Project: AirRAID

[Arthalen]

Looking really good! "Jealous" Love the look of all those fans!!!
Quick question, how hot does the raid card get? because looking at your gfx card, it looks a little cramped for air intake. Would popping the fan from the raid card onto the southbridge heatsink provide the gfx card with some 'fresher' air so to speak, or would it mess up the air flow in the case? Might reduce the gfx card temp a little. Just a thought.

Hehe, thanks!

The RAID card is absolutely fine, the heatsink is cool and the backside of the card is 'just' warm, so I have no worries there. a lot of its heat is generated by the Intel IOPS processor, and that huge Thermalright keeps it tamed easily

As for the GPU and strapping an 80mm fan to the Southbridge - its a good idea, and I have a spare 80mm Enermax Cluster. I'll look at that when I come to GPU overclocking, but in all honesty, the 5850 is tearing through everything I throw at it

I think that main HDD cage could be easily modified for notably lower airflow impedance if you need more HDDs at some point.

Absolutely, and the RAID card can take another 4 hard drives (8 Drive RAID-0 madness ?!?). I just never liked the sideways orientation of the drives, so decided to get maximal airflow for now by removing that cage and re-using the Hotswap bay.

Use TinyPic instead of Imageshack - Imageshack has always been slow compared to TinyPic.

Great tip - will take a look

 

[Arthalen]

Well, I got some basic software installed this morning to check temperatures and the like, and its been running at 3.0Ghz with ease while I've been messing with it, hopefully tonight I'll give it a good whipping into shape and hit the promised land of above 3.6ghz.

Interesting note: With the NB remount, its now idling at 45C after booting to windows. The CPU was idling at 22C after booting into windows

 

[Arthalen]

Welcome to the 4Ghz Thread

Yeah thats right baby, 4GHZ on Air


Ok, off to get it stable now

 

[Arthalen]

Thanks for the kind comments guys, but the bad news is I don't have a flying chance of getting it stable at 4.0Ghz unfortunately.

My self imposed Vcore limit is 1.65v, and I'm at that now running Prime95 SmallFFT test at 3.75Ghz. I've been backing down from 4.0Ghz step by step and running the small FFT test to ensure that my CPU is stable at the rated overclock before moving on to check NB and Memory stability.

My experience tells me that if I can get two hours stable Prime SmallFFT, I'm looking at a possible 24/7 overclock. Especially as most of the time I'll never max out the CPU as much as what Prime does.

Temperature wise, the Q6600 is loving it - even now its just scratching 70c (these chips are rated upto 100C ), idle wise its at the 30c mark. To me, thats absolutely fine.

One thing of note was I was surprised to hear a fan spin up to max when I'm doing the Small FFT testing - its the PSU Fan, so I know I'm putting the PSU under a lot of load for it to heat enough to have to kick in full whack.

Here's my current settings:

CPU Ratio: 9.0x
FSB Frequency: 417Mhz
FSB Strap to NB: 333mhz
PCIE Frequency: 100Mhz
DRAM Frequency: 1,000Mhz
Command Rate: 2T

CPU Voltage (Vcore): 1.65 BIOS Set, 1.635 in Windows
CPU PLL Voltage: 1.74v
NB Voltage: 1.73v
DRAM Voltage: 2.30v
FSB Termination Voltage: 1.56v
SB Voltage: 1.15v
SB 1.5v Voltage: 1.55v

Loadline Calibration Enabled
CPU GTL Reference: 0.63x
NB GTL Reference: 0.67x

I haven't given up totally on 4.0Ghz yet - I may be missing something (GTL Reference/FSB Termination voltage?) on the voltage settings besides lots of Vcore to get the 4.0Ghz. Atleast I know it will boot into Windows and be stable long enough for me to get the screenshot

I'll keep posting back with results as they come.