I think it's still appropriate to call him "jackass".

No TARDIS.

I'm okay if you want to without the Doctor part until I can acquire one.

Temps not doing too bad. Will push harder when I get a chance. (Weird variation in temps eh)



getting better


I could post at 5.0, boot couldnt boot into windows. dropped it to 4.8 and could boot in but blue screened about 1 minute in

My parts came in. My initial plan to do an upgrade to my existing machine failed. I noticed that my power supply only has the two PCIe power connectors (there's 2 connectors on 1 video card), so I wouldn't be able to power a second video card. So.. off to the local geek store I went.

I bought a Coolermaster 800w silent pro. It's not the greatest PSU ever, but it'll work. I figured at this point I had nearly all the parts for a completely new machine, so I bought a new case.. an Antec DF-30. I really like the looks of the case, and the way it functions. The power supply is moduler, so you only plug the cables in that you need to use, but I ened up using all but one cable. Coolermaster claims you can power 3 video cards with this PS, but that's because each cable has 2 of the 6 pin connectors on it. So, you're not really using two seperate cables for each video card, but one cable with 2 connectors per card. I don't think that'll be a a big deal since there's plenty of power on this PSU and I don't think the video cards will have an issue.

I installed the CPU and Noctua HS/fan first, outside the case. You really can't imagine how big the thing is until you actually see it in person. It's absurd. I figured that it would be hell trying to install it in the case so I installed it outside, which was fairly straight forward. It's nice how sturdy it seems. I use latex gloves when setting up a CPU and HS just to avoid getting greasy fingerprints on anything. This releveant because the gloves became useful later.

The Noctua is so massive it basically covers the memory with the intake fan. The memory I bought comes with it's own fan, but there's no way that will fit because the Noctua fan is pretty much directly on top of the memory, but I might be able to install the fan side ways, in front of the memory.. just for a bit more air flow or something. Actually, I think the Notcua intake fan is moving enough air (to power a small jet aircraft) that it should keep the memory cooled also. I'll see about that later once everything is settled.

So.. having the mother board in the case, it is apparent I'm going to need a multi-jointed person install the power connector at the top of the board by the cpu. It took me.. literally.. about a half hour to get that right. It didn't help that the power supply didn't have an 8 connector lead which would be much more obvious which is the correct cable to connect. Anyway.. I got it installed, but if I knew that was going to be an issue, I would have connected it to the mother board and then placed the board in the tray and screwed it down. Lesson learned.

Now.. for the screw from hell. If that power connector was difficult to reach because of the Noctua, the screw at the top left corner was impossible. I don't have a magnatized screw driver that long, and even if I did, the washer would keep falling off... so what i did was make a small hole in a finger of the glove, push the screw through it, pulled it up on to the screw driver and it held in place while I threaded it in a couple of rounds, and then pulled the glove up and off the screw and bam.. screwed it in the rest of the way and done.

The cable management is non-existant. After I get everything working and such, I'm going to recable and clean it all up. I need to get a couple of the 4 prong molex connector to 4 pin mb connector so I can get the chassis fans connected to the motherboard instead of directly to the power supply.

My plan to use a windows image of my old system did not work, and I'm very bummed out about that. After much struggling, I got the image to install, but it would bsod on boot and windows repair could not fix it. I'm going to just rebuild the raid and install windows and see if I can use the transfer wizard from my old computer to get most of what I need.. and then I'll just reinstall programs and such from there.

Speaking of the raid - a big limitation that I was not aware of. The P67 intel raid controller can only support 2TB max. That's pretty retarded, isn't it? I could have gone back to the store and bought a real raid controller but that's just more money, so I just configured my 2 tb drives to 1 tb each for the 2tb raid. I really wanted 1tb drives in the first place but seagate doesn't make a 1tb drive in sata 3. So, that's a waste of some money, but whatever. I still plan to put a big single drive in for backup and storage anyway. There's a chance that I might be able to allocate the other 2tb after windows is up and running. I kind of doubt it but you never know.

I should get the system up and running and windows setup the way I like, and then I'll get into the bios. I did look around at the new gui style bios and honestly, I don't think it's any better than the old style. It's prettier I guess.. and you can use a mouse.. but there's tons of new stuff in the bios. I'll use that one link I posted before to get started and hope it goes well.

Those clocks are so hawt Phaded, i'm envious.

4.6 blue screened after an hour or so. I think I'm messing around with the vccio too much. Might try toning it down to 4.5.

p8p67 pro/deluxe just got new bios today http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1578865 , removing the most frustrating bug in the board
"- Removes full reset at POST (double post) on cold boot or auto overclocking routine."
I have to wait until early next week before they release it for the p8p67 standard though.

I'm not sure what gives headroom for bclk tweakage. I've tried a few times to get it to boot at 102mhz with no luck

I'm not sure it it's related but my P67 evo will not post now. I've got Windows installed and all the drivers updated and working solid and was going to try and over clock. I saw an option called "oc tuner" which is supposed to do some automatic oc or other.. and now the fucking thing won't post. It starts, shuts off, automatically starts again, shuts off.. does that a few times until the power stays on but there is no post.

I don't know if this is related to the "cold" bug, I'm not sure exactly what that is. I cannot get the thing to post, and I don't know how to clear the cmos or whatever to get it back to default values. It certtainly is very chilly at idle, the ~20 range. Default clock speeds with prime95 torture test running, it topped out around 45.

I'm started to get worried this isn't recoverable.

/update

Got it to work. Was trying to boot again, noticed the red light of the "memory" in the upper right hand corner of the board was on. I pushed and held the button near it until it rebooted and now it has a screen up that says the memory is okay, and to save the settings in the bios. So that auto over clocking thing I hit must have changed the memory timings to something unusable. Think I'm okay now.

Yeah, its to do with the board stuffing up memory voltages when its set to auto

Set it off default and put in the rated voltages and frequency. I didn't bother putting in the proper timings though, left those on auto.

Theres a clear memory jumper on the board near the USB headers on the board
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1577124

Set at 4.5ghz without adjusting anything but the multiplier. Pretty nice heat numbers. I'll test to see how far it'll go but settle probably at ~4.5 depending on the heat and stability, and be super happy with it. The rig is a complete beast now.




I need to figure out how to manually enter the memory settings for the DIMMS I have. It's running at 1600 cas 9, but still.. the bandwidth is pretty exceptional.




Compare to the memory in my old Q6600 system.





The raid is very snappy as well. I mentioned before that the black caviar was almost twice as fast as my old raptor raid. The seagate raid is about 1.5x as fast as the caviar, but it's the small file speed that makes it feel so quick. It's also very quiet. It's going to work well for at least a few years I think.



the black caviar




Actually.. looking at that again, the raid 0 absolutely crushes in smaller files. I need to find some SSD atto benchmarks and see how far off my raid is to a single SSD. It really is fantastic how it feels.

Re-ran 3dmark resulting in 7142, compared to Kor's 8201, which is not bad considering the much faster GPU's he's using... and quite a bit better than the 3489 I had on the Q6600 single GTX460 I was using.
http://3dmark.com/3dm11/473436

There's a new WHQL Nvidia driver just released, 266.58, that seems to be working well. All the nerds at hardocp are raving about it anyway.

This is what my system does.......it's like Tool but more complicated.

Well.. I'm a bit amazed. The Seagate 2 terrabyte raid is slightly faster in reads and writes, and absolutely demolishes in small files, a single SSD.

I'm just blown away how fast this is. I've got BFBC2 at 1920x1200 everything on high, 8x MSAA, 16x AF, HBAO on and it's always over 100 FPS and looks fantastic. Wow has every possible setting maxed and FPS over 100. And the sound.. the realtek chip on the mb is so much better than the one on my old gigabyte. It really is like a warzone in my house when playing BC2. I had no idea how much my old Q6600 system sucked compared to this.

I'm still not able to get the memory to run stable at 2133, but it's running nice at 1866. Maybe the new bios update will help with that, tucked into one of those "minor bug fixes". If that doesn't work, I'll hit the G.Skill forums. Their techs seem to be very responsive, if not well versed in engrish. It's possible that using 4 DIMMS is causing the issue but they should still hit their rated speeds regardless imo. If 1866 is the best it'll do, that's not a big deal as it's pretty damn close in bandwidth but it would be nice to be able to run it at the speeds I so obscenely paid for.

Gonna push it really hard in a bit to see how it'll do. So far, the entire overclock process for me has been to put the multiplier at 45 and turn on the computer. I don't really understand many of the bios options and what they do, so I need re-read that one post I linked before that has a lot of the info in it.

*** adding.. the new bios updates and chipset drivers have been released on the hardforum thread.
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1578865

Here's another thread at hardforum from an Asus rep, detailing how to overclock the 2600k.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1578110

I'm at 4.9ghz stable, with AIDA64 stress test temps sub 60, and prime temps in the mid 60s. Playing games, the CPU is typically in the 40's to low 50's. I just copied what he shows on the bios screenshots, and kept raising the multi 1 step at a time. It became unstable at 5ghz. The Asus rep says that unlike previous CPU's, the 2600k's just have a wall that no amount of tweaking will allow you to pass. Adding additional CPU voltage and such won't help so he says set the bios at the settings shown and just ramp up the multi until it fails, then back down 1 multi and it should be stable.

It's quite impressive... and I've got the memory stable at 2133mhz. I ordered a 2tb green caviar from newegg for $70 bucks, and I'll install that for backups and such.. and I think it's done.

http://3dmark.com/3dm11/520305

Ran this again on the latest AMD drivers, gave a little boost. Still doesnt detect my CPU correctly, leaves off the extra multiplier from turbo boost.

Picked up the new GTX560 Ti for my brother yesterday for his birthday, should be in next week. Keen to take a look at it, that being said the rest of his rig is going to bottleneck the crap out of it but hey... he can pay for that himself.