Project: "I might regret this"

[AdamR79]

Well, I thought it was about time to upgrade from my trusty Shuttle P4 2.8, and as I'm pretty skint, sought out some cheap bits.

I got a Celery e1200 - cheeeeep dual core oh yeah

Geil 800MHz DDR2, 2x1GB - was only a couple quid more than cheap

e, so why not

POV GF 8800GTS 320MB - 88 quid, so cheap I couldnt resist

I also bought a batch of cheap mobos, amongst these was a 946GZ foxconn mobo, which I thoguht would be ripe for the picking. It has pci x16, ddr2 etc, grrrreat.

No.

Get everything plugged into this old packard bell case I have laying about (it'll do for now), borrow a mates 550W PSU, all good. Turn it on, bit of fan noise, BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.

oh. what could it be I wonder. could it be the geil memory which reckons it wants 2.1v on the sticker? I pull it out and bung in a 512MB 1.8v stick I have, BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.

I then play about, turn it on, it posts. kind of. tells me I can press del if i want, but nope, BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP.

eventually, it posts normally (lol), apart from the beeping. most odd. I'm used to either an error message on screen OR an array of beeps to let me know something is buggered. This thing carries on like its ok, no errors on screen, just the beeeeeeping!

Conclusion is the board is probably up the swanny, attempts to flash the bios proved fruitless as it would give errors while booting off floppy, with even more beeps lol.

So right now im thinking bugger. But my mate happened to have a nice looking asus p5kc, with a cool looking copper pipe and

like that. I couldnt resist, although I would of liked to of researched the board etc, and tbh given the choice I would of bought something a bit less snazzy and conservative looking.

I get the board in, fires up fine. Install XP. Great. Get DX9 on, cool, try to install Crysis... hahaha. No. After approx 1-2GB of transfer it would lockup. HDD led on solid, and after about 10 mins, hdd led would flash, warning style. HDD inactive. Forced a reboot, same thing.

So I change HDD, thiking bad block. Same thing again with a different drive. So I think maybe something up with dvd drive, so I try install an ISO of NFS pro street I have, mounted virtually. Same thing, 1-2GB transfer and locks up.

ARRRRRGH. The board has some

ty jmicron IDE controller (Im using IDE not SATA drives btw). Why hasnt this board got a proper intel IDE controller on it

So, I put in my old Promise Ultra100TX card I have. (knew it would come in handy one day). Install XP, seems real quick. Install some games to test it out, faultless. I play some games for a few hours, rock solid.

So I decide to image off the 40GB drive to a 320GB I have, bung it in, boot up, BSOD, reboot. oh yay. So I think I'll re-install XP, boot off the xp cd, xp tells me there's no partitions, and the drive is 128GB... oh no.

Turns out the controller only supports up to 128GB drives lol. forgot about that limitation. However, While windows decided to tell me about the 128GB drive, it also trashed the partition table, and the 250GB partition on the drive, with films, pr0n, music etc has vanished. could this get any better!

Yes. I try my usual HDD recovery tools, and seems not to be able to find any of the ntfs streams, apart from a few small ones, nothing interesting. I'll look into that later...

Is the P5KC a bit of a lemon? It seems a bit picky about deciding to POST aswell, sometimes it doesnt post at all, sometimes it does.

I'll update this later, when I actually get this thing working right. I'm a bit gutted the IDE controller is a POS.

 

[kataras]

what a shame, hope you will sort it out...

let us know how you get on

 

[AdamR79]

Well, I'm now running the e1200 at 2.4GHz very stable, although speedfan reports my cpu 'core' reaching 65c, and just 'cpu' around 53, when running crysis etc.

I put the voltage up to 1.35 from the start, reckon I could get away with lowering it?

im running a stock intel cooler, not really bothered about changing it right now, need to stick with what I have. (£££)

 

[kataras]

take a look at what "Core Temp" shows you, speedfan might be off a bit

 

[AdamR79]

it shows core0 and core1 at ~35c, and just 'core' at 65... 'cpu' is ~53

Since then I've bumped it up to 2.8GHz and stil stable... should I be able to do this on a stock Intel cooler? 1.2GHz extra, wahey

 

[kataras]

Hell Yeah!

 

[AdamR79]

i just worked out the 'core' temp is actually my 8800GTS temp, so the cpu is only hitting 55 ish on full load @ 2.8ghz - YEEEEAH

o/c'd the gfx card too, 620MHz core and 2000MHz mem the difference is quite amazing

 

[AdamR79]

Well, I got it to 2880MHz, I tried for 3GHz, but with the voltage bump needed I think it was overheating the CPU too much as it would reset midway booting etc.

So i'm happy with 2.88, seems a good deal for a £35 CPU inc HSF!

Also got the ram running at 900MHz, with 4-4-4-12 timings.

Combined with the 620/2000MHz gfx clocks, I managed to net myself 10325 3Dmarks (06).

Combined, the above 3 components cost me £150 - good or what?

 

[kataras]

that is a 3d mark ownage, get a proper cooler, and clock that cpu more, even though, 2.9Ghz is indeed quite a lot. now if they only had a competition, where everyone, showed peformance per money spent, your rigs would be like nr 1. Congratz on overclock mate

 

[AdamR79]

cheers buddy

Been playing some more, trying to find perfect setting for the video card.

Got the core at 650 and the shader clock at 1600.

at 1650 it hung straight away virtually.

with the core at 660 and 655 crysis froze after about 10 mins of gameplay. Hoping 650 will be stable

May well get a proper cooler. I'm also using the "paste" you get with the CPU which is a small dollop, not sure how good it is tbh.

What would be a good LGA775 HSF, ideally quieter than the intel one. There's bags of room all around it so space wont be an issue if i have a huge heatsink.

Would really like to do a 100% overclock!

 

[kataras]

have a look at this table (below), G80 core cards have ratios/steps by witch they increase in speed. memory too. best bet is to download Riva tuner, and while increasing speed look at the hardware monitor (its got one built-in) you will see, the actual core increases every like 9mhz or something.

 

[AdamR79]

i've been using riva tuner as it happens. Most stable seems 625/1447, which doesnt bail out, but according to speedfan the core hits 70 ish c. from looking about on the net, thats normal for these cards. ouch!

I'm not really happy with the CPU temp, 45c at idle. What should they be stock?

 

[kataras]

i've been using riva tuner as it happens. Most stable seems 625/1447, which doesnt bail out, but according to speedfan the core hits 70 ish c. from looking about on the net, thats normal for these cards. ouch!

I'm not really happy with the CPU temp, 45c at idle. What should they be stock?

as long as cpu doesnt hit 65c on load, your fine mate

yer lol, graphic cards do run prerry hot, hell, mine one used to hit 80ish on load

 

[Acid90]

cheers buddy

What would be a good LGA775 HSF, ideally quieter than the intel one. There's bags of room all around it so space wont be an issue if i have a huge heatsink.

Tuniq Tower 120 or TRUE120 would be your best bet. If you do that, you could probably push it just that little bit more. Impressive so far mate, good job.