- Joined
- May 11, 2002
I recently re-acquired the first computer I built from my son. He was complaining about poor performance. He was also somewhat lax with proper system maintenance, so no big surprise there.
I cleaned it up, did a few case mods for improved cooling, & did a couple of upgrades. It's set up as a Dual Boot with WinXP Pro SP2 & Wndows Vista Ultimate RC1.
CPU is an early Northwood P4 1.6A running at 2.4GHz. I tried a P4 2.4B 533FSB CPU, but it wouldn't clock as high as I would have liked.
Motherboard as an Abit TH7II-R with Intel 850 Chipset. This board is one of the all-time great overclocking boards, IMHO, but it only supports RDRAM. I added 2 sticks of Samsung PC800 RDRAM for a total of 4 x 256MB. The memory would clock up to ~140 FSB w 2x256MB, but won't go any higher than 125 FSB w/ 4 sticks installed. Memory is currently running on the 3/4 divider.
Video card is my old ATI Radeon 9500 non pro with Omega 3.8.291 Drivers with the Soft Mod applied. Vid card is cooled by anArctic Cooling Silencer. It's overclocked to 375MHz Core & 300MHz Mem.
I'm using the on-board Highpoint RAID Controller to run 2 Western Digital WD800JB Hard Drives in RAID 0.
I've removed the fan grills in the case for better airflow &opened up the front to take a 120mm intake fan. There are filters on the front & side intake fans. This case is sililar to the one I used for my wife's rig:
http://www.ocforums.com/showpost.php?p=2886663&postcount=2030
This case came with 92mm fans on the side (intake) & on top (exhaust). I've left the stock 92mm fan on top.
It's not doing too badly at all, IMHO as this screen shot with some benchmarks shows:
It does quite nicely with XP & I'm somewhat surprised that I can run Vista RC1 with the full Aero interface with no apparant problems.
I cleaned it up, did a few case mods for improved cooling, & did a couple of upgrades. It's set up as a Dual Boot with WinXP Pro SP2 & Wndows Vista Ultimate RC1.
CPU is an early Northwood P4 1.6A running at 2.4GHz. I tried a P4 2.4B 533FSB CPU, but it wouldn't clock as high as I would have liked.
Motherboard as an Abit TH7II-R with Intel 850 Chipset. This board is one of the all-time great overclocking boards, IMHO, but it only supports RDRAM. I added 2 sticks of Samsung PC800 RDRAM for a total of 4 x 256MB. The memory would clock up to ~140 FSB w 2x256MB, but won't go any higher than 125 FSB w/ 4 sticks installed. Memory is currently running on the 3/4 divider.
Video card is my old ATI Radeon 9500 non pro with Omega 3.8.291 Drivers with the Soft Mod applied. Vid card is cooled by anArctic Cooling Silencer. It's overclocked to 375MHz Core & 300MHz Mem.
I'm using the on-board Highpoint RAID Controller to run 2 Western Digital WD800JB Hard Drives in RAID 0.
I've removed the fan grills in the case for better airflow &opened up the front to take a 120mm intake fan. There are filters on the front & side intake fans. This case is sililar to the one I used for my wife's rig:
http://www.ocforums.com/showpost.php?p=2886663&postcount=2030
This case came with 92mm fans on the side (intake) & on top (exhaust). I've left the stock 92mm fan on top.
It's not doing too badly at all, IMHO as this screen shot with some benchmarks shows:
It does quite nicely with XP & I'm somewhat surprised that I can run Vista RC1 with the full Aero interface with no apparant problems.
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