805 at 3.8GHz on Thermaltake Bigwater

Pandobear

Pandobear

Pandobear

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Joined
2 Jun 2006
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827
Location
Aylesbury, Bucks
Hi Guys

I thought that I would post a few pictures of my setup. I am using the Antec P180 case, which seems to be pretty popular right now and have fitted a Thermaltake Bigwater 745 kit to cool a Pentium D805 running at 3.8GHz. Getting idle temperatures of 45 with load in the high 50s. I know that all the experienced guys recommend staying away from Thermaltake, and I am sure that they are correct, but in this instance it does work. I had previously been using a Arctic Cooler Pro and could run at a FSB of 166, but no higher. I am currently only using one of the radiators that came in the Bigwater kit, due to depth restrictions under my desk, though of cause the extra radiator would add extra scope.

http://uk.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/[email protected]/detail?.dir=/7ebfre2&.dnm=5253re2.jpg

I mounted the 240 mm rad over the top blow hole of the P180, so the internal fan is blowing, with the rad fan sucking, this droped the board temperature down 10 degrees from having no top mounted fan, no air flow previously over the Asus stack cool at back of board I guess. I have all the 120mm fans set on their lowest speed apart from the powersupply/hard drive centre divider, so this is a really quiet system. The two thermaltake ones on the rad are a fixed low rotational speed as standard, the other thermaltake one is speed controlled, set as low as it will go.

The pump and reservoir sit at the bottom of the case quite neatly, though I had look at possibly changing to one of the swiftech 5 1/4 bay pump and res models, just to keep the case free. There still appears to be room for a second 7900GTX, though my current mainboard does not support SLI.

http://uk.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/[email protected]/detail?.dir=/7ebfre2&.dnm=361fre2.jpg&.src=ph

Anyways, it all seems to work pretty well, very quiet, but can't help wondering if it can be done with Thermaltake, which no one recoommends, how much better it might be with Swifttech or a custom setup.

System Spec

Asus P5LD2 Deluxe
Intel D805 at 3.8GHz
2Gb DDR2 667MHz
4 x Maxtor Diamond max 10 300GB
2 x Western Digital Raptor 150GB
7900 GTX
Antec P180
Antec Phantom 500 watt PSU
 
The pump is rated at 400L per hour, which is similar to the smaller of the swifttech pumps. The flow rate seems ok, with only a couple of degrees difference between the CPU block inlet and outlet. Most people say the problem with these pumps is the pressure, and Thermaltake do not publish figures for this. Anyways my only point is that the Thermaltake may be hopeless next to custom builds, but it does work in this instance. The smaller Bigwater kit has a smaller pump, which has a much lower flow rate.

Does anyone have any idea how this setup would compare with the Swifttech kit? particularly the smaller combined pump and reservoir for the 5 1/4 bay?
 
I can get it to run at 4GHz but the voltage needs to be over 1.6vcore, and I don't think that it is worthwhile upping it that much to gain that extra 200Mhz. It is running at 1.55vcore right now, which I feel a lot more comfortable with! I also notice with this board that the vcore voltage moves around depending on processor loading, if I had bought one of the mainboards with the 8 phase regulator then I would have made it easier to clock.
 
I think that I will have a go at that mod myself. Running the 805 at 4GHz worked, but I had to have the voltage above 1.6 and it would crash on the processor bench part of 3DMark 06, but if I watched the processor voltage it was all over the place, so I will try the mod and see what happens. Cheers guys.
 
I have just done the pencil volt mod, could not have been easier. The oddest thing is that now it actually runs 3.8 GHz at stock voltages, which are obviously 0.1v higher than set, but this is a full 0.15 under where I had to have it before. Runs cooler now also, obviously because of the lower vcore. What I don't understand is what is the downside of this mod? There must be one otherwise surely Asus would do it as standard? Anyways, thanks guys vcore does not move more than 0.02 now, and only upwards! woohoo
 
Last update before I hit bed - running fine at 3.8Ghz on Full Dual Prime load - temps same as what they were at 3.7, no voltage change necessary (yet lol), voltage is super stable for me
Click to expand...

Really excellant processor for the money. I was going to change for a Conroe as soon as they are available, but I think that I will hold off for a little while, wait and see which one will really give an improvement over the 805. Also not many of the new chipset boards have many sata ports. I really need a minimum of six internal, but most boards seem to be going for the esata, not sure why, can't see much use for it. The P5LD2 has the four intel sata which I use for a four drive RAID 5, and then I have to use a 3112 Silicon Image PCI card for the two raptors as the board has only one more internal sata, and it is a real mess to have a esata to sata cable running from the outside of the case back in.

One other interesting thing with the overclocking is that at 180 FSB I lose the intel raid controller, comes back at 190FSB. Doesn't matter whether I lock the PCI and PCIe buses or not, weird.
 
Mine doesn't go above 60 degrees, idles at around 40 from the motherboard monitoring. The water block never really moves temperature wise though, but hte processor will rise immeadiately that it goes on load, up to 60 very quickly, but then drops just as rapidly when coming off load, so I think that it is either a heat spreader or waterblock problem. I keep being tempted by the swiftech kits, everyone says how excellant they are, and that the Bigwater is poor, but then I keep thinking don't fix that which isn't broken. It does the job and there are no gaurantees that the processor is going any highter than 4 GHz anyways. I will probably buy a swiftech kit anyways, just to play.
 
Yes, am tempted to push it a little further, but as you rightly point out, what then to do with the CPU cycles, you can only benchmark so often before it begins to lose it's appeal, lol. This way I get to leave all the fans turned down as low as they will go, and be as near silent as possible. I am now looking, or rather listening to my media center machine, that is in one of Antec Overture II cases, very noisy power supply fans, perhaps I will start a seperate thread
 
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