[I.M.O.G.]

Great to have you here Gary.

If you REALLY want to hotrod a PC, you may want to check out the benching section... That's where the crazy stuff goes on.

[Newman378]

Hi guys, I've come to this site casually for probably 5+ years to keep myself in the loop of things. Back when I found out about this site I remember it not letting me register an account because I had a Yahoo! email address. Anyway I just wanted to introduce myself to you all before I start making posts!

My name is Matt, I'm 27 living in the Berkeley/San Francisco area, I'm a Union Ironworker (currently laid-off) and I'm married.

The last PC I build was a Socket 478 P4 3.2 Prescott so I've been out of the game for a long time. About a year and a half ago I bought a Gateway FX6800-01e and was fairly satisfied with it until recently. I saw an add on CraigsList for another computer for $620 that I liked, so I sold my Gateway in a few hours for $600 and bought it.

The new computer is as follows-

CPU: i7 930 Revision D0 w/a CoolIt ECO push/pull
Mobo: EVGA X58 SLi LE
GPU: EVGA GTX 280 1GB
RAM: 3x1GB Corsair Dominator
PSU: Zalman 850W
Case: CM Cosmos S

He also included a Scythe 4 way fan controller and 6 120mm fans, 1 of which is a Scythe Ultra Kaze. On top of that he threw in an HP w2207 22" monitor.

I know this isn't the best system, but it's certainly better than what I had and I basically traded my Gateway for it hehe. Now I can finally experiment with overclocking! I plan to upgrade the RAM, and possible get an HAF 932 Black Edition case.

Right now I've used the Dummy OC feature on the mobo (I know I know...) and it's OC'd to 3.2. Idle is 36-40 across all four cores and after an hour of Prime95 I'm at about 65-69 (both with ambient at ~23.5).

I really only download media, and play a few games like Red Alert 3, Crysis 2 and Homefront so I'm not really a "power user." What are your opinions of this setup, again I know it is far from current/top of the line. What upgrades other than the RAM would you all suggest? I'm thinking of ditching the ECO for a Hyper 212+ as it seems to be highly recommended and noise isn't much of a concern to me. Thanks in advance guys!

What it looked like when I bought it:


After:


(I have since added a cheapo CM 120mm fan under the radiator for the push/pull I mentioned above)

[jsharpley]

Hello, I'm a new member here, and I just thought to drop in and say hi. Looking forward to participating in this strong community.

[hokiealumnus]

Welcome Newman378 and jsharpley!

[Mikester70]

Hi Everyone!

I am new to this OC thing and am currently researching to do my first build. I currently have a Dell XPS 420 it is alright for most things I do but have recently become interested in building my own machine and maybe an moderate overclock.

By the way how do I make a signature?

[HankB]

Originally Posted by Mikester70

Hi Everyone!

I am new to this OC thing and am currently researching to do my first build. I currently have a Dell XPS 420 it is alright for most things I do but have recently become interested in building my own machine and maybe an moderate overclock.

By the way how do I make a signature?

to OCF from DuPage. You'll have a lot more fun building your own (and maybe a frustration or two along the way.) And overclocking is just frosting on the cake.

Once you've made a few posts in the H/W forums you will be enabled to create a signature.

[Mikester70]

Originally Posted by HankB

to OCF from DuPage. You'll have a lot more fun building your own (and maybe a frustration or two along the way.) And overclocking is just frosting on the cake.

Once you've made a few posts in the H/W forums you will be enabled to create a signature.

Thanks HankB! Looking forward to my first build.

Just ordered my new case Corsair 650D.

[Cantebuss]

Hi, everyone. I've dropped a line in a few places to introduce myself and I'll begin listing my full system specs here and update it when I get home from work. This is a purchased system, I essentially built none of this except inserting the RAM. I wanted my first cooling loop to be professionally done so I could see in detail exactly what/how to make a loop. I'm one of those that learns more from seeing than reading and online pics don't always show the whole story or its hard for me to conceptualize.

Case: CM HAF 932
CPU: 1090T @3.8 (not prime95 stable yet)
Mobo: Asus Crosshair IV formula
RAM: G. Skill 8GB(4x2GB) DDR3 1600
Vid: Sapphire 5670 1GB - not on current loop
[in brackets = details forthcoming]
[Swiftec Res]
[Danger Den CPU block]
[120mm rad]

[k1ndafad3d]

Im all for short and sweet, sometimes its the best.

Hi everyone. Look forward to becoming part of forum and learning from you all!
speaking of... see my new build thread and critique my build!

_K1ND4F4D3D

[arachnaut]

Hello everyone. This is my first post on this forum and I wanted to just say hello and thanks.

I've been reading many, many articles on overclocking in this forum and several others to prepare for a new computer purchase.

I currently have a 2006 model AMD Athlon Dual Core 2.2 GHz Win XP SP3 and it has served me very well these last 5 years.

My main application is Reaktor 5 and Live 8. I do a lot of electronic music design and produce electronic music. I don't play games - at least not that often.

My main need is for raw core speed.

All the audio samples are made by software modules running through my user-created Reaktor ensembles.

I also use other Native Instruments products, like Kontakt, that are music samplers. These generate sound from huge music sample libraries. So another need is for high disk bandwidth. It is not uncommon that these sample libraries are several gigabytes in size.

Some of the effects I use are reverb processors like 2C Aether that can take several hours to process an 8 minute audio segment with it's extreme settings.

In audio applications, at least the ones I use, an audio channel is processed by a CPU core. So if you have 8 tracks, each track will go to one of your 8 cores if you have that many. But if you only have 1 track, it doesn't matter how many cores you have, all the sound is processed by one core.

Since I stack effect after effect in a channel you can see that CPU core speed is the dominant factor in my purchase decision.

Sorry if this is too much info, but I suspect that most people here are more into different types of applications, so I added a lot of possibly unnecessary info.

As time has passed, the old machine is not doing so well and I often now have to scale back on my projects. I knew an upgrade was necessary, but I was waiting for a few conditions: adoption of USB 3 and Light Peak (Thunderbolt), cheap and fast SSDs on ultra fast PCI express ports, full 64-bit software support.

These things are just about here and Native Instruments now has everything in 64-bit that I want and Live 9 will probably be fully 64-bit very soon, so the time has come.

Oddly, my wife's computer had a malfunction last month - the graphics card fan spun off the card and messed up the motherboard. She was running 32bit Vista, so I got here a new power supply, mother board, and CPU. I got a core i5-2500K and MSI P67A-G43 B3 motherboard.

I got this mainly as an experiment for me. I hadn't built a system since a few years and I wanted to see how the new Intel chips performed.

I was very pleased to see the new BIOS supports a mouse and so many I/O ports. And the new CPU worked so much faster than anything I've had before.

I, actually, just set the BIOS settings at Optimal and didn't bother to overclock. She was very happy with the improvement and she's not a power user.

So anyway, back to the present. I've been going to the local Fry' and checking out parts and stuff, then going on-line and checking specs, etc. Finally I decided on the parts and I got them all now except for one thing - I'm waiting on the memory order from Newegg.

Here's what I got, I'm opening them today and hope the memory arrives in the afternoon mail:

CPU: core i7-2600K
MB: Asus P8P67 Pro B3 rev 3.0 (NEC USB3 chip)
Case: Cool Master HAF 932 Advanced
Power: Corsair AX 850
Cooling: Thermaltake Silent 1156
Memory: 2 kits of 8GB Ripjaws X to total 16 GB, currently on-order:
(G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL8D-8GBXM
Newegg N82E16820231445)
Drive: Seagate ST320005N1A1AS-RK - Barracuda XT 2 TB SATA/600 7200 RPM 64 MB buffer
Windows 7 Pro 64-bit OEM

The rest of the stuff is more conventional and not all that impressive. I got the PNY GT440 1Gb DDR5 graphics card. As I said, I'm not into gaming and I want to keep that other PCI express lane for a future SSD drive.

I hope the 2 memory kits are in the same batch so they are equally matched - the Newegg sale was too good to pass up.

I got the Silent 1156 because I know the stock cooler is not that good and I don't know what to get yet that would fit everything. After I assemble and test I'll see if I can live with that or whether I want to go for more cooling. It wasn't very expensive and I think its going to be a lot better than stock.

Since I work with audio a lot, I don't want the fans to get too noisy. Liquid cooling seems a bit risky to me after I saw what a graphics card fan can do.

My audio interface is a Focusrite Pro 14 which uses Firewire. I probably will not even install the motherboard audio drivers, bluetooth, RAID, and maybe some other stuff. I want to keep IRQs and interrupt latency as low as possible and keep the PCI switching lanes as clear as possible for audio.

I expect to get about 4.4 Ghz without too much trouble, maybe 4.8 if I'm lucky. This system should be about 10 times faster than what I have now ( 2x on each core and 2x the number of cores (4 if you count hyperthread) and generally faster system bus).

I don't plan to go into overclocking extremes, but I will push things to see what I can get.

Sorry for the length of this intro, and thanks for all the help I found reading things here.

[way2aware]

Hey Arachnaut,
Welcome aboard! My last system, like yours, was an Athlon 64 2.2GHz dual core (4200+) and I had upgraded to get more speed... in my case for light gaming. Also, it was just time to upgrade; I'd bought my system in 2006 , an OEM Compaq desktop with the typical locked bios which severely limited me for changing settings.
Also, like you, I decided to give Intel a try, but unlike you I did not get a decent CPU at first, but opted instead for an older dual core Pentium D 930 3.0GHz, thinking (mistakenly) that actual real world performance is pretty much just a function of CPU clock speed, along with L2 cache size. You couldn't imagine my dissapointment when I realized that even when overclocked to 4GHz, the Pentium D 930 would not give me the performance I got out of my old Athlon 64 4200+! So the next move I made was a relatively inexpensive, but new E6600. And this did the trick, giving me everything I was looking for. It is FSB speed that the Pentium lacked at 800MHz, and the E6600 will easily handle 1250MHz- makes all the difference in the world. Your memory is better than mine (G Skill PC10700 Cl8 DDR 3 2X2048) so your system should be pretty damn fast especially with a SSD. You should be able to break out of the 5.9 Windows 7 experience rating limit, which can only be done with SSD disk drives, or so I hear.


I'd be interested to see what kinda rating you get out of your system, once it's up and running with that SSD hard disk!

[arachnaut]

way2aware: I have not yet purchased a SSD drive. I certainly want to get one to attach to the PCI Express bus directly, and I want to put Windows and programs on it, but not temp files, swap files and 'Documents and Settings stuff'. So I probably will want about 150 GB. Currently my Win XP partition of system and program files is about 60 GB in size.

That size is readily available now and the SandForce chipsets look very attractive.

But the technology is still new and prices are pretty high, so I think I will wait, maybe 6 months or so. By then I will have this new system in pretty good shape and be better able to decide what I need.

I'm jumping from XP to Win 7 so I expect a few learning curve issues.

But I am avidly reading about these new drives with great interest. The next generation should have issues resolved with wear-levelling, TRIM management, and all those low-level flash issues. It is quite different from hard drives or RAM memory.

[arachnaut]

By the way - a quick question - has anyone used DeoxIT Gold (G100L) on the CPU chip? Or the spray version? This should improve contact but I'm worried to tamper with the CPU.