Our Computers

Mike's New Comp – built 2-19-9 Asus P6T Deluxe Intel X-58 Chipset - LGA-1366 Motherboard Intel Core i7 920 Bloomfield CPU – 2.66 GHz – SLBCH – 3839A610 – 8M/4.80/08 6 GB (3X2 GB) Corsair Dominator PC-1600 – TR3X6G1600C8D – DDR3 eVGA 017-P3-1291-AR GeForce GTX-295 video 150 GB Western Digital 10,000 RPM SATA 3.0 VelociRaptor OS Drive 1 TB Samsung Spinpoint 7,200 RPM 32M SATA 3.0 storage drive Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme HSF (with Artic Silver 5) Lite-On 22X DVD R/W iHAP422-08 LS RT OCZ EliteXStream OCZ800EXS 800 Watt ATX12V CoolerMaster CM-690 Case   Sandra Mem B/W 25.78 GB/s 3Dmark 06 – 20,090

Build pictures

All the parts with the exception of the heat sink came from NewEgg. The HS I bought straight from Thermalright.

It was a good, trouble-free build. The comp fired right up when I first turned it on. My Samsung Spinpoint was DOA, though - I RMA'ed it to NewEgg and got a new one a week later, and it's been trouble-free since.

I'm really happy with the case - the temps seem very good, and it was easy to work with in the build. The tool-less PCI card holders don't work - they just didn't hold the vid card secure, so I tore them out and used screws instead. The HD drive bays were easy to use, and there were plenty of spces to hide excess cables - making everything look nice and neat.

I'm really impressed with Asus products - every board I've bought from them has been really well done - starting back to the oldie but goodie, A7N8X Deluxe - the original NForce 2 board.

The eVga GTX-295 is just awesome. It performs so well - the frame rates are so good on every game I play - that I really haven't tried to overclock it yet.

For CPU overclocking, I did pretty well - I ended up stable at 3.7 GHz - an 1,100 MHz overclock (idle temps at around 33c - load 77c). . I did get it to run at 4.0 GHz, but it wasn't stable, and the temps were so high I didn't feel comfortable increasing the vcore any more.

Current stable specs:

Yeah, I haven't overclocked the RAM yet either (it's running below spec). I found it hard to get the BCLK up past 200 MHz. I'd been screwing with it a couple weeks and basically just stopped - it runs too good to worry about squeezing that last little extra bit of performance out of it right now.

Eventually, I'll spend some more time working with lower mulpipliers and see how far I can push the RAM.

Benchmarks:

Highest stable 3Dmark 06 – 22,191 at 3.976 GHz (with a multi of 21) BCLK at 190 - vcore at 1.43 but BSOD during P95 (8 instances).

Sandra Mem B/W - 26.28 GB/s - at BCLK 199 @ 3.8 GHz.

Previous Computers

The Pellegrini family is now an all-DFI household. All three of us now have DFI Lanparty nF4 DR SLI boards:

Our current comps:

We still have a couple of the MSI K8N Neo Platinum (socket 754) boards running in backup computers:

Update - 4-24-7

Over the past few months, we upgraded everyone to Opteron 170's. Trav and Mason's are running at 2.75 GHz - which was a quick and dirty overclock - I never pushed it with their comps. I also upgraded both to 2 GB's of RAM - the Patriot PDC2G4000 ELK, which has turned out to be just great.

My comp, I upgraded several months after Trav and Mason's, and I ended up with an Opty 170 with a different stepping.

I spent a couple days pushing my comp and was able to get it to run stable at 2.9 GHz at 1.4 vcore. I was able to get it to boot into Windows at 3 GHz - at 1.50 vcore - but it wasn't totally stable (Failed Prime). I think it probably will run stable at 3 GHz, but I'm guessing it might take as much as 1.525 or even 1.55 volts to do it and that's kinda high for air cooling. I may try it later after the chip has burned in, just for the hell of it.

Even so, a 900 MHz overclock is pretty damned awesome!

The OCZ RAM I had running with no problems at 273 MHz - it passed 4 hours of Memtest. Pretty damned impressive. I may push it more later (and try to see if it'd run 1:1 at 290 MHz).

Strangely enough, at the same speed (263 MHz), my Sandra Memory Bandwidth test is about 200 points lower with the new processor. Same exact RAM settings as I was using with the 3700 San Diego.

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I'm extremely happy with the DFI boards. All three boards have proved to be exceptionally stable - and good overclockers.

I've had mine running stable 1:1 at 275 MHz - where it passed 6 hours of Memtest and 2 1/2 hours of Prime. Unfortunately, 3D applications won't run properly - I get what looks like video errors - artifacts and some pretty severe stuttering in 3D Mark.

It really does look like a video problem - which doesn't make any sense, because the PCIe bus is locked at 100 MHz.. I've tried under-clocking the video card, and it doesn't make any difference. Like I said, Memtest and prime run just fine for hours without any errors. All the Sandra tests run okay. But it won't run any 3D application - I get the stuttering and and artifacts right away when I launch 3D Mark (2001 SE, 03 and 05).

I've tried loosening the RAM timings and it doesn't seem to make any difference.

I've tried lower FSB settings close to 275 MHz. The first time I tried it, it wouldn't even run at 270 MHz, but then I re-tried it a few days ago and it was very nearly stable - the amount of stuttering and artifacts was substantially reduced.

I'm hoping that in a few weeks, after the comp is well burned-in, that I'll be able to do 270 MHz without any problems.

I haven't come close to finding the max on the CPU yet - this San Diego seems to have few limits. Right now it's doing 2.65 GHz on 1.41 volts. Plus it seems to run really cool. Even when I had the vcore jacked up to 1.57 volts, it still only topped out at about 47c under load, with medium fan settings. I'm hoping eventually that I'll be able to run it at 2.8 - 2.9 GHz on air.

I haven't really explored the limits of the kid's computers yet - they don't want me to, because they're afraid I might kill the comps trying to push too far.

Both comps are running on the shipping bios's. Eventually I'll change them to the 704-2bt bios - which everyone seems to agree is the best - and then have another go at it.

I have my second comp on a KVM switch, so I'm actually using both right now.

My saga with MSI mainboards is here.

Here's a picture of my office:

Trav's computer room:

And Mason's