The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

With a 35% overclock, I'd probably say bump the Vcore up a bit more, maybe 1.33-1.35.
I believe Core 2 is the third core.

 

@mrk44

When my cpu wasn't OCCT stable it handled everything but games, but a BSOD or something is probably bound to happen eventually.
OCCT starts counting cores at 0 so core '1' would be core '2'.

 

LOL. it happened! i was watching a video, it lagged, froze, then gave me bsod.
I'll raise up the vcore and prime95 overnight and go from there.

 

Spot the mistake:

 

Triple channel. NOT 3gb

 

Nope

 

Oh geeze! Mhz, Not hmz!
Boy do I feel silly

 

Here's a Mini review of the Scythe "Kama Bay" 5" bay system cooler that I installed this morning in my Cooler Master Centurion 534 case. While not for everybody, because it eats up three 5.25" drive bays, it works very well for me. The fan is dead silent and moves 30 cfm of air at 800 rpm. The temperature drop for the CPU is a noticeable 2-3C, with a corresponding drop in the CPU Cooler Fan's speed.

Since my case is Black, I ordered a black one, but it also comes in Silver and white. The black is spot on color wise and looks like the case was made that way. I heeded the advice of others and removed the filter, as it requires removal of the whole assembly to be able to remove the fan so you can get at the filter. Not worth the effort at all, IMO! All I can say is that it does an excellent job and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a way to get more cool air to the CPU, Chipset and Memory. The biggest bonus was the difference in the Northbridge temps which are now 35-37C vs 42-44C without it! Overall, the case and the Kama Bay work very well together! Not bad for $19.99!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835185020

Russ

 

Code:

Cooler Master Centurion 534 case

I do like your taste in inexpensive cases and Scythe makes some decent fans. It should be quiet enough to even quell Sam's near obsessive compulsive search for quiet.

 

OK let me start buy saying my build is done, do not have the time right now to make a complete low down how everything went but I will. I will say my build is very simular to Russ's, its not as super charged as his but simular.

That cooler Russ has that sucker is nice, I even thought about it but since I'm not a gamer or overclocker I don't think I'll ever need it also I would not want to lose several bays, Oh Russ that other cooler is on it's way, 7 bucks for S/H man what a rip ehh what are gonna do, you need it you need it.

And before I leave, I am eladed with my new PC, I never had any so fast, and I did not have to spend hours getting rid of all that bloated crappy software thats always loaded with store bought PC's.

 

Good job Fred

Nice Sig russ

Well, I finished my taxes. Should be seeing a return with in 2 weeks or so. then its newegg shoppin time, LOL

 

Fred that is GREAT!!!!! I'm glad that Russ helped you thru it and you are satisfied with your product... Oh and it's beautiful NOT to have that extra crap in there innit?? Good luck buddy and keep us informed.

...gm

 

Sophocles,
I like the case very much! The big surprise was the PSU that came with it. It's well designed and very quiet. Looks nothing like the one in the Newegg pics at all. It has a 120mm fan on the bottom, rather than the air inlets on the sides and back like the one shown on Newegg.

The case itself needs a little improving in airflow in order to cool better, but the fan locations are all there, so it's easy enough to get it perfect. I pulled the stock rear fan and replaced it with a 53 cfm 1200 rpm Silverstone. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835220031 I moved the fan I removed to the front to help cool the sideways mounted HDDs, and added a Silverstone 80mm set to 1300 rpm as an exhaust, to replace the almost useless CPU Air Duct. The lower 120mm intake on the side cover doesn't do anything that I can see. Probably good if you are using a Video card, to help cool it. All in all, I'm very happy with the first AMD x2 I've ever built for myself, and so glad that I built it! In spite of a total of 5 case fans, it's extremely quiet! I've given it a mild 500MHz OC to 3.2GHz, although I had it as high as 3.7GHz using AMD Overdrive and the ACC. I'm quite happy with the performance at 3.2GHz, so that's where it's going to stay, until I can afford the new Phenom II to put in it. I'm one happy camper! LOL!!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Oman7,
It should be a nice sig. I made it from your Pic and PhotoShop! LOL!! My scanner died after all these years, and I don't use one often enough to even consider replacing it! One will turn up, one of these days! LOL!!

Thanks for the Pic,
Russ

 

Wow, your system can't use very much power Russ.... You can tell a coolermaster PSU from the next room at a LAN party.
The case you use though, the 534? Is it much like the 532? I was quite impressed with how that case performed in the system I built for my cousin.

 

Sam,
Here's the link to my case.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119159
Judging by the way it keeps things cool, I would say it has very good airflow characteristics. Temps are Super!

The temps are, R to L, Green=CPU, Dark Red=NB/GPU and the Purple=System temp. The two black ones are the HDDs, and the last one is the CPU Fan speed. Ambient temp is 21C/71F. I don't think it's possible to get the temps much lower than that, even though it's a bit chilly in here at the moment. The Sun's up so it will be getting warmer shortly! Here we are a couple of hours later at an ambient temperature of 24C!


As far as the PSU goes, that was a big surprise to me as it's a completely new and much better designed 460w PSU that the old one! Here's the old one.


And here's the new designed one.


The old design took air in from the front of the PSU. Considering that the majority of the warm air is behind the intake point, the air somewhat stalls around the top R corner of the case. The new design is a much better designed PSU, and a lot quieter than the old design!

I've discovered that Sandra Benchmarks for AMD's, are totally worthless! Please remember that I went from a bad E6750 to a Pentium D-940, OC'd to 3.55GHz. In fact using the D-940 at 3.55GHz, even though it's Sandra Performance numbers are much higher than the 7750BE, kicks the D-940's ass in performance all to hell at a stock 2.7GHz! The 3.55GHz D-940 never came close to the results of the E6750 yet the 2.7GHz 7750BE is marginally faster encoding the same test media, than the 3.55GHz E6750 was, with about 40% less MIPS! IMO all Sandra actually does since Sisoft stopped supporting Sandra 2005, is feed people's Egos! I'm pretty sure you will remember when I bitched about the huge gain in the numbers when Sandra 2007 came out. I mean, which one was correct, the 22,000 MIPS 2007 showed for my E4300 @3.355 or the 17,000 or so MIPS it showed with 2005? I think the then upcoming Core 2 Duo had a lot to do with that. Everest went the same direction too! Both companies barely support AMD at all! They saw the end of AMD's rein coming and geared their software pretty much to suit Intel results!

I really like this computer, and I am so glad that I built it. It does everything that the E6750 did and is better at encoding. I was wondering how the games I do play would look and play with somewhat slower video than the old 7600GT? It's better in every way! I know from playing Age of Empires on Oxi, with it's on board 6150 graphics, if you have two 200 man armies, and start building a lot of stuff that the video will eventually get dis-jointed where you think the mouse is acting up! I upped the Video Frequency to 800MHz and use both the 128MB Sideport memory and 256MB of the main memory and can run three 200 Man Armies with no sign of a slowdown in anything! Good Stuff!

I guess what I've accomplished here is to demonstrate how to properly do a Decent quality build on a budget. I had $650 to work with, so I concentrated first on what I wanted to have when finished. The MB, CPU and Memory were final, there were no options there! Everything else was looked at carefully, although I did blow it on the Lite-On ODDS! I managed to get two duds! LOL!! I like the Pioneer's I replaced them with. My total cost including Sales Tax and shipping was $550, with a $30 MIR coming from Corsair, so final cost will be $520. Add to that the $75 it's costing to repair my monitor, and I'm still under budget by about $50! For my efforts I wound up with the Best 790GX Motherboard, the best AMD x2 in it, and the best Memory available for the price at the time. I think it's safe to say that I made a wise choice in the case & PSU. Other than the two bad Lite-ons which were replaced the next morning by the Pioneers, and a bad round IDE cable, it's been the perfect budget build in terms of bang for the buck, for my needs. I'm extremely pleased with how well it all turned out!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

The noisy coolermaster units are the 120mm fan units like the one in your second photo. I don't know anything about the older 80mm boxes.

The HD3200 is far better than the Geforce 6150, without a doubt, but I would still place the 7600GT ahead of either.

 

Probably silly but...Im really liking that this new board. It doesnt mind 2 printers on post. My msi, I had to disable legacy support. It was causing post times to be 2-3minutes. Or I simply had to shut them off. Trivial amount of time I know, but when im in a hurry or feeling impatient, thats quite a bit of time that doesnt need to be. I think it has something to do with the printers having USB pic bridge, or whatever the heck its called, LOL. Obviously alot of thought went into this gigabyte board! If it continues to impress me, I may just be a customer for life
Its got a little competition. My asus is 8 yrs old. And the MSI has been a solid performer. So far, the gigabyte is getting nothing but praise from me

 

I made an interesting discovery last night. I though maybe that my ODD
problems might be related to my OC! I decided to up the SouthBridge volts a little. I added 0.1v to the Southbridge, and the I/O speed went up dramatically! It now boots up completely in 61 seconds, with all drivers and software loaded, and ready to use. I have absolutely no idea why the voltage increase did that. Any ideas as to why? I know the Southbridge handles the Sata and IDE drives, as well as doing a few other things but I just didn't expect it to boot up so much faster and I'm curious why. I mean it normally has to address the Anti Virus, My Disc Stakka, HD Audio, Ati Catalyst and the Lan. Now they are done before Looney Tunes stops playing! An amazing difference for just adding a tenth of a volt! I'm just wondering, how come and what other people have to say about it?

Russ