My new build

[GOZR]

  The C0 are 3.6 Ghz safe. You'll be happy. You should do a 3DMark06 bench mark and Vantage and compare with after.. I'm curious to see as well.

[TX-Thunderbolt]

I said I was going to wait a couple days before testing some OC potential...but I didn't.

Last night I tested it a bit and went about it in a completely ignorant manner. A wise person would have set his numbers in a chart and incrementally bumped things up until he achieved instability and started to tweak and squeeze. Not me.

I made some setting adjustments and went straight to 3.8ghz. I ran through a few quick checks and started 8 instances of Prime95 right at midnight (OCCT wouldn't setup properly for me and I didn't want to fiddle with it right then. Prime went right in though). When I woke up this am it was still running solid and the temps were as stable this am as they were last night when I went to sleep.

At idle it was running about 40c before any OC. I thought that was only marginal but didn't think I needed to go through re-seating the HSF and would simply check for stability over a few days. After setting my OC to 3.8ghz idle temps only went to 46c and under load (after about 40 minutes of running the stress test) it peaked out at 75c. When I woke up this a.m., it was sitting at 73c and still running all 8 instances.

I had to drop my RAM down to 1066mhz before setting my Bclk OC because the DRAM frequency increases incrementally with your Bclk settings and setting my Bclk from 133 to 190 (x20 to achieve the 3.8ghz) raised the RAM from 1066 to 1523mhz. Had I left it at 1600mhz it would have tried to set the RAM to over 1900mhz...which simply didn't want to boot  (yeah, I did that )

All in all, I am completely jazzed.

Now I really need to get RoF all setup again and will need to try and give you a call Eco (if that's o.k.) as I have a couple questions that I'm sure you can answer.


TB

[GOZR]

Great TB  what is your voltage?

[TX-EcoDragon]

Cool! It's hard to resist!

You don't want it to get much hotter than 73C if you can avoid it, and the most important bit of data is missing up there. . what vCore / core voltage are you using? vCore will raise your temps much more than higher clock speeds, so at your given overclock try lowering the voltages. . .and don't OC with voltages on AUTO because that will generally overvolt everything. From what I have seen low 1.3 vCores are normal in this OC range, but find the lowest vCore you can use, and manually set it if you don't want to risk killing the chip.

[TX-Thunderbolt]

I set the v core to 1.35 as that was apparently the defacto setting where stability was most common. I haven't dropped it down to see just how low I can take it. I'll DL the 3DMark tests and see what it does there and post.

[GOZR]

3DMark06 they just release the update today..  go get it
In 3Dmarks06 you can only keep 5 tests so instead take pictures like i did .. if it get full.

[TX-Thunderbolt]

3DMark06 results:

total - 18,643
Sm 2.0 - 7,148
SM 3.0 - 8,245
CPU - 6,342


Vantage results:

Total - 15,536
CPU - 52,549
Graphics - 12,582

Not sure how good those numbers are and I didn't turn off AA, AF or any other settings. I know in the past, if I would turn down the AA settings, the numbers would go up, but I ran it at 2 a.m. and just didn't change anything.

[GOZR]

Don't bother all Application controlled but 3DMark take care of this.. ( Take a screeny and the best would be to have CPUZ open as well..)

[TX-EcoDragon]

Yeah, you need to leave the driver level settings at defaults, you should see 3dmark in the nvidia driver profiles tab too. . .don't make any changes, that's way people have agreed to run it for the purpose of comparing to other systems anyway.

[GOZR]

Any more news?

[TX-Thunderbolt]

Actually, no. Once I ran the benchmarks I deleted them as I'm not one to "play" benchmarks competitively. I still have them, but the "Vantage" program said I could only run it once for free anyway and I'm not even remotely interested in buying it so I deleted it. I can do a few more runs on 3DMark06 after changing some settings and even grab some screenies of the results, but to what end?

Also, I dropped my Bclk to 180 for a total overclock of 3.6 instead of 3.8. I know it's stable at 3.8, but just to see the fraps counter go from 174 frames up to 197 frames just didn't seem worth the extra wear on the CPU. Changing it back is really easier than loading saved BIOS profiles so I can reset it anytime I want with a simple reboot.

What I really need to do is get RoF reinstalled and get it updated to the latest version and see what it will do on this machine. At this point I'm a little lost as to how to go about it though.

[GOZR]

i understand TB the benchmark system is a very good one but not to see what is the max  like me i posted the Bench mark at 3.9 or 4 just to see and to actually make a fine tune system for example making a 3.8 having a better bench than my other bench mark at 4 Ghz and i did. SO it 's a personal tune challenge as you can see i didn't post anything at 4.2 or 4.4.. I'm thinking concervative ( heat of summer max ) but with the best tuned system and some time bumping the voltage do not run better ..  To me Tuning with 8 GB is the challenge ..

I hope to see you in RoF since i saw no one flying with me on Lockon SU-25.. alas...  I have the sim but not the numbers yet but it's out very very soon.. i can't wait !!!

[TX-EcoDragon]

Good call TB, one of my favorite features of my motherboard is that I can select one of 6 different profiles so I have my default which is an underclocked and undervolted setup for web browsing and such, on up to the FSX CPU lifesucker settings at 4.0GHz. On your machine RoF should run well at clocks close-ish to stock as you have the hyperthreaded quad core and RoF should use all "8" cores well so you can probably run 3.0-3.2 in RoF without much need for more. . .but I'm just guessing being a lowly dual core user.

I am on a laptop and don't have TS, but you can call me for help getting RoF setup, but actually I think there is already a thread dealing with that, you just need to change that updater file.

This is posted in detail on the RoF forums, I'll PM you at their site with a link.

[GOZR]

Mine has only 3 profiles.. Great stuff isn't it Tomorrow the 17 GoGamer doesn't have it yet  and Paypal do not take Pre-orders so maybe tomorrow.. ? hope so..

[TX-ScubaSteve]

I'd like to get a system that can handle RoF well.

I like your system Thunderbolt, and was curious Eco, what system you have these days?

I've been pricing out various systems using the i7 chip... (i7 920 and 960s), motherboards, memory... and finding a lot of the pre-built computers that seem to be a lot cheaper than what I could build myself.

Has this been anyone else's experience?  Granted, some reviews I've read of various pre-builts leave me a little concerned about who's actually slapping these systems together.

Any suggestions?

I was looking at a
MB: Asus X58 DDR3 1600Mhz
Power: Ultra X3 1000 Watt
Memory: 12GB Corsair 1600Mhz 8-8-8-24
CPU: i7 920
Heat Sink: Cooler Master V8
Optics: LG Blue Ray
Thermaltake Tower
GPU: GTX 295
OS: Win 7 Home Premium

All running for $2520.89 or $2800 for an i7 960 instead.

Then there's the pre-built "CyberpowerPC" with an i7 960, with the same amount of ram, including 2x 1TB HDs (not priced above), Blue Ray writer, 800W power supply...

for $2149.99