New build and overclocking surprise...

[Vic Vega]

I've been eyeballing a number of parts for a new build for about a month and magically they all went on sale last week so I took the opportunity to pick them up. I ended up with:

Antec P183, Antec CP-1000, MSI 890FXA-GD70, AMD PII X4 965, 4GB Patriot DDR3 1600. A WD Raptor HD, two NEC DVD burners, Samsung LCD and ATi X1950 Pro video card were sourced from my old machine to round out the build.

Everything went together without a hitch with no DOA parts. The machine fired up the first time and to my surprise, Windows 7 Enterprise 64 booted flawlessly even though nearly all the hardware had been changed. I fully expected the machine to bluescreen and only powered the machine on to see if it would post. I was completely surprised to be at the log on screen in less than 30 seconds.

Even though the OS seemed to be in working order I did a clean install anyway. Afterwards I decided to bump up the clock speed. I was hoping for 3.6GHz without having to change any settings and didn't expect the wimpy looking AMD cooler to be up for much more. With just a multiplier change I had 3.6Ghz and about an hour later I bumped it to 3.8Ghz. Everything seemed ok so I finished the OS and application setup. Curiosity got the best of me and I set the multiplier to produce that magical number, 4.0GHz.

To my surprise the machine booted at 4.0GHz with only a multiplier change, nothing else. Temperatures on the stock cooler could be better but hot damn, I'm impressed. No, I haven't done any stress testing per say, just several hours of CoD4 MP (say 4-5) without any problems at all. For the $160 I paid for this little quad I'm supremely satisfied and never had any intentions to net 4.0GHz, let alone with just a multiplier change on stock cooling.

I have a larger Zalman cooler in the mail which should alleviate the slightly higher temperatures but overall I'm stoked! I couldn't be happier with this machine.

 

[Sickamore]

What is the temp on the amd stock cooler. Just idle

 

[Vic Vega]

Should be less when I get my new cooler in there.

 

[faxon]

Still using an x1950? You must not game anymore lol. That's a great board though for OCing, very robust power delivery and quad crossfire support is win

 

[guskline]

Gotta upgrade that video card!

 

[Vic Vega]

Does SimCity 4 count? I installed CoD4 and CSS just to see how they run compared to the old rig (FX60). The several hours I've spent on CoD4 in the last two days are the most gaming I've had in a while.

I think I'll wait for the 6000 ATi cards before I retire the old X1950 Pro. When Battlefield 3 gets here I'll probably get sucked into that if it's as good as BF2 was/is.

 

[Face2Face]

The X1950 PRO was great card -- Now a litttle long in the tooth. I still have a X850, 6800 Ultra and Two 7800 GTX's . Gotta love those days....

 

[Vic Vega]

Just upped the ante... picked up a second X1950 Pro for $35 shipped... Look out!

 

[FalseChristian]

Do you want to play newer games or not? If so grab 2 5850's and game on DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.1 goodness.

 

[Arsynic]

Why is everyone seem to be running Dual Channel memory in unganged mode? Shouldn't it be ganged?

 

[Vic Vega]

False, I don't have much interest in newer games. If and when BF3 comes out I'll probably upgrade the video then. As is, my X1950 Pro plays CoD4 pretty much maxed out and with the addition of the second one I just picked up things should be fine for me at 1680x1050.

Arsynic, that's a good question, I should probably look into it.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Why is everyone seem to be running Dual Channel memory in unganged mode? Shouldn't it be ganged?

Unganged is faster for multi-core CPUs.

 

[Face2Face]

What do you mean Unganged? And how do you set it up?

 

[fffblackmage]

Gah, makes me wish I somehow picked up a C3 instead of a C2 stepping 550BE.

I never did understand what "ganged" and "unganged" meant. Is that like dual channel mode on unganged and single uber wide bus channel mode?

What do you mean Unganged? And how do you set it up?

Should be a simple BIOS option somewhere near the memory timings (probably).

 

[Arsynic]

I thought unganged (dual channel) is to memory what RAID 0 is to hard drive.

 

[Vic Vega]

Well, after a month this system is humming along nicely.

I ditched the X1950 Crossfire setup and picked up an HD5770. I'm not a super gamer so it's more than enough, all the games I play are well over 100 fps.

I also have a Zalman 9700NT installed which is much, much quieter than the stock fan which sounded like a leaf blower.

Overall I'm very satisfied with this box.

 

[mizzou]

My 555be was unlocked and ocd real easy to 3.6 temps are so low, pretty sure i could hit 4 ghz with just multipler

25c idle so far

 

[Vic Vega]

So, I'm basically six months in on this system.

It's been running 24/7 @ 4.0GHz the entire time. I don't think it's had more than 24 hours of downtime since I built it.

Overall very pleased with this AM3 platform.

 

[VirtualLarry]

AMD makes some very nice stuff. I'm glad you are happy with yours. I would have gone AMD, probably Thuban, with my desktop rigs, had I not had the opportunity to upgrade them to some decent C2Q chips on the cheap. ($100 for Q9300 at MC deal.)

Then again, had I done that, I would have been upset that I wouldn't have an upgrade path to BD, which I am also considering as a future upgrade, mainly for F@H I guess. I sure don't need 8 cores on the desktop, but it's nice to want, isn't it?

Your rig should be faster than my desktop rigs, PII @ 4.0 is like what, C2Q at 3.6-3.7 or so? Mine are only at 3.0.

 

[Vic Vega]

Your rig should be faster than my desktop rigs, PII @ 4.0 is like what, C2Q at 3.6-3.7 or so? Mine are only at 3.0.

Truthfully, I don't know, I've never bench marked the system. I think my Raptor is holding me back a tad... I've been thinking of getting an SSD for a bit now.

 

[bryanW1995]

there are regularly deals in the $100 range for 60-80gb ssd's these days. I highly recommend one, it's far and away biggest difference between my old x3350 rig @3.6 (in daughter's room now) and current i7 920 @ 4.0.

 

[veri745]

I thought unganged (dual channel) is to memory what RAID 0 is to hard drive.

Actually, I'd say ganged mode is more equivalent to RAID0. Ganged mode (still dual channel) is using both channels as a single 128b memory bus.

Unganged mode is basically using two separate 64b buses. Both have the same total bandwidth, it just matters if the data you're accessing is mostly serial or random.

With multi-core processors, unganged allows separate CPUs to be accessing different memory addresses at the same time.

 

[BD231]

Actually, I'd say ganged mode is more equivalent to RAID0. Ganged mode (still dual channel) is using both channels as a single 128b memory bus.

Unganged mode is basically using two separate 64b buses. Both have the same total bandwidth, it just matters if the data you're accessing is mostly serial or random.

With multi-core processors, unganged allows separate CPUs to be accessing different memory addresses at the same time.

Don't forget that ganged is the faster option in almost *ANY* situation. If you run unganged you're limiting every single CPU to a 64-bit pathway, vs 128-bit pathway you get ganged.

If you're gaming or encoding you definitely want to used ganged mode.

 

[Tuna-Fish]

Don't forget that ganged is the faster option in almost *ANY* situation. If you run unganged you're limiting every single CPU to a 64-bit pathway, vs 128-bit pathway you get ganged.

If you're gaming or encoding you definitely want to used ganged mode.

This is true for DDR2, but not DDR3.

The vast majority of critical memory fetches are fetches of a single cache line, or 64 bytes. The smallest single fetch you can do from a single channel of memory is 32 bytes for DDR2 and 64 bytes for DDR3. This means that the vast majority of the time having a 128-bit memory bus for DDR3 doesn't help in any way. If the channels are unganged, at least you can get some use of the second channel when there are many simultaneous fetches.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Don't forget that ganged is the faster option in almost *ANY* situation. If you run unganged you're limiting every single CPU to a 64-bit pathway, vs 128-bit pathway you get ganged.

If you're gaming or encoding you definitely want to used ganged mode.

Not true. If you have multiple CPU cores, all wanting to access memory, if you leave it in ganged mode, one has to wait for the other to finish. If you leave it as unganged, they can both access at the same time.