Upgrading Cooler to OC

alright, lets start at the begining you will need

Edited by !ender_ - 12 Sep 2010 at 12:24am

c states are best left off for complete stability

cant know that until we know what your setup can handle, the higher blck the better, but with that comes more stress and higher temps.

So tinkered with my overclocking into the wee hours of the morning. The NH-D14 dropped my idle temps almost 10 degrees over the stock cooling before overclock.

I ended up pushing my overclock to a mild 3.6GHz as that was the sweet spot temperature and voltage wise before I started having to push a little harder. I have to say I was not very impressed with my little 930, it required more voltage than I thought it should to get to 3.8.

Running my 930 at 3.6, I still have Prime95 going but it hasn't gone beyond 68C under my NH-D14 for any of the cores.

I am actually underclocking my RAM a little bit, which I am entirely ok with, for my uses rock solid stability and a safe margin on the temps is far more important to me than being able to forum ninja a 4.1GHz overclock on air.

So...
i7-930 on a eVGA X58 3X (the new 767 part, more on that in a minute)
Running 20x180 @ 1.285V for 3600MHz nominal
Under an NH-D14 monster cooler
6GB Tri-Channel Mushkin @ 2:8 for 1440 Nominal

At the time of this writing I am at 26 hours of Prime95 burn in preceded by 20 runs of Linx and my max temp on any core has been 69, and that was a spike. Cores run 41-45 degrees during normal 2d productivity operations and hover in the mid 60s under extended 100% load.



So the new eVGA motherboard.
1) They are harnessing a piece of the PCI express bandwidth to do the USB3 and SATA6gbps. Thus you are 16/8/8 under the best of conditions. I knew that going into it and am ok with that but for others that may not be ok, it bears repeating.

2) As with most eVGA hardware, its a great setup, lots of accessories in the box. I wish there was one more USB header (only two on the board, accessible), maybe instead of the two firewire headers. I would much rather have 3 USB and 1 1394 than the 2 and 2 it has now.

3) As of this writing, when you register the board to your account over there, it really doesnt get you anything. The new -767 part is not listed in any of the support listings so you cant even GET to a support page for drivers and such. AND even when its registered to your evga.com profile via the serial number, it is not recognized as a registered X58 motherboard part so you don't get access to e-leet. I had to do all of my overclock work via BIOS which made it take that much longer. It may sound like a little thing but when you release a part, I am one of those that thinks your marketing and support channels need to be ready to appropriately support it.

4) The BIOS was a little odd. Out of the box, the boot order is hard drive before CDROM. There is no auto-detection setting for CPU fan between voltage or 4 pin intelligent fans. With everything on the default settings and auto-everything, it detected my 2.8GHz i7-930 as such... and then ran it at 2.66GHz (?!) and underclocked my 1600MHz Mushkin blackline rated for 7-8-7-20 to 1066 8-8-8-something.

Edited by Clocks - 15 Sep 2010 at 12:25pm