snoepie Posted July 4, 2003 Share Posted July 4, 2003 With the great help of forummoderator Peachy I've planned this weekend for my first serious attempt of overclocking one of my machines. Since I want to be prepared properly I went shopping for some cooling devices on my P4 and GeforceGPU. My local computershop advices me to use ThermalTake products. Is this a good advise or should I look for something else? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peachy Posted July 5, 2003 Share Posted July 5, 2003 Snoepie,good luck on your overclocking forays this weekend. Thermaltake is a good brand. Their products rank consistently high amongst the overclocking crowd. Swiftech also makes good products. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FuzzButt Posted July 6, 2003 Share Posted July 6, 2003 I would agree with peachy,TT's products are good as is CoolerMaster's stuff. The fan's vary if you want fast high flow TT is good. But if you are looking for quiet and high flow then your guess is as good as mine. I have yet to find the holy grail of quiet high flow unless I go to 120mm.Good luck Snoepie.Chris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FuzzButt Posted July 7, 2003 Share Posted July 7, 2003 How did it go? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snoepie Posted July 7, 2003 Author Share Posted July 7, 2003 How did it go?Ordered my Thermaltake stuff, was not in stock, have to wait for delivery. First mount the cooling devices, then start overclocking. Safety first! (ooh, I can't wait but must be patient!) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FuzzButt Posted July 7, 2003 Share Posted July 7, 2003 Did you get the Artic Silver III compound for the processor to Heatsink bond? After appling I would wait a day or so of regular use at the regular settings to allow it to "Seat" before really cranking it up. Kind of like buttering the pan before you cook your eggs. What HSF did you end up ordering?Chris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
quint Posted July 7, 2003 Share Posted July 7, 2003 Snoepie,Admire your OC'ing interest...best of good fortune to you. FuzzButt makes a great suggestion, though the proper procedure is involved, it is critical! Here it is from the "horse's mouth": Artic Silver III DirectionsHave fun, most of all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snoepie Posted July 7, 2003 Author Share Posted July 7, 2003 FuzzButt: What HSF did you end up ordering?I ordered: TT-A1258 Dragon Orb (for CPU), TT-A1349 Giant II (for GPU), TT-A1414 Passive Heat Spreader (for RAM) and an extra case-fan. It will make my computer very noisy, I know, but it's for testing/learning purposes only. The moment I master the techniques of overclocking, I possibly build me a watercooled system: what fun this will be! FuzzButt: Did you get the Artic Silver III compound for the processor to Heatsink bond? After appling I would wait a day or so of regular use at the regular settings to allow it to "Seat" before really cranking it up. Kind of like buttering the pan before you cook your eggs.Quint: The proper procedure is involved, it is critical!Ooops..... Gosh ...... Never thought about this (there's thermal grease interface material included with the Orb and Giant). Should I buy and apply Artic Silver III? And wait 200 hours to "seat"? Wow: never knew that before! You rescued me from sudden death! Thanks for your support! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peachy Posted July 7, 2003 Share Posted July 7, 2003 Snoepie,Arctic Silver may or may not be needed depending on how much you trust the quality of the Thermaltake interface material. I would just leave it for now. But, once you remove the heatsink you'll definitely have to clean the old material and apply Arctic Silver or similar.Wow! You are going to have one heck of a noisy computer! What's your strategy for overclocking going to be? Inspired by you I decided to push my overclock a little higher last week. I've been running at 2.2 GHz since last Wednesday (138 MHz FSB), but I can't seem to get it to POST at 140 MHz. I suspect I've reached the limit of either my memory (Crucial DDR PC2100) or I need to up the voltage from the stock 1.5 V. My goal when I get some PC2700 RAM is to try and hit 166 MHz for an effective frequency of 2.66 GHz. Mind you, an overclock from 1.6 GHz to 2.2 GHz is a 37.5% increase in speed. Not bad with the stock Intel HS/F and two Antec case fans (one in front drawing in air and the other at the back expelling it!) Just for stability sake I ran a Quake III Arena demo loop alternating between q3crusher and quaver overnight yesterday and it was still running when I woke up 6.5 hours later. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snoepie Posted July 8, 2003 Author Share Posted July 8, 2003 Mind you, an overclock from 1.6 GHz to 2.2 GHz is a 37.5% increase in speed. Not bad with the stock Intel HS/F and two Antec case fansGreat results Peachy. I'm pleased to hear you're able to further increase the speed of your system, nice to hear I inspired you on this My overclocking goal wil be an effective frequency of 3.80GHz (high goals are hard to reach, but lets try it out; I've done all the proper preparations didn't I?).Current speed 2.538Ghz with clock multipier of 19 and FSB at 133.6MhzTarget speed 3.800Ghz with same multipier and FSB at 200.0Mhz.I've upgraded my Bios so I have bus speed at 800Mhz (devided by 4 makes 200Mhz reachable). I have PC3200 Ram, so on this there can't be a problem.Of course I will increase the FSB step by step, each time testing stability and carefully monitoring temperature. After reaching the max possible I will optimize my DDRAM-settings and try to increase the max possible any further (but not above 200Mhz).This is a great adventure for me; I deeply appreciate the help you gave me in understanding the principles of overclocking in the clear written, easy to understand PM's you sent me. Thanks Peachy, I will keep you informed on the results. Ooooh, it's a tease for me all those plans and having to wait for my cooling devices to arrive! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FuzzButt Posted July 8, 2003 Share Posted July 8, 2003 Wow. That is some goal. Odds are that 3.8GHz is reachable with the correct processor and cooling combination. Some of the Extreme Hardware PC Shops are selling high 3 GHz P4's with water cooling. I wish I could remember what manufacturer it was. Your ultimate success depends on the quality of the die your processor was cut from. Some are better than others. Nearly a 33% overclock is not a big deal but these are frequencies that are .5GHz above what Intel is selling on the streets right now. So where are your O/C ideas comming from? Tom's Hardware? Overclocker Cafe? PC Extreme?Chris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snoepie Posted July 8, 2003 Author Share Posted July 8, 2003 So where are your O/C ideas comming from? Tom's Hardware? Overclocker Cafe? PC Extreme?Ooh, I've been reading quite a lot about this but in fact it was Peachy that made me think about o/c. BTW I love doing weird things with pc's and os's. Using an old commodore64 I made a computercontrolled toy-railway for a nephew, with an adapted RS232 interface. I have a full functional old computer running with Win98 stripped to 40Mb. Currently some friends and I are working on a fun-project to get a full functional WinXP on a computer without harddisks, but only using a cd-rw (that's a tough one!). Together with my dad I did some Eprom-burning of games to use with a SuperNintendo, etc. I like the challenge of making something I invented for myself. I think this is an exellent time, since computers now are (compared to cars) in the stage of the T-Ford. When I hear my granddad telling about his old cars (always defect and he was always able to do the repairjob himself) and think of my Mazda, always driving without any problem and I not having to know anything about how to repair! In about 50 years no-one will ask what OS is in use?, can I add an extra application or peripheral without problem?, no, they will only look at the speed and the shiny case and let some maintenancemen do the yearly 800Tb checkup.So now is the perfect time to learn (and have fun), in a few years we will take it all for granted. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peachy Posted July 8, 2003 Share Posted July 8, 2003 Currently some friends and I are working on a fun-project to get a full functional WinXP on a computer without harddisks, but only using a cd-rw (that's a tough one!)Snoepie,Take a look at this page and see if you could adapt it to Windows XP. I haven't tried it; I've been putting it off for the past 4 years! Maybe I will tackle it this year. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snoepie Posted July 9, 2003 Author Share Posted July 9, 2003 Peachy, nice link. But it's describing the easy way out. Compress Windows, burn it on CD, add a ramdisk-creator, boot up from cd and run the usercritical parts of windows in the ramdisk. Besides shrinking the size of WinXP it's not too difficult. What we're trying to do is the full use of the rewrite function of a CD-RW. So we're creating an utilitie to first enable read/write functions on the cd-rewriter, then boot up WinXP and letting it think the rewriter is a harddisk. Of course the whole thing will be incredible slow and has no use at all But possibly during the process we discover things that come in handy later (and stripping WinXP to the bone is great fun, since there's so much nobody ever needs to use). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peachy Posted July 9, 2003 Share Posted July 9, 2003 Point noted. How about this Windows XP Embedded Howto from Microsoft? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snoepie Posted July 9, 2003 Author Share Posted July 9, 2003 Good link Peachy, me and my mates will read it carefully (never seen before!). At first glance the EWF is a kind of ramdisk. We will study the article. Thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest genaldar Posted July 9, 2003 Share Posted July 9, 2003 Before I ordered my current fan/heatsink I did some digging on the net and found a great round up at this site. Dan also does an interesting comparison of heatsink compounds that shows arctic silver 3 isn't really worth the premium price. In case you're wondering I got the Global Win Fop 38 and yes it is very loud. But it keeps everything cool. In fact it allows me to overclock to 133 fsb (on an old abit bh6). The only thing that keeps me from keeping it at that speed is the video card. It crashes at 124 fsb and 133 (it can only use a 1/1 or a 3/4 multplier). And at $10 its a **** of a deal, beating coolers that cost 2 or 3 times higher. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gus K Posted July 9, 2003 Share Posted July 9, 2003 I suspect I've reached the limit of either my memory (Crucial DDR PC2100)It is the Crucial. There is really nothing special about Crucial, except for their excellent support. It's got to stay pretty close to spec, not a good choice for overclocking. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snoepie Posted July 10, 2003 Author Share Posted July 10, 2003 Followup on cooling devices:Yesterday the ordered Thermaltake cooling devices (CPU, GPU, Ram and case) arrived. Wow, great stuff: what ease to mount! The hardest part was the Giant II for GPU-cooling (two heatsinks, heatpipe and fan). Of course all the mounting took me the whole evening (bit clumsy with a screwdriver and such super-tiny screws), but it's done now!For all I didn't choose for the ArcticSilver but the Thermaltake included interface material.Now the grease has to "seat", so I'll wait another 48 hours before I start overclocking. So far all the new cooling devices decreased temperatures (at normal clockspeed) with approximately 6 degrees celsius. (CPU from 41 to 34 degrees, mobo from 38 to 33 degrees, GPU from 56 to 48 degrees) only graphics-ram temperature increased one degree from 41 to 42.I'm happy with this results so far, and I'm looking forward to the actual overclocking! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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