Well now that Christmas is over time to gear up for the new year. Last year I focused on getting a new system up for playing EU on and got a prebuilt monster from a company called IBuyPower. I modded one of their Paladin DR I series to what I wanted. I have been very pleased since I have gotten it but found a few flaws by by own doing in what I ordered in the build. I have added since I bought it custom built a liquid cooling system for it as it really did not like the heat during our summers. Its now very very happy and cool. Since I got the system temps under control I decided to start learning about over clocking and how to control the system better. ( I also wanted to see exactly what the beast could do) I played around with a few settings and decided I was brave enough to step it up and push its limits. Over the course of the year I worked up from 3.8 ghz over clock that was stable to my latest best of 4.34 ghz. I used different testing software as many do and found the hard drive in my system to be the weak link. I got one of the caviar blue series drives with the system that had 64 meg cache and spins at 7200 rpm thinking this combination would best suit my needs. It does over all do what I need and more but it gimps the potential to max out the system pretty hard by some of the newer standards. Well tomorrow my new OCZ Agility 2 60 gig SSD drive will arrive. Yes there are better drives available but for the current system I have this seems the best fit from both performance and financial standards. I am getting excited again as I love messing with things like this and will have a new hobby the next few days with this new addition. For those of you that are into stuff like this I am aimng to hit a 4.6ghz OC that is stable enough to run full time should I desire. (Id like to hit a max of 5ghz but not to serious about that yet)I got it to 4.34 ghz and am able to play EU anytime I wish at this setting with temps staying around 45c even after a few hours play. I know the system can hit over 4.6 ghz and not crap itself as during my work up I had frogot to shut off the turbo featuer in the bios and saw the system hit that mark and not skip a beat. Currently the system I have is this.. Asus P6T motherboard. ( I went with the original not the SE becuase many SE features I would never use) Core I7 920 processor 12 gig corsair ddr3 1600 (got the extra ram for recording to resolve latancey issues. I know that much does not effect gaming at this point yet) An ATI 5770 vid card wth 1 gig ddr5 ( I went this route cause at the time 2 of these in crossfire mode could blow away the newest at less then half the cost if needed later) the new OCZ Agility 2 60gig ssd (coming tomorrow) All in a Cooler Master Haf 922 case The cooling system I made consists of all this X2O 750 Dual 5.25in. Bay x20-750 reservoir Pump. Swiftech MCR320-QP Quiet MCR-320 Power 3X120mm radiator - Black Swiftech MCB-120 Rev 2 MCB-120 Radbox Radiator/fan Durelene PVC tubing 1/2in. ID x 3/4in. OD EK High Flow Fittings G 1/4 to 1/2in. ID Barb Swiftech Apogee XT CPU Waterblock EK Waterblocks EK-FC5770 - Acetal / Copper Lastly it has a decent dvd burner, fan controller, and multi card reader. Ill post pics and test scores if anyone else is into this kinda stuff here and we can compare what we all use to play EU on and what we like or dont like about what we use.
Have been playing around with some overclocking in the past, but figured it is just no use to me. I don't have the balls to go very far, scared to blow stuff up. Still don;t feel very good about water cooling (thing against water and electricity). The rig I have now plays anything I want to run on it, so no need to upgrade it. I usually do that if I come across something I wanna run but can't. I do however would like a SSD and that time will probably come next year (and then I might upgrade the lot after all, who knows).
That's a nice little toy you just built yourself. The ASUS brand MB is an over-clockers best friend. Although I have never really done over-clocking, you can't go wrong with ASUS. Using a water cooled setup is also good. And what you've put together for that, looks like you will have one cool running setup. What are you using for a coolant? The SSD drive should make you quite happy as well. Whilst I have not used one, yet, I know the transfer rate is the best out there that a non server system can have. No more bottle neck for you. I'll probably get one of those for my laptop once the prices come down to a reasonable amount per gig. Other than that, you have one hell of a machine that should not need upgrading for a long while. Yes I would like to see pics when you get around to it. But then, I do build servers for a living and it's also a hobby. So I enjoy seeing others peoples work as well. As for me, I just run EU on an ASUS G73-JH laptop. Core i7 720 w/HT, 17.3 monitor, 8GB, 2 X 500GB HDD and an ATI 5870 w/1GB DDR5, and a 24" Samsung 1080P monitor on the side. HDD is the only bottle neck here as well. Plain and simple little machine that does what I want. It also plays EU better than my desktop, but that only has a 32 bit OS on it and EU seems to run better, for me anyway, with a 64 bit OS. Enjoy your new toy.
Well its a system again!.. Got the new SSD drive today at 11:30 am and had it installed and loading windows by 12:30. Ended up rearranging a few things and a little rewireing along with a good cleaning. It now takes 40 to 45 seconds from the time I press the power button untill I am in windows and all things are done loading. This includes a slight stall for the Asus program that allows me to do certain things without enitrely booting the system and entering a password for windows. The windows experience tool that rates the system after a few tests now looks VERY respectable. It used to range from 5.4 to 7.3 on a scale from 0 to 7.9 however it rates things. Now it sits at 7.3 for the HD (STILL the weakest link) to 7.4 for video, 3d stuff, and the processor, and finally 7.5 for the system memory. To be honest I WAS getting worried when I started to install the OS as that took near 2 hours to completey set up. Then another hour to download and install all the windows updates for security. Once that was all done and set the speed difference REALLY came thru. I have the OS, Norton 360, realtemp 3, the asus utilities, prime 95, 3dmark 06, and CPU Z installed for testing now. Oh and EU as I will try that out in a few minutes after I get done here. Tomorrow I will burn all my personal files to a dvd then reformat the normal drive as a storage drive and get to reinstalling all my games, music, recording software, pictures and other junk. I will also have access to the original pics from Febuary when I got the system and the rebuild pics when I did the water system to post for all to see. I cant wait to try my reflex flight training simulator for my remote helicopter in a lag free environment. I havent used that since I was using my laptop a year ago. Anyway more to come... Lets see some of you other players toys!!
