I fired up my 6300 and DS3 last night

[classy]

I got around to toying with my 6300 and DS3 last night. I just set it up on the table and installed the cpu with one stick of OCZ Platinum. Here is a couple of things. The board fired right up with no issues at all. Now my board came installled with the F3 bios. Quite frankly this is a hot board. The NB just sitting in the bios was so hot it could burn your finger. This is not a board for a small case or poorly vented case either. The cpu heatsink also sucks as well. The little push pins ain't worth 2 cents and quite frankly I am not going to use it. It did seem to cool well, considering how hot the NB is which is right next to the cpu, running stock sitting in the bios it was sitting right at 35 degrees celcius, which ain't bad at all considering the board had the fan running at only 800 rpm :Q. So no doubt this is a cool running chip. The bios seems rather, plain too. Ctrl F1 opens up a some tweaks, but its ok, but seemed a bit lacking. The board does seem well made, very well made. Nothing crooked or bent. So my suggestion is, if you go with this board, make sure you have a good cooling case, buy another board that utilizes a heat pipe or better NB cooling, or change the NB cooler. The NB cooler looks pretty stout till you turn it on.

 

[skriefal]

You realize that while "sitting in the BIOS" the CPU is effectively operating at 100% load? The CPU will get hot.

I too assembled a 6300+DS3 a few days ago. Replaced the northbridge heatsink with a Thermaltake Extreme Spirit II. The CPU heatsink is a Scythe Ninja w/120mm Scythe 49ccfm 20dbA fan. The heatsink barely fits in the Antec CS-600 (SX-1000) case -- the two rear 80mm fans were so close to the CPU heatsink that I had to remove the plastic clips that held them in place to free up a few millimeters of space between the fans and the heatsink. After removing the clips, the heatsink was finally able to sit flat on top of the CPU. Then used zip-ties to hold the case fans in place. I really need to get a new case with a removeable motherboard tray, and a new PSU to replace the old Antec TruePower 430 (first series with 20-pin ATX connector, not the TP-II).

I still hit a 400FSBx7 overclock with almost zero effort, and still need to try pushing it farther. A near-effortless 50% overclock isn't bad at all IMHO, especially with the old 20-pin PSU!

 

[htne]

Originally posted by: skriefal
You realize that while "sitting in the BIOS" the CPU is effectively operating at 100% load?

I've never heard that before. Can you provide any references to backup that claim?

 

[skriefal]

I don't have a good reference. I ran some quick searches through Google and found other references to this, but nothing that I'd label as "authoritative". Basically, while your sitting at the BIOS screen there is no operating system running to issue idle/halt (HLT) instructions to the CPU -- so it's "idling" at full power instead of the reduced power you'd usually expect while Windows is running. Thus my use of the phrase "effectively operating". Obviously it's not actively processing a stream of instructions to force the CPU to 100% usage, but the effect on temperatures is effectively the same.