PCWormhole.com

Evolution

MaadDaawg — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 04:01:58 +0000

It’s been too long since I’ve been back, my travels through the wormhole, while extensive, were sidetracked by a ruinous relationship with Corporate America that kept me away. Constantly beating at me, like an unseen wild animal that looks to consume your soul.

But I’ve thrown off that yolk, and look forward to spending more time with my beloved equipment, the stockpile of which has grown tremendously since last I wrote, yet, has sadly lain mostly unused until the point of my liberation last week. I am now free to pursue my passions as President of MaadDaawg Enterprises Inc. MaadDaawg.com shall soon arise with more on that.

I believe last we spoke I had just put the finishing touches on my “Dueling Banchetto’s”, an awesome achievement in mind and technology at the time. While the Gamer was water cooled, the “Bencher” was equipped with a Single Stage Phase Change Chiller that froze the CPU to -40C. What a thrill ride it was to speed along at speeds unheard of under water cooling.

But alas, as with all good things, that ended as it became obvious that the SS alone would not enable the speeds I craved, so I went to DICE, a combination of Dry Ice and Acetone that enabled awesome temps of -65/-70C. I never did fall in love with DICE though and it was only a very short period of time before I realized that I had to go all the way, I had to do LN2 …. and once you go LN2, there ain’t no going back again.

Let me back up a little to the pre-Single Stage (SS) days of water cooling. Water Cooling (WC) required you to mount a water block on your motherboard with a back plate that sandwiched the CPU in between them. Water pumped through the system and the radiator(s) kept the CPU cool. While an important consideration, the TIM you chose was not as critical as when you go sub zero. You didn’t need to worry about condensation because, by definition, water cooling will only cool your system to you ambient temperature. Consequently physics dictates that there will be no condensation.

When you go sub zero with an SS unit you have to protect your motherboard from condensation, because the colder temps of the phase head will create condensation, and unless you’re adequately prepared for it, it will destroy your system. Although there are several ways to accomplish waterproofing your motherboard (more today than last year) I went with my peers and started using rubber artist eraser to prepare my systems. CPU and GPU both. There are many good “how to” guides out on the net, some of the best at Overclockaholics.com.

A simple layer of eraser was basically all you need for DICE as well. DICE is fun in that the mixing of the acetone with the dry ice can create some very dramatic eruptions, but it’s deadly as well as the mixture creates toxic fumes that could kill if you don’t adequately ventilate.

DICE, and LN2, both require specialty material to use. For DICE you need a DICE pot, one for your CPU and if you’re so inclined, one for your GPU. LN2 gets a little more interesting.

In addition to protecting your equipment from water, LN2 also requires a degree of thermal protection as well. What is most normally used is a combination of closed cell foam insulation, Snow King insulating tape, and Armaflex. There are numerous variations and I’d encourage any newcomer to check the threads on Overclockaholics.com for tips before starting.

In addition to LN2 pots, which may or may not be similar to the DICE pot you’re using, you also need a Dewar to hold your supply of LN2. A Dewar is a double walled vessel that maintains the LN2 at or close to it’s native temp of -365C until you’re ready to use it. Note however that all Dewar’s “leach” out a small amount each day, so your supply will not remain forever if left unused. The most common Dewar used by the enthusiast community is a low pressure vessel that vents at 10 pounds of pressure and loses about 1/2 a liter a day or less. The high pressure Dewars hold at about 300lbs of pressure and can vent up to 10 liters per day.

As a rule of thumb, most LN2 pots can be used for DICE while most DICE pots are not good for LN2. This is because of the dynamics of how each is used.

With DICE you normally want to get as cold as you possibly can, which means keeping the pot full of dry ice and acetone and periodically mixing the brew. LN2 is all about “temperature control”.

Many motherboards, CPUs, and GPUs cannot function at the depths of cold that LN2 can create and they subsequently hit their cold bug (CB) temp and lock up. When this happens you need your trusty propane (or mapp gas) torch to warm up the pot (and the CPU/GPU) to the point where it will successfully boot again. This point is referred to as the CBB. You will spend a good deal of time learning where your motherboard and CPU “bug” out on you, then, you use controlled pouring to hold the system at a steady temperature just below the CB to best optimumize performance. To keep it interesting, sometimes when you change voltage or clock settings, it can cause the the CB and CBB to move, so it’s never a dull moment.

I found my Dewar online at E-bay as have many of my OCAlliance brothers. The OCAlliance by the way is the brothership between the Overclockaholic Gladiators and the Sub-Zero Syndicate and is the number one overclocking team in the USA. Number seven in the WORLD! That’s pretty damn good cause there are a lot of good overclockers out there.

Having my Dewar I bought my pots from Kingpin Extreme Cooling. An F1EE for my CPU(s), a Tech Nine slim for SLI, and a Tech Nine Fat Boy for the hot 480.

My first few sessions were not as successful as I’d have hoped. There is a big difference between running an SS at -40C and pouring LN2 at temps well below 100 degree’s or lower. After several Dewar’s worth of practice I finally got my system under control and was successful in wracking up a few “boints” for my team. At that time I was using an EVGA e762 4-way SLI motherboard, an i7 975 and i7 980X, and an ASUS 5870 video card – both under LN2. It was just too much fun and the LN2 ran out way too fast, but….. no pain, no gain, right?

The TIM you choose when going LN2 cold is critical and until recently it was believed that Artic Silver Ceramic was the best because of it’s thermal properties. Just recently it’s been discovered that OCZ FREEZE is far superior. I’ll be testing that out this weekend, but I know it’s true cause thats what my brothers tell me, and they know.

You also use your torch to “flash” the pot .. which is a pretty awesome experience the first time you do it. When you start pouring LN2 you’ll note that the temp goes down rather slowly, 1 or 2 degrees at a time. When you get to about -60C you hit the pot with a good dose of flame from the torch and warm it up 10 or 15 degrees. When you start pouring again you’ll notice a kind of “snow” falling off the inside of the pot into the awaiting LN2, and it sizzles, snaps, and erupts (you don’t want to have your face over the pot and be looking down without some damn good safety goggles when you do this). After that, you’ll notice that your temps are falling in 10 degree increments or more. You do know you need a digital thermometer (K-type) to do LN2 don’t you?

Then my corporate bosses figured I wasn’t working hard enough (I was only putting in about 60 hours a week working at home) so they decided to send me all over the damned country. From no travel I went to traveling at least every other week. I was so damned tired when I was home, and in so much pain (I ain’t no spring chicken), that my benching suffered something terrible. Then, my job was eliminated and I was unemployed. BUT HAPPY for the first time in a long time. I decided the hell with corporate BS and incorporated MaadDaawg Enterprises to give myself something to do, a means to help others do what they want to do, and, hopefully, make enough money to keep me off the street with a “please help” sign.

Took me about a month to decompress but while doing so I found myself buying new equipment, which was strange considering that now I had no more incoming revenue? A new ASUS Rampage 3 Extreme mobo and a MSI GTX 480 Lightning to go along with my Core i7 980X. They are being prepped for LN2 as I type, well, not actually as I type cause that would be impossible, but, you get the idea. So, this weekend will be LN2 fun in the man cave (future home of MaadDaawg Enterprises Inc) in the basement. Just wish I had more than one 35 Liter Dewar to extend the fun time.

One thing I should mention. If you decide on going LN2, check your local source for pricing first as some locations may be cost prohibitive. For some strange reason too, the smaller your Dewar the more per Liter they charge, so keep these things in mind. AirGas is usually the main if not the only choice you’ll have.

So I hope I haven’t bored you too much, but, the main thing I’m wanting to say is “The MaadDaawg” is back wOOt.

Be seeing you around more often, and don’t forget to check in with Overclockaholics.com and MaadDaawg.com whenever you get the chance. Be good to see you there.

The Daawg

Quakecon ’10 Asus Event

romdominance — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:25:51 +0000

After a quick battle in SPi 1M on Asus’ site, Splave and I were slated to face Team Pure’s Brian Y and Gomeler in the ROG Experience tour round 1 finale at Quakecon 2010.
Chris (Gomeler), Brian Y, Allen (Splave), Bren (Romdominance)
The first day of competition was on the Rampage 3 Extreme motherboard with the Intel 980x cpu and a Asus GTX 460. The two tests for the day were SPi 32M and 3DMark 06. Splave and I were far behind half way through the first day, when we quickly switched out our cpu for the backup. With an hour and a half to go we passed Pure’s SPi 32M score by almost three seconds…it was then that we turned our sites on 3dM06. In the last half and hour we passed their score in 06 by a slim 330 points to sweep day one. Day two was AMD thuban 1090t and GTX480 day. All we had to do was win one of three tests and we win the event.
Just as if caught in a loop, day two started the same way as day one. Our first chip was garbage and we quickly switched cpus and focused on wprime 1024. After tweaking to an amazing result at almost 6.4MHz and Team Pure’s chip was badly degraded and frosted over, Splave and I had won the event.
It was a blast and I need to thank Brian @ Asus as well as his staff for a great event. Also thanks to Brian and Chris from team Pure for being graceful friends and worthy competitors. Last but not least, thanks to my wingman Dentlord for making the drive, for always supporting his team and partying with us in the evenings. On to Asus ROG tour round #2!

Our team’s path to number one in the U.S.A.

romdominance — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 05:33:14 +0000

Its been far to long since I have written here on the Wormhole. The last couple of months have been filled with late night LN2 bench sessions and overclocks I never thought were possible. The path to #1 in the U.S. was nothing like I thought it would be though.

The big change to our team began last December. The topic of team growth came up as we discussed how to achieve the goal of recruiting good members and eventually overtaking XS for the number 1 spot in the HWbot team rankings. We had discussed a merger earlier in ’09, but had mutually decided the time was not right. Since the Bot had recently changed it’s scoring in its latest revision, Overclockaholics had surged back up to number three directly below us. The time for unity had come. We would only need another 1500bts to overtake XS for the top spot if we unified.

Unfortunately it was not a unanimous decision to merge. We were a great team over at NBOC, but some of the leaders had different views on how to proceed. Ultimately the top eight heavy hitters from NBOC, under the new unit name of “SubZeroSyndicate”, joined the Overclockaholics.com gang to form the “OC Alliance”. Kal-El, the administrator of OCA, has made the transition as smooth as superhumanly possible, big thanks to him. This new alliance seemed to motivate all of us as never before.

Seeing the new Alliance rapidly approaching in their rear view mirror, XS began a benching rally to maintain their lead. This proved to be ineffective as the new Alliance’s momentum was unbelievable. Through the tremendous efforts of our members, and a great community of helpful and knowledgeable benchers, we have succeeded in capturing number one.

Our plan for the future? That ones easy,… bench our asses off with the goal of world domination!

So you see why its been difficult to make the time to publish here recently. I intend to continue pushing the envelope for myself and my team. I also intend to spend more time here writing about this amazing journey. Lets celebrate our victory as we battle our way up through the world ranks. Congrats team OCA!

The Gigabyte P55A-UD6 Review, SATA and USB3 are here!

romdominance — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 00:51:32 +0000

Gigabyte P55A-UD6: SATA and USB 3 are here!

The board I am reviewing today is the Gigabyte P55A-UD6

You will notice that there are many similarities between the standard P55-UD6 board. The one difference and it is a major one is the addition of usb 3.0 and sata 3.0 support on a select few ports.

Here are some of the strong points I see just overlooking the board
+Large heatpipe cooler covering all devices, and the obscenely high number of power phases (24 of them).
+Cooler allows fitment of large tower cooler without any fitment issues.
+10 serial ata ports 6 onboard controlled by the P55 chipset one pair controlled by a add in Jmicron controller (esata). One pair controlled by Marvell chipset for sata 3 6.0 Gbps
+Onboard power and clear Cmos buttons for ease of use outside of the case.
+14 total usb ports, 8 via rear panel and 2 usb 3.0 on rear panel via the NEC add on chip and 4 via the onboard headers.
+24 Phase CPU power for extreme stability under heavy loading or high end overclocks.
+rear panel ps2 dual use keyboard or mouse port.
+Onboard post code LCD display for diagnosis of posting or bootup issues

This board has many great features. And looks to be a very solid built board. Here are a few issues I did see with the setup

+ When enabling SATA 3.0/USB 3.0 in bios primary pci-e slot drops from 16x to 8x
+When using 2 cards in a Crossfire or SLI configuration USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 is not available.

Overall when considering the setup, Until either there is a chipset offering more PCI-e lanes than the 16 offered by the 1156 CPU the implementation of the new SATA and USB modes are very well handled.

3 3 3 Onboard Acceleration

All of the new features added to this board represents the advertised 3 3 3 Onboard Acceleration system.

It is comprised of 3 systems of course:
> Sata 3.0 support Via add on chipset
> USB 3.0 support Via NEC add on controller chip
> USB power 3x via more and stronger power circuits feeding the USB ports

The major plus side of each feature will be detailed below

Sata 3.0 support:
Allows double the throughput on each of the 2 ports that support SATA 3.0. Also has the capability to be run in a RAID0 configuration which will give you 4x the throughput of a single SATA 2.0 port.

USB 3.0 support:
Standard USB 2.0 runs at 480 Mbps The new USB 3.0 runs at a blazingly fast 5Gbps. So imagine where we used to move 25gb to a USB hard drive and it would take up to 14 minutes under ideal situations. The same amount of data transferring to a USB3.0 device will transfer in approximately 70 seconds, or just over 1 minute.

USB Power 3x:
Allows a much higher amount of power to external USB devices which will in turn allow far more usb devices, and as seen by non external powered usb hard drives of the past which required 2 usb connections to have enough power to transfer effectively, With this new available power the same can be achieved with just one usb connection. Not to mention with the higher amount of power more devices will be allowed to be connected to one port via a usb hub with far less issues.

Testing

Unfortunately I have run into some difficulties getting my hands on some USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 Devices for testing at this time, and the Review will be updated with comparisons once the hardware is available.

Installation

Installation is quite easy as it is a standard ATX layout, and all screw holes are easily accessible. I found it quite easy to even remove and reinstall single screws with the board mounted in the case and standing upright.
Installation of most single slot cooled Physx cards in bottom slot appears to not be an issue at all with the slot placement. The 1394 port is above the lowest 4x pci-e (Physx) slot can be possible issue depending upon placement of your 1394 header.

Bundled Accessories

This board comes a very complete accessories selection.
>SLI connector (a single flexible 2 way sli bridge)
>Sata cables (a total of 4 yellow cables 2 with right angle plugs on one end)
>a single IDE cable
>Full Motherboard manual including motherboard driver/software cd
>Multi language manual
>IO shield
>Smart 6 manual
>Smart TPM manual

Bios Layout

The bios you will see is very similar to the P55 boards I have seen from Gigabyte. It has a option for enabling the higher speed USB and SATA ports. Otherwise it is what you have come to expect from Gigabyte bios. Excellent overclocking options and plenty of misc options for custom configuration of the board. Here is the main bios when you first enter MIT

Test setup

Motherboard: Gigabyte P55A-UD6
CPU: Core I7 870
Memory: Kingston DDR3 2000 Mhz Cas8 2x1gb
Hdd: Western digital 320 GB
Graphics card: Gigabyte GTX 295
CPU cooling: Prolimatech Megahalems with Skythe ultra kaze 3000RPM fan
CPU cooling (extreme overclock) Copper/ALU Dice pot
PSU: FSP Everest 1010W

Getting started overclocking

I started pretty much like I always do, just bumping up the Bclk to see where I could get it. I found the board overclocked extremely well and did not seem to struggle at all and saw over 4 ghz without an issue on air. The voltage granularity was very fine and had a lot of voltage options at very small steps which makes fine tuning much easier

Benchmark testing

These tests will show how the system handles the common benchmarks setup to show how the system performance and efficiency is at stock settings. Wprime is a Multi threaded test I run which uses all cores to crunch out numbers. The amount of time it takes is basically your score. The faster you can do it the better your system is running.

Stock

Here is the overclocked run of the exact same test. Just like my previous reviews, you will see that it scales pretty much the same as other Gigabyte boards. Performance on these new cpu’s greatly improves with overclocking without a large heat dump.

Now for 3dmark vantage, In this test We will see if a dual gpu card scales differently with cpu frequency higher.

On the left is the stock single card Dual GPU run, and on the right is the overclocked run with the 295.

Gaming overclock testing

These tests are to show how well the board scales in real life gaming situations. I tested it with 16x and 8x Pci-e Bandwidths to see if there was any markable difference between running the Dual gpu card in the 8x slot and the severity of the performance impact.

The games used are Crysis and Resident Evil 5. I used these games on the previous test and the seemed to represent very well. Crysis being very graphics intensive Will show any differences between the 8x and 16x pci-e bus.

First up is Resident Evil at 16x:

Next up is Resident Evil at 8x:

and heres one with the mild overclock

Next test is Crysis, like stated this will show any scaling issues between 8x and 16x

Here is the 16x run:

But heres with 8x:

and heres one with the mild overclock

One very important thing to note is that YES with a dual gpu card you do see a bottleneck with a 8x bus, but then again at stock cpu speed on a 8x bus with a single 295 this thing still was a lil below 60 AVG FPS on high. Not to mention for some reason, and I tested it multiple times for consistency but on the 8x bus the minimum FPS actually was higher… so it did not spike downward nearly as badly. Why? I am not sure, possibly with the bottleneck it kept the card a little more busy and therefore did not droop in performance at all. But I repeated the same results over 7 passes to withing + or – 1fps on minimum FPS. So you can run crysis on this beast on high at playable framerates with a single 295.

Xtreme overclock testing
For this section I decided to see how this setup handled the cold, and the results were quite surprising. The board ran very easily all the way up to 4.8ghz. Some 2d benches were easily obtainable up to 5ghz or so, but I believe fine tuning and cooling quality becomes a huge issue when pushing any further than this. I made these runs on dry ice/acetone mix, which was ideal for an unloaded temp of approx -70C. I did see as you will see on my benchmark screenshots that my results were right within the range of the other power users who have benched similar setups on liquid nitrogen. That speaks very highly to the overall strength, durability and overall capability of this board.

BUNDLED SOFTWARE

This board just like the micro ATX board comes with the Smart 6 software which opens up quite a numerous amount of possibilities.

>Smart Quickboot: An advanced sleep method that allows almost instantaneous boot
>Smart Quick boost: simple one click overclocking
>Smart recovery: Allows you to easily roll back settings to a previous time so you can quickly recover from a system issue
>Smart Dual bios: A backup so no matter how bad the bios can be damaged the backup will reflash and recover for you.
>Smart Recorder: Advanced and easy Pc monitoring
>Smart Timelock: Time Controller for PC

The board also comes with the Dynamic Energy Saver 2 which allows hardware/software to coincide together to help tweak down any unnecessary power usage in order to save you just that much more on your power bill when you dont need the extra power or punch this system can deliver.

Conclusion and final thoughts

This board layout is superb, it has the power button in an ideal location so that even with board fully hooked up in a benching configuration it is accessible. The reset and clear CMOS buttons are bot located at the edge of the pcb so that even if using multiple full length dual slot cards in the board will still allow usage. Also with a dual gpu card I can say that it performed flawlessly not to mention under the 8x pcie bandwidth the minimum seen FPS in crysis was actually higher and the card did not have nearly as much choppiness with the card in the physical 8x slot.

I believe with the advertised results and sata 3.0 ssd’s and USB3.0 flash drives there are going to be a lot of reasons to want this board, besides its excellent performance the availability of such high I/O’s just adds to the list.

Pros:
+SATA 3.0 and USB3.0 that should be enough but theres more.
+Excellent bios, very easy to work with
+very cool looking racing stripe cooler design just like the Micro board
+Every option you can think of and im sure some you couldn’t
+Excellent board layout, even with full length card most everything is usable.

Cons:

-With 2 cards installed in system you cannot run sata 3.0 as it uses 8x pci-e so you have either tradeoff single 8x card and the enhanced IO performance, or better PCI-e performance but no sata 3.0

_______________________________________________________________________________
Review written and photographed by Shannon/Punx223
Edited and submitted by Romdominance

Some new hardware since I last reported in. :)

GFDuke — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 15:23:53 +0000

I have recently had the privilege of getting a cherry Xeon W3570 and one of the hottest GPU’s on the market, the HD5970 dual gpu solution from ATI/Radeon. This one happened to be the Sapphire Radeon overclocked edition. Even though it is not advertised as an overclocked card, it has higher core and memory clocks than any other manufacturer, as of now…

The XEON W3570

First off the Xeon 3570 is an amazing chip. Period. On phase it overclocked to 5225 MHz on only 1.44 Vcore and 1.30 vtt for a very respectful PiFast run of 16.17sec. I might add that I was running a 2:10 divider on the ram and a 20x uncore. I won’t bore you with ram timings and such. All of that is visible in the screenies below. I also managed a nice Super-Pi run of 7.75sec at the same speed of 5225 MHz..

Unfortunately for the WPrime runs of 32m and 1024m I had to drop back my clocks a bit due to the fact that my phase couldn’t keep it cold enough. Even at only 1.43Vcore. But it still produced some respectable numbers. Prime32 was actually not that bad and my temps stayed low enough to make a 4.731 run at 5091mhz. Prime1024 was a bit harder and hotter so I had to drop the CPU back to 4946 MHz but it still made respectable run of 153.984 or 3min 33secs. If I had ln2 for this wonderful w3570 I am positive I would have a world record competitor.

The Radeon 5970

Out of the box….this thing is freaking huge. Its length dwarfs my EVGA Classified by about a 1 3/4″. You are definitely not putting this card into a mid-sized case. If you manage to, you will kill it and everything in your pc with heat. Capable of running 1.3vgpu and a 1gig core you can heat a small room with it. No kidding!!

Some benchmark tests

First off, the driver for this card is at best, poor. When they work they work great. But for an overclocker they are a nightmare. Constant crashing and the need to reboot, uninstall and reinstall drivers becomes the norm after about an hour with this card. Is it worth it? IMO if you’re an overclocker and into the HWbot anything is worth the huge points this card has to offer. I was totally blown away when I was running a 1gig gpu core clock in Vantage at 1.3Vgpu. Interestingly enough I couldn’t get the 1 gig clock to run in 03, 05, and 06 without a huge meltdown of the drivers. But the high 977 MHz clock for 3Dmark 03 and 06 turned in some nice scores. While I only managed a 920 core clock for 3Dmark 05 my score was very respectable. All in all… it was a great time benching these cards. It’s not often that we see an increase in performance hardware that makes us “hardware junkies” excited. I can say that this was one of those rare times.

Karmakazi’s 5870 benching

karmakazi — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:44:42 +0000

At the time of my benching, all these scores were Gold Trophy’s on the bot. I was very limited in what I could accomplish due to CCC limiting my clocks to 900/1300. Also at the time, there was no software based voltage adjustments available.

New bios (S21Z) in the eVGA Classified 760 got me booting from bios at 230+ bclock. This W3540 is a very strong chip, loving the cold. The board would cbb at around -90° to -92°, but the chip wasn’t cold bugging even at -130°! With the Kingpin F1EE cpu pot I was able to maintain steady temps even under extremely heavy loads like wPrime 1024. So 3D benching wasnt a problem since the most cpu demanding bench I was running was 3dmark 2006. On to the results!

One unfortunate happening during this session was when I was benching 2D first. I killed 2 out of 3 of my Kingston Elpida Hyper sticks during 32M runs. All these benches were thus done in single channel mode which hurt things some (especially in aquamark3)

3DMark 2001 Gold (now silver)

3DMark2005 Silver (now 7th)

3DMark2006 Gold (now silver)

Aquamark3 Gold (now 6th) – Could had about 390k if I had triple channel working.

I currently have no 5870′s (this one was for a customers gaming computer) but will revisit this again for sure. I got some new non-explosive hypers in from Kingston.   Now with CCC limits of 1200+ on core, adjustable voltages from software, people are pushing these cards to 1050ish core on air, 1125ish on water, and 1200-1300 on LN2. Quite impressive!

Romulan Ale and a lot of Boints

romdominance — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 03:48:21 +0000

Romulan ale and boints, are two of three things I can never seem to get enough of. Those of you who know me, know where the “Rom” thing comes from. For those of you who don’t, Greetings! I am Romdominance and this is my formal Introduction. I am a proud member of Team NBOC and the administrator of the wormhole. My username derives from my past gaming experience as a Romulan fleet admiral in a game known as StarFleet Command II, and has stuck with me over many years. I am sure my “fleet” memories are just as much “the good ol’ days” as the “clan” memories are for many of you,…so lets move on…..

I began building gaming rigs and overclocking them 4 years ago. I purchased a Dell xps 700 and was not at all impressed with it’s performance. I proceeded to upgrade everything from bottom of the line to state of the art (for the time) right down to the h2c cpu water cooler, dumb right? I managed to overclock the quad to 3.85GHz stable and achieve a 3dmark06 score of almost 21k, at the time one of the top two dells in the world. I still was not impressed as Crysis was not playable at 19×12. A month later I sold the rig on eBay.

It was time to build the “warbird”. The next step for me was to take out a small mortgage, lol, and buy the best of what I thought was out there. Like most of you, I made some good choices and bad, but with a little luck, she came together well. I began my oc forum debut at a little quaint website known as eocf. There the warbird dominated the Crysis bench thread for well over a year as well as winning the first “rig of the month”. Gradually I noticed that many of my friends were no longer around. With a little digging and a tip from a Vulcan, I found they had left to form NBOC. It was clear to me that I was through with noobville, so I joined the No Borders Overclocking Club and have never looked back.

With the advent of NBOC and our HWBot team, I soon realized that I had become a bencher, not so much a gamer any longer. Our team has managed to claim the number 2 rank in the USA and I am very proud to be a part of such a great group of guys. I was anointed as the Bot coach for our newer members, and that has enabled me to forge true friendships with each of our team members…

During that time, the warbird has undergone continuous upgrades to this point. Where I started with a 790i ultra, she now boasts a e759 Classified. For GPU’s, she started with 9800gtx sli and now sports
280GTX-HC tri-SLI,..and the list of CPU’s looks something like this, a QX9650 to an E8600 to an i7 965 to finally the i7 920do which I adore. Its all happened with the PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 1200 for a power plant, all within the Silverstone TJ-10BW ESA case, which has and will remain the hull of the Warbird till the end of her days.

Unfortunately, as many of you know, a case is difficult at best for benching. Also there are very real limits to how much you can achieve under water cooling…which leads us to my new project.

Under the wise advice of many of my brothers, (MaadDawg for the Banchetto, ocgmj for the w3520, Splave for the SS, and Kal-EL for providing my pots,… just to mention a few), I have began to assemble an escort battleship for the warbird. This rig will be a boint killer and will fetch many cups for the Empire in the days to come. For more on this build, please watch for a post entitled “The Empire’s new Prototype” under the rigs & racks category.

Until then, Thanks for visiting pcwormhole.com. I hope you enjoy the articles from our fantastic group of overclockers. I look forward to what the future holds for our team as well as for our sites and until then, Enjoy the Journey…

karmakazi on board at the wormhole!

karmakazi — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:49:18 +0000

Hello everyone!

I would first like to thank RomDominance for the opportunity to blog here with this great bunch of guys. Many of you may have seen me around at xtremesystems, overclockaholics, i4memory or other various forums around the net.   For those of you whom havent met me yet, let me give you a short introduction.

My name is Jamie and I’m 27 years old. I live and work in the Buffalo NY area, running a local computer repair business and an online ebay store. I’ve been into computers from the time I could walk as a little kid. In fact I could type my name on a computer before I could write it! My father was a computer programmer and got me into hardware and games at a very young age. Been an addict ever since! I also run a small Overclocking team that is part of the PURE overclocking team. Its called the Uberclocker OC Team and we have a small blog where I also post at. Members include myself, Slovnaft, Chispy and Pauld5999.

My first gaming PC was an Apple IIe (no hard disk, just two floppy’s) and Ive owned many since… From a 286 16Mhz playing Wing Commander to my current i7/classified rigs waiting for some DX11 action.

I first got into overclocking during the end of the AMD reign. I wasnt concerned with benchmarking, it was mainly just to squeeze some extra performance out of lower end cpus to save some cash. Then in late 2007 I got bitten with the benchmarking bug which led to heavy hardware purchases and extreme cooling. Funny how this hobby usually starts out as a way to save some cash, but results in an expensive addiction that rivals heroin

In 2008 I skipped from air cooling right to LN2. Never messed with water or phase, and only used dry ice a few times. Picked up a 50L dewar and cpu, nb and 2x gpu pots from Duniek. Earlier this year I purchased an F1EE cpu pot from Kingpin. Been cold clockin ever since

Ive recently been on a quest to max out my hwbot hwboints, and in doing so have broken back into the top 100. Currently ranked 75th I hope to hit 600 points by the end of 2009.

I will be posting the results of my OC adventures, and some hardware reviews too. Looking forward to working with everyone here, to make pcwormhole a top destination for OC related news and reviews!

My Review of the Gigabyte EX58-UD5 motherboard

Punx223 — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 06:04:49 +0000

The Gigabyte EX58-UD5 : A review by Punx223

Over the past few weeks I have had the great opportunity to work with the Gigabyte EX58-UD5.
Mind you this is my first major full time venture into the X58 1366 socket platform, so let’s continue.

First of all a great amount of thanks goes to Gigabyte for providing the board to test with. I have used many Gigabyte boards in the past, and if this board is nearly as easy to use or as easy to overclock as the previous, I do not see how all of the other motherboard manufacturers stay in business.

We start with an overlook of the entire board to see how well it is laid out, and any possible issues we may encounter. There were a few things I did notice with the layout. I see the chipset cooler appears to be very similar to the one I previously have seen on the EP45-UD3P, which shares not only its styling but hopefully its excellent cooling characteristics.

+ Large heatpipe cooler

+ Cooler very well laid out to allow fitment of most large aftermarket coolers without issue.

+ Very low profile but efficient southbridge portion of cooler completely clears any large graphics cards.

+ Inclusion of a 4x slot for usage of non graphics cards (graphics cards will not fit in slot as the leg going to the southbridge cooler would be in the way.)

+ 10 total serial ata ports (6 “blue” controlled ICH10R southbridge, 4 “white” controlled by 2 different Jmicron controllers) for a very large amount of drive expandability.

+ Onboard power and clear Cmos buttons for ease of use outside of the case.

+ Onboard 2 digit post display to assist with potential no post condition diagnosis.

+ 8 rear IO panel usb’s plus 4 main available from the onboard headers

+ 12 Phase CPU power for ultimate stability when pushing overclocks or heavily loaded situations.

+ Onboard power phase, temperature, and overclock LED’s give you a real time look into how your system is running.

That is just the start of the features that I love about this boards layout. There are also a few things that concern me about the layout and may be problematic to potential users.

- Lowest Pci-e slot location: If running Tri SLI with dual slot cooled cards you would need a case with 8 expansion slots, whereas most cases have 7

- X58 chipset only provides 32 Pci-e lanes, so tri sli setups will be 16x8x8x this is actually very common.

- Onboard power phase status and overclock LED’s can be quite bright, and if in a windowed case can be overpowering.

As you can see there are some things to look at when thinking of this board,   but otherwise the board layout and coloring scheme is very well laid out and subtle enough. In a world where off the wall color schemes and UV reactive seems to be the norm. I found this board to be a peaceful break from that, as its styling to me was very nice subtle and yet functional.

Installation

Installation turned out to be as easy as any motherboard I have ever done. It carries the standard ATX layout and all connections for the most part are located at the immediate edges of the board to allow for easy routing and cable management. You will find that the IO shield does have covers over the Network ports that do need to be bent back, be sure to do so as that would be quite troublesome to do once the board is completely installed.

When testing a few cases for installation I did notice that the screw midway down the board below the sata ports can be difficult to get to, otherwise it installed with the greatest of ease (unlike compared to a few other boards I have tested recently.)

The board actually has both keyboard and mouse PS2 ports. Something that is starting to disappear in a lot of boards these days, but a welcome addition for any legacy user that is ready to upgrade systems but loves they’re old keyboard.

Bundled Accessories

The board comes a very complete accessory selection. These include SLI connectors (both a flexible dual SLI and a rigid 3 way SLI), sata cables (a total of 4 yellow cables with right angle plugs on one end), floppy and IDE cables, e-sata bracket with included power cable and e-sata cable, full Motherboard manual including motherboard driver/software cd, multi language manual, and of course an IO shield.

Bios Layout

The bios is pretty much a standard Award bios, with the addition of the first menu “MIT” or “Motherboard Intelligent Tweaker”. This section is very intuitive and very easy to use for the overclocking of pretty much every component of the system. I found this area very easy to use, and very easy to learn compared to many boards out there. The bios offers full ability to overclock the system, and also offers the CIA which is basically a small safe overclock the board will do for you automatically without having to be too deep into settings (definitely a major plus for any novice overclocker)

I did find that there were a few settings that seemed odd.   For instance the QPI link speed slow mode was extremely too slow   whereas the slowest realistic speed can be a bit too high at certain high Bclk situations.

Also under advanced clock controls you have your drive settings along with skews, and the pci-e freq and the CIA feature I mentioned earlier

The memory timings are well laid out and very nice to be able to setup each channel individually.

Voltages are well laid out as well,   but I have found that this board does very well with auto voltages especially for moderate or 24/7 overclocks. All to often in other boards, auto settings can be inadequate for anything beside initial startup…this is a refreshing change and should help some as they begin to overclock with this board.

Test setup

Motherboard: Gigabyte X58-UD5
CPU: Core I7 920 D0 stepping
Memory: Kingston DDR3 2000 Mhz Cas8 3x1gb
Hdd: Patriot SSD 32gb Qty2 in raid level 0
Graphics card: Gigabyte GTX 260 Super overclock
CPU cooling: Promiliatech Megahalems with Scythe ultra kaze 3000RPM fan
PSU: Corsair HX 1000

Getting started overclocking

First things first I decided to test with each of the auto overclocks to see how the board worked,   and as expected it definitely pulled off the overclocks and without a hitch.   They were very simple overclocks but then again its a free eprformance boost and gives you a decided jump over the stock performance for no extra charge.

Next I decided to see how the board scaled when just trying to clock it myself. So I started by leaving everything on auto and upping the Bclk directly through Bios.

I was very surprised as the board went to 200 Bclk with everything on auto with the exception of setting up the ram correctly. Not only did the board start but ran almost completely stable Passed Linx testing 4 out of 5 passes.

That speaks extremely well for the board as it can automatically set these settings and get the board to such a level of stability with basically no user intervention. With a little voltage tweaking I was able to get the board running 24/7 stable at 4 ghz 200×20 stable with a ram speed of 1600 mhz CAS7 which returned very remarkable results.

One strange thing I did run into is that the board occasionally would have a strange post cycling and list a failed overclock once posted on a 24/7 stable overclock.

Benchmark testing

To start off with we run them at stock (all stock runs of each bench on left side)

Wprime is basically a multithreaded number crunching bench…it gives us a chance to test all 8 threads of the CPU. On the right is the overclocked run of the exact same test. You will notice how large of a difference that made, so imagine how much difference it would make when encoding a video or any other normal application.

Now on to 3dmark vantage. On the left is a stock single card run. Once more on the right is the overclocked single card run. Notably, not a large increase as only the cpu score went up,but the graphics score is largely unaffected,…Lets see if the bottleneck is the single card?

There we have it, this processor/motherboard combo is very efficient, so that leads to the graphics cards being a huge bottleneck, and adding the second card increased the score amazingly.

Gaming overclock testing

These tests are to show how well the board scales in real life gaming situations. Both single GPU and dual/SLI configurations. The games used are Crysis and Cryostasis. Both games are fairly new with very intensive graphics engines.

First up on the left is Cryostasis single card, followed on the right by Cryostasis in SLI. As you can see the cards one again scale beautifully together and make for a very good performance and frame-rate jump.

Next up is CRYSIS! This game is very system intensive and still very difficult to get playable frame-rates in large resolutions without a “state of the art” system.

Once again on the left is the single card run: Not bad considering that this is just a single super overclocked GTX260. But here is the result on the right with 2 cards in SLI: As you see the games scaled very well in SLI.     But one thing to note, on games so graphically demanding, I saw almost no increase (not even 1 FPS difference between 2.66ghz stock CPU and 4ghz overclocked CPU). Once again this CPU/motherboard combo apparently work very efficiently together, and quickly rendered the single GPU as a bottleneck.

“EASYTUNE” Utility

For anyone not aware, many motherboard manufacturers have been bundling software utilities that not only monitor health of the hardware but now also assist with some level of software overclocking past whats available in the bios.

The software included by Gigabyte is labeled “EASYTUNE” and it represents exactly what the tool does, making it very easy to tune and monitor your system from one easy “hassle free” utility. I included some screenshots of the overclocking features to help demonstrate what features are offered by this utility.

+Temperature, voltage, and fan speed monitoring

+Graphics card monitoring

+Memory settings and memory SPD information

+CPU information, along with motherboard details.

+A full overclocking section with frequency and voltage settings for most setting,…most can be changed actively without ever leaving the OS.

Conclusion and final thoughts

The board was very impressive, and I must say it did live up to the expectations I have for a Gigabyte board. Not only did it live up to those but it smashed through them, and set a new record for me as for the ease of overclock and ease of usability.

Aside from the issue with tri SLI needing 8 expansion slots, the board is amazing and very powerful. Anyone looking to build a great gaming rig that also has all of the power features to allow for lower heat dissipation but also a much nicer power bill when doing standard desktop tasks, this would be an excellent choice for you.

In Review;

+Excellent bios.

+Great chipset cooling

+Lots of onboard options

+Excellent board layout

And on the downside;

-Needs 8 expansion slots in case to run Tri SLI

-occasional strange post cycle on cold boot on a 24/7 stable overclock.

_______________________________________________________________________________
Review written and photographed by Shannon/Punx223
Edited and submitted by Romdominance

La Vida Loco ~ MaadDaawg!

MaadDaawg — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:31:14 +0000

Hot cars, HOT women, High performance rigs … the three things that make life worth living (although not necessarily in that order). Hot cars were years ago, hot women aren’t as numerous as I would prefer, but my rigs are EXTREMELY COOL!! I B MaadDawwg, and I live in a maad maad world where form and function meet to transform mere parts into a deadly design of overclockability and desire. Soon, my Maad laBORaTORY will be completed and god only knows where I shall wander next?

I’ve been building computers longer than I will ever admit to, but it wasn’t until about one year ago that I discovered the wonders and joys of OVERCLOCKING!!!! Quite by accident as it was….

While upgrading the graphics card in our “family” computer, I decided a good cleaning was in order. When I pulled the CPU HSF off, there was no CPU in the socket!!! AHHHHHH.. I screamed (not really, but the drama is good). Slowly I turned… the HSF over…. only to find the CPU stuck to the bottom of it, all it’s little pins bent from being pulled through the lock down device…. sob. FREAKED out, I was. Wife due home soon, she was. DEAD I was… soooooo, I scrambled to the nearest MicroCenter and put about $2300 on my AMEX and raced home to start assembling a new machine… maybe she wouldn’t notice?? hahahahaha

That rig turned out to be my first gaming rig. Based on a nVidia 780i, and Intel Q9450, 8Gigs of Corsair Dominator Ram, SLI XFX 9800GTX+, a huge HSF, and at least a dozen blue 120mm fans…. awesome dude! Also turned out to be my last blue themed rig?? (ps – I ended up buying a used Pentium and sticking it back into our “family” machine for her to use lol)

Got that bad boy up to around 3.6Ghz and my UT3 count was climbing. Then, Intel released the Core i7 processors and I was drawn like a moth to the flame. Consumed by the desire to build the ultimate rig I’ve gone where no (sane) man has gone before. From the infamous “Battlestar”, to the “Duelling Banchettos”. From the 775 socket to the socket 1366, from ASUS Rampage II Extreme to eVGA Classifieds, from water cooling to Phase Change I’ve evolved from a wannabe to a be ??huh?? 920D0, 965, 975, got one of each (only two rigs though???… note to self, build another rig)…I can see my NBOC brothers shaking their heads right now!

Soon the six core multithreaders will be out – 12 frickin virtual cores man!!!! I mean like WOW MAN!!! At least one of those unlocked versions WILL find its way to the socket in my Classified 759 mobo to be frozen into overclocking nirvana ….far f’n out man. Maybe one for my Classified 769 too ??? hmmmm… Anyway, that’s a brief look at the Maad me.

I’ll put up more on the rigs and my Maad theory behind their designs sometime soon (hints: the wc’d Banchetto boots at 4.6Ghz (with or w/o HT enabled) while the phased one boots at 4.8Ghz+.

Keep on clocking