DDR RAM, nVidia GeForce 5200FX graphics, Creative Labs Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS soundcard, and a generic DVD-ROM drive. This is where I really started to learn how to replace PC components, and what all the different aftermarket options were. This was my lemon machine, my money pit, my learning tool. About a month after the warranty expired, so did the DVD-ROM drive. I promptly found a place called Tiger Direct, and with a little research had a shiny new Sony DVD-RW drive on its way to me. Not long after that, the graphics card went kaput, so back to Tiger Direct we surf again, and order a BFG GeForce 6800 GS AGP, and an Ultra 450 Watt power supply. We were back in business, for a month or two, then the hard drive took a dump, all files on it were totally unrecoverable. So of course, back to Tiger Direct I went and ordered a shiny new 250GB Western Digital Caviar IDE HDD. Once it was installed, I was back up and running, and the computer lasted several more months until the CPU started getting really hot all the time. New thermal paste helped it for a while, but it finally just fried itself for whatever reason (maybe a lesson learned in why not to buy cheap power supplies? I dunno).
Time to get a new desktop was upon me, and I wasn’t about to buy another Hewlett-Packard. I could either order a new PC, or having learned that I could probably put my own build together cheaper, and with better parts, I decided to try my hand and building my first homebrew rig. I was so excited, I went a little overboard on my build-budget, but it turned out to be worth it. I grabbed an Antec P-180 case and everything else I needed from Newegg.com. Inside the case, I stuffed an Antec 650-Watt True Power Trio power supply, XFX nForce 680i-LT motherboard, an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale w/ OCZ Vendetta cooler, 4 GB Corsair XMS-2 DDR2-800 RAM, an XFX GeForce 8800 GT PCI-e GPU, Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer soundcard, and a 4-disk RAID-5 array. I loaded the machine up with Vista x64 and off I went. It was, and still is a very good machine that sits in my study and gets plenty of use of by everyone in the household. I was so proud of myself for being able to put together my very own PC, and have it work without any hiccups or snags. I called it the Destroyer, not because I thought it was “all that”, but because my dad served on two different destroyers during his time in the Navy, and it was that which got him into electronics and computers, and him getting me into them in turn.
Early this year I got the hankering to build another desktop PC, one that I had originally intended to be just a small secondary build, that I could set in the bedroom and have access to on days when I didn’t feel well enough to trudge across the house, or for when the other PC was already in use. Those plans went by the wayside in a hurry, as a bigger/better/faster got the most of me. In comes the current PC, which also went together without any hangups, thank goodness, also bringing us to the meat and potatoes of this post. Step right up and meet the Stormchaser (named because I have a love for stormchasing):
Cooler Master HAF 932 case: I don’t care what the teenybopper reviewers say about the inadequate ventilation, this case with its three 23cm and single 14cm fans has more than adequate airflow. The inside of the case is not going to get any cooler save for building a PC inside a refrigerator. A cigarette smoke test will quickly prove just how well this case flows.
Corsair CMPSU-650TX power supply: Yes, I know many people will scoff at me for having “only” a 650-Watt power supply, but I can always upgrade it later, and at this point in time, even when the computer is stress-tested to the max, the most my system draws is around 380 Watts. It does it’s job quite well right, and that’s all I need it to do. Bigger numbers mean nothing when this one isn’t even pushed to anywhere close to it’s limit.
ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 motherboard: I had a real hard time deciding upon a motherboard, and it all ended up being a coin toss. The Asus board won out, and so far I’m very pleased with it. It has yet to cause me any issues or let me down in any manner. Some of the software utilities that came with it are, in my opinion, useless, but I bought the motherboard for the motherboard, not the software packaged with it.
Intel Core i7 920 CPU: This is the C0 stepping model, not the newer D0 one. I am sure I could do better things with the D0 to a point, but to me it’s not worth buying a newer one and trying to sell this one. This one, is for all my needs, more than enough, even though it’s not the cream of the crop.
Corsair Dominator 6GB TR3X6G1600C8D DDR3 1600MHz RAM: That’s right, 3 2GB sticks of triple-channel RAM. It’s not the fastest, nor the slowest. It was a good buy, and you can’t beat Corsair for service and support. Plus, the Dominator heat-sinks look really cool if you peek inside the case.
EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB: zOMG, LOL, WTF, etc., etc., etc. Yes, I have a lowly 9800 card in my Core i7 rig, instead of a big bad overpriced GTX 285 or whatever. Believe it or not, it still runs all my games I play on higher settings just fine and dandy. I am waiting for the GTX 300 series cards with DX11 support to come out before I spend a fortune on a video card, that way when I upgrade to Windows 7 I will be current. Hey, it even runs Crysis at decent eye-candy levels with only noticeable slowdown in the icy-cold blizzard scenes. That’s good enough for me for now, and saved me a couple hundred bucks.
The rest of the components are just average stuff. Vista X64, a 250 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 HDD, a Sony DVD-RW, and using the integrated SoundMAX HD Audio sound. The monitor is a Dell 2209WA e-IPS 22″ flat panel.
The newest addition to Stormchaser as of yesterday is:
Noctua NH-U12P SE1366 CPU Cooler: I ordered this and a tube of Arctic Cooling MX-3 thermal compound from Jab-Tech.com out of Newella, Oklahoma. I am very pleased with how quickly they shipped (same day) my package, and the amount of care they took to pack it very well, to help prevent any damage during shipping. I will definitely be doing business with these guys again. The cooler itself seems to be very well made, and the mounting system they use is, even for a person who has only has one hand such as myself, it was a breeze to install. It took only a few minutes to take off the stock cooler, clean the old thermal paste off the CPU with some alcohol and Q-Tips, and mount up the new cooler, which fits in the Cooler Master HAF 932 Case with a very little bit of room to spare.
Why the big CPU cooler? So I can try overclocking this thing a little bit without getting it too hot, was the plan. This is my first forray into the world of overclocking, so I’m sure I’m going to make mistakes as I learn. But so far so good, and I managed to get up to a stable 3.61 GHz running Prime95 for 8 hours without any issues. So here’s what I did, and why:
First, I read all the overclocking guides for the Core i7 I could find, paying special attention to those on clunk.org.uk, evga.com, and overclockers.net. Then I went on to write down my normal BIOS settings in a notebook, and using the notes I had taken from various resources, proceeded to try various methods of overclocking my CPU from the stock 2.66 GHz to 3.2 GHz. I did this by simply setting the AI Tweaker to Manual, setting the RAM timings to 8-8-8-24-2N, with 1.66 Volts, set my V-Core to 1.225 Volts, and my QPI-DRAM BUS to 1.35 Volts. Then I set the BCLK to 160 and chose a corresponding DDR-3 1282 MHz, just like Clunk advised. All was well and good, and seemed stable. But anything over a 160 BCLK no matter if the CPU voltage was upped all the way to 1.35 Volts, the QPI/DRAM to 1.375 Volts, and the PLL to 1.88, it would not find a steady clock with either a 20x or 21x multiplier. (contrary to popular belief, the Core i7 920 can be set to 21x with turbo off, and will stay there).
So I was upset that I couldn’t get past 3.2 GHz on a 160 BCLK. A little more reading said that many 920′s do better on a 19x multiplier with a higher BCLK, and possibly allows for lower voltage at the same time. At least for my specific chip, I was able to reach a 190*19 overclock, netting me 3.61 GHz that has stayed stable under Prime95 all day long. This was moving to 1.325 volts for the core, a 1.88 PLL, and 1.36875 volts for the QPI/DRAM. I was able to get up to a 195*19 3.70 GHz setting, at 1.35 volts for the cpu, and 1.375 volts QPI/DRAM, but I still wound up with BSOD after 2 hour runs of Prime95. I’m sure a little more tweaking could get me stable, but I wouldn’t want to run much higher than 3.6 GHz for 24/7 use anyway, as several articles I read seemed to all conclude that around 3.6 GHz is the sweet spot for performance/energy use for these things. How true that is I don’t know, but I do know that I found a very rock solid stable spot at 3.61 GHz using the 190*19 method, and that will be plenty good enough for me. Anything past that would just be temporary for bragging rights, and I’m not sure I really care about that, since there’s always someone out there who has/can/will do it better.
For me, the main point of overclocking was both to learn, as well as to squeeze enough extra performance out of my $270 Core i7 920 to meet and/or beat the stock performance of Intel’s $999 flagship Core i7 975 Extreme Edition processor, which I have succeeded in doing, while keeping my temps around 40 idle, and 70 with all 4 cores + 4 hyper-threaded cores at 100% for hours on end in a room with an average ambient temperature of 30 degrees Celsius. I would have liked to have seen a little better performance from the Noctua cooler, but put up against the stock Intel cooler, it’s still a major improvement, allowing me clock speeds that the stock cooler would not have been able to handle, as I’d get those same 40-min/70-max temps at stock 2.66 GHz with HT on, under 8-threads of Prime95 doing what it does best.
And the best part? It eats Second Life alive.
Recent Comments