How low can I go?

[v8envy]

Those of you with weak stomachs, please look away. I accidentally bought a D0 i7 920, 6 gigs of low latency Patriot RAM and the Gigabyte X58 UD3R board. The deals were so good I just couldn't help myself.

Problem is, I don't need another quad right now. But I *DO* need a DVR replacement in the worst possible way. So the i7 will spend a few months as a temporary DVR until I'm ready to swap out my desktop for it.

What I'd like to do is downclock it as low as it (and the RAM) as low as possible. My target is 1ghz, lower when idle. Same with the RAM -- the lower the frequency and voltage the better.

So, experts in i7 overclocking. Do you think this is possible? How should I go about doing this? Can you think of anything to watch out for considering it will also be water cooled while on DVR duty?

Thanks in advance!

 

[richierich1212]

wow talk about overkill.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

How about I trade you one of my s939 systems that use less power while you have that DVR installed?

I wouldn't mind an i7.

On a serious note, WTH are you thinking? If you need a DVR just pick up an old P4 system on CL and call it good. Why on earth wouldn't you be ready to swap out your desktop for it? Even if you have a Skulltrail board or something similar its not worth keeping up while you have an i7 just sitting there.

 

[v8envy]

Originally posted by: Scholzpdx
How about I trade you one of my s939 systems that use less power while you have that DVR installed?

I wouldn't mind an i7.

On a serious note, WTH are you thinking? If you need a DVR just pick up an old P4 system on CL and call it good. Why on earth wouldn't you be ready to swap out your desktop for it? Even if you have a Skulltrail board or something similar its not worth keeping up while you have an i7 just sitting there.

No thanks, I have plenty of old 939 (3) boxes still doing stuff or gathering dust. In fact, that's what the current wobbling and ready to fall down DVR is - a single core 3200+ with 2 gigs of blinged out OCZ ram. Suspend to ram isn't very good on that vintage iron, flakiness is increasing and I have much higher hopes for new hardware.

As far as upgrading - it's a matter of need and inconvenience. I simply don't have the time to move installed applications to a new box right now. I'm ashamed to admit I still use Windows, and moving a several year old Windows install to a new motherboard can be a giant pain. My current desktops are a 3.2 ghz E2180 and 3 ghz Xeon 3210, and neither CPU is lacking power for anything I do. In a few months I'll pick up a new drive or six, a copy of Win7 and get the migration done over a weekend.

 

[GLeeM]

I haven't a clue how low you can go, but I would be interested to find out your results.

On my board (P6T Deluxe V2) I see in the BIOS that number of cores to activate can be selected. You could probably get lower by having only one or two cores active. And turn off HT, as with it on it adds heat so with it off you should be able to get lower.

If I remember right the BIOS has a range (min to max) for CPU multiplier and BCLK and voltages. Unless someone is willing to tell you some numbers, I would just try lowering everything a bit at a time and see if it starts and if it does, try again with lower settings.

I'm starting to do that now with CPU voltage (summer heat finally got here), last night I lower CPU voltage from auto (1.27) to 1.20 and everything seems OK so far. If it makes it thru the heat of the day I think I'll try 1.10 or 1.15 tonight!

I don't really know what I am doing either, but I don't see how we could "break" anything by trying lower settings Someone please correct me if I am wrong here.

 

[Byte]

Wow nice. I "accidentally" bought an i7 and p6t with GTX260 too . I figure waiting another 6 months for 32nm would kill me and i5 brings nothing new to the picture. Though those P55 with insta remote o/cing looks pretty fun for us lazy people.

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: v8envy
So, experts in i7 overclocking. Do you think this is possible? How should I go about doing this? Can you think of anything to watch out for considering it will also be water cooled while on DVR duty?

It should work. When I was dicking around with a Phenom 9600, I found that I could run at 1000mhz with a Vcore of only 0.85V and it was prime/linpack stable. There's a limit on how low you can put these modern processors, but the limit is very very low and you can undervolt them so much that you don't even need a fan on the heat sink. I'm not saying you should take the fan off, but you can if you want.