Overclocking

[replicant]

You can get a decent water cooler for 200 quid, Still decent clock at 2.3 gig from a 2500xp. My old 2500 xp hit 2.4 gig stable.

[H-Man]

Wanna lend me 200 quid? :x

[charlaph]

I bought a Coolermaster HHC-L61 last week and fitted it last night. Works like a charm. It's way quieter than my old Akasa HSF and it's also keeping my Athlon a couple of degrees cooler into the bargain. However, the fins on it are orientated the 'wrong' way around and all the hot air is being blown onto the northbridge. This has resulted in a rather worrying 12C increase in it's temperature - it's now sitting around 60C. Is this a safe temp for a VIA266a chipset? I know older VIAs were rated to over 100C but I can't find the specs for the 266a.

I was on for hours last night and it was stable, nothing undue, but it is rather disturbing. I'll probably try turning the fan over on the heatsink to see if it'll blow it out the other side (where there's nothing in the way) but failing that it looks like I'll have to get a northbridge fan. Which would mean more noise and rather spoil the point of having a quiet HSF. Grr.

[mt50]

charlaph- i've got a fan on my northbrige and it doesn't make to much noise, i can't here it over my psu fan anyway(not got a cpu fan now)
they are only around ?6-?8 for a good one and come with a southbrige heatsink aswel which is good, i need to get a heatsink for my southbridge as it's bloody hot when you touch it.

how much was your HSF?
i broke a blade of my cpu fan at the weekend so have just got this to replace it-

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=51155

seems to get good reviews, can't wait to get it as i'm running my cpu at [email protected] to keep it at around 35-45C, i did have it at 2.3ghz before i broke the fan
quite a big difference in speed

[charlaph]

99p off Ebay. Postage was a few quid though as it's a heavy bast.

It's secondhand which worried me, and there was some light damage to the base of the heatsink where I presume the previous owner went overboard removing some thermal paste, which worried me more. I took the opportunity to lap it because of this and got rid of all the scratches and eventually got quite a nice finish to it prior to mounting.

I've seen a nice northbridge cooler which would match my other fans quite nicely - I think I'll take the plunge, it's ?7 which is pretty reasonable.

[mt50]

i got my 9500 from ebay today(took a while for the cheque to go through)
anyway installed it ect and it broke just give all messed up colours on screen. so now it's got to go back
it had the 3.3 infinion(sp?) ram on it was that the good ram?
anyway looks like i'll be getting a refund now

[charlaph]

Mine had Samsung chips, 3.3ns. I do know of another guy I put onto this and when he got his it gave aberrations when he applied the softmod. It worked fine unmodded as a plain 9500, but when softmodded to 9700 it just gave speckled pixels all over the screen. We reckoned it was either because of damaged/poor pipelines, or possibly overheating, although it was exactly the same as my board, so I didn't think it'd be that. I haven't spoken to him for a while but he was going to buy extra cooling to see if that'd help. He kept his though, he was happy enough with the stock performance and the money he paid (he's not a big PC gamer)

[Ciaran]

Those 9500's are only checked to have 4 working piplines. So sometimes you can get one with damaged pipelins which can't be soft modded.