Project Red Alert - IMG heavy

BigDom · 31 Jan 2006 at 20:40

With the inspiration of similar recent project I've decided to turn this old case I had lying around...

Into an overclocked Red monster of doom. Naturally on a budget although the budget's a bit higher than other recent examples of about £400 it's still fun and hopefully you guys will enjoy it too

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Mobo and PSU fitted, Mobo is the Abit AN8 Fatality although won't be using the Nguru module as it's the wrong colour and not practical to respray.

CPU, 3500+ Venice cored with a Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro CPU Cooler. Since buying it I understand this cooler might struggle beyond 2.5ghz - we'll see. As you can see it's got help from 2 80mm fans plus the 2 fans on the mobo ( covered by the black shroud ). I'll also be adding a blowhole and 80mm fan just as soon as I can work out where.

BigDom · 31 Jan 2006 at 20:41

Once I'd done that it was time to paint the panels - here they are in primer awaiting the gloss coats. Using normal car aerosol spray paints, in this case a metalic peugeut red. Chose red as black is too normal

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and finally the case all together in red lovelyness. This is a bit of a trial fit as the side panel hasn't been laquered yet but gives a good idea of the final look.

Final spec will hopefulyl be :-

1gb Gskill ZX
SLI'd 6600's cooled by Zalman's.
Athlon 64 3500+ Venice cooled by Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro

HDD is an old 10gig which wil in the future be replaced by something else.

CD-Rom is an old one I had lying around, not even sure if it works.

Everythign will be clocked as high as I can stabely manage

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BigDom · 31 Jan 2006 at 23:16

m3csl2004 said:
deffo want some serious cathodes and fans in there, get it lookin mean, than you want......water cooling with red uv additive

Hehe Oooo now you mention it that could be a fun future addition. Especially with that red mobo

BigDom · 31 Jan 2006 at 23:18

(BoG) Napalm said:
Shame about the paint you got on the washing machine(?) in the background

Otherwise looks sexy.

hehe fortunatly turps got it off the machine and the wood is going in a weeks time

BigDom · 1 Feb 2006 at 00:06

Ooo thinking about it... shame I don't know someone who can do custom lazer cuts... Lazer cut window in the side with 'Red Alert' accross it.

BigDom · 1 Feb 2006 at 00:57

nikebee said:
none of the images are working here mate

nothing at all in firefox, and red X's in IE

Strange working fine for me on Opera and obviously for other posters. Definatly still on the FTP host too.

BigDom · 1 Feb 2006 at 02:03

Appears my mates host is playing up - changed host

BigDom · 1 Feb 2006 at 23:25

Thanks for the support

I remembered an unusued Tagan 430W modular I had so that's been swapped for the Antec. Neater insides now

- but tighter behind the CD-Rom

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Just waiting for the 6600's to arrive then I can start work on the next stage

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Plan on benchmarking with a single 6600 and default clocked 3500+. Then working on the CPU. Then SLI, then overclocking the graphics.

Not got any expectations out of the 6600 ( although they are being sold as overclocked ) - don't really know anything about them at all so any tips on that front would be appreciated. I just know they are SLIable and have run in SLI mode.

BigDom · 6 Feb 2006 at 23:02

Update time

The twin 6600's havn't arrived yet but I recently took advantage of the cheap X1800XT's so I've setup Red Alert with my old X800GTO2. Managed to get the layout pretty neat and tidy.

So the spec is currently :-

Venice 3500 cooled buy the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro
X800GTO2 cooled buy a Arctic Cooling ATI 4 (X800 Series) VGA Silencer
G.Skill 1GB DDR ZX PC3200 (2x512MB) CAS2 Dual Channel Kit

After Installing Win2K and the various tools needed to test her I setup to work overclocking her.

Currently at the time of writing she is running prime95 with the following :-

230FSB at a voltage of 1.45 - 2.530 Ghz
Memory I've slackend off to (assuming I changed the right values) CL 2.5-4-4-8 and upped the volts 1 notch to 2.65.
Graphics running at 494/594 for now.

Benchmarks will be when I'm happy she's stable

As said earlier I am aiming for 2.6Ghz so 236fsb

BigDom · 6 Feb 2006 at 23:36

nikebee said:
haha
great news buddy, really starting to take shape!

what PSU are you using in it?

oh.. and ever heard of a duster?

Tagan 430W silent modular.
Duster - nah

- I know I know - I'll get it done when I remember

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BigDom · 7 Feb 2006 at 09:18

Thanks for the support

Ran Prime overnight then took the gamble to go straight for 2.6Ghz and added the extra 6fsb. She's now priming at 2.5993 Ghz

. Guess I need an extra fsb to reach the first target but I'm hopefull of a bit more out of her

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BigDom · 9 Feb 2006 at 21:03

haha Keyboards my daughters old one.. she has this habit of decorating things - lol...

As I type I'm running a 3DMark 06 benchmark on it.. I'll be back with the current status in a little while

. Looking promising for a stable O/C at 236FSB though. Just wish I had a ram divider as the rams starting to limit ( proved by running the non-RAM torture test and getting no errors but getting errors in the with ram test in prime95 ) the O/C and I'm now sure the CPU will go higher as I figured the origonal problem I though was CPU ( so was pushing the CPU volts up and thus temp ) was the Ram.

BigDom · 9 Feb 2006 at 21:28

Benchmarks so far :-

The initial test was Default CPU, Default Graphics (other than it being 16 pipes) gave 3DMark05 4671 and in the benchmark on prime95's benchmakr gave a Best time for 67 bit trial factors: 12.675 ms.

Overclocking the GTO2 to 494/594 Gave 3dMark05 of 6077 and 3dMark06 of 2006

Gives 3dMark05 6155 3dMark06 2051 and Best time for 67 bit trial factors: 10.564 ms.

Next to wind up the graphics a bit

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Sadly looks like I've suffered from the bad experience of the bay and my cards havn't arrived...

Gives three options...

Buy 2 of Leadtek WinFast PCX6600GT-TDH GeForce PCX6600 GT 128MB DDR3 TV-Out/DVI (PCI-Express) to carry on the SLI theme.

Or stick with the GTO2..

Or any other options you guys can think of.

I'm thinking of installing watercooling at some point but that's for another time/project. May even do that in another case I have ( full tower ) in the future.

Not sure how that rates for a air overclock but I'm reasonably happy with it.

BigDom · 9 Feb 2006 at 21:39

Or even two
XFX GeForce 6600 256MB DDR2 DUAL DVI XXX Edition
assuming that =
XFX GeForce PCX6600 Extreme XXX Edition 256MB DDR2 TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (PVT43-PUDS7) (GX-058-XF)

As the former is the description on the XFX site and latter OCUK.. Former is SLI compatable, latter the picture shows a SLI connector but doesn't say SLI compatable - this card is a nice choice as it's on this week only.

BigDom · 21 Feb 2006 at 00:54

Working on it

Got two 6600's from OCUK but SLI's been playing me up something rotten. Trying to get them overclocked in SLI mode is proving hard although in single mode I'm happy with the OC I'm getting ( about 150mhz boost ( 400 to 550) on GPU and RAM ( which I expected to be poor ) from 800 to 975. Also had trouble in that the wierd test that Nvidia like kept failing so had to disable it.

Single benchmarks are about 3000 in 3DMark05 and 1500 in 06 - just under double in SLI mode.

I'll do a full post when I've got SLI working as I hope.