Overclocking

[Paul LS]

Yes your MB does appear to run hot... mine is a good 15C cooler than yours. My temps at idle and having stabilised running at 100% are:

MB: 25C 26C
CPU1: 32C 57C
CPU2: 27C 50C
CPU3: 31C 55C
CPU4: 25C 47C

So my idling temps are much lower, but when at 100% they are similar.

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

OK. Final posting from me on this topic. Fitted the Antec Spot fan (only one). Test results are no load, previous 10 min stress test figures, new 10 min stress test figures with Antec fan:

CPU - 25, 37, 33 (-4)
MB - 31, 41, 31 (-10)
Core 1 - 42, 54, 51 (-3)
Core 2 - 44, 54, 54 (similar)
Core 3 - 42, 55, 51 (-4)
Core 4 - 42, 57, 51 (-6)
HDU1 - 25, 31, 27 (-4)
HDU2 - 29, 33, 30 (-3)

So really big difference on MB cooling.

Edit: And huge difference from figures originally posted on 12th December.

Core 1 - 68
Core 2 - 68
Core 3 - 65
Core 4 - 65
MB - 44
CPU - 29
HDU - 38

[VernonRobinson]

John,
Have you started your overclocking exercise? I am thinking of doing it after Christmas. I will have a couple of days to play. I would be interested in what/how you got on since we have the same processor.

-Vernon

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

Hi Vernon. Now that I have some temperature stability I am planning to begin playing with overclocking in the New Year as I'll be too busy over the Christmas period. I'll basically be following this guide:-

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/240 ... uals-guide

[VernonRobinson]

Thanks John,
This should prove to be interesting. I bought 1066 memory, but according to my fast read of the article, it does not seem to make much difference. It does appear that the 800 watt power supply was in order. I am running (5) 500 gig WD drives in a raid 0 configuration. This should give me pretty fast reads and writes. Thanks again.

Regards,
-Vernon

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

Vernon, as well as trying out overclocking I have, arriving today, a 10,000 rpm 150Gb Raptor that I will use to replace my system disc. When I'm done I'll post some benchmarks - system boot times, application program loads, render times etc. but that won't be until 2008!

[VernonRobinson]

That would be great John. I am sure that I will run into a couple of challenges with the overclocking, but I like a challenge.

-Vernon

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

Well. the 150Gb Raptor arrived and, despite my good intentions of leaving it on one side and getting ready to go away, I couldn't resist it. So, carried out some simple timings, installed the new drive, old C; drive contents copied across to new drive (used Acronis True Image) and then I carried out some new timings.

First though, the caveats. The timings for my system will not necessarily show the same proportional time gains for you simply because we will have different software and hardware combinations. So my timings should be treated as being, perhaps, broadly indicative of the performance gains that you might obtain.

The timings are old C: drive followed by new C; (Raptor) drive.

Boot up - old C: 2m 22.08s; new C: 1m 43.05s (so 39.03 secs faster)
Load PrElv2 up to splash screen appearing (Yes, I am still using v2!!) - old 22.56 secs; new 15.83 secs (6.63 secs faster)
Load Word 2007 - old 10.83 secs; new 7.75 secs (2.08 secs faster)

So a 33% increase in rotational spin gives about a 26/27% or so gain. So all in all quite impressive.

[VernonRobinson]

John,
I assume that the Raptor is hooked up with a Sata II connection. But is 150 GB the largest size of the drive? I realize most people will use it as their system drive due to cost concerns, but you will need space to put all of your apps on it so that you can get that faster load time. 500 gigs seems to be the going rate these days. What are your thoughts?

-Vernon

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

Hi Vernon,

As far as I know the Western Digital (WD) Raptor is the biggest at 150Gb - that is the one that I have. I am using it as the system drive alongside two other drives - both WD, SATA II with 16Mb cache.

Using HD Tune I obtained the following throughput rates:-

Raptor: 83MB/sec
250Gb: 58MB/sec (this was my old system disc)
500Gb: 83MB/sec.

I have not used the 500Gb HDU as a system drive so have only compared the 250GB drive and the Raptor to obtain the timimg results posted earlier. Now that I have the Raptor I won't be reconfiguring my system again to time the actual performance of the WD 500Gb drive as a system unit but the numbers posted here suggest that that could be an interesting test(?).

According to websites that have lab tested the Raptor, the issue (apparently) is that WD have not been able to get reliable enough consistent performance with 10K rpm and SATA II with all HD controllers.