My 6 month project...

[sheepdog]

About 100 hours invested in this off and on for the last 6 months.

Work/Build Log (http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=108092&page=1&pp=20) and more pics.

2ft. by 2ft. by 2.5ft. deep.
Weight is well over 100 pounds. :o

http://www.bikeguide.org/images/comp/day20/IMG_3754.JPG
http://www.bikeguide.org/images/comp/day20/IMG_3752.JPG
http://www.bikeguide.org/images/comp/day20/IMG_3734.JPG
http://www.bikeguide.org/images/comp/day20/IMG_3758.JPG
http://www.bikeguide.org/images/comp/day20/IMG_3768.JPG



Hardware:
Intel 805 2.66@3.5 ghz, it can do 3.6 ghz but I need better ram to go higher (Never breaks 40c.)
ECS C19-a
Kingston 512meg x4 533 (running at 710 or so)
Sony 8x Dual Layer dvd burner
ATI X700 pro
ATI Tv Wonder
Hitach 250gig Sata drives x2 Non raid
Seagate 120gig Sata
Antech Silent Power 2.0 430 watt psu
Swiftech Apogee cpu block
Swiftech VGA block
Black Ice 2 dual 120 rad.
Magdrive 700GPH pump
All fans are 120mm Thermaltake w/adj. speeds for noise reduction (psu is a 120mm Antec and the Nvidia Northbridge fan, bith are temp controlled)


Willing to entertain offers. Shipping will be a fortune though.

[m42 fan]

two initial thoughts:

1) Liquid cooled--awesome

2) with the window, you can see all the dust build up and know when to clean it out :)

Good luck with the sale

Brian

[sheepdog]

two initial thoughts:

1) Liquid cooled--awesome

2) with the window, you can see all the dust build up and know when to clean it out :)

Good luck with the sale

Brian

Thanks.
Not really up for sale, but I would listen if someone made an offer.
It is a killer case, but I got more from making it than using it.

As for dust, what is visible is from building, the fans are low flow so dust should be minimal. Filters could easily be added though if it does become an issue. Biggest problem is the lexan being static charged, it attracts dust.

[D. Clay]

How loud is it? I am a nut about noise. I paid extra for quiet power supply and CPU fan.
Is this your first water cooled box?
Is water cooling recommend for overclocking at this level?
What temps does it run?
I like ECS mobos. Low cost and they last. I have two here from the 1600-1800 MHZ Athlon XP days that are still running after three years of 8-10 hrs. daily. Is that board easy to overclock?
Man, that's a lot of questions!

[sheepdog]

How loud is it? I am a nut about noise. I paid extra for quiet power supply and CPU fan.
Is this your first water cooled box?
Is water cooling recommend for overclocking at this level?
What temps does it run?
I like ECS mobos. Low cost and they last. I have two here from the 1600-1800 MHZ Athlon XP days that are still running after three years of 8-10 hrs. daily. Is that board easy to overclock?
Man, that's a lot of questions!
Actually the pump is still purging air from the system, so the pump is audible. Sounds like a fish tank at worst. The pump is mounted on a piece of bicycle inner tube for vibration dampening. Otherwise all of the fans are temp controlled or switch controlled. They are low nose fans anyhow 21db I think @12v. That is why I used 3 to suck through a dual radiator. 120mm fans are pretty quiet anyhow and other than the northbridge fan, which I may do away with, all fans are 120mm.


I have been doing watercooled for about 6 years now. Built several systems myself from transmission coolers, homemade blocks, etc... I was doing it back when there was no parts to make them. Even made the front page of HardOCP twice and wrote for a website for a while regarding watercooling and modding. :D


If you want silent and a good overclock, water is unbeatable pretty much, but air is safer, cheaper and can do almost as well if you pick your parts right. Try a Thermaltake Big Typhoon. it is a great air cooled cooler, that is quiet and very good at cooling. probably one of the top 3 air coolers. Fits all sorts of systems as well. Runs about $40-$50 as opposed to a cheap water system $120 (Thermaltake Big Water Se, which is darn good by the way) or mine which is high end at $250+ or top of the line water cooling at around $400-$500.

This chip at 4.1 gigs puts out almost 200 watts of heat... At 3.6 it is pumping out probably 130-140, which is pushing the limits of almost any decent air cooler. Most systems do not pump out much more than 100-140 watts though.

If you go water, buy a decent kit, or go big. Using crap parts, or DIY parts is a recipe for trouble.

Oh, and do not let the B.S. rumors scare you, water and electricity are fine. For one thing, many houses have electric water heaters, but more importantly we use distilled water plus water neutralizers like Water Wetter so that the water will not be conductive even if it leaks. Simply dry things out and start over. In all my years I have only lost one network card and a (possible) motherboard, I was too scared to try and test it afterwards as the socket the network card was in was fried badly. The only reason I lost those was because of a manufacturers mistake on some pipe I bought and the dust buildup making the water conductive again. So it is safe if you are careful. Waercooling though is not for everyone really.


Since air is still purging, the system will run a bit more warm, but basically it is barely above room temp.

The only reason I got the ECS board was that it was VERY cheap when I bought the processor. It works great really, I was surprised how well it works. In fact i tried to replace it with a medium level Gigabyte board and had to take it back, as it would barely run stable at stock clock speeds. I fired up the Gigabyte overclock tool and it actually underclocked it to make the system stable. The power system on it was sub par. If I was not trying to get OSX to run on here I would not bother replacing it.

Easy to overclock?
I put the chip in, and ran it up to 3.5 without even thinking. One adjustment to the fsb was all that was required. $200 is not bad for a board and chip combo that is dual core, 64bit and capable of running 3.5ghz.

[Zoso]

So you're mounting that thing in the trunk of the 318is - nice carputer :) Hehehe. Nice work

Coincidentally, I just put together a similar system. I'd been trudging along with my POS P3 1.2Ghz system with 256MB system RAM and a PCI video card. Yes, the mobo didn't allow me to have any more RAM or even an AGP video card. The speed sucked and it was swapping constantly, but I was getting by.

I recently bought a Sony HC3 high def video camera. I wanted to be able to edit the video but my old computer wasn't even fast enough to run the programs and the video... so it was time for an upgrade.

I also decided to go with the Pentium D 805 because of it's cost and overclocking prowess. I got a Gigabyte 8I945P-G mobo with 2 x 1GB DDRII-667 RAM, a massive heatsink and fan, and a GeForce 7600GT PCI Express x16 video card. All of this was about $50 shipped.

In my old system, I had 2 PATA drives and 2 optical drives. For the life of me, I couldn't get the Gigabyte mobo's GigaRAID controller to run the 2nd and 3rd IDE channels in normal ATA mode so I gave up last night. I ditched my old CDROM and put one of the hard drives in an external USB case. (Over a week ago, I ordered a 250GB external USB hard drive to do backups to. The case arrived, but the 250GB PATA drive was on backorder). I changed my order from a 250GB PATA to a 250GB SATA-300 drive.

I also overclocked mine. I have mine running at 3.33GHz - rock solid. If I want to go above 3.33GHz, I would have to up the core voltage. I upped the FSB to 180 see if 3.6GHz would work (normal core voltage still) and it crashed while booting Windows. I haven't experimented upping the core voltage. Tomshardware upped theirs well over the recommended max of 1.4V. The crash could have also been because 180 * 4 (memory multiplier) = 720... and the DDRII I have is 667. I could also try upping the voltage to the RAM aswell to help it do faster speed. The bios allows me to use a 3.5 memory multiplier so I could use that to do 3.6GHz if the RAM was the limiting factor.

At idle, I'm running 43C @ 3.33GHz. I haven't measured it under 100% load yet. You're right - $200 for mobo + CPU that is dual core, 64b, and overclocks to 3.33GHz+ is very attractive.

BTW, here's the fan I bought:
http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/productimage/35-186-134-01.JPG

My old tower case sucks for airflow. I need to do something because my hard drives don't seem to have much airflow and they get pretty hot.

Followup question:
Is there any advantage to running the 64b version of XP?

[sheepdog]

So you're mounting that thing in the trunk of the 318is - nice carputer :) Hehehe. Nice work Thanks.
Actually used to have a Celeron 366 computer in the Bimmer, in a motherboard box, for mp3's. Now I just use an Ipod with the alpine, much more elegant sollution. Man, the weight of this thing in the back would kill the acceleration!



I also overclocked mine. I have mine running at 3.33GHz - rock solid. If I want to go above 3.33GHz, I would have to up the core voltage. I upped the FSB to 180 see if 3.6GHz would work (normal core voltage still) and it crashed while booting Windows. I haven't experimented upping the core voltage. Tomshardware upped theirs well over the recommended max of 1.4V. The crash could have also been because 180 * 4 (memory multiplier) = 720... and the DDRII I have is 667. I could also try upping the voltage to the RAM aswell to help it do faster speed. The bios allows me to use a 3.5 memory multiplier so I could use that to do 3.6GHz if the RAM was the limiting factor.

At idle, I'm running 43C @ 3.33GHz. I haven't measured it under 100% load yet. You're right - $200 for mobo + CPU that is dual core, 64b, and overclocks to 3.33GHz+ is very attractive.
Same reason I bought that chip. I saw the article and ordered it that night. I got the ECS board as a temporary.

Funny, I "upgraded" to the same board you have, it would barely run stable stock, much less overclocked. The power system on 945 boards is not up to par. Odd since it was way more expensive than the cost of the ECS board. I think I could do 3.1ghz semi-consistent on it. The power systenm on that board sucks and I would not expect it to last long unde rthe conditions you are running it under.

Right now, I can hit 3.6 but it is just barely above to do it. It does it at stock voltage though. I thought it was my ram, asking for 720 from 522 valueram is asking a lot, but it may be a power limitation of the board.

I have not checked 100% loaded temps, probably low though considering my cooling system.

After lots of research I have found, you need a 955, 975 to really max out that processor.

Followup question:
Is there any advantage to running the 64b version of XP? Nope, it is buggy as hell, and has limited driver support. It was dumb to even bother releasing it this close to Vista as no one wants to support it.

[Zoso]

I'm not 100% happy with the Gigabyte motherboard. I got it because it was a good value and it had a lot of IDE channels so I could reuse my current PATA hard drives (I built the system as a budget system).

I'm unhappy with the 2nd and 3rd IDE channels. For the life of me I can't get that GigaRaid chip to work properly in normal non-RAID IDE mode. I would also like more control of the RAM timing. It'd also be nice to have a RAM multiplier over 4. I think my RAM could run faster than 667.

Maybe the board you had was defective? I have mine running at 3.33GHz rock solid with no voltage mods. I had it running at 3.5GHz but I had to up the core voltage to over 1.4V and lowered it back to 3.33GHz.

Why do you dislike the power system on the board? I've had no problems with it and I like the ability to independently control the voltage of the CPU, RAM, FSB, and PCI Express bus.

Does the ECS board allow you to change the RAM multiplier? If so, you could set the FSB speed to 200MHz to get 4GHz and set the RAM multiplier to 3 and have the RAM run at 600 or 3.33 to get 667. With you massive cooling, you should have no problems!

I did my first video editing last night. I imported an mpeg 2 transport file into Vegas and converted it to an MPEG4 file. It pegged the CPU(s) to 100%. I monitored the heat and it got up to (and stayed at) 57C while running at 3.33GHz.

Regardless, sweet case!

[sheepdog]

I'm not 100% happy with the Gigabyte motherboard. I got it because it was a good value and it had a lot of IDE channels so I could reuse my current PATA hard drives (I built the system as a budget system).

I'm unhappy with the 2nd and 3rd IDE channels. For the life of me I can't get that GigaRaid chip to work properly in normal non-RAID IDE mode. I would also like more control of the RAM timing. It'd also be nice to have a RAM multiplier over 4. I think my RAM could run faster than 667.

Maybe the board you had was defective? I have mine running at 3.33GHz rock solid with no voltage mods. I had it running at 3.5GHz but I had to up the core voltage to over 1.4V and lowered it back to 3.33GHz.

Why do you dislike the power system on the board? I've had no problems with it and I like the ability to independently control the voltage of the CPU, RAM, FSB, and PCI Express bus.

Does the ECS board allow you to change the RAM multiplier? If so, you could set the FSB speed to 200MHz to get 4GHz and set the RAM multiplier to 3 and have the RAM run at 600 or 3.33 to get 667. With you massive cooling, you should have no problems!

I did my first video editing last night. I imported an mpeg 2 transport file into Vegas and converted it to an MPEG4 file. It pegged the CPU(s) to 100%. I monitored the heat and it got up to (and stayed at) 57C while running at 3.33GHz.

Regardless, sweet case!
It may have been a buggy board. Hard to say, however, I have read from a few people that basically the 945 chipset is just not capoable of pushing that processor.

Your ram shoudl definately go above 667. Mine does and it is only 533.

The ECS board actually has seperate controls for memory, fsb and PCIe as well as specific individual ram timings, you need to access teh advanced menu, f1, I think, to get to them all. May want to try that on your board (go into the bios and hit f1 or f2, but try others untill you see a change, not all bios have this though.

I may try to get more from my system, but I am not sure if it will. I would not be surprised if I am maxxing out this boards power system as well, as it is quite cheap, although it is more robust than the Gigabyte.

Gigabyte seems to make good reliable boards, just not high poerformance ones. Every time I have gotten one from them for personal use, I have been disapointed, but for customers, they work great.

[Zoso]

I'll have to hunt around for an advanced menu... I never saw any mention for it in the manuals or in the bios, but it's worth taking a look!

I agree that my RAM can go higher than 667 - but to get it that high, I have to up the FSB... and therefor the clock speed. The RAM multiplier is limited to a max of 4 on the board.

Overclocking is cool shit. My 3rd computer was a P2-300 that was known to overclock to 450 without issue. 150MHz was huge. Now we're going from 2.66Ghz to 4GHz! Let us know how far you eventually push your system.