WOOHOO! Got my C2D setup running. :-D

[mikeos]

Ok, well nothing special so far. Unfortunately setting everything up and installing and using new thermal paste took longer than I thought, but at least she's up and running, at stock speeds. :santa:

Anyway.. my setup is an e6400 w/ a P5b-E and Thermalright ultra 120.. I ended up using a (forget the name) stealth 120mm fan, since the yate loons don't work with the heatsink's clips. Ambient temps are ~69F here, but I wanted to see what my temps are even @ stock speeds, and I'm very surprised, because TAT is showing a steady 27/30C at idle for the two cores, and asus probe is showing 33C. I thought asus probe wasn't accurate and read cooler? Maybe not?

I also tried core temp and i was getting the same temps, so this heatsink sure works well and runs COOL. :) I'll get back to tinkering w/ this think after work tomorrow. Getting late, thanks everyone for all the advice and help! :beer:

[einstein2]

Nice one Mikeos :D, i,ll be joining you tomorrow :D, my Core 2 duo E6300 im setting up on a DS3 board :D. Nice tempatures at stock speed!, usually will find 2 different temps at 3c apart. Welcome to the forum :D

[mikep7779]

Grats dude, got the heatsink... now OC :D

[mikeos]

A couple initial thoughts.. WOW the system is silent. :bday: Having just relatively quiet 120mm fans and no smaller/louder fans makes a huge difference. I have a 92mm fan for my old socket A heatsink, and the system sounds like a tornado's coming compared to this build. lol

Also, I was surprised to see how big the retail heatsink is! Man, they've gotten pretty big. It looks like it would be pretty decent for a modest O/C. The Ultra 120 sure takes up a TON of space though. lol. It blocks almost half of the NB heatsink. Mounting the 120 didn't seems that bad overall, it seemed pretty easy and straightforward. Of course it would be impossible to install it w/ a mobo mounted..

At stock speeds w/ the ultra 120 under full load, it looks like the temp pegs at ~44C, which is pretty nice, and the mobo temp was hitting 28C. Pretty cool overall so I'm happy. It looks like I should be able to hit 3ghz and keep things pretty cool. We'll see tonight..

[mikeos]

Well, finally got a chance to really tinker w/ this thing tonight and wow, this system flies! :santa: Right now I'm running the FSB at 400mhz, so it's chugging along at 3.2ghz, w/ a 1:1 ratio. I haven't done any long periods of testing (prime95), but i'm running a vcore of 1.4, and idle temps are ~35C, and load temps peak right at 50C, according to core temp and TAT. Ambient temps are at ~69F so that helps. I ran dual prime95 for 15+ mins and no issues. When I get more time I'll run some longer tests to see how stable the system really is.

I wasn't terribly impressed initially w/ the system at stock clock speed, but now that it's O/C the system really flies. I ran PCMark05 as a comparison against some other benchmarks and it scored 8255, which seems like a solid score for my machine. A real world test re-encoding a DVD showed a TREMENDOUS jump over my old system. Previously reencoding would take all-in-all 1+ hr easily, but reencoding the same movie took ~15mins. :drool:

Oh ya, I see what people are saying now about the fan for the 7900 series being loud. It's been kicking on intermittently and it's definetly not quiet.. I got an arctic cooler on the way, so that should hopefully keep things nice and silent.

So far things are looking good. Unfortunately I'll be out for the weekend so I'll have to wait till next week to tinker some more and actually try playing a game! Thanks again everyone for all the help!