Sprocket Resurfaces...

[Detale]

Damn!! Where did you see it for that price man? I think th ewin assesment with that CPU at that speed should be higher that 7.5 no? Also how the HELL do you get your HDD at 182Mb/sec

[clocker]

Craigslist.
Yeah, I was surprised as well...I just checked on a whim and hark!, there it was.

He was a very nice, bright guy...ended up tossing 2 x 2GB sticks of g.Skill DDR2 into the deal.

I was surprised to get as high as a 7.5 frankly.
MS didn't leave much room for the i7 performance superiority in the CPU test.

About the HDD score.
It's actually low compared to HDTach.
In HDTach I get an average read of near 250MB/s.

That's 3 x 250GB drives in RAID0.

[clocker]

Still struggling with the setup.
Looks like I'm going to finally come to grips with the BIOS settings...


This setup seems to pretty stable, anything beyond and things fall apart pretty quickly.
All indications point to increased northbridge voltage (which might be eased if I removed 2 sticks of RAM but I'd prefer to run fully populated as long as possible) but since I went water and lost the airflow from the CPU heatsink, the northbridge gets rather toasty at stock voltage.
Gigabyte uses a weird 65mm hole spacing for the NB, so no generic chipset blocks will fit.
Probably have to make my own mounting plate to get around this issue.

My luck with Intel temp sensors continues to suck...two of the four are non-responsive at low temps, the other two have relatively low movement.
I've pretty much been reduced to watching my vid card temps to track overall loop performance.
Fortunately, all seems well- no giant spikes in temp- and I have a ton of cooling headroom, so I'm not very concerned.

[Detale]

3.5 still isn't a bad oc man. personally I think you may be spoiled Maybe because I have 2 750gb Hdd's they are slower? Was the chip new or used? Looking good as usual bro.

[clocker]

3.5GHz ain't bad for a start but there's a lot more left...she hit the 500FSB on the first try.
The problem of course, is my bullheaded insistence on running all four DIMM slots.
Four memory modules and four cores really puts the wood to the northbridge and that's where I'm going to be concentrating next.

RAID 0 scales linearly with the number of drives.
More drives= higher read/writes/burst...it's just that simple.

The chip was used, for a total of three months- I saw his sales receipt from Tank Guys.

[Detale]

Shit that aint bad at all man. Quit being so stubborn and pop two of them sticks outta there man. or why not WC the northbridge? the EK5 fits I think it looks about the same as my other GB board

[clocker]

why not WC the northbridge? the EK5 fits I think it looks about the same as my other GB board

No, the EK5 won't fit...at least not unmodified.
The hole spacing in the board is 64mm, which is a non-standard distance.

I'm going to pick up a Swiftech MCW30 and make some brackets to adapt to the board.

As far as the RAM goes...
Ever since the days of s939 it has bugged me that 4 sticks of memory cause the board to flake out.
Especially since I was buying (then) top of the line DFI boards, it seemed like for the money, I should get the functionality.

This relative cheap Gigabyte board looks like it can do it if I spend the time to figure it out.
If I can't, well, we'll cross that bridge when it falls on us.

[Detale]

Sounds good man. Make sure you charge your camera battery

[clocker]

OK, here we go.

First off, here's the stock heatsink setup...


The northbridge and the mosfet sink are tied together with a heatpipe.
A very loose and poorly clamped heatpipe as it turns out...all it took was a gentle twist and the pipe easily parted company with the sink and the two were again separate.
As impressive as the stock setup looked, I have to wonder how effective the heatpipe could have been. It was so loose that contact had to be crummy.
Oh well, all gone now.
While I had the board out I decided to upgrade the southbridge sink as well- I have several Zalman passive sinks and one of them was already cut for vid card clearance, so what the hey?, says I, and on it went...


I also hardmounted the mosfet sink...say bye to the plastic pushpins.

Back to the northbridge.
The stock mounts for the Swiftech MCH30 chipset block were indeed too short to match the Gigabyte's mounting holes.
So I decided to do a quick and dirty mockup mount so I could measure for new brackets.
Turns out, this was rock solid and I decided to just leave it as is...




As I feared/suspected, the distance between the CPU block and the northbridge was just too close to avoid tube crimping.
Ultimately the only satisfactory routing led from the CPU up to the vid card, then down to the northbride and out to the pump.
Like so...




This made bleeding slightly more difficult as the tubing didn't follow a bottom to top route, instead it went bottom> top> middle.
This caused a big bubble to get trapped between the vid card and the northbridge, but some creative tipping of the case finally freed it up and all was good.

Of course, I have no way to monitor the northbridge temp, so whether or not this was useful, I have no idea.
The stock sink was getting very warm to the touch and I have to assume this setup is better (why do I HAVE to assume this? Mainly because I spent the time, that's why...), so we'll see.

Right then- back to our sad little lives...

[Detale]

Lookin good man. I love the cut down heatsink. a few questions if you don't mind

1) What kind of barbs ar those?
2) how do you like those hose clamps? I had them and dreaded taking them off
3) I cant really see how the NB sink is mounted could you please elaborate a touch?