This is a follow-up to my recent post where I detailed my purchasing decisions for my PC upgrade.
Everything is great! I took everything out of my old case, cleaned it and started from scratch building. Some fun things I did before it got up and running:
-Since I planned to use my old graphics card I decided to clean it out. In order to accomplish that, I ripped the metal plate off of the heatsink with a pair of pliers, and cleaned out all the dust. Then I decided that the metal plate probably helped air flow, so I attached an aluminum foil replacement with two-sided adhesive. Unfortunately, the graphics card is a noise disaster. I don’t think its the foil, but since all my other parts are nearly perfectly silent, the noise alone is making me consider upgrading the card as well (or perhaps on-board video?)
-I love my six year old microsoft natural keyboard, so I decided to take it apart and give it a cleaning. Taking it apart was fun and informative, but getting it back together was… an adventure. It took at least an hour and some creative duct taping inside to get everything to stay in place but I managed to pull it off. My roommate owes me $.50 for my success.
Other than that the process has been as smooth as possible. The only frustrating moment came when I realized that there’s only 1 IDE connector and my DVD drive and old hard drive would have to be connected together, but I sorted that out. I managed to get everything plugged in correctly the first time, Vista loaded up perfectly, and I was up and running.
Overclocking worked as advertised! Oddly, the default setting on the CPU was a 8.5 multiplier @ 267, even though the official 2.53 GHz mark requires a 9.5 multiplier. I adjusted this and set the FSB to 333, getting up to 3.15 GHz, and everything booted normally. Almost…
I used Prime95 for stress testing and was failing. I busted out Gigabytes included tweaking software to diagnose. Thankfully my CPU was staying under 53 C under full load, even with stock cooling, so things seemed to be ok there. Checking out the overclocking options, however, I noticed that the memory speed was set to 999 MHz. I recalled reading that the memory speed should be double the FSB speed in DDR2, and besides, my memory was only rated for 800. Adjusted that setting down, rebooted, and passed Prime95 with flying colors.
In addition, I used PassMark to benchmark my CPU. A score of 1977 put me essentially in stock Phenom 9600 range, AMD’s mid-range quadcore processor, which goes for about $250. Yay!
Considering that I’m only bothering to overclock to levels attainable with default voltages and stock cooling, operating at safe temperatures, this result has me overjoyed. Now to install Cubase and see what I can pull off.
