Take a look at this baby. After countless hours of messing around drawing crappy schematics in class and buying crap off ebay, it’s finally finished…. the aesthetical part at least. All stock fans are replaced by blue LED 120mm, that push about 60 CFM each, with the Thermaltake V1 cooler pushing 86 cfm.

From the front, 3/4 shot. Notice the window fan which extrudes from the panel: a Thermaltake 120mm mounted on a 90 to 120mm adaptor, with the cables cleanly routed inside the adaptor, for maximum sexiness. On the front, I have the stock 120mm, plus an iCage holding another 120mm.

I swore to myself that this was the absolute last time that I was taking my motherboard out, so I put lots of effort to clean up my cable routing, which need some adjustments. The 8 pin 12v motherboard line, the USB and sound pinnings as well as the PCI-E six pin are all routed in back, using holes I drilled myself. Despite the only tools I had were a drill, a file and some wood drill bits, they turned out to be pretty clean. I also chopped off the Firewire pinnings for the top panel, Firewire sucks mah ballz. Turns out pretty clean.

On the back, I drilled and modded some stuff for the whole thing to be a bit more practical. The V1 came with a speed adjustment knob, but couldn’t be mounted on a panel, and the cable on it was really short. I went out and bought a pot, mounted it straight to the back of my case, and now I can control the speed of my cooler from the back. Also since leaving a 1230819023 foot molex cable for the side panel fan is not exactly my definition of clean, I mounted a 3.5 mm jack on the back, which is hook up to 12v. The fan on the side window has the plug, so I just shut my door, then plug in the jack to get some juice, and the fan runs.

With some appropriate cooling, I started overclocking this thing a bit, and the results were the following:

Core: 8 x FSB1650 (412.5 mhz), that’s 3.3 ghz. 35 idle, 65 load. It handled everything fine, including Orthos but then I started iTunes and the shit just crashed. FSB and RAM speed/ timings not getting along? Lameass eXX50 series Core 2 Duos have lower multipliers and higher FSB out of the box, so overclocking is limited. At 3.4, FSB 1700, even my CMOS misbehaved. Voltages wrong? Anyways, Running at 3.2 for everyday use, idle 31, 100% Orthos load at under 60.

Memory: 950 mhz @ 4-3-4-10-16-2T with a pair of XMS2 PC6400C4. Even at a stock 800 mhz, they had some trouble handling 1T, so I figured f it, I’ll just OC then to hell’s gates. Honestly, didn’t think I could hold up so high with tight lats like I did at 2.25 V. Corsair is my new lover.

GPU: EVGA 8800 GTS 320M SC. Core @ 622, Memory @ 917, everything stable. With my card, the max is supposed to be 650 - 950, but I kept crashing at anything past 630-930.

Benchmarks are good too:

3dMark06: 10 868 SuperPI Mod 1.5 (1M): 15.422 FutureMark CPU score: 2994

Not bad for something under 2000$. Running FEAR, Farcry, NFS Carbon, CS:S, every game I own, on full AA and AF, under 1240 x 1024, everything maxxed out, with frames greater than 60 every time. Crysis ready? Nah… I need some SLI to play everything maxxed out.

Evil plans for upgrade? Another 2 gigs of the Corsair jank, which is unusually cheap at Tiger these days, and another 8800. Since everybody is getting the newer 8800 GT models are getting release with more VRAM, and that everybody wants more VRAM, I should be able to either buy one through OCN, or buy one from all those that will eventually get processed through EVGA’s Step-Up program for really cheap…. relatively.