It's Alive! - Monster PC Buildup - Part II

[StangFlyer]

For those of you who followed my post a while back called, Going Overboard Building my new PC?, you'll recall I was ordering parts and planning to build a new P4, liquid cooled monster computer to replace my older 1 Ghz Athlon PC I had been running on for the past three years. Well, the beast has been in operation now for a couple weeks. However, up until yesterday I was running at the stock 3.06 Ghz of the P4 HT (HyperThreading) CPU. Finally yesterday, after hours and hours and hours of playing with endless settings and tedious testing, I found the optimal combination of system settings to overclock the beastie to it's full potential, as well. So, now it's not a 3.06 Ghz beast... It's effectively (3.59 Ghz) a 3.6 Ghz beast. It's darn pretty too... So, make sure to check out my updated photos.

Here is the benchmarking results so far, but this is with the stock Radeon 9700 Pro card. I will soon be overclocking it too. Most likely I'll get it's core clock speed running at least at 410 Mhz from it's stock 324 Mhz and get the memory clock speed up there too. I'm currently adding a card fan cooler on the side of it and a small copper heat sink onto each DRAM chip on it. Of course, the main GPU has a water block on it - so, that's liquid cooled. In addition, I'm also adding active heat spreaders onto the DDR modules to replace the standard ones. i.e. the new heat spreaders have heat sinks and a fan on them.

Sandra Memory: Integer 3886 / Float 3903
Sandra Media: Integer 16539 / Float 25647
Sandra CPU: Dhrystone 11079, Whetstone 3104 / 6755 (iSSE2)

3DMark03 : 3674
3DMark2001SE: 16853

Also, the file system benchmark on the ATA133 Raid Array came out to 44,886 KB/s. Yep... It's FAST.

[Sicy Stang]

omg and I thought my piddly 800mhz hp was fast. lol!!

Geek

[jonnyk]

Sounds nice but why didn't you try and find a board with serial ATA RAID? That would have been fun to play with

[StangFlyer]

My motherboard is a Gigabyte SINXP-1394. It has both ATA133 RAID and Serial ATA RAID. I am using ATA133 drives for two reason. One is that they are cheaper by far still, and two is that the Serial ATA RAID controller only supports two devices where the ATA133 RAID controller supports four. I am running a four drive array... My ATA133 array is plunty fast enough. My array almost benchmarks near 15,000 RPM SCSI U320 drive speed.

[jonnyk]

That makes sense I was under the impression you were only using 2 or 3 drives. Sounds like you have a monster on your hands!

And I thought my 1.1 GHz AMD Athlon that I got was fast here,but Dan,your smoki'n my butt,and leaving me in da dust!

Looks like a awsome machine!

[Coupe Devil]

Originally posted by Dan McClain
My motherboard is a Gigabyte SINXP-1394. It has both ATA133 RAID and Serial ATA RAID. I am using ATA133 drives for two reason. One is that they are cheaper by far still, and two is that the Serial ATA RAID controller only supports two devices where the ATA133 RAID controller supports four. I am running a four drive array... My ATA133 array is plunty fast enough. My array almost benchmarks near 15,000 RPM SCSI U320 drive speed.

I read all that the only part that made sense to me is "15,000 RPM" and thats just FREAKING cool

Bradley

[mustangII460]

intresting

[tireburner163]

*drool* Nice computer Dan!!!!

I REALLY need to upgrade mine. The 350mMtz P2, 64 megs of RAM, and 9.2 Gigs cramed into a 10 gig hard drive full really sucks. As a future computer network tech I need a faster computer. Dan, just let me have your old stuff

L8ter,
Josh, aka the tireburner

[StangFlyer]

Yeah it's a lot of system. Well Tireburner, you are definitely in dinasour land with that system now, but hey... Atleast it's getting you to MW! So... It's not all bad, eh?

Actually, I have someone that likes my system so much they are giving me money to build them one now just like it. Actually, it'll be even better since by the time I do build it the new 800 front side bus motherboards and P4 CPU's will be available, so it'll be an 800 FSB water cooled system and have the newer Radeon 9800 Pro card.

[ultraflo]

Fancy!! ...very cool lookin' stuff, Dan.

From what you've described, it sounds like it's going to work really good too.

[jj_jonathon]

thats nuts...lol

mines a 1.6ghz...i cant believe youve more than doubled me.....but then i remember my computer is a year and a half old ...damn time flies....

did you get some killer case for it? i want pics! hehe

[NoSlow5.0]

HUH????? My brain hurts, time to take a nap.

[StangFlyer]

Yeah, it's a beastie... But, give it a couple years and it'll be slow. That's the way it works with computer technology advancing all the time.

Any ways, click the links in my original post for pictures... I'll add more later too of some extra stuff I added (active memory coolers, card cooler fans, rounded cables).

[Skyman]

Too COool.