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THE SYSTEM
Test
fitting the parts
Close
up of blocks and heatpipes
Large
heatsink mounted on backside
FIRST TEST
After all the components were secured in place, I fired up the system
and went into BIOS. Initially I used a two-fan Antec Smartpower
power supply that I happened to have available. Later I put in a
Seasonic Super Tornado 300 (SS-300FB). The Seasonic is much
quieter.
When I turned on the system without a hard drive, I put
my head a few inches from the motherboard to see what I would
hear. I didn't really hear much but the power supply fan.
Ocassionally the motherboard generated various kinds of electrical hum
and crackles depending on the load, but this is likely to vary with
the motherboard design and CPU load. Such electrical noise was mostly apparent when
overclocking the CPU.
I sat in the BIOS screen with the
temperature readings. I was happy to see the temperature did not
ramp up quickly, it slowly went to a stable reading after many minutes.
I spent a fair amount of time trying different CPU speeds with various
overclocking settings. This was done to simulate different CPU
heat loads and see whether the CPU temperature would go out of
control. The highest speed Althon XP is a 3200+ at 2.2 GHz.
I was able to run the system for around 10-15 minutes at that speed, but
the system was unstable, because I received a system error in
Windows. The temperature was in the low
60s °C when the error occurred. I suspect the CPU/RAM combination is the main factor in the
overclock success/failure, not overheating. The system seemed to be fairly stable at
2 GHz. Perhaps PC3200 RAM instead of PC2100 Kingston "value
ram" would make a difference in the maximum overclocking tests.
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