Quad into a mITX with 120W? No way :)

hmm, didn't realise ATI tools worked on the nvidia card :)
well, with boinc on snooze, prime95 on the torture test at in place large ffts (max power consumption) and ati tools running with default 450 core and 1066 mem
my load peaks between 114-115W,
so i guess thats close....
goes and searches for more undervolting tools....
 
Ok- so I gave up and bought a q9400s..... just arrived in my hands. will post new values when I manage to get that FP7 out of the socket....... (might have to go with the intel stock cooler if I can't get the FP7 back on again after that).
 
Hot dang.
The CPU runs really cool....hitting 40oC max!
And very low power draw, about 61W at idle, 90W full
so there you go!

 
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awesome, glad you did it, running your PSU at full load for extended periods of time drastically shortens its life. You can undervolt your Q9400S so it runs at exactly 1v, that should save additional power. Also, it is faster clock for clock than your Q6600! :)

also, judging by your screenshot, you are still running XP. Have you thought about upgrading to Vista or 7? They are able to take advantage of multiple cores/threads far better than XP.
 
You can effectively run a vanilla Q9400 at 1v stock clock, both the Q9400 and Q9400S are R0 cores with the same VID range.
Some one did a comparison of Q8400S and normal Q8400 and the Q8400 sample managed to run its stock clock at a slightly lower voltage than the "S" version!
 
Hmm, how do you guys get access to the lower voltages? bios doesn't allow undervolting and it isn't present in rmclock, which i believe reads off the cpu, as in different machines it gives me different allowed values.
I don't think I can undervolt this chip anyway, which is a shame, at 8x full load on 1.1V it has hung a couple of times within 2 hours; (not blue screen, just hangs), and so I think I have it running on 1.18V now, and seems stable enough so far. And at that voltage power draw is about 100 W full.
I am still most impressed with the amount of heat generated- it really hasn't gone above 45, on the same cooler as that q6600, which was running at 80 degrees...

timefalls: i have windows seven on preorder- can't wait to put it on this baby :)
 
Grimgoth... What are you using this computer for? I don't get why you would need a quad in a m-itx setup unless you were planning on gaming, graphic design of some sort or number crunching, and you don't seem to have much of a gaming gfx card and windows 7 isn't going to help crunching?

Or is the quad in there just so you can say you've got one? Just curious
 
Well, to be honest, it was an experiment guardsmon,
everyone was putting in dual core chips into thier zotac setups, and I kept wondering why not a quad- and in a small ITX case like the inwins, rather than the SG05, the answer seemed to be that the power headroom was not enough. So I bought the bits to try and proove that it could be done.
To that: yes it can be done with an undervolted Q6600, but the consensus is that it wasn't going to be safe enough in the long term.
Now of course, why didn't I just stop there and just pull out the chip and live with it. Well... right now its sitting there crunching BOINC away for me, and is proving more power efficient that some of the older rigs that I had (a 4200X2). I was going to put win7 on it when it finally comes out, bring the baby into work and go: who wants me to build these for their office, seeing as we are a lab, don't have too much office space, and am being taken over by imacs (and even a mac mini at one point), which really, for processing power... but then again I am a hobbyist, not a pc supplier, so. hmm. :)
edit: I guess its a why climb a mountain thing in the end.
 
Fair enough. Please keep going ahead with your plan to stop the office being taken over by mac. That sounds like a good start to saving the universe :D
 
I should actually sit down and price the whole system again, because I am thinking that I've gone over the roughly £400 budget I set myself.

edit:
Well, looks like I was right, without Hard Disk, OS and RAM, the build came to £409.93 including VAT.
sigh. Thank gosh i didn't go for the Q9550S lol.
 
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Sigh, now OcUK brings out these bundles which would have saved sooo much hassle :p
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/search_results.php?sortby=&groupid=&search=itxpromo
and that case with a rated 200W PSU. so really the original q6600 would have worked here.
Difference in Case dimensions between the two:
New BP655 in bundle: 265mm x 100mm x 310mm
BM639 I used: 264mm x 112mm x230mm
Am guessing that extra 8 cm is for the beefier PSU.

edit: crap, I just specced myself a system, and it comes in at about £500 (all new, no OS. sigh..)
 
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It's a spot of necromancy, but I've just come across this thread and would like to say thank you for posting it. I'm trying to gauge whether a 750 can be run using a 150W pico psu, and this is the first evidence I have that suggests it'll be fine.

Cheers :)
 
My Htpc is a E5300, 2gb ddr2, 1tb lp seagate drive, 80gb laptop hard drive all together with a Asus P5N7A-VM. This runs off of my silverstone ML02 120w psu.

In reviews a similer system using my motherboard and a q6600 a single desktop hard drive and 2gb of ram and a desktop lg blue ray drive , total draw was 85w another review with a dual core noted 60w total load, im not surprised of your system its impressive just how much you can run on how little these days, GPU seem to be the hungry sods these days, i think people over exagerate on system power supply needs.
 
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