Project Phoenix

look forward to the completion

Good luck with this.

I'm with you with this

Sorry folks I've been lazy I completed the build and have been enjoying it. 1080-60 gaming is noticeably better than what I'm used to on consoles.

Can't quite find a killer title to play though.

The biggest pain was windows 7 updates. A good 6 hours was spent trying to update manually since the Automatic update system kept hanging.

One thing that's been made clear with this build..

Modular power supplies are a must..

Did a little bit of benchmarking last night.

First up is very vanilla.

CPU:- 3.2Ghz
GPU:- 1000Mhz
GPU Ram:- 1500Mhz

Using the Firestrike Demo from steam

Next up was some simple over clocking using Msi afterburner and changing the multiplier for the CPU.

CPU:- 4.1GHz
GPU:- 1135 Mhz
GPU Ram:- 1675 Mhz



Obviously I have around 20 incremental changes to get to this point and it does post with higher speeds. I just wanted to keep the temperature optimal.

Playing FarCry 3 on ultra at 60fps, gpu hovers around 65°C. Cpu mid 40's.

Guess all that's left now is to flog that second G3258 on eBay!

Cable braiding sub project started now. All red.

Also ordered a third 120 aerocool shark fan to light things up a little

Updated with new fan and braided cables.. Tight case and stiff cables though is turning out to be a nightmare to manage

Stripped out the Heat sink this weekend and replaced the Thermal Paste. I wasn't entirely happy with how I applied the stuff that came with the upgraded heat sink when I bought it.

Sure enough, on removal it was uneven. The rig never reached thermal limits on the OEM gloop when running at 4Ghz, but as we all know, the G3258 should be good for that on a standard heat sink. the result of properly applying new paste has been a lower CPU temp at higher clock speed.

Little bit of BF1 running 1080p and recording video at the same time so I'm fairly impressed by the humble setup!

Upgrade to the i5 4590 has meant a silky 60Fps.

Seems BF1 was really at the limit of what Dual Cores are capable of.

Must say for a cheap as chips rig it's looking not too shabby.... Even though I am entirety biased

Just refurbished a HD 5850 1Gb I got on eBay for under £20. Whacked it in to see how it performed in some newer titles..

For a 2009 gpu I could still hit 60fps in BF1 on the low preset with a few settings upped to medium. Even full medium it was Comfy at about 45fps.. It freaked out at high though completely failing to display.
Really surprised as the G3258 was severely bottlenecking the R9280x... But with the i5 and a cheap gpu I can actually play everything I want at 60fps after some settings fiddling.

Lesson learned about the benefits of quad cores I think!

Also.. Refurbished the gpu by dis-assembling, cleaning, degunking and changed the TIM. The card now runs about 5°c cooler (it was disgusting) but also netted me an extra 300 points on 3d mark and extra 2-3% increase in FPS on every game I've tried it on.

This was done by running 3 built in benchmarks prior to the refurbishment and then the same bench after..

Any ideas why this would increase performance?

Figo said:

Any ideas why this would increase performance?

Click to expand...

Sounds like plain old thermal throttling to me