Air beats Water

No silly, I'm not talking about that stupid movies from Deepa Mehta. This is more about Overclocking. I got the Thermaltake Bigwater 735 kit from Newegg. For a start it was missing a nut to tighten the tube connection to one of the outlets. But still I decided to take the risk, remember a liquid cooled system means there's quite a bit of liquid flowing around your electronic components, and test the system out.

So out went my thermaltake bigtyphoon vx and in came the Bigwater 735. The setup was quite easy even though my ThermalTake Shark case wasn't ideal for connecting the components. But all said and done, the temps on my processor actually went up by about 6c. That's quite a bit of let down. Also due to the absence of fans over the PWMIC and Chipset their temps were also reaching 58-60c. Dismantling this setup was a mess though. Once your system is completely filled with the liquid you have to be carefull while uninstalling. With some spills and splashes I was able to dismantle the setup and was able to setup an RMA with newegg.

Now I'm back to aircooling. I'm convinced now that chips are cooled better by having a good airflow through the case. When the YateLoons arrive next week I'll have replaced all the stock fans with the YateLoons and these fans should move more air through the case than I'm doing now. My goal is to get this Opteron OC to 3.0Ghz. I'm at around 2.8G with a voltage supplied to the core, vcore, being 1.5V.

So there u go folks. Air beats Water

Overclocking

My current obsession is with overclocking. Overclocking simply means to run a processor at a speed greater than the prescribed one. AMD Processors (Athlon, Opteron etc) are well known for their overclocking ability. My current chip is an Opteron 165 that is rated to run at 1.8Ghz (remember its a dual core). I'm currently running it at 2.8Ghz which is about 60% Overclock.

It's great fun to assemble your computer and then mess around with the bios, tweaking the voltage to your proc, the FSB to your memory etc. But you have to be really careful with this overclocking thing. There are great many photos on the net showing fried CPUs, those that couldn't take the voltage supplied by their masters. An important part of OC-ing is to keep your processor cool. So if you up the voltage to the core of your processor the proc. temperature will go up. Therefore OC-ing through voltage raising should be the last resort.

The amount of OC-ing also depends on the MotherBoard (MoBo) you have. I have a DFI Lanparty CFX-3200-DR/G that's literally an OC's dream board. I can change a lot of parameters for the memory modules I use.

You overclock a processory by increasing the FrontSide Bus speed. This speed for my opteron was 200Mhz. Then there's the FSB multiplier which is 9. Therefore the speed for my proc was 1800Mhz (200*9). So the best way to OC is to increase the FSB. But if you increase the FSB you will face a limitation by the memory. Most DDR memory are rated at 200Mhz and will work well up to around 220Mhz. Therefore you are looking at a max OC of around 1980Mhz.

This is where the MoBo comes in. If your Mobo allows you to have steppings then you can change the FSB and set the stepping in such a way that your memory is run in it's stated speed. Now theoretically you can change the FSB and the memory stepping to achieve greater lengths of OC-ing. For the combo I have I was able to change the FSB to 300Mhz and change the stepping in such a way that my Memory ran at 225Mhz.

The FSB trick lasts only so long. Then you have to apply small increases in voltage to both your memory and proc to achieve further OC. This is where I'm stuck. My core temp goes up to 64C (core voltage,vcore, is 1.5v and FSB is 318Mhz). To keep the chip cool airflow in your case is very important. I have changed my setup so many times now. I had Coolermaster Centurion, then Antec P180B and now finally the setup is in a Thermaltake Shark. The processor is cooled by Thermaltake BigTyphoon VX. Great cooler by the way and it's huge. I mean literally huge. But one heck of a cooler. My core temps are around 39c at idle. But when at full load, running a program called Prime 95 to test the stability, the temp shoots up almost by 25c. I suspect the airflow in case is the problem.

To proceed further with my OC efforts, I have ordered a Thermaltake water cooler from newegg. Should arrive tomorrow. I have also ordered some 120MM fans to improve the airflow with in my case. I think the hot air is not removed quick enough (stock fans on the rear). I'll try with more fans and see if I can go past 320Mhz FSB. If not I have to go with Water cooling.