To Laby (and anyone else)

[Jedakiah]

Since Laby no longer uses the B.o.E. forums...

Okay, I got my Kandalf LCS along with a 700W Truepower and a Zalman waterblock for both my CPU and my GPU. I than ran into a bit of trouble opening mah case, some Tt genius put one of the two locks to close to the side of the case, so when I pulled the lock back all the way it still wouldn't open. I pried on the thing with a screwdriver for half an hour, than pushed pulled and shoved on it til I finally had to go to class. I talked to Tt while in class and they sent me an RMA slip. Since I had nothing to lose, once I got home I applied even more force without worrying on the consequences, the damn thing finally opened!

I can not stress to you how well built this thing is, and how if your a thief on the outside looking in, you'll never ever get in. The lock was positioned with a 1/6th" overlap, when there was supposed to be no overlap at all. And even with a skrewdriver, and eventually a hammer, my muscally self could not open it. To illustrate the "tank"ness of the thing, if I was in the middle of World War II getting shot at, and I saw two places for cover, a sherman tank or a Kandalf case, I would choose the Kandalf. The thing is also bloody huge, luckily we recently added onto our home.

Well, moving on with my long and boring tale, I installed everything in the case on Wednesday. Considering i know nothing about liquid cooling, or the new fangled gadgets in this case, it went quite slowly. I got to the part where I was supposed to install my VGA's waterblock. Upon unskrewing it's current heatsink I came to discover the work of another genius, this time one at Giga-Byte. This one went to town on securing the heatsink, he took it so far that he in fact glued the heatsink to the chip, or so I think. So my craptastic video card, that I bought a liquid cooling system for, will always run on "silent cooling", in other words a heatsink with ribbing, but no fans. Has anyone else encountered something similar, and wants to impart knowledge to the Jed on how to fix?

Finally I got everything else installed, just in time for me to do an assignment from my previous class, than go to bed at 2 AM. Got up the next morning just in time to get to class, got home the following night just in time for an appointment. Which brings us to today, 4 days hence, I own a bunch of new equipment I've never used. I would like to cap it all off with a question. Now that I own a Liquid Cooling System with a 432sq cm radiator that I only have connected to my CPU, I would like to overclock it. I have never overclocked anything before. I need overclocking information, I've read the frontpage tutorial ofcourse, but I don't know if that is enough. Anything I should know before I start? My CPU is an Athlon 64 3000+ @ 2ghz. I don't want to burn the thing out cause I can't afford a new one, so what would you feel is a "safe" speed to run it at or near?

[Latro]

I haven't Overclocked since back in the AMD K6 - 2 processers and you had to adjust jumpers and so on then.  Now I think a lot of it can be done in BIOS and with software... 

I'd search for OCing on that chip type and see what people are reporting as safe speeds. 

[Jakestaby]

You can do it all through BIOS.  I'll post more after I get home and have a look at my case.  But you don't need any additional software for the 3000+ chips.

[Jedakiah]

Yea I'll search it more on Google once ya'll have given me tips.  It just seems to save incredible amounts of time to ask an expierenced person first, than do more reseach on what he tells ya . 

I remember those days Latro, never did knowingly over clock anything though. 

[Jedakiah]

Okay, I started remembering back on when I bought my CPU a year ago.  It ran at 1.8 ghz not 2.0 like the majority tha were on the market :/. 

I'm trying to find out which one I actually have out of these four.  It shouldn't really matter which one, so long as it is 90 nm right?  Well the only way I can think of to differentiate, is what wattage is my CPU at, how can I tell?  I really hope that i don't possess the 130nm one, cause that would really suck . 

[Labyrinthine]

Ok, overclocking; how fun

You're going to want to check out this http://www.dfi-street.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20823. Granted, that is for a DFI mobo, but the same concept applies: You still do everything through the bios, and you still have to test it the way they tell you to.

I personally don't like going from super pi, to the next program, to prime 95. I just jump straight in to prime 95 and run the torture test. Saves a lot of time and I only lose a few Mhz.

But essentially what you're going to be doing is READING that guide 8000000000 times until you understand every litle last detail of what's in it. If you don't, you're VERY likely to kill your new computer. So, once you have become the overclocking whiz, proceed with OC'ing your CPU.

It's not too hard, and it is all done through the bios with stability tests done in windows via Prime 95, etc... but if you don't know what you're doing you could easily set one wrong setting and have your PC explode in the next 5 minutes.

[Jedakiah]

Oh joy!  Well I found my CPU's voltage last night, but forgot what it was.  I think it was 1.4, so I got a 90nm (YAY!). 

Now here comes the worst part, my computer is still "broken", $1400 later I stil have a broken computer. I'm a bit pissed, and I feel as though I need to choke someone.  On the bright side the problem is not as bad.  I have always reported my problem to Windows, in hopes that one day Microsoft would give some back of what it has taken, by helping me.  I finally got a useful report, it told me that one of the following components is most likely bad:
CPU
RAM
Motherboard
Video Card
And than it told me to take it to a local repair shop with hardware diagnostic tools.  Usually I can skip this step by figuring it out for myself, but I lack another PCI-E card, another socket 939 CPU and/or motherboard to use as a diagnostic replacement.  I will test out the ram though.  If I find that is not the problem, I will probably take it in and have them figure it out.  Should be cheaper than pawning the whole thing and buying a new one?   Or is there some ingenius software diagnostic I should try first?

[Latro]

When you say "broken" what exactly do you mean? 

Are you getting blue screens of death, programs crashing,  or something else?

[Jedakiah]

Both.  Interestingly it gave me this page last time I reported the error. 
linky
I have RMA'd my graphics card twice though :/. 

[Labyrinthine]

Uh details please.

BSODs etcc.. are just meh.

You may also want to try installing the nVidia chipset drivers if you are running an nForce board.

[Jedakiah]

Okay, I shall give you the details.  But the details are so many sir, however I did start a forum for this very problem way bck when.  Read tyhe whole thing, and I'll give you a cookie. 
nv4_disp
My problem, in a nutshell, is the same system instability and blue screens caused by a bad overclock, but I havn't overclocked anything.