Thunderbirds are GO!

Introduction

"So with the Equipment I set about installing it in my new ATX case to "experiment", click here to see the blowholes . More info later esp on fans, Arctic Silver thermal compound and soldering iron are shown below in this little picture I took, heck it's cheesy but so what (O:

I've done a few pics of the bits in my rig on this page click here to see the gubbins inside my PC.

Mother board Installation was easy, putting the FOP32 cooler on the CPU was worrying to say the least !. I took the fan off the heatsink and straightened the clip slightly to ease the pressure, I also lapped the bottom of the FOP32 with fine grade wet and dry paper in the middle and polished it with T-Cut to give it a mirror finish. having done this I installed the heatsink, after a while the whole rig was ready to switch on, fingers crossed and it booted first time, after all the horror story's of core breakages this was a relief hehe (O:.

Into the BIOS and a quick check on core temps and then on with setting up the RAID array. The highpoint bios is pretty easy to navigate and after a minute or two I had a 60 gig RAID 0 Array with 16k stripe size, a quick reboot and on with the format, quite a while later and I had a 6 gig boot partition and a 52 gig D drive (O:.

Windows installation went as planned and after 30 min's or so I had it all running properly, with the Via 4in1 and Nvidia Detonator drivers, and few ,loops of 3dmark and Sandra and then on to the good stuff, Over clocking this T-bird (O:

A shut down a bit of pressure on the FOP32 and I was ready to close a few L1 bridges (O:, the trusty Staedtler HB pencil was sharpened up and ready for action, with the help of a bit more fine wet and dry paper to give it a sharp point (O:.

I looked at the L1 bridges, pondered for a few min's then thought sod it and just well connected the dots (O: a brief investigation with a magnifying glass and the pencil lines all looked in the right places. it was time to test it, eek, a bit of Arctic Silver thermal paste was swiftly applied to the CPU slug and, the FOP 32 clamped back down into place and arghhhh another tense few moments, but thankfully it booted up fine again.

Athlon showing rather messy pencilled in L1 bridges

Click here to see more on L1 Bridges

So back into the BIOS and Softmenu 3 and set the multiplier to 11 and see what happens, and again the gods are with me it boots at 1100Mhz no probs at all and boots straight into windows (O:.

Back into the BIOS and 12 multiplier and that worked to, 12.5 didn't and just locked up as soon as windows loaded, upping the voltage to the maximum 1.85 volts had no effect on it at all )0: I thought maybe I was stuck at 1200Mhz, In a last attempt I tried 12.5 multiplier and a higher FSB, 102 Mhz booted and worked, something bizarre here, I still haven't got it to work at 12.5multiplier, but its working at 1275Mhz and running 3dmark 2000 which is pretty impressive I think.

I had to try more and got it up to 1296Mhz at 1296Mhz I got some errors on bootup but it did at least run WCPUID, 1300Mhz caused registry errors, and was very unstable, games where out of the question )O:

So 1275Mhz seemed Ok so far, but I wanted more, The Overclocking Gods where calling me, I had to try the Voltage mod, this involves soldering a resistor on to the motherboard, at certain point to increase the core voltage up to 1.97 volts. It looked a bit daunting but hmm well I wanted speed, so you gotta take risks aren't ya !.

The Original Pics which I used to copy off for this mod are here (along with a more detailed explanation of the mod) So out with the trusty soldering Iron and file to sharpen it up again (O: and on with the "Experiment " hehe. I managed to solder the top solder point pretty easily, but the bottom solder point on the picture proved a little tricky but after a little perseverance I got it sorted, again it was time for the, nervous few seconds of waiting to see if it would boot, well luckily it worked which was nice, back into the BIOS and checking the Core voltage in PC Health confirmed that core voltage had gone up to 1.97 volts a 0.1 volt increase.

CLICK HERE For more mod details

On wards with the overclocking again, 1296Mhz booted fine, 1303Mhz booted fine 1311Mhz booted windows fine but produced registry errors and was unstable under pressure, trying again, 1311Mhz seems to be the highest I can get it to boot windows. Above this it gets registry errors on bootup. At 1350Mhz it stalls halfway through bootup and then actually reboots itself )O:, ah well there's always the higher voltage mod with 15k resistor. For now I'm running at 1275Mhz, with pretty good stability. I've actually got it to run 3dmark 2000 at 1303Mhz which resulted in my highest 3dmark score to date of 8738.