Hi everyone!
I would like to thank John and graysky for posting the 2 stickies, and others that helped me decide on the processor. I used them as my guides.
My wife gave me $600 so I went and got:
e6750 processor (was going for q6600, but anandtechers suggested this one because its cheaper and has more room for overclocking)
gigabyte ga-p35-ds4 (was going to get abit $89 board, but had enough room in budget for this one, only got it for the cool looking pipe/heatsinks lol)
corsair 2x1g twin2x2048-6400c4dhx (gigabyte tested ram, got the dhx for the cool looking heatsink
)
antec tri power 650w (I always bought antec and never had problems, no other reason)
$606 total
+ended up buying 3 90mm and 3 80mm fans to replace old ones that were a pain to clean.
Putting it all together:
First problem was installing the heatsink. I have reused my water cooling block. The block was slipping and sliding around processor because of the long water lines twisting up on me. So I kept tightening the screws until it stopped moving (when I move the hoses).
I heard a sharp snap, than another......I panicked. Looking at the board expecting cracks all over from overtightening the heatsink, I was relieved it was the heatsink/pipe setup poping off the motherboard. I removed the entire motherboard heatsink and pipe (one piece), loosened the screws on the water block untill there was only a slight bend in the motherboard. I wanted to remove the thermal pads and put AS5 but decided that I would probably end up with it all over the board so I just flipped/cleaned the pads and reinstalled it.
Was ready to install mobo. hmm this board didnt' come with the standoffs. (off to microcenter)
When I got back I noticed it also didn't come with the screws....... I just used the 6 off the old mobo for now. Dam you Gigabyte! for this kind of money you could have included those.
I than spend at least 3 hours trying to route all the cables from the power supply. thinking back I should have got one with longer wires and one that has modular cables.
When I went to turn it on.... I remembered that I never looked thru the hard drive for files Iwanted to keep. bummer
I was able to load windows in safe mode, woot and check for important files before installing new windows and formating the hard drive.
spent some time looking at the temp in bios to make sure the processor is not too hot
loaded windows, and had no problems at all installing drivers, updates
the only thing that bothered me was the motherboard driver disk had Yahoo IE bar it wanted to install WTF? I hate all those google/yahoo bars
Ran a couple Prime95 tests and everything was ok. Ran 3dmark06 got a score of 9429 and processor at 2417 with no overclock. Old pc had 5663 and processor 1100.
I than decided to overclock. Went and just tried FSB at 400mhz. voltages in auto, PCIe at 100mhz, could not find the pci 33mhz setting but I have no pci cards anyway so I didn't worry about it much. Changed the memory to run at 800 by sellecting the 2x multiplier
restated and had no problems getting into windows. temperatures with prime95 were under 55C at 100% on both cores. Cpuz showed voltage at 1.46 something. restarted and put voltages on manual and changed cpu voltage to 1.32. restated ran prime95 just fine.
didnt mess with any other settings, I think I will leave it at this overclock for now and test out some games for a few weeks to see if I need to overclock any more
tryed overclocking the graphics card, not so easy, ntune sucks and didn't work for me at all, atitool didn't work, rivaturner worked only because I could turn the fan on to 100%, ended up overclocking the graphics card to 658/954 from 513/7xx. ran 3dmark06 and got
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=4296462
I have no idea why the drivers are not aproved. I don't care. the graphics card overclock didn't get me much more fps and since I realy have a hard time understanding how to overclock it I will probably run it at stock . all I did was drag the slider to where ever lol I didn't check the stability of the overclock on the GC cause I dont' realy want to ruin it and I have no clue what I am doing. All I know is it ran 3dmark06 3x with about the same results. The processor overclock seems stable, ran syssandra, prime95. Never tried memtest98, but I think its stable and good to go. will run a longer stability test for a day when I have more time. but 1 hour of prime95 and no errors and I am happy.
Btw all this took over a week with about an hour or 2 per day.
Thank you all for helping and I hope I will learn more as time goes on. I am happy with my results so far. Happy Holidays Everyone!
I will update my sig after I run for a few days and am certain the setup is stable.
PS I would like to encourage people to buy from B&M stores. They are fast disapearing. So if you have a Fry's or Microcenter around and the prices are not too much higher than online stores go the your local stores! I like Microcenter lots. Never been to Fry's.
I forgot to mention rest of the system : BFG 8800 GTS 640 that I payed 430$ last spring lol
I would like to thank John and graysky for posting the 2 stickies, and others that helped me decide on the processor. I used them as my guides.
My wife gave me $600 so I went and got:
e6750 processor (was going for q6600, but anandtechers suggested this one because its cheaper and has more room for overclocking)
gigabyte ga-p35-ds4 (was going to get abit $89 board, but had enough room in budget for this one, only got it for the cool looking pipe/heatsinks lol)
corsair 2x1g twin2x2048-6400c4dhx (gigabyte tested ram, got the dhx for the cool looking heatsink
)antec tri power 650w (I always bought antec and never had problems, no other reason)
$606 total
+ended up buying 3 90mm and 3 80mm fans to replace old ones that were a pain to clean.
Putting it all together:
First problem was installing the heatsink. I have reused my water cooling block. The block was slipping and sliding around processor because of the long water lines twisting up on me. So I kept tightening the screws until it stopped moving (when I move the hoses).
I heard a sharp snap, than another......I panicked. Looking at the board expecting cracks all over from overtightening the heatsink, I was relieved it was the heatsink/pipe setup poping off the motherboard. I removed the entire motherboard heatsink and pipe (one piece), loosened the screws on the water block untill there was only a slight bend in the motherboard. I wanted to remove the thermal pads and put AS5 but decided that I would probably end up with it all over the board so I just flipped/cleaned the pads and reinstalled it.
Was ready to install mobo. hmm this board didnt' come with the standoffs. (off to microcenter)
When I got back I noticed it also didn't come with the screws....... I just used the 6 off the old mobo for now. Dam you Gigabyte! for this kind of money you could have included those.
I than spend at least 3 hours trying to route all the cables from the power supply. thinking back I should have got one with longer wires and one that has modular cables.
When I went to turn it on.... I remembered that I never looked thru the hard drive for files Iwanted to keep. bummer
I was able to load windows in safe mode, woot and check for important files before installing new windows and formating the hard drive.
spent some time looking at the temp in bios to make sure the processor is not too hot
loaded windows, and had no problems at all installing drivers, updates
the only thing that bothered me was the motherboard driver disk had Yahoo IE bar it wanted to install WTF? I hate all those google/yahoo bars
Ran a couple Prime95 tests and everything was ok. Ran 3dmark06 got a score of 9429 and processor at 2417 with no overclock. Old pc had 5663 and processor 1100.
I than decided to overclock. Went and just tried FSB at 400mhz. voltages in auto, PCIe at 100mhz, could not find the pci 33mhz setting but I have no pci cards anyway so I didn't worry about it much. Changed the memory to run at 800 by sellecting the 2x multiplier
restated and had no problems getting into windows. temperatures with prime95 were under 55C at 100% on both cores. Cpuz showed voltage at 1.46 something. restarted and put voltages on manual and changed cpu voltage to 1.32. restated ran prime95 just fine.
didnt mess with any other settings, I think I will leave it at this overclock for now and test out some games for a few weeks to see if I need to overclock any more
tryed overclocking the graphics card, not so easy, ntune sucks and didn't work for me at all, atitool didn't work, rivaturner worked only because I could turn the fan on to 100%, ended up overclocking the graphics card to 658/954 from 513/7xx. ran 3dmark06 and got
http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm06=4296462
I have no idea why the drivers are not aproved. I don't care. the graphics card overclock didn't get me much more fps and since I realy have a hard time understanding how to overclock it I will probably run it at stock . all I did was drag the slider to where ever lol I didn't check the stability of the overclock on the GC cause I dont' realy want to ruin it and I have no clue what I am doing. All I know is it ran 3dmark06 3x with about the same results. The processor overclock seems stable, ran syssandra, prime95. Never tried memtest98, but I think its stable and good to go. will run a longer stability test for a day when I have more time. but 1 hour of prime95 and no errors and I am happy.
Btw all this took over a week with about an hour or 2 per day.
Thank you all for helping and I hope I will learn more as time goes on. I am happy with my results so far. Happy Holidays Everyone!
I will update my sig after I run for a few days and am certain the setup is stable.
PS I would like to encourage people to buy from B&M stores. They are fast disapearing. So if you have a Fry's or Microcenter around and the prices are not too much higher than online stores go the your local stores! I like Microcenter lots. Never been to Fry's.
I forgot to mention rest of the system : BFG 8800 GTS 640 that I payed 430$ last spring lol
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