The First Stage

Back at it, this time older and plenty wiser after endless days of research in hardware websites. Makes head hurt and gf pissy, but what ya gonna do.

All this research made me decide on following components:

Antec P180 Case (3 x 120mm fan)
Antec Tricool 120mm & 80mm fan
Antec TruePower II 550W
Asus A8N32SLI-Deluxe
AMD Opteron 170 (2x2.0GHz, 10x Multiplier)
Corsair TwinX2048-4000PT 2x1GB
2 x Hitachi K7T250 250GB Sata II (RAID0)
Zalman 9500 LED Cpu cooler
EVGA geforce 6800 Card (DDR3) (temporary, to be replaced - x1900?)
Pioneer 108 DVD-RW (old, to be replaced)
19" LG 995 Display (old, to be replaced)
Black Microsoft Internet Keyboard (old, to be replaced)
Black Microsoft Optical Mouse (old, to be replaced)

This will be extremely interesting project since I haven't really done anything with the latest technology stuff. Never done installed RAID0 nor even seen Opteron 64-bit processor. Target is to achieve very fast but silent machine. Conservative expectation is to reach 2x2.5GHz but main goal is 2x2.8GHz. Time will tell.... where is that damn UPS/FEDEX.

Since technology has changes so much and for now main goal is to see the CPU performance I think Super PI might be the best test for it - use 8M for more accuracy. I'll start gathering some comparable results. I'm also planning to use SisSoft Sandra 2005, 3DMark2003, 3DMark2005 and 3DMark2006.

Got some of the overclocking done even before I have my machine, plugged my 6800 to my work machine (Pentium D 820, 2.8GHz) and played around with it. 325/600MHz stock and i got it up to 404/825MHz, over 11K 3DMark2003's, pretty impressive for $99 card, maybe i just thrown another one of those in and get cheap overclocked SLI.

Finally got my machine up and running, huh! never imagined there was that many wires, almost 3 hours to put it together. Had my first experience of building RAID 0 too, wtf! ASUS! why the hell you require a floppy drive still when you install windows and who the f*** place that CMOS reset jumper in the worst possible spot!

Otherwise very happy with the machine, RAID 0 is lightning fast, except after my first overclocking attempts I got to rebuild it again, completely forgot to change hypertransport multiplier and system wend down with serious crash, RAID rebuild and reinstall Windows and now everything is good.

Slowly started lifting the CPU speed up and have kept the memory multiplier at 1:1 too, memory timings seemed to be 3-3-3-8 which started causing problems around 2x2.4GHz. Now at 2x2.5GHz with following settings:
- CPU Speed: 250
- CPU Voltage: 1.45V
- Memory Multiplier: 1:1 - 500MHz
- Memory Voltage: 2.7V
- Memory Timings: 3-4-4-10
- 1T/2T Memory Timing: 1T
- HyperTransport Multiplier: 4x (wanna keep it as close to 1GHz as possible)

Now at 2x2.6GHz after serious stability issues:
- CPU Speed: 260
- CPU Voltage: 1.475V
- Memory Multiplier: 1:1 - 520MHz
- Memory Voltage: 2.85V
- Memory Timings: 3-4-4-8
- 1T/2T Memory Timing: Auto (probably 2T)
- HyperTransport Multiplier: 4x

Still very unstable, so decided to resert everything and start from scratch, stock voltage etc. And this is that I came up, been now 24 hours rock solid with 100% load on both CPU:
- CPU Speed: 265
- CPU Voltage: 1.35V (STOCK!)
- Memory Multiplier: 10:12 - 440MHz
- Memory Voltage: 2.85V
- Memory Timings: 2.5-3-3-7 (TRF3, TRRD2, TRC9,TRWT2, TRFC12)
- 1T/2T Memory Timing: 2T
- HyperTransport/SB Multiplier: 4x

Unreal that machine which is clocked so "high" is able to run with stock voltage, temps also dropped from 66C -> 46C under load! had to cut down memory speed quite a lot, but was able to gain the speed back up tightening up the settings, new Super PI record etc.