Project: Desk Rad

Gunslinger · 11 Mar 2011 at 16:08

Looks good

also looks very similar in design to the MIPS RAM cooler block i have just got (along with other motherboard blocks)

I was wondering about that heat paste, and whether it would be better trying heat transfer pads rather than paste, what are your thoughts on that ??

JohnTedd · 14 Mar 2011 at 08:01

Although I have used heat pads on the GTX 480 I think they are most useful when the things you are cooling are at different heights. So I think thermal paste is fine for DIMMs as long as you believe they are all the same height. Otherwise pads would be better.

EK don't supply pads or TIM with the EK RAM Dominator, but they specify using TIM, so that's what I did (and, to be honest, I don't have any spare thermal pads lying around).

I've been a bit busy lately so I haven't had the chance to do any more overclocking yet. I can't see that situation changing in March... May be I'll have time in April.

Gunslinger · 14 Mar 2011 at 22:25

ok thanks for the info, TIM should be fine,, and is likely what i'll end up using, the screws should ensure everything is touching just fine, the pads idea was simply based on it maybe being tidier, TIM can be a pain if you need to remove the cooler at any point later.

JohnTedd · 15 Mar 2011 at 07:57

I think you will be fine with TIM and let's be honest it's not a huge deal to wipe off the TIM and re-apply. I had to do that a number of times with my i7 in order to get the CPU to see all 12 GB of RAM....

Gunslinger · 19 Mar 2011 at 11:59

That's pretty bad, CPU seating should not be that temperamental

JohnTedd · 20 Mar 2011 at 22:03

Gunslinger said:
That's pretty bad, CPU seating should not be that temperamental

I absolutely agree! I couldn't believe that the CPU would work but could not address all the memory - that just seemed weird to me. It's not as if it just happened to me, as this was the advice from corsair support and googling for the error showed others who had solved the issue by re-seating the CPU, including someone else on this forum.

piggin · 21 Mar 2011 at 19:56

JohnTedd said:
More goodies have arrived.... In Piggin style, here's the unwrapping.

Sorry I missed this the first time m8.

Thanks for the mention in your build log.

Keep up the good work

JohnTedd · 21 Mar 2011 at 21:43

piggin said:
Sorry I missed this the first time m8.

Thanks for the mention in your build log.

Keep up the good work

No problem.

I certainly have plenty more to do but as the computer is working it is taking a back seat at the moment. Hopefully next month I can re-site the bigNG to keep it cool and re-route all the cables tidily.

Gunslinger · 25 Mar 2011 at 09:12

JohnTedd said:
I absolutely agree! I couldn't believe that the CPU would work but could not address all the memory - that just seemed weird to me. It's not as if it just happened to me, as this was the advice from corsair support and googling for the error showed others who had solved the issue by re-seating the CPU, including someone else on this forum.

yeah, i don't doubt it, it sounds like something went amiss with some CPU sockets, perhaps associated with one make ?? - i know foxconn make a lot of the sockets these days, butt hey are not the only ones, so it is possible someone else made some as well, and one of them got something slightly different/wrong, causing this odd behaviour

JohnTedd · 25 Mar 2011 at 10:10

I guess if someone were really interested they could look at the pinout and work out where the high address lines are and see if they are somewhere peripheral. I also guess it points to the QA-ing of the sockets not extending to all the address lines or something like that.

Never mind, it is working well now. Nice and quiet with the RAM cooler

Mister Wolf · 4 May 2011 at 19:55

looking very nice

never seen RAM watercooled before! :O

JohnTedd · 4 May 2011 at 20:58

Thank you for your comments.

I hadn't originally planned to water cool the RAM, but the sticks came with fans which were the noisiest thing in the system and drove me crazy. The good news is that with the watercooled RAM I can overclock more than before. I have been running my 1600 MHz RAM at 2000 MHz for ages now without any issues with the CPU running at 4.4 GHz.

Dokinator · 4 May 2011 at 22:50

Something different I see

JohnTedd · 17 May 2011 at 08:30

Having seen the GIGABYTE Masters of Overclocking comp I decided that since I had a Gigabyte board I would try some further overclocking....

In order to get some extra cooling I stuck my air conditioning unit behind the desk at full blast straight onto the rads. It was a bit awkward as the aircon unit is too high to hit the rads, so I raised the desk temporarily on two boxes to get the full effect of the aircon unit.

In this shot you can see the aircon by the rads:

This reduced my CPU temps by about 10-15 deg C so I was optimistic about getting some further overclocking, especially given that my CPU, NB, RAM and GFX cards are all watercooled.

Unfortuntely in the time I had I didn't manage ANY further overclocking

I will have another go, when I have some more time, but I am not that optimistic that the CPU can go higher. That is to say, without tweaking the voltages (which I have never done to date, so I'd need to learn a lot more about it).

Schizo · 17 May 2011 at 08:33

ghetto cooling !

love it

JohnTedd · 17 May 2011 at 08:38

I enjoyed doing it, but I was disappointed with the results. Gotta have another go!

piggin · 17 May 2011 at 10:57

Just up the voltages & go for it.

JohnTedd · 17 May 2011 at 11:26

I guess I will have to read up on what voltages to tweak then!

I also need to know how to underclock for the competition. I thought that would be a breeze, but even modest amounts of slowing down result in a non-booting PC and I have no idea why!

Sgt Tackleberry · 17 May 2011 at 12:48

OMG, you've got to love it

JohnTedd · 23 May 2011 at 22:05

During the week I did briefly up the Vcore quite significantly and got all the way to 5400 Mhz (200 MHz x 27 Mult x Vcore 1.8). It wasn't a stable configuration, but it kept going for long enough to qualify for the competition.

On Sunday I re-deployed the aircon unit, this time squarely facing one of the RADs. I got about 10 deg C cooling this time, perhaps not as good as the first time - no idea why. Idle temps came out at 22-25 for OC with aircon as opposed to 30-33 w/o aircon. I couldn't get a stable configuration above 5.1 GHz and a few times the temps shot up to 84 deg C!

My last test I went for a 3DMark Vantage score using 5 GHz and OC twin GTX480s and got a fully qualifying score of 40256 (using CPU Phyx) which I am pretty pleased with.

Afterwards I did some more tests w/o the aircon and soon found out that the aircon did make a +ve difference to the amount of OC possible. I don't know if it was these latter tests, but now my CPU is sick. I couldn't work out what was wrong, but I've disabled 4 of my 6 cores and now the PC boots. So it looks as though at least one core has gone kaput! I am going to try to RMA it, although I am not sure what I am supposed to say about OCing...

Anyone got any advice?