Aging PC needs a kick in the a*se

cregser

She's served me well for 3 years, but unfortunately the old girl is starting to show her age. I was going to build a new one but then I remembered that I'd always planned to dabble with OCing towards the end. I've never done it before, so I'd like if maybe somebody could give me a little helping hand... pwease?

Teh Specs (built with the advice of this board actually):

PSU - Fortron/Source ATX-400W 120mm fsp400-60pn
+3.3V....28A, +5V.....30A, +12V......16A
Mobo - MSI K8N NEO2 Platinum S939 nForce3 250Ultra
54G WiFi (not installed), SATA,GbLAN,ATX,Dual-DDR
CPU - AMD Athlon 64 3500+ 2.2 GHz Socket 939, 512KB cache
stock heatsink
RAM - Corsair TWINX1024-3200XLPRO DDR400 (2x 512MB DIMMS)
Only recently set to 2-2-5-2 1T in dual channel mode. Were in single channel mode all this time. :rolleyes:
GPU - XFX GeForce 6800GT 256MB GDDR3
Stock cooling
Case - Q-Tec Midi tower ATX TL-MD2, Silver
Has 2x 80mm sucking (into case) fans at bottom and 1x 80mm blowing fan near CPU/memory.
Sound - Creative X-Fi PCI
HDD - 2x Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 160GB S-ATA 8MB cache 7200RPM
(well used)

Obviously I'd like to do this with the absolute minimal expense but it looks I may have skimped on the PSU. From what I've read, the 12V rail needs 20-30A before you consider OCing. Am I right? Is it worth the risk?

Also cooling may add another expense. I happen to have some Arctic Cooling paste that I got with the PC but never used. But my main concern is with the 6800GT temperatures. Right now with my case open it's at 55C. Max I've seen was about 85C but with a dirty heatsink that is now cleaned. I believe it currently hits 78C max when busy. Since the 6800GTs are essentially lower clocked 6800Ultras (350Mhz V 400MHz core with 16pipes with the GT mainly limited in it's memory OCing capabilities) I'd like to give it a good push to see what I can get from it.

The CPU temp sits below 30C most of the time (I've used the RMClock utility for the lifetime of this PC so the CPU should be well looked after). The hotest I've seen it run is not much over 50-55C.

The AIDA32 Sysinfo Tool currently measures my memory read/write per second speed as 5651MB/2018MB.

MSI have in the past had a brilliant forum for this mobo so I'm gonna thrall through that for some info. Any help re PSU/Cooling would be appretiated. I don't really want the hassle of water cooling - something simple would be best.

Cheers!

cregser

So far I'm looking at:
Corsair Powersupply 450W, 120mm Vifte
Zalman VGA Cooler VF700-Cu for GPU
3x AKASA Amber Series Ultra quiet Fan 80mm for Case

Which'll cost me €180 from Komplett if I want them this side of Christmas.

I also just noticed that my CPU fan is about 75mm. Simply swapping for a decent 80mm fan with stock heatsink should give an easy/cheap increase in cooling. What you reckon?

cregser

maybe this thread is more suited to building/upgrading ?

uberpixie

cregser wrote: »

maybe this thread is more suited to building/upgrading ?

Tbh I wouldn't bother sinking any money into that rig.

€180 can buy you a good new processor or 4 gig of pc6400 DDR2 easily for a new rig.

Overclocking your gfx card will add very little to the frame rate in games, say 5 frames if you are lucky. even if you add on a new cooler.

Save the €30 for something else.
(unless you want to practice fitting a 3rd party cooler to a gfx card for future fun)

PSU you should get away with fine for overclocking.

Other than that if you want to mess about with overclocking and are worried about the heat, take the side of the case off. Its cheaper and you can always dial the pc back down:D.
(save the money for a new rig)

Fitting the arctic is easy and it would be worth the practice, just make sure to have some TIM cleaner on hand.

I.e. http://overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=OA-001-AK
(for cleaning off old thermal grease/ heat pads that stick to the cpu.)

Arctic should drop your temps for the cpu by 2-3 degress.

Other than that, google for a socket 939 overclocking guide.
(I never overclocked my socket 939 rig as it was a shuttle box and thus know sodd all about overclocking socket 939)

example:
http://www.forum.ibc-base.net/forum/hardware/hardware/1110-how-to-overclock-a-amd-64-system-socket-939-am2/

After that it's down to how far your parts will go.

Best of luck.

Lord Deco

Agree get a new mobo,cpu,ram and mess with those

Intel E2140

http://www.dabs.ie/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4L1D&CategorySelectedId=11147&PageMode=1&NavigationKey=11147,12,410480000

Gigabyte Ds3
http://www.dabs.ie/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4R91&CategorySelectedId=11143&PageMode=1&NavigationKey=11143,12,48760000,50509

2gb Ram

http://www.dabs.ie/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=3R5L&CategorySelectedId=11150&PageMode=1&NavigationKey=11150,11,4294959239,48800000

€184 delivered

HD3850 would go nicely

http://www.dabs.ie/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4SRY&SearchType=1&SearchTerms="hd+3850"&PageMode=3&SearchKey=All&SearchMode=All&NavigationKey=0

cregser

Cool. Thanks for the opinions. I found a huge thread dedicated especially to the mobo:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=43033

You're probably right about (literally) sinking money into it. I'll consider buying a PSU that's good enough for a new rig but also lets me play with this one for now.

Or maybe I'll just get started now on a new quad-core SLI rig... because it seems it takes a lot of time to learn the quirks of various boards. For example I've learned that the mobo needs 24A on 12V rail, that 2 of the 4 SATA ports are locked to the CPU\bus speed (the other 2 badly placed) and the mobo only OCs stably with 2 of the 4 DIMMS in use. What else is there to know???