# Realizing my childhood dream [LGA775 / Nvidia SLI]



## Dinnercore (Sep 6, 2018)

Hi there. I started working with some older GPUs and had so much fun reliving all the memories that came with it, that I decided why not realize a childhood dream system of mine.

*[EDIT: The build part of this project is complete, currently busy with finding stable OC settings. You can find a component list and pictures of the system at the end of this post!]*

So I started with a mainboard I found in classified ads and began planning out what I want to get in there. So far I only have the case and the board.

XFX nForce 780i






Silverstone Temjin TJ10 WNV





I plan to use liquid cooling with my external 'Mo-Cu-Wa-Lo' ™:





Since the pump, res and rad are all external I can just route tubing to the tubing ports on the back of the case and use quick release fittings to connect it.

Where possible and plausible I will try to stick with parts that are from ~2008. I´m not sure yet on the GPUs that will run in there, I´ll see about that when I calculate the budget for the PSU...


EDIT: Photos of the finished build:


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



The parts:

Mainboard: XFX 780i SLI
CPU: Xeon X5470
GPUs: 2x GTX 295 for quad-SLI
RAM: 4 x 2GB DDR2 (G.Skill 1200MHz CL 5-5-5-15 + Geil 800 MHz CL 4-4-4-12)
Cooling: Single-loop watercooling with a Mo-Ra3 radiator for CPU + GPUs
PSU: EVGA Supernova 1600W T2
Case: Silverstone Temjin-Series TJ-10 Nvidia edition


----------



## coonbro (Sep 7, 2018)

when you go cpu shopping  keep this in mind as well  

https://www.delidded.com/lga-771-to-775-adapter/

everything should still be easy to find and get like off ebay

https://www.ebay.com/itm/3-LGA-771-...th-2-Intel-Xeon-Inside-stickers-/231293020634

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313&_nkw=LGA+771+&_sacat=0

of course all ways check your boards compatibility  for the mod  / bios/ microcodes for supporting xeon 

maybe a good solution in cpu choices


----------



## Durvelle27 (Sep 7, 2018)

If you decide to do above I have some Quad Core Xeons and a EVGA GTX 260 that can be SLI’d


----------



## coonbro (Sep 7, 2018)

one more thing is memory

a lot of todays  memory may not work in that board    better do some good homework on what still available  that will work in a 775 / yours    - lot of guys find this out the hard way   should be plenty of posts on it like here in this one  for a example

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3032790/lga-775-motherboards-memory.html#17848493

775 if funny  to build / upgrade  now  a days

pretty bad when these guys don't list you board    there pretty good  for older stuff memory still in stock / sale when the rest don't .  maybe the xfx 790i stuff may work 


http://www.crucial.com/SearchDispla...showResultsPage=true&searchSource=Q&pageView=


----------



## agent_x007 (Sep 7, 2018)

Unless you want to put a 4GB DDR2 stuff in there (which is usually quite expensive for Intel/nvidia compatibility), I say, there can't be a DDR2 memory that won't work in LGA 775 (if you update BIOS to latest version).


----------



## coonbro (Sep 7, 2018)

maybe   I just wanted to point that out  .i don't know anything much on a xfx board or its support  .

unless he got the working memory in his deal along with that board it could come down to  you buy, you try ,and hope it don't make you cry  .

you got to know your dealing with obsolete  stuff  and memory manufactures  aint getting the same ic densities or  the ones they only want to deal with is for the later maybe better supported boards that will take them  .

the last ones I got that did work aint even sold anymore    when there stocks ran out it was a done deal and a goner  out side of crucial memory  in house ordering  that i'll assume wile supplies last  with them  

heck when I looked up that board I don't recall xfx coming up in a result for a support page to even get support like a bios  ?  this kinda build is a near full at your own risk deal.   its a shame  cause it can be a fun side project  for a legacy build


----------



## Dinnercore (Sep 7, 2018)

Thank you all for the good advice.



coonbro said:


> when you go cpu shopping keep this in mind as well
> 
> https://www.delidded.com/lga-771-to-775-adapter/



Yeah I know about this mod and was thinking to use it. I can get a pretty tough Xeon for around 40€ while the QX CPUs or even a Q9650 is more expensive. 




Durvelle27 said:


> If you decide to do above I have some Quad Core Xeons and a EVGA GTX 260 that can be SLI’d



Thanks for the offer, if shipping to Germany wouldn´t be so expensive maybe. But the way it is I think I´ll be cheaper buying local. Besides, I have a waterblock ready for a GTX 280. Don´t think it will fit a 260. 




coonbro said:


> a lot of todays memory may not work in that board better do some good homework on what still available that will work in a 775 / yours - lot of guys find this out the hard way



That´s why I don´t buy new or modern memory. I´m hunting used parts currently. And my mainboard compatibility list and the manual explicitly mention what should technically work. 8GB is the total maximum it supports, so 4 x 2 GB is what I´m trying to find. I hope to get something with atleast 800 4-4-4 or 1000 5-5-5. My board supports up to 1200, but says it would have to be the SLI-Ready memory (a strange marketing stunt back in the day with Crossfire and SLI-Ready memory that are just XMP-Profiles...). 




agent_x007 said:


> Unless you want to put a 4GB DDR2 stuff in there (which is usually quite expensive for Intel/nvidia compatibility), I say, there can't be a DDR2 memory that won't work in LGA 775 (if you update BIOS to latest version).



Nah, I already know that will not work. Would have been cool to have 16GB DDR2 system, but no game that I would play on GTX 280s will ever need that. 8GB is still plenty for Windows 7. 

I´m a bit worried about ordering 4 x 2 GB, because XFX only tested up to 4GB and claimed that 2GB modules have to be used in specific slots, so maybe the other slots are not capable of 2GB... However if that is true, why do they say the board supports 8GB? 

As for bios, I can´t check the version yet, but in case I brick it I can still buy a new chip that will be flashed with the version I want for 10€ on ebay. 

I´m trying to make up my mind about the PSU I put in there. This will be a new part, because getting a PSU from 2008 is a bit ridiculous. Considering my tests with a modern PC and different GPUs where I saw 300W+ with Furmark, so no real CPU load, I think 3-way-SLI could get me over 1000W fast. I need some quality part for this. Really like the 1600W Supernova from EVGA I have in my threadripper 4 work build, but that thing is a bit to expensive I´m afraid.


----------



## FreedomEclipse (Sep 7, 2018)

I'll speak to a friend who bought my old Q9550. I remember giving him ALL my old ddr2 OCZ reaper 8500 ram.

I think he sold the machine on again to a friend and I don't know what happened to it after that sort of thing no promises that anything will be in good condition but I'll ask for you


----------



## Dinnercore (Sep 7, 2018)

FreedomEclipse said:


> I'll speak to a friend who bought my old Q9550. I remember giving him ALL my old ddr2 OCZ reaper 8500 ram.
> 
> I think he sold the machine on again to a friend and I don't know what happened to it after that sort of thing no promises that anything will be in good condition but I'll ask for you



Thank you very much, regardless of the result! 

I really like the look of those OCZ heatsinks they had on the reaper series.


----------



## agent_x007 (Sep 7, 2018)

I use A-Data red stuff (800MHz CL4), as my go to 8GB RAM (4x 2GB).
OCZ ones can be a bit of a pain when you try to use all RAM slots (on some MBs, slots are simply too close to each other for 4 DIMMs to fit at the same time).


----------



## coonbro (Sep 7, 2018)

sounds like a plan..   thing is that 775  today   like a same time period AMD don't have the issues as the intel   ..   seems just in the 775 line  ..

I like a nice legacy build   . slap some XP and Linux on it   and play around  .  I got a msi k7n2gm2 with a AthlonXP 1800+ and agpx8 with a msi gt6600  

''´m a bit worried about ordering 4 x 2 GB, because XFX only tested up to 4GB and claimed that 2GB modules have to be used in specific slots, so maybe the other slots are not capable of 2GB... However if that is true, why do they say the board supports 8GB? ''

pages 21 -22 I don't see that ?

https://www.manualslib.com/manual/703982/Xfx-Nforce-780i-3-Way-Sli.html?page=21#manual

maybe tested a single stick

https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Description=4GB ddr2 ram&Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&N=100007611 600006067

seems as long as you got one slot occupied   and don't exceed the 8gb limit in one or total of 4 sticks  should be fine so  4x2gb should work


----------



## Dinnercore (Sep 7, 2018)

agent_x007 said:


> I use A-Data red stuff (800MHz CL4), as my go to 8GB RAM (4x 2GB).
> OCZ ones can be a bit of a pain when you try to use all RAM slots (on some MBs, slots are simply too close to each other for 4 DIMMs to fit at the same time).



Good point you mention there, could be an issue. Well I´ll have to try tho, if not I´ll shave something off of that cooler.




coonbro said:


> sounds like a plan..   thing is that 775  today   like a same time period AMD don't have the issues as the intel   ..   seems just in the 775 line  ..
> 
> I like a nice legacy build   . slap some XP and Linux on it   and play around  .  I got a msi k7n2gm2 with a AthlonXP 1800+ and agpx8 with a msi gt6600
> 
> ...



I had this list: https://www.nvidia.com/content/nforce700i/nForce_Intel_Memory_List.pdf
And under ddr2 for the 780i chipset it always says "max 2 modules supported". That was what had me worried. 

But I will test it anyway. If only 2 slots work, then I still have 4GB working and I can fiddle with it later. It´s only luxus at that point to have 8GB.


----------



## coonbro (Sep 7, 2018)

Dinnercore said:


> Good point you mention there, could be an issue. Well I´ll have to try tho, if not I´ll shave something off of that cooler.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




ya, but xfx may of improved there bios  over NVidia  ?     like how a NVidia aftermarket card like from evga say a classy is far improved over the NVidia reference    evga tweaked there bios

that's just something under try and see what works out and don't  -shrug shoulders move on

I don't know look up things as this  and see whats been said

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/273175-30-nforce-780i-question

kinda funny on that
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/267907-30-nvidia-nforce-780i-board

seems the evga is the same board under there brand ? , but it also says

*System memory support*:


Supports dual channel DDR2 533/667/800, and up to 1200 MHz SLI-Ready


Memory. Supports up to 8 GBs DDR2 memory.


I cant find there test sheet on any of that ?

manual says the same  as far as population of the slots

https://www.evga.com/support/manuals/files/132-CK-NF78.pdf


----------



## agent_x007 (Sep 7, 2018)

I never look at QVL : LINK (Vantage score : LINK)
Just FYI : 4x4GB is not possible on official BIOS for ^that board (It takes 2x4GB) :/

Also, you may not find a QVL with 2x2GB because those QVLs are simply too old to include that kind of configuration (when QVL was made, those capacity kits weren't available yet).


----------



## coonbro (Sep 7, 2018)

agent_x007 said:


> I never look at QVL : LINK
> Just FYI : 4x4GB is not possible on official BIOS for ^that board :/




Memory. Supports up to 8 GBs DDR2 memory. should be the first clue to that?   if I said 4x4 it was by accident  / typo and I'm sorry


----------



## agent_x007 (Sep 7, 2018)

No. I meant it as "does support 16GB, IF you mod EVGA/XFX BIOS onto it" 
Example thread : LINK. I DID NOT tested this myself.
Not sure if 780i can support it "out-of-the-box" as well...


----------



## Dinnercore (Sep 7, 2018)

agent_x007 said:


> I never look at QVL : LINK (Vantage score : LINK)
> Just FYI : 4x4GB is not possible on official BIOS for ^that board (It takes 2x4GB) :/
> 
> Also, you may not find a QVL with 2x2GB because those QVLs are simply too old to include that kind of configuration (when QVL was made, those capacity kits weren't available yet).



If only I could find waterblocks for 295s... I have one of those on air and getting a second one would be easy, but for overclocking those I need water.


----------



## agent_x007 (Sep 8, 2018)

Getting those to work is a pain, becase of this - I don't recommend doing QuadSLI for anything other benchmarking. Stick to regular SLI, or buy something newer.
NV cards from 2007-2009 era like to cook themselves to artifacting (and then require "baking adventures", to not fall apart... works for some time). 
Consider getting something newer with SLI support.
My Striker II Ex. works with GTX 1080 no problem : LINK (valid : LINK).


----------



## Dinnercore (Sep 8, 2018)

agent_x007 said:


> Getting those to work is a pain, becase of this - I don't recommend doing QuadSLI for anything other benchmarking. Stick to regular SLI, or buy something newer.
> NV cards from 2007-2009 era like to cook themselves to artefacting (and then require baking adventures to not fall apart for some time). Consider getting something newer with SLI support.
> My Striker II Ex. works with GTX 1080 no problem : LINK (valid : LINK).



No I want my childhood dream pc, and that involves the GPUs from that era being used in real work conditions. I will tame the cards if I have to. Gave my current 295 a refresh, see this thread. Compared to other cards, that 68°C is not to bad for air cooling a system that eats 300+ W.
And with water it should be better. Any card can degrade over time or cook a solder joint. Depends more on how much it was used and how it was used before I got it. It´s a bit like a lottery. And I had my share of experience with the wonky SLI-Support from that time. You need very specific driver versions. And it never was a perfect solution I know, but it is exactly what I want.


----------



## agent_x007 (Sep 8, 2018)

I see... Well, if you that sure about it (and know about the up hill battle ahead) - go for it 

But can you a least NOT get a 10Y old PSU though ?
It would be a shame if PSU died and took something with it


----------



## RealNeil (Sep 8, 2018)

Too bad you're so far away from me. I have four GEIL DDR2-800 2GB sticks here. (PC2-6400)


----------



## Caring1 (Sep 8, 2018)

RealNeil said:


> Too bad you're so far away from me. I have four GEIL DDR2-800 2GB sticks here. (PC2-6400)


Same here, I have a couple of sticks in storage, too good to throw away.


----------



## AlwaysHope (Sep 9, 2018)

This semiconductor industry is...... amazing. How can 2 big vendors ever get together & create a motherboard like the one OP has demonstrated, especially in light of legal squabbles in 2008 & 2010?










@20:17

& this....
Intel V Nvidia, the tech behind the legal case - 2010:

https://www.cnet.com/news/intel-vs-nvidia-the-tech-behind-the-legal-case/


----------



## hat (Sep 9, 2018)

Well, XFX "makes/made" a bunch of stuff... graphics cards, motherboards, power supplies and more. They simply used one of nVidia's chipsets (which were not uncommon) on a 775 board "they" (more likely Foxconn or something make them to their specs) made.


----------



## coonbro (Sep 9, 2018)

back then I liked NVidia chipset boards  my old NVidia 590 sli   was a good solid board   and this older  nforce 2  still going well today  .   but back then I built nothing but AMD and they did not have there own chipsets as they do now  , so ??  ypu my buddy had a sis chipset board that worked well  .

NVidia dropped out of the chipset business  and AMD and Intel  were left to develop there own in the end from that  . amd  better boards in my opinion were the ones with NVidia chipsets   and there first amd brand chipsets did not impress me at all   [still don't today ]


----------



## Dinnercore (Sep 9, 2018)

agent_x007 said:


> But can you a least NOT get a 10Y old PSU though ?
> It would be a shame if PSU died and took something with it



Worry not: 


Dinnercore said:


> I´m trying to make up my mind about the PSU I put in there. This will be a new part, because getting a PSU from 2008 is a bit ridiculous.


[...]


Dinnercore said:


> I need some quality part for this. Really like the 1600W Supernova from EVGA I have in my threadripper 4 work build, but that thing is a bit to expensive I´m afraid.


----------



## coonbro (Sep 9, 2018)

just check for any molex connectors your old stuff needs and the new psu has any or you may need adaptors  .   last one I got had all connectors I needed  fpr old and new hardware  . most new psu's are for the latest stuff in there plugs  


should be able to sli the 260's off this

1 x 24 Pin ATX
2 x 8pin(4+4) EPS (CPU)
6 x 8pin(6+2)PCIE
9 x SATA
6 x Four-Pin Peripheral
2 x Floppy
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817438133

300w max draw cards
https://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-295/specifications

300wx2=600w/12v = 50amps  for them casrd at nvidias max  draw  

a true 850w psu is 70 amps  on the 12v     I'm sure the rest of the build aint using 20 amps     a intel 80w  cpu is just like  7 amps  [6.6]  at max   [watts /volts [12] = amps ]

[opinion]


----------



## OldGuy (Sep 9, 2018)

This is my system is:

Asus e3559 Rampage Formula Motherboard – Bios ver. 1001
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 Processor 3.0 GHz 12 MB Cache Socket LGA775
4 each Kingston 2GB 800MHz DDR2 Non-ECC CL6 DIMM
2 each Samsung 850 PRO - 512GB - 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD
Creative SB X-Fi – sound card
Acoustic Research powered speakers (very old but very good)
NVidia GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition video card with 397.64 64bit video driver
EVGA SuperNova 650 G1+ fully modular power supply
Dell P4317Q 43” Monitor running DP 3840 x 2160 x 60HZ
Windows 10 Pro Version 1803 64bit
Apevia X-Cruiser case
All fans are Arctic Fluid Dynamic Bearing type of various sizes

Back in 2016 we had a power failure that ate my hard drives. I didn’t really lose any data as I had everything backed up. So I decided to rebuild my system with some newer hardware. I don’t play games and I don’t overclock even though I could. I was looking more for reliability. I was running Windows XP when it died and since it was becoming more difficult to maintain the system and software, I switched to Windows 10 BUT I installed Classic Shell to give it that XP look and feel. I turned off as many auto updates as Windows 10 would allow and set most things to ask permission before changes are made.

My original hardware update included a NVIDIA Quadro K2000 2GB GDDR5 Graphics card. It worked OK but the card memory was a little weak for me so I recently switched to the GTX 1070.

The only problem I have had was not of my making. Nvidia after version 397.54 did something that caused all subsequent versions of the driver to fail. It has to do with the Core2 Quad. They are up to 399.07 and it still fails. They are aware of the problem but it does not seem to be high on their priority list to fix.

Don’t know if this helps. It is what I did and it works fine.


----------



## Dinnercore (Sep 9, 2018)

I got some RAM:

And just like @agent_x007 said it´s gonna be a PITA to fit these all together. The slots on the board do have a little bit of space between them, instead of touching each other like on other boards, but it´s not enough. I might get all in with force, but this will propably break the mobo over time. It just needs 0.75mm more spacing to fit perfect without a struggle. That is like 0.35mm off from both coolers and it would be fine. And it´s not the top part, those fins can interleave. Maybe I will try to mod it, maybe I will just remove 2 heatsinks and put ones from Geil on instead (got some of those off of 512mb DDR2 catching dust).





And I can still return those, got a sweet deal from a dealer that offers 30 day return and a one year warranty.


@coonbro : Thanks for the suggestion, I can get this one with some % off here in my country for 115€ at best, that is about 132$. My CPU will more likely be more then 120W, but I will see. Pricing on some parts is insane here, the 850W EVGA PSU model G2 is 175€ =~200$. I´d rather get the full 1600W Titanium then, since that is 'just' 400$ atm.


----------



## coonbro (Sep 10, 2018)

lol.. I remember the sticks,,,     thing is will they fit under your cpu coolers in the closest slot ?     seemed my buddy had that style . they worked but only in slot 2-4    slot 1 would not fit with the cpu cooler he had   .  same issue using them corsair ''afro pick ''   sinks on there memory  

I use these in my 2 legacy builds
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2120

3ed under the 2 corsairs in the ddr2 chart

http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=2190&page=5


----------



## Dinnercore (Sep 17, 2018)

A little progress on the parts list:





Mod material will arrive later from china. If this runs on my board I will be happy, if not I also have a Q9650 inbound.
Additional to that I got a spare I/O-Shield for the mainboard, since the original was missing.


----------



## coonbro (Sep 17, 2018)

keep us posted on that mod job.   I hope it will work good.

in that delidded link  was your board listed in there page 8  tested mobo's    -  xfx  -  780i -  Xeon Compatibility  --  ''Probably all''

https://www.delidded.com/lga-771-to-775-adapter/3/#xfx


----------



## Dinnercore (Sep 26, 2018)

More parts coming in:






2x GTX295 from EVGA, one sticker says super clocked, another one talks about ULTRA clocked, I guess this means it runs a tiny % faster then standard version.






I got really curious about that sticker from Fujitsu and found out that they must be from one of those things:
https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/ds-CELSIUS-ULTRA.pdf

Very cool. And I may have gotten super duper lucky with those, the owner claimed they have not even ran multiple months but only weeks since he was to busy with his job at the time. The fins of the cooler and the fan itself look very clean, and the plastic lids of the outer GPU cover are all intact still, which makes me believe it was really not taken apart much. Other 295s I worked with so far looked FAR worse.






Another thing that brings tears of joy to the child in me, those I/O brackets in tempering colors look so sexy. I will propably never really notice that again after the build, but still.











And finally I settled on the overkill PSU, it went into sale since last time and I could no longer resist. Got a matching sleeved cable set too.

Now the only thing left besides DVD drive / HDD / small stuff, is the hardest thing to acquire. Waterblocks for those GPUs. I currently may have someone who can find one if I´m lucky. If it turns out to be dual pcb, that would be a shame but no problem since I got another 295 on dual pcb spare. However it is nearly impossible to find offers, last one I found was 3 months ago. They are usually not expensive (~40€), but rare.


----------



## coonbro (Sep 27, 2018)

I don't look at it as overkill    better to get too much then find you did not get enough.   that PSU should last you a long tgime and build after build    with power requirements well covered as you go  

https://www.evga.com/articles/00494/

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130504

i'll assume  1295 '' AR or  ER''    that AR = America and ER = euro  market cards?   


ya in SLI the will run to the lower card specs   and that like you say is slight anyway   or overclock them to even  rates

what about the xeon mod stuff any luck there  ?


----------



## Dinnercore (Sep 27, 2018)

coonbro said:


> I don't look at it as overkill    better to get too much then find you did not get enough.   that PSU should last you a long tgime and build after build    with power requirements well covered as you go
> 
> https://www.evga.com/articles/00494/
> 
> ...



Must be the european market part, I guess it´s for the warranty or sth. A german price comparison platform still listed this card and it says 3 years here instead of the 10 that EVGA offered.
I wonder however if the Fujitsu sticker means anything, did they OC the system further and bin the cards above the advertised speed or did they just throw it on there to brand it for them. We will see when I got it together.

As for the mod, I did not have the time yet to try it out. Really busy working 2 jobs during semester break to afford these things and get parts for my car to fix it. Got many things going at once, and I still need storage for the build. I could just pull an existing drive from my daily system, but that would mean even more time spend moving data around and I will rather wait for the boot drive to arrive.


----------



## coonbro (Sep 27, 2018)

the Fujitsu sticker means anything

on the vid cards ?   maybe evga cards made for OEM use on there computers or as for upgrade options ?     you see that with like HP's and dell's      . evga makes a line of cards just for best buy stores as well   under a best buy part number not listed under evga line up at there site as retail cards   . thing I would wonder about is what is the cards bios from ? is it a true consumer bios  or one for  Fujitsu branding and usage ?    like for a dell a aftermarket card may not work plug and play but a dell branded  card will  .  I don't know  100%  but have seen that  issue  a lot 

all you can do is get it up and running and see if the cards post as normal  or not .  if they do you should be OK  .    + you bought used and old so there still the risk of a non working card / buyer beware deal on used parts  [???]

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3423300/bought-evga-1080-card-buy.html

https://forums.evga.com/Beware-EVGA-board-partner-Best-Buy-m2412444.aspx


heres another thing I see  

looking at the pci-e slot blade  just above the golden fingers   it don't say ''EVGA or NVIDIA ''   printed on the PCB back then  like they do now

example






looking at these cards from evga  asus - msi    seems just putting there name / logos on them was all the difference   between them

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/ca-asus-gtx-295-evga-gtx-295-co-op.113566/


thing is if there good working cards  when you go to use them your fine    and should work well in a sli set up as intended to do


heres a review showing the evga 295 cards in that  Fujitsu  rig

https://www.trustedreviews.com/revi...jitsu-celsius-ultra-gaming-workstation-page-4

 you'll be fine if the cards were not a used e-bay rip off deal


----------



## king of swag187 (Sep 28, 2018)

*SUPER-ULTRA-DOUBLE-VERYFAST-OVERCLOCKED-CLOCKED Edition GTX 295
Now at a NCIX near you*


----------



## Dinnercore (Sep 28, 2018)

king of swag187 said:


> *SUPER-ULTRA-DOUBLE-VERYFAST-OVERCLOCKED-CLOCKED Edition GTX 295
> Now at a NCIX near you*



Sounds like a gun in Borderlands


----------



## coonbro (Sep 28, 2018)

''As for the mod, I did not have the time yet to try it out. Really busy working 2 jobs during semester break to afford these things and get parts for my car to fix it. Got many things going at once, and I still need storage for the build''

don't need storage to get up and running  

get a live dvd of Linux  to boot  and  to play around with   and run it off of to see  or test  as you go  .   I keep one or 2 handy   no harddrive needed     detects my internet and all for near full OS use   

You can download the Linux Mint operating system for free. It comes as an ISO file
which you need to burn to a blank DVD. The liveDVD is then bootable and provides a
fully-functional operating system which you can try without affecting your PC. In
layman's terms, when you put Linux Mint on a DVD and place it into your computer, you
can try it out while leaving your current system intact.

 no harddrive needed   [also casn do this with a pen drive as well  [look at pen drive Linux and all for that  ]]

https://www.pendrivelinux.com/


live dvd is a little less involved  to make and use is all   my buddy likes pthe pen drive way I like the dvd      results are the same in the end between them 

get the iso for 32 bit   or 64 bit what ever  your cpu supports


----------



## king of swag187 (Sep 28, 2018)

But he still needs a flash drive, and what's the point of booting a live image, or Linux at all? This isn't supposed to be functional, but fasionable, though I do see where you're coming from. It's just that I doubt he would boot Linux in his dream build, or that it would let him do anything besides web browsing. As well, @Dinnercore just try and get a cheap 64GB SSD or 160GB HDD


----------



## coonbro (Sep 28, 2018)

first off why would you not use Linux  that rig may do better on it theen windows anyway   then windows support will be old  or may not get anything as in the latest ??   2ed  he don't need storage / harddrive   so he don't have a ''flash drive'  use a dvd    how hard is that    a legacy build without a optical drive ?    a pen drive is pretty cheap now  anyway ,  what 5 bucks  for one for this ?   a small 2gb will do 
https://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruz...d=1538168726&sr=8-3&keywords=sandisk+pendrive

with Linux he could be running and testing his hardware out today to see if its all working and go online  for something to do   , not waiting for windows  $$  and a harddrive to put it on  $$$.   

that's just in my opinion    and I'm running wile I wait on that windows and hard drive  not wishing I was ....lol...


----------



## E-curbi (Oct 5, 2018)

Dinnercore said:


> No *I want my childhood dream pc,* and that involves the GPUs from that era being used in real work conditions. I will tame the cards if I have to. Gave my current 295 a refresh, see this thread. Compared to other cards, that 68°C is not to bad for air cooling a system that eats 300+ W.
> And with water it should be better. Any card can degrade over time or cook a solder joint. Depends more on how much it was used and how it was used before I got it. It´s a bit like a lottery. And I had my share of experience with the wonky SLI-Support from that time. You need very specific driver versions. And it never was a perfect solution I know, but it is exactly what I want.



Very cool build 

I appreciate your theme very much. In college, I had zero money but wanted to experience all the amazing high performance hardware at the time. Told myself one day - one day I'm gonna get there and grab all the super-low latency ultra-efficient components and build my dream work computer. I might even build two! 

Have a couple sticks of the classic Corsair Dominator GT with the super tall heatsinks in red and black 2133MHz 9latency you can have for this build.

Oh wait, will it work?


----------



## Dinnercore (Oct 6, 2018)

E-curbi said:


> Very cool build
> 
> I appreciate your theme very much. In college, I had zero money but wanted to experience all the amazing high performance hardware at the time. Told myself one day - one day I'm gonna get there and grab all the super-low latency ultra-efficient components and build my dream work computer. I might even build two!
> 
> ...



That is a very kind offer, thank you! 

But I need DDR2 RAM, and I now already got some for the build, see this post. 

I will make another update on everything next week, currently work has got me occupied a lot and I find little time for everything I got going on right now. Like my main PC might have a weird issue I´m looking into, I got a 9800 GX2 card lying on my desk waiting to be finished etc..
Hope you all don´t mind if this project will take a while.


----------



## Dinnercore (Oct 26, 2018)

Alright I think I´ll have to put this on hold until I figure out how to watercool the 295s.

It seems absolutly impossible to find waterblocks for these. I´ve got several adverts going on different sites offering 120€ per block but for months now no one has showed up. Maybe I need to increase the price offer but at that price point I would rather make something completly custom and new.
One guy mailed me that he just threw his old blocks aways since no one wanted them  Only thing he could offer me were 480s.

Someone else said he might have one but told me it might take a while for him to get it, haven´t heard any news from him for nearly two months now either.

This is really bothering me. I have my mind set on these 295s, those had been my holy grail back in the day.


----------



## mouacyk (Nov 16, 2018)

I know it's _your_ childhood dream, and not mine, but I'd still recommend the X5470 over the X5482 if you decide to go XEON.


----------



## lexluthermiester (Nov 16, 2018)

mouacyk said:


> I know it's _your_ childhood dream, and not mine, but I'd still recommend the X5470 over the X5482 if you decide to go XEON.


He's already got the chip he's going to use.


----------



## coonbro (Nov 18, 2018)

don't know why a water cooler is stopping you ?   its not like you could add it in at a later date  if one was to be found   [then your hoping for 2 of them ]  ?      your dream should work as good on air  and be enjoying it  over collecting dust wishing for a water cooler to pop up  .

don't for get you doing a obsolete build to start with .   and things can be just found after a guy cleans out a junk box and posts it on e-bay if not just chunked in there trash can anyway to start with


----------



## Mr.Scott (Nov 18, 2018)

http://www.vgastore.com/1001875/bfg...MI17Dl7pLe3gIVCAVpCh10dQCIEAkYASABEgJ11PD_BwE


----------



## coonbro (Nov 18, 2018)

Mr.Scott said:


> http://www.vgastore.com/1001875/bfg...MI17Dl7pLe3gIVCAVpCh10dQCIEAkYASABEgJ11PD_BwE



OUCH!!    they see ya coming at that price ...lol...   

makes running on stock air look real good   to me .


----------



## Mr.Scott (Nov 18, 2018)

Unusual and rare drives the price up. I'm not surprised at all.
I do agree with you though. I wouldn't pay that. Air is free.


----------



## coonbro (Nov 18, 2018)

new ''old '' stock is that way  . even a new old stock referb  will cost plenty  ...     if a legacy build  air is just fine  ,   if just needing to run win - xp     a more up to date  AMD 990 , 970 fx build will do it   and excepts more modern easy to find hardware  .     them  amd bulldozer platforms were still full win -xp - vista - Linux  supported   .   load and go  [ that's one big thing amd use to have going for there platforms , not no more  now another stranded to win -10 or it may not fully work if at all build ...lol ]


----------



## Dinnercore (Nov 19, 2018)

Things are starting to fall into place now, one by one. I bought one single pcb waterblock from a very nice person and found a dual pcb innovatek waterblock. Now I can´t use both of those EVGA cards together, so I´ll keep one spare and now go hunt for a dual pcb card.


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 3, 2019)

I´m not dead, the project has been going on in the background for a while now and I´m getting close to completion! Part 1 of my Story (Part 2 in a later post):

Whew this is/was quite a rocky road so far. I´ve been busy in the past month(s) and found little time to work on my hobby. But I kept the parts in sight on my desk to remind me every day and now I sacrificed a few nights of sleep to finally get it running.

Since I was really tired and exhausted + feeling a little blue this winter season I had no nerve to document every process with pictures like I usually do. I hope you can forgive me, it would have meant many more hours of work, stopping what I do every few minutes to take a snap and later editing and cutting it all together. Hours that I just don´t have atm. I will take some shots of the finished build tho!
Instead I´ll write down the story and share my experience of putting this machine together.

My last post from november was back when I finally received a waterblock for one of my single pcb GTX 295s. A very friendly user offered me one from his collection and I bought it, thank you so much once more! It´s the key element that was really tough to find. If you read this and want to be mentioned feel free to post or write me and I´ll give you a shout 
Now I had one single slot waterblock and lucky me found a dual pcb card + waterblock. The card was definitly used for a while, I hoped it would still work for a while since I have no backup dual-pcb. This is a picture of the cleaned innovatek waterblock:







Sadly it will not be a matching look with these two, but I don´t care. I got two watercooled cards, I can´t possibly ask for more. From here on out I finally had most parts together and felt motivated enough to start working on everything. First thing I did was the 771 to 775 mod.
First part was not very difficult, I put on the sticker and checked the position with a magnifying lens -> done.
Modding the socket however was a cold sweat moment for me. I picked a scalpel and very carefully, bit by bit, cut down the two plastic notches so that I can place 771 CPUs in my socket. I took my fair time for that, went really slow and tried to use as little force as possible. After about 30-45 minutes I was happy with the result and strapped the X5482 in place.

CPU is now shielding the pins, which meant I could more or less safely take off all the heatsinks from the motherboard. I replaced all of the old pads and paste with fresh material.

Next up, the RAM-heatsinks that were just a bit to wide to fit. I thought about sanding them down some fractions of a mm, but soon realized that this might not be enough. I took the heatsinks off from a stick and saw that these "heatsinks" were just connected to the memory modules by a rather thin line of thermal glue and the heatpipe inside did barely cover 1/3 of each module. So I figured that just maybe the heat from these parts will be rather manageable.
I decided to improvise and from 2 of the 4 sticks I took off one side from the heatsink and left it bare. Then I sanded the heatsink from the opposing module:






And slapped a thick thermal pad between the now bare modules and the sanded down part. I will take a picture of that later so you can see what I mean.

Next up I replaced the CMOS battery for good measure. Then I got to the waterblock for the CPU. I choose the Alphacool NexXxoS XP³, because it was readily available and I like that black finish. I installed the backplate for it, put the paste on and the block in place. Screwed it down with the springs, not very tight but just some pressure.

Now the board is ready to rock at this point. Next are the GPUs. I´m used to working on these (btw my GPU thread will be continued when I have my next semester break), so I had no trouble taking each apart, cleaning them and putting them back together with the waterblocks. Still on these dual GPU cards it´s quite some work to do. Many tiny screws, you need to be careful with your tools and they ate a LOT of thermal interface material. I like that the waterblocks feature very tight tolerances on most parts so you can put the pads in the bin and use thermal paste, but the huge GPU IHS + 28 memory modules on each card took me 2 syringes of MX4. I just barely had enough left for the trouble ahead.

With the GPUs done I turned to the watercooling loop I had already prepared weeks ago and realized with horror that I made a huge mistake. I left it standing still for 2 months and small spots of mold had started growing inside the tubing and reservoir...
This meant taking the whole thing I had already build with radiator, pump and all apart again. Flushing it, cleaning it. I threw the tubing away, flushed the radiator many many times and disassembled the pump as well as the reservoir to give both a proper clean-up. Had to re-order some tubing and then but it back together. Finally I had everything else I need and started to build the system.

At this point you might already realize how naive I went about the whole thing, not even testing parts before putting them under the loop and everything. Did not even test the GPUs if they work before. I was so focused on getting it together in the little free time I had. I did the same with my TR build, but those had been new parts.

First sketchy thing that I did was on the CPU waterblock. It said max. 5mm long threads on the fittings and guess what, my fittings were exactly 5mm. So as I picked one from the box, I picked exactly the one that had some burr left on it which made it 5mm and a half. I tried to get it in and felt it hit the bottom before really sealing on the O-ring. I was getting a little impatient and decided to just throw in a 2nd O-ring over the first, hoping it might seal this way... DUMBEST IDEA I´VE EVER HAD.
I however called it a day and decided to go into leak testing like this. Put the loop together inside the case and routed the tubes outside to the portable part of the loop. I put paper towel around every fitting and carefully padded the mainboard too. Filled the reservoir and send it into the loop. Guess where it was leaking.

Yes from the two double O-ringed fittings on the CPU-block. And it was leaking bad, the second O-ring was completly pushed out and visible. Thank god I had it standing and it dripped down on the paper. Nothing got into the socket, not even on the board. Only the top GPU got some water and ofc it crept under the backplate... Fun moment for my heart.






But this fail shows the strengths of quick release couplers, I could quickly disconnect the two lines on the lower back outside of the case and drain only the waterblocks. I took the tubing off and took a closer look at the fitting, realizing that the problem was only with this one. So I replaced it, replaced the O-rings and only used 1 this time, like you always should.
I dried everything as best as I could and closed the loop back up again. No leaks this time. I filled it up and let it running for several hours. Still no leak. But that water under the backplate had me worried. However to take it off, I would have to undo the screws that hold the whole block in place... So I just carefully put some towel into every nook I could get under, took it off after a while and let a fan blow air under the backplate for a whole night.

I plugged in the last cables, up to this point I never had power anywhere near the system. For good reasons I think 
My heart was really racing at this point. So much work up to here and I do not even know if any of the parts work at all. Is the board ok as the seller stated? Does the CPU mod work? Do my GPUs work? What if something does´nt work and I can´t even figure out what it is? What if I turn on power and some water is still left from the spill and I destroy something?

Would you have flicked to power-switch on your 1600W PSU and pushed the power on button?
Well I did.

It lit up. Fans spinning, roaring even. The first breath, the first stretch. LEDs on the board light up, blue and yellow above the RAM. I have no idea what they want to tell me but they are on and they stay on!
I heard my hdd start. I see green LEDs on my GPUs!

Then the beep, the single, satisfying and oh so sweet BEEP. It posted.

I still had no display out tho. Cable was plugged in the top GPU, but instead of a picture out I get a blue LED on the bottom card. Which told me something was going on. The blue LED only lights up on the dual pcb cards if they are recognized as the 'master card' and the blue LED is then indicating the DVI-Port to use for monitor signal.
I switched the cable to the blue port and saw the post screen for the first time. Many informations on there, good and bad. Xeon was detected and running like it should. However it claimed that there was no GPU in PCIe-Slot 1 and one in PCIe-Slot 3 and that I should re-seat it to the first slot...
Strange since the card in slot one was visibly running, indicated by the LED.

This is where part 1 ends, it´s getting late again and I´ve been sacrificing many hours of my sleep for this project as you may be able to tell already.
If you want to guess what the issue is and what caused it, feel free  You may be surprised.

Some teaser shots of it currently running next to me:


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 4, 2019)

So then lets start where we left off, the non working or not detected GPU in slot 1:

I decided either way I´d have to take it out of the case again, so I disconnected the radiator/pump/reservoir and drained the waterblocks once more. As I removed the card I instantly spotted some physical damage on the pcb! Some components that sit directly on top of the PCIe pins broke off and were missing (3 or 4). I suspect that this meant these pins had no connection and therefor the mainboard did not detect the GPU.

Now I wondered if I caused this, since I could not remember any moment where I used force, I was extra careful when seating the waterblock. It could have been a damage that was there since they arrived, maybe during shipping the cards hit each other. Could also be my fault and I just didn´t notice.
Next thing I had to do then was swapping the card for the other single pcb one I got. Thank god I had one spare! Just another hour of taking cards apart, cleaning them, applying thermal paste and putting it back together.
Next up was the message I got on the POST screen. Why did it say that the working card was in slot 3? Well I did not check the manual of my mainboard and just assumed to use the slots 1 - 2 - 3 from top to bottom. But of course that would be not very practical for huge coolers or other PCI expansion cards, so they should be installed 1 - 3 - 2 instead.

I switched the card from slot 3 into slot 2 and put the new card very very carefully back in slot 1, closed the loop once more, replaced the volume of liquid that I had to drain and powered back on.

I got greeted with this screen now:






Looking alright, all drives detected, memory all there and no PCIe related errors. FSB seems to be set to low but I can live with that for now. Let´s press DEL to enter setup eh?

Well I pressed it, nothing happened. I restarted and pressed again, nope. I switched from USB to PS-2 keyboard (ofc with power off and restart), still nothing.
I was not impressed. Remembering that I did change the battery I also realized that I didn´t clear the bios with the jumper... So I took the battery out, shorted the pins and tried it once more.

This time it let me enter bios. I was so happy at this point. Finally I´m getting close to completion.

I relaxed a little, took a look around and played with fan settings, changed boot priority. I looked around for my Win 7 stick and couldn´t find it (thanks murphy), so I created a new one.
While waiting I had some time to take a look around the case and was hit with the beauty of green LED light, water filled tubes, two insane GPUs, a very special case and the completly overkill RAM heatsinks. I fell in love a little bit. As usual my build is not very 'clean' I did not bother with extreme tidy cable management:






Just sort of let it hanging around as it pleases. This is the side view through the window:






My camera tried its best with the LED lights, but in reality the light is a much deeper and richer green color. On the right side you can see the drive bay, which has its own fan with separated airflow.
Between this bay and the cables is another fan that is taking air in from the duct which you can barely see to the left of the drive bay. On the top are 2 fans blowing out and there is another one on the back blowing air out. I also had to rotate the PSU up, because the fan grill for it is not designed for this modern PSU, it is not in the right place and made for something like an 80mm fan, not a 140mm.

This all means intense negative pressure in theory, but it is compensated a bit by very tight closing panels which help to reduce air bleeding in from small gaps and in the top of the backside is a mesh cut-out that allows the 3 fans there to circulate air in order to relieve the negative pressure inside. I´ll see how it all turns out in the long run and I don´t need a very strong airflow in there.






The front is a bit dull, good thing that I don´t look at it very often. I placed the system in the VIP spot, replacing my current main rig on my right side under the desk. This way I was able to also get the radiator unit behind it under my desk.






This is the Mo-Cu-Wa-Lo in its current config. After cleaning and flushing everything I replaced the top fitting on the pump with a rotating 90° one. This gives me much more flexibilty when positioning it. The pump (Eheim 1048) is at the limit I´d say, with these 3 blocks and quite some amount of fluid. It was still capable of quickly filling it and getting the air flushed out, but I noticed a drop in pressure from the flow back into the reservoir. On the last fill of the reservoir it took the pump about 5 seconds to drain the ~250ml volume. That would equal to pretty much 3l per minute.

I´m not an expert on flow rates, but I´d say that is still ok. For anyone working with gallons, that would be ~ 0,79 GPM.

Next up the other side of the case:






Not as exciting, but the fans really add to the look from every angle.

And now my final shot for tonight. Maybe I will add some more pictures later, but the Windows 7 installer finished and I actually bought a real key for this one. Lets get it set up!







I have some first screenshots for the idle temps:






Driver install went like a charm, GPUs are in SLI and temps look promising. Still have to do load testing.






This is bothering me just a little bit, 3 of the 4 core temps (1,3 and 4) seem stuck in idle and don´t move at all, only with some load they can be bothered to move and even then core 3 is stuck at 36°C.
I will look further into this later. For now I need to get some load testing, raise the FSB a little and go from there. It is however again 2:30 am and I need to be at work in a couple of hours...

Update will follow.


----------



## steen (Jan 4, 2019)

Nice project, I like the case & fortunately you obtained the I/O shield. I'm almost inspired enough to do a retro build myself. Don't sweat the CPU temp sensors, it's rare that all four work properly. You might want to update firmware on ST500DM002-1BD142 to KC48.


----------



## hat (Jan 4, 2019)

Wow... GTX295 is retro now? And I have a GTX260 216 in my parts bin. It used to be fast...

I'm still rather young, but if I ever want to feel old I'll just remind myself of that.


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 4, 2019)

steen said:


> Nice project, I like the case & fortunately you obtained the I/O shield. I'm almost inspired enough to do a retro build myself. Don't sweat the CPU temp sensors, it's rare that all four work properly. You might want to update firmware on ST500DM002-1BD142 to KC48.



Thank you  From what I read about these sensors I´m just happy they are not stuck at 95°C, like some people reported. That means constant thermal throttle no matter what. 
Regarding the firmware you mention for that drive, is there a special reason you suggested it? Like does my old version produce any problems that I should be aware of? 

So far it served me well, 'If it aint broke don´t fix it':









hat said:


> Wow... GTX295 is retro now? And I have a GTX260 216 in my parts bin. It used to be fast...



Hey I feel like that too, kinda. A GTX260 - 196 was my first GPU upgrade in my first pc back then. Had the 8600GT before. And this is the time I´m coming from, I dreamt about not having to worry about cost and build a sick watercooled PC with 295s. My dad took me to an expo back then, where they had some killer systems on display. There was a booth where you could play quake vs a pro player girl that wiped the floor with all the people that dared to try and beat her. If you could score just a single kill you´d win a price but I don´t think anyone made it. There was a row of high end systems next to that and I spend a long time looking at those and the specs they boasted. 
Sorry for my flashback and little detour, that was quite a defining moment in my life. However, that is now over a decade in the past, which to me classifies this as barely retro already.


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 4, 2019)

Next update:

I took some time to inspect my bios settings and found many things I´m not familiar with. I never touched OC back in the day and my current experiences are all from the AMD Zen architecture. I´m not completly clueless, I could guess what most stuff does but I´m scratching my head about the feature of running FSB in linked mode or unlinked.

My board officially only supports 1333 MHz, but it can go much higher then that as I´ve seen in reviews from the time. First thing I want however is a baseline, so I set it to the 1600 MHz the CPU is rated for and checked into the memory frequency to see how this will effect my clocks there.
Well there I got the option to leave it on [auto] which resulted in 887 MHz for the RAM or linked with manual ratio (which gave some pretty extreme ratios like 1:1 [would equal 1600 MHz RAM] for my scenario with the locked CPU multiplier) or I can use unlinked mode and set the RAM frequency independent of FSB.

I tried the auto setting and it failed to boot, gave me a long and angry beep and restarted with default values. So I set it to unlinked, 1600 FSB and 800 on the memory. Voltages I left at auto for now.
A quick test run and it seems to work well:






CPU reaching the stock 3.2 GHz, it seemed to peak at 50°C during the first small FFT batch. I don´t have the patience to do a full stability test and I don´t see it necessary for now. Voltage droop had it drop to 1.264V during load, in idle it´s at 1.312V with the auto setting. I wonder what these chips can tolerate, if I remember correctly I read from intel something about a 1.35V limit.
Memory is at 800 like I set it, my guess would be that in linked mode the 887MHz threw the RAM off and this is why it was angry.






Yay already ~12% more meaningless points in a benchmark then before 

Next up I installed a game to test 3D loads on the quad SLI config. Just a very easy to run game like Flatout 2. I knew this one worked with this driver and a single 295 before, so I´ll start there and see if the quad SLI is even going to work at all.






Yes it does. I did not see any artifacts, flickering or tearing either. 
And after these short tests I looked at my water temp and saw that these low loads did not even bother the huge rad. It raised from 22.7°C to 23.4°C. I think in idle and desktop use I could cool it passive.

Now I´m torn between trying for some higher FSB and memory clock or installing a game to make these cards sweat a bit.


----------



## lexluthermiester (Jan 4, 2019)

Dinnercore said:


> I´m scratching my head about the feature of running FSB in linked mode or unlinked.


Run unlinked. What that means, IIRC, is that the FSB clock is linked to the PCIE/PCI/RAM clocks. If you unlink them then you can OC the FSB without applying an OC to the other clocks.


Dinnercore said:


> So I set it to unlinked, 1600 FSB and 800 on the memory. Voltages I left at auto for now. A quick test run *and it seems to work well*


And it naturally would.


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 5, 2019)

And I decided to test my luck with the CPU / FSB OC first... Why, why do I do this to myself?

Well I was at the 1600 baseline stock settings for every part. My board set higher voltage on auto and I was curious if that is a fixed mode that toggled or a continues process e.g. does the board raise voltage higher with increased frequency?
So I had to test it out. I slightly raised the FSB to 1640, RAM to 820. On top of that I changed the RAM voltage, wanted to check how well measured voltages correspond to dialed in ones. It read 1.85V currently applied, so I went for a manual setting of 1.90V.

Saved settings and rebooted. Started up no problem. I got HWMonitor as additional monitoring, hoping that it could read MCP temps since I have no software to display any of my chipset temps yet. In bios it´s at 47°C and I´d like to keep an eye on that.






Everything looked ok at first glance but then I noticed that the mainboard CPU-temp has some strange spikes up to 85°C at times. They happen so short that I never caught one on current value. And I have no idea what the AUX temp is supposed to be, it toggles between 25 and 50...
All in all I was not too concerned, propably some wrong readouts. Core temps are fine, real temp showed the same values and it never got above 50°C in prime95.

Voltages did not get increased further by the auto setting, these seem to be the standard 'OC-mode' voltages. However the DRAM value did not change, it was 1.816V before (Bios read 1.85V) and now that I set it to 1.90V it still reads 1.816V.
Well it is what it is. Next thing I did was installing Nvidia system monitor as this tool supports my 780i chipset. After the installer finished I wanted to test stability and launched p95. The moment I started real temp 2 of the 4 workers stopped on rounding errors. This told me something was going on stability wise. I stopped the test and the moment I tried to close my browser window I got a BSOD.

This happens, no problem. I´ve seen a lot of these by now, they don´t jumpscare me like they used to years ago. Back into bios I decided to try and just manually set some slightly higher voltages. I left FSB on the auto value of 1.3V, set CPU to 1.35V (bios read 1.31V current) and raised DRAM to 1.95V but noticed that in bios it did read the 1.90V that the software did not.
I saved and restarted, went straight back into bios to check the voltage readings there.
I was surprised to find that my set value of 1.35V resulted in a lower 1.28V in bios, that is lower then the auto setting. The DRAM was at 1.95V now. I decided to try and get into windows now. Well I tried.

Windows now instantly bailed into a BSOD on the loading screen. Like within half a second. Not nice. I went back into bios and set all frequencies to default -> nope. Windows stuck in instant BSOD.
Extended starting options launched and did not detect anything wrong. No repair to be done, just suggested to unplug new devices...
Well then. I went into bios once more and set JUST the DRAM voltage back to auto and look at that it wants to start. Kind off. Now I´m stuck in the blackscreen mode with no login screen. I can only restart or shutdown from there.
Fun night so far. I got my repair stick and went into recovery mode, suspecting the Nvidia system monitor install a possible troublemaker. Recovery is always worth a shot, who knows what happened on that install during my unstable OC.
And look at that now it´s back.

Much work for nothing, I´m back on auto voltages with my 1600 FSB. This is working now, fingers crossed. Now finding what caused what will be fun. If anything this showed me how delicate you have to be with FSB-OC.
I mean I had my Ryzen first gen system running with deactivated CCX on 4.3GHz and unstable RAM for quite a while on a similar Win 7 install with many bluescreens but never experienced such a major brick.


----------



## lexluthermiester (Jan 5, 2019)

Dinnercore said:


> I left FSB on the auto value of 1.3V, set CPU to 1.35V (bios read 1.31V current) and raised DRAM to 1.95V but noticed that in bios it did read the 1.90V that the software did not.





Dinnercore said:


> I was surprised to find that my set value of 1.35V resulted in a lower 1.28V in bios, that is lower then the auto setting.


On some boards, when you take one setting off auto, you'll need to set everything manually as the bios defaults will incorrectly read the manual settings and apply the wrong matching setting. So in other words, if you take the CPU off auto, you'll need to set everything else manually as well. And I've discovered that as a general rule, on 771/775 based systems, if you bump the CPU voltage up, you need to bump the FSB voltage one notch for every 3 you make to the CPU. It's a system voltage balance thing. Ram voltage however is completely separate and unaffected.


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 5, 2019)

lexluthermiester said:


> On some boards, when you take one setting off auto, you'll need to set everything manually as the bios defaults will incorrectly read the manual settings and apply the wrong matching setting.



I´ll go slow now and start with exactly that, set all voltages manual and check without doing anything else. I do to many things at once and then have no real clue what actually went wrong 

I do notice a very immense vdroop under load and on top a big gap between CPU voltage value set in bios and the real voltage applied. At 1.35V set in bios it applies 1.28V, these 1.28V are the idle voltage in windows as read by CPU-Z. Under small FFT load it droops down to 1.24V even, resulting in instability even at 3.2GHz. That is insane, over 100mV difference from the voltage I choose in bios.
For FSB voltage it seems to be rather managable. 1.3V setting results in 1.28V. And according to multiple sources FSB voltage on these 780i boards should not be much higher for 24/7 use. I think my main problem is the vdroop currently, and maybe the GTL offsets.
I did notice that before the crash the 2 workers from core 3 and 4 stopped with errors almost instantly while the other 2 went on, and in bios the auto setting for GTL made a +65mV offset to GTL-2 only. Other 3 were 0. So I read about this and it seems that on a quad core I should set the value on all GTLs or atleast 2 and 4.

Right now I´m looking into the vdroop and found that this is common with the 680i and 780i boards, they did pencil mods on a resistor to negate that. Seems a bit sketchy to me, but I might give it a careful try. But I´m thinking they put that resistor on that Vcore line for a reason, if I now step in and tweak that do I really take care of the root cause or am I just treating a symptom and fake my readouts / hide and underlying issue?


----------



## agent_x007 (Jan 5, 2019)

You can just go higher on Vcore, since Vdroop is so big.
Try 1,4V in BIOS and see how low it will go under load.
Sure you get a bit higher temps in Idle, but at least CPU will be stable.
Pencil mod may require unmounting heatpipe cooling system from motherboard.

@lexluthermiester Vcore to FSB Voltage/"FSB Termination"/VTT isn't always 3:1.
It depends on how far you have to push your FSB vs. actual core clock.
In short : If you need 500MHz (2GHz) FSB to get to 4GHz clock speed on CPU cores, you probably will need FSB Voltage on par or close to actual Vcore (on 45nm Quad Core CPU). I'm assuming no GTL/PLL tweaks that can lower it.


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 5, 2019)

Thank you all for the input, we are making progress. 



agent_x007 said:


> You can just go higher on Vcore, since Vdroop is so big.
> Try 1,4V in BIOS and see how low it will go under load.



I did try 1.375V just this moment. And like @lexluthermiester suggested set all other voltages manual to the values they had on auto. 
That is 1.3V FSB, 1.5V MCP, 1.4V SPP, 1.2V HT link, 1.85V DRAM.
I noticed that I don´t have fine tuning for FSB voltage, I can only choose from 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 or 1.4. It has a slight droop from 1.3V down to 1.28V.

I booted 1600 FSB with these and ran prime95. I got these figures:






In idle the Vcore is now 1.328V with temps sitting in the mid 30s. During intense load it goes down to 1.28V on 50°C while during normal load it sits on 1.285V - 1.29V.
No errors or crashes this time. I wonder what happens with HWMonitor and the CPU temp, I found out that the max. temp value is reaching always double the current temp. When the CPU temp readout reached 45°C, it instantly read 90°C max. As it climbed to 50°C, max. hit 100°C. Strange.
I guess the AUX sensor has the same issue, the 'maximum' value is always on double the actual maximum. That sensor should be on the pcb reading case temp for the aux fan headers. I doubt that the air in my case jumps from 26°C to 52°C and back. 

The TMPIN0 is interesting tho, this seems like a real and working value, the question is if that is MCP/SPP or VRM. 

Now concluding these results I have some headroom in terms of CPU temp I would say. A little more Vcore should be fine, like the 1.4V @agent_x007 suggested. I will have to see how far that will get me before the FSB voltage becomes the limiting factor. 

RAM stuff I will inspect after I´m done with that.


----------



## lexluthermiester (Jan 5, 2019)

agent_x007 said:


> Vcore to FSB Voltage/"FSB Termination"/VTT isn't always 3:1.


True. That's just generally the voltage scheme I remember having to use to get a stable OC's. It of course varied from individual system to system.


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 6, 2019)

I have slowly crept my FSB up, increasing by 10MHz each time and then running a short p95 blend test (past the 2nd small FFTs). Not touching anything else and with the slightly raised Vcore I went just a bit past the point it terminally crashed last time. I hit no trouble yet, so I´ll continue raising it tomorrow. 






Something interesting is starting to happen now. Due to the extreme droop the idle voltage is high enough to produce temp spikes that reach nearly the same temp as under highest load scenario. The idle is still in the 30s on average but spikes with every activity up to 47°C, while the highest load temp I got was 52°C. 
If I continue like this I will be at a point where my idle spikes on a single core are higher then load temps. I looked further into the pencil mod and the instructions and pictures I found indicate that the resistor in question is very accessible:






It is next to the RAM slots and looks exactly the same on my board. All SMDs are in the same spot, I would guess the IC part number is the same too but from the bad image quality I can´t tell. 

I got a little bored and tested a game to finish this day. Unreal Tournament 3 is the title I choose, since it is up there in my top 10 all time favorite games. No trouble to get it running, just started it and disabled all artifical smoothing options for mouse movement and fps. Set resolution to 1080p and also disabled v-sync. 
Worked like a charm, GPUs where not really bothered as expected. I played a 20 minute match and observed temps with afterburner. 






I did not have any artifacting and performance was great. UT3 always ran great and was optimized for nvidia as one of their example titles for PhysX and SLI.
What I did notice however was some screen tearing and a little bit of micro stutter every now and then. Now I did play this on my old 60Hz display which always had some intense tearing in the past and I did upgrade to 144Hz freesync on my main rig, so I´m not sure if the tearing got any worse due to the quad-SLI rendering or if it has always been like this and my eyes now struggle to get back to the non-sync 60Hz.
It did not impact my performance tho 

Temperature wise I´m very happy. The cards are still far from their usage limit ofc, but these numbers equal the idle temp of my air-cooled 295. Water temperature inside the loop reached 24.9°C after these 20 minutes. Ambient is ~20°C at the moment. I think my cooling solution is capable to handle this on full throttle.

Games I´m planning to play and test on this include Far Cry 2, the Stalker-Series, maybe some Crysis just for the meme, I want to try and get Sacred 2 to run but this game is terribly optimized and already gave me trouble back in the day on a single 260.


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 6, 2019)

Sadly it seems like I already hit close to the wall. At 3.3GHz it seems stable but I fail to get 3.33GHz to run. I raised Vcore 3x, raised DRAM voltage just for good measure but it didn´t help. I played around with GTL values from 0mV to +60mV but nothing helped. I went down to 3.32GHz but I can already tell it´s not stable from chrome getting site display errors when a tab is open for more then 1 minute.
Seems like a memory communication related issue, but maybe not. I guess 3.3GHz it is then.

Funny enough I found a document about the 780i chipset:






In there they mention some funny voltages for 'safe' OC:






My board can´t even go that high on FSB.


----------



## lexluthermiester (Jan 6, 2019)

Dinnercore said:


> Sadly it seems like I already hit close to the wall. At 3.3GHz it seems stable but I fail to get 3.33GHz to run. I raised Vcore 3x, raised DRAM voltage just for good measure but it didn´t help. I played around with GTL values from 0mV to +60mV but nothing helped. I went down to 3.32GHz but I can already tell it´s not stable from chrome getting site display errors when a tab is open for more then 1 minute. Seems like a memory communication related issue, but maybe not. I guess 3.3GHz it is then.


Yeah it does seem like you've hit a wall.


Dinnercore said:


> My board can´t even go that high on FSB.


That might not be the problem. It is possible that you've hit the "silicon lottery" wall. That CPU might just be limited to the clocks you've discovered. Personally, I'd drop it to 3.2ghz@1.3v and call it a day. You've achieved a good boost and even though it's not stellar, it's respectable and indeed very workable. Get yourself a GTX1060-6GB or R9-480-8GB and you'll have a damn decent 1080p gaming rig.


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 6, 2019)

lexluthermiester said:


> That CPU might just be limited to the clocks you've discovered. Personally, I'd drop it to 3.2ghz@1.3v and call it a day. You've achieved a good boost and even though it's not stellar, it's respectable and indeed very workable. Get yourself a GTX1060-6GB or R9-480-8GB and you'll have a damn decent 1080p gaming rig.



I agree, it seems to be a hardware limit. I did expect a little more, after I saw reviews and user reports of this board and Q/QX CPUs hit close to 2000 FSB many times. But I have a different CPU, I guess the Xeons don´t like to be OC´d. Still every other example of X5482s I could find reached 3.4 GHz atleast, even in dual CPU setups.

I also agree that the speed I got is absolutly enough. I will leave it at the 3.2.

Might be to late for that tho, I discovered that my Windows install is hurt pretty bad from whatever happened so far. It started with chrome tabs closing with errors, prompting a refresh. I went back down to 3.2GHz and 1600 FSB, 800 on the RAM (which is its stock speed, no OC here). Rebooted and was greeted with my explorer crashing every time I open anything. Even opening the start menu crashed it almost instantly. It restarted no problem but then crashed again soon after.
So I typed fast and opened cmd.exe with admin rights, ran a couple sfc /scannow.






Many broken files, and about half of them could not be repaired as it said the file in store is corrupted too. After it repaired the things it could I can no longer start my browser, it just closes instantly without any error or crash report.
I repeated the repair process 5 times, after the 3rd it stopped repairing anything and just listed the things it couldn´t repair. These files are still many in number and I don´t think I have the patience to try and fix them manually. Something is still very busted, as I looked at the .txt file I got a hard freeze and had to reset. No BSOD.

Before I reinstall the OS, I´d like to find out what killed it to avoid that it all happens twice. Currently running memtest to check if any of my modules might be the culprit. If this shows no errors I´m unsure of where to look. CPU seems stable now, 2 hour prime95 test passed no problem.
Could the GPU setup break windows? I will try a different driver version next time just to be safe.
The only thing that I installed new after the last system recovery point was Sacred 2 from Steam, which came with a bunch of DirectX packages.

Maybe the installation was bad from the start, I don´t know how much I can trust the USB-stick to be reliable. Might try a different one next time.
I knew things like these would happen.

EDIT - Update:

First was a 1 hour pass with the TPU memtest, after that I let memtest86 have go at night. No errors. 






My SSD is healthy too, so it should be a software related issue or it is the result of running unstable clocks for a couple of hours.


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 8, 2019)

One fresh windows install and everything is back to normal. 

Today I went through the trouble to get Sacred 2 Gold edition to run in a manner where one can call the experience enjoyable.
Installed the Steam version as it has the right patch to install a community fix. I tried it without the fix first, but it had some very weird issues. Like frame rendering would suddenly stop, image frozen on a stand still frame while the game continued to run in the background. I could hear it going and even click around and move my character, but it refused to render or display another frame. It could be convinced to continue for another 2-3 minutes by tabbing out of it and back in.
Oh and the game engine does not start with riva tuner overlay in Raster-3D, only Vector-3D and 2D are ok.

After installing the patch it does no longer freeze. Next I had to tackle the graphic settings. The problem with this game engine is the CPU usage. It is a heavy single thread user, fixed on the first core only. GPUs had a usage between 40-60% depending on graphics setting I could even get it up to 70% with physX enabled and all sliders maxed. But none of these settings changed the framerate in a significant way. Medium settings? 70 fps with stutter and drops to 30. Highest settings + PhysX + dynamic weather effects and all the goodies: 65-70 fps with higher GPU usage but the exact same drops and stutter. It felt really bad, I´d call it unplayable. The savior with this title is V-Sync for me. Enabling it seemed to take some load of that single thread by not bothering it with the extra frames. A nice side effect was that all tearing was gone. Suddenly it felt really smooth, a day and night change. Still get some nasty dips with spikes on the CPU usage, but they are much less frequent.
I´m absolutly CPU bound in this game and/or the poor engine is struggling with itself.
And this is something I never managed to get around, even with modern hardware. Which is such a shame, I really love this game and the first one. Love the world that is not taking anything serious, the humor, the strange cast of voice actors for the german language (some famous voices, some of the main characters are spoken by voices that dubbed Star Trek TNG! e.g. the german Data voiced the Inquisitor, one of the playable characters and evil high priest).



<-Without V-Sync, 100% on CPU1 and stutter


<-With V-Sync, 60fps most of the time and a lot smoother + no more tearing

Highest temperature on the GPUs was reached on the dual pcb card at 39°C. Hottest core peaked on 49°C. This was when playing with V-Sync off.
I continued to play for a while and got really hooked with the game once again. If only it could run without that little hiccup every 15-20 seconds. 

Next up I want to try one or two 3D benchmarks and raise the GPU clocks a little. I currently have the cores on 576 MHz and the memory on 1008 MHz. I think 600/1100 could be possible, everything on top is a gift. With 4 GPUs you´d have to win the lottery 4x...


----------



## lexluthermiester (Jan 8, 2019)

Dinnercore said:


> If only it could run without that little hiccup every 15-20 seconds.


Looks like you have AA on. Turn it down to 2x or off. That hiccup will likely go away as a result. The problem is that the card is having to pause for a few frames while it loads data from system ram. AA takes up a ton of VRAM, so naturally, if you turn AA off or down, VRAM usage will be reduced and the card will not need to go to system ram as often. Your frame rate will increase as well because your GPU will not need to spend as much of it's time doing AA calculations.


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 8, 2019)

lexluthermiester said:


> Looks like you have AA on.


Good catch, yes I had 4x AA (ingame max.) on. I´m not sure if the VRAM is the limitation here, the 295s have 896MB each which to me seems enough. Plus I had the same trouble on my Vega64 with 8GB...
It is the game that is not handling memory well. Turning AA off resulted in less stutter, but it is not gone.






First screen is AA off and you can see how the CPU is still up close to the limit. I may try -nocpubinding and check if that does anything for me. It did still hiccup on 100% usage when moving into an area with 5+ npcs.






This is 4x AA, CPU 100% most of the time and higher VRAM usage. I´d say 2x AA is the better option, 4x does get very blurry and seems to wash out colors on things like grass or the fence.
Something I want to try too is forcing AA via nvidia control panel.

What really hurts retro builds is the increase in missing support for hardware acceleration:






The modern video codecs can not be encoded or decoded in hardware mode it seems, only software and that is taking all of my resources. This 720p video in 60fps is dropping frames, CPU is busy at 80% on all 4 threads to keep up, GPU is up on 84-90% too. 1080p becomes a slideshow.
A bit sad to see that, the hardware is actually capable of playing high res content, but not with the modern standards. I can play in 1440p and 100+ fps, but can´t watch a 720p video :/
Really reducing the usability of such a build for anything other than games. Which is fine for me, but I feel like it doesn´t have to be that way. It´s all about the market and not about a lasting joy.


----------



## lexluthermiester (Jan 8, 2019)

Ah, looks like you're hitting another platform limitation.


Dinnercore said:


> I can play in 1440p and 100+ fps, but can´t watch a 720p video :/


If you use Firefox there is an extention you can use to force video players to use h264 instead of VP8/9.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/?src=search
There's also a Video Downloader which will let you download video's direct to your system so you can watch them natively on a video player.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-downloadhelper/?src=search


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 9, 2019)

You can call me insane, but fiddling around with all this really got me excited again. And I can´t help but fall in love with this 10 year old platform.



mouacyk said:


> I know it's _your_ childhood dream, and not mine, but I'd still recommend the X5470 over the X5482 if you decide to go XEON.



I will not half-ass this, it´s top-speed or bust. I got a Xeon X5470 to replace the 5482, I take the advise from @mouacyk . I got the x5482 for a pretty 'neutral' cost and thought I could atleast get it into the 3.4Ghz - 3.5GHz range. Not knowing about the limits of 780i when it comes to FSB oc. 

The CPU is actually a bottleneck for many games, as I see usage always above 80%. The quad SLI setup is really adding stress on the CPU, as I checked benchmarks from back then I saw how just a single 295 did benefit most from high clocking Q9XXX CPUs and fps + GPU usage really seems to scale well even beyond 3.6GHz CPU clock. So to remove that I will try my luck with the X5470.






To prepare for the case of blowing something up I got spare parts incoming. Bought two more 780i boards (call me insane if you want but I made a decent deal as the one in the picture is a bit dirty and beaten up but still working and the second one coming in will be including a mystery CPU ) and 2x X5470s. Currently also having my sight on some cheap offers for 1066 5-5-5 DDR2 modules, market is flooded with DDR2 atm. So I can do the science of probing things until they smoke and then try to stay below that line next time 
I never killed hardware before and I don´t want to but at the same time I really want to see if 1.4V FSB does any harm and I´d like to test how well my RAM is scaling with voltage (or how well my ghetto mod heatsinks work). And before I take those risks I´d like to have spare parts ready.

Oh and I also have 295s on spare, one single pcb card and a dual pcb card. Just in case


----------



## phill (Jan 10, 2019)

I remember these boards, they did royally suck from my experience..  That north bridge temp is low compared to what mine was, about 60C if I recall, will need to do some digging for some pics etc   Not quite the same with the GTX 295, but had dual 8800 GT's which weren't bad at all.  Having gone nuts and bought a brand new QX9650 at the time, overclocking on that board was a nightmare..  Memory holes and temps on it were awful.  

I'll see if I can grab some pictures of the setup, I believe it was when I had just started water cooling and a bit of benching as well...  Was fun but that board was damn frustrating lol


----------



## lexluthermiester (Jan 10, 2019)

Dinnercore said:


> You can call me insane, but fiddling around with all this really got me excited again. And I can´t help but fall in love with this 10 year old platform.


None of us think you're insane. You're enjoying a hobby! Have fun with it!


Dinnercore said:


> Bought two more 780i boards (call me insane if you want but I made a decent deal as the one in the picture is a bit dirty and beaten up but still working and the second one coming in will be including a mystery CPU ) and 2x X5470s.


Again, not insane. Those are nice boards and OC champs. Premium stuff. Again have fun with them!


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 10, 2019)

I´m on the X5470 from here on out:






It was an easy swap, now that the board accepts 771 CPUs. I´m thanking my past self who bought 6 mod stickers at once.

Well, the physical swap was simple. I went straight into bios and set my voltages manual again, trying to remember where I had them before. These are the voltages I set in bios:
1.343 Vcore / 1.2 FSB aka VTT / 1.9 (!) RAM / 1.3 SPP / 1.5 MCP / 1.2 HT
GTLs +40mV on all.

It booted and I got into windows but it was unstable. Prime95 failed after a while (15 min.) in blend on core 1. I took the time to read into GTL adjustments and how to calculate the estimates from where I can start to test for my individual values.
I figured I was pretty close to the calculation but read that lane 2 and 4 are address lanes that can work with a little less voltage which can increase stability. Since I got a fail on core 1 which is the first die, I raised the first GTLs by one step (+5mV).
Which in total lead me to +45mV / +40mV / +40mV / +35mV.






Small FFTs run stable, or atleast get further then before. At the current state I do not make multiple hour long stability tests, since I need to test so many little steps.
If you read through the thread you already now that something is always up, and it just so happened that on booting the next day I got a BSOD crying that my bios would not support ACPI...
Eh? Thanks, whatever. I rebooted and it started normal. Everything working, windows file integrity test passed.
I decided to run prime95 again and guess what, I got instant errors this time in blend test. I started to question my sanity and re-ran the small FFT test -> that one is still solid, even for 30 minutes. Blend test is using larger sizes to check RAM too, I showed the sticks my angry face through the window and checked my screenshots.

Meanwhile I also installed hwinfo64, thanks to the suggestion of @Edwired . It does report some very low core temps that seem to good to be true, but my SPP temp is showing up there! It sits at 45°C in idle and neither gaming nor artificial load could bother it to go over 50°C. This now leaves the other unlabled mainboard temp sensor to be either VRM or MCP.

Upon investigating my hwmonitor screens I noticed the voltage 'VIN1' changed from 1.488V to 1.528V. I must have set something different then with the X5482 and it hit me that I set RAM higher then before! After adjusting it back down to 1.85V in bios I re-ran prime95 once more and got it now stable in 30 minute small FFTs and blend tests. Also no more BSODs or other fun stuff.






The voltage balance is very critical on this platform and I like it. Much more exciting then todays 'just raise Vcore'. And I learned a lot already.

Now back to a game, I ran some Far Cry 2 benchmarks with the old X5482 at 3.3GHz, close to what the X5470 is doing atm.



 



I was testing no AA vs 4x AA at 1080p. As you can see those results are within margin of error. The 4x result is fluctuating more, lower min. FPS but also higher max. FPS. I saw the GPU usage scale rather well with the higher AA setting but still only hovering around 40-50% on 4x, the CPU was at 85-95% at all times.
Judging by this I´m either restricted by CPU speed or hitting a bandwith limit somewhere from the SLI-setup. Reviews and benchmarks from the time show a single GTX 295 reaching higher average fps (80) at 1920x1200 with AA. Quad-SLI setups got even higher, but most of them used overclocked i7s at or above 3.6 GHz with the newer platform that had just been released back then.
A graph and an article from tom´s hardware compared the performance of GPUs paired with different CPUs and even at high resolutions a Q9550 @ 3.7GHz was necessary to get a single GTX295 to its full potential. At 2560x1600 this setup even outperformed the i7 920.

Now I hope that my bottleneck is actually the CPU and not with the chipset. The setup is stable now but before I try any OC I want to lower Vcore and try to do the droop mod on that resistor. I don´t trust the pencil method, seems like a quick and dirty trick. Got a 150k Ohm resistor ready to try if that changes anything. At low Vcore first, in case I can overshoot this. But the source stated 100K Ohms, so 150K first should be on the safe side.  For a moment I thought about using a potentiometer, but this is a dangerous game knowing myself.






phill said:


> I remember these boards, they did royally suck from my experience.. That north bridge temp is low compared to what mine was, about 60C if I recall, will need to do some digging for some pics etc  Not quite the same with the GTX 295, but had dual 8800 GT's which weren't bad at all. Having gone nuts and bought a brand new QX9650 at the time, overclocking on that board was a nightmare.. Memory holes and temps on it were awful.
> I'll see if I can grab some pictures of the setup, I believe it was when I had just started water cooling and a bit of benching as well... Was fun but that board was damn frustrating lol



I have nothing to compare them against, this is my first time on 775. I did notice that they require patience and careful balancing but seem to behave well once you hit the right numbers. I changed the TIM between all chips and coolers on the board, this might have helped with the temps. On top I use the 'optional' fan on the heatsink and I have no other heatsources thanks to watercooling.
I would love to see pic of that, I had to settle with a 8600GTS back then. My first PC :,)




lexluthermiester said:


> Again, not insane. Those are nice boards and OC champs. Premium stuff. Again have fun with them!



I love the boards, and they might not compete with sth. like a maximus formula in terms of FSB clocks but so far mine takes the high Vcore / power draw very well. Once it is balanced out it feels solid. Bios has all I need and is replaceable if something happens.


----------



## phill (Jan 11, 2019)

I've had a few 775 boards and with the memory holes and the overclocking issues I remember they where a pain!!  Here's a few pics of one of my first water cooled rigs  

    

Ah the days where I didn't really know too much about stuff but would do something daft anyways...  Funny, things not really changed much!! 

 

I loved that screen.....


----------



## Edwired (Jan 11, 2019)

That a lot of information as im trying to soak it in. Yeah that one i posted up on xeon owner club is stable for cpu only not gaming. Im at the moment testing the overrall system stability as i use project cars game to make a load on cpu, ram, northbridge and graphic card that way i can  tweak one setting at a time . The trick i discovered for gtl settings is to do vtt x gtl = math that way you know if you are getting the correct gtl voltage.

Also another thing for bluescreen you need to check it with bluescreen viewer that way you can get the error code and look online what that cause by.

Heres the link for information on 775 error codes
https://www.overclock.net/forum/297...ing-must-have-info.html#/topics/940091?page=1


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 12, 2019)

@Edwired Thank you, I know about the bluescreen viewer and how to use it. It´s just that im confident that any bluescreeens immediatly after my hardware and bios setting changes are likely a result of unstable / wrong settings. And if my memory bus is unstable and corrupts my VGA driver while booting then bluescreen viewer would lead me to believe that my drivers are broken while instead I have a hardware level problem.


I now spend many hours with my bios and the methods of how to flash it to a more recent version. I was still on version P06:





Latest is P10 from EVGA, but XFX ones are little more hard to find. They should theoretically work if you cross over BUT I got an XFX board so I stick with XFX bios. The latest version from XFX was P09, the only difference in P10 is increased CPU compatibilty. Since I have no issues so far I decided to leave that out.

What got me interested in updating the bios were changelog notes like improved WHQL compatibilty, improved GPU compatibility, corrected SLI memory calculation, improved RAM compatibility when using 4x 2GB.
After some digging online I found the XFX-Bios archive and had to piece together how to actually get the flasher to work from USB. I have no DVD-drive nor floppy. I got the .iso and had the intuitive reaction to extract the files from it, made a bootable freeDOS stick with rufus, copied files over and booted from that.

First time I did it like that too, my AMD X370 board had an ez-flash utility so I could skip the freeDOS part and was a little unsure if I would remember how to navigate in DOS. Well my dad had an old PC he let me play on when I was 5 years old and that was using DOS, so ofc it was no trouble. I don´t need to look things up, I´m a big boy! 

Thanks to XFX a handy autoexec was already set up and I got straight to this little horror movie:




Now for the sake of my own sanity, you do see the p09.bin at the end of the file name to program?!
After this screen came one erasing step, then one programming step, another erase and another program. It played a sweet tune in some high key major on my speaker and I somehow got the image in my head of a dog proudly wagging its tail because it knows it is a good boy.
It wanted to reboot and halted on the post screen like after a bios reset. I decided to be on the safe side and powered off, switched PSU off, took battery out and cleared CMOS for a good 10 minutes. The whole process included another 20 minutes of me having to remove the PSU and turn it upside down because in order to get to the battery I had to take out the lower GPU, which then spit one of its slot screws right into the PSU-fan...

Back up I went into bios, set all settings the way they had been and got into windows. I started CPU-Z, excited to see my new P09 bios version but:





Eh? P06 still?... msconfig32 told me the exact same thing. BUT I compared the date and saw that this version is now a whole year more recent then the version before. What. I was confused and disappointed and frustrated after what seems like another hour wasted.
I googled the exact issue and found a user in EVGA forums to have the same trouble, he too had the P06 before and even after 4 tries he got the same result. Someone there told him to check the POST screen too. He did not answer back so this is what I will be doing now.

I will edit a picture of it in this post later.
EDIT:




So this is saying P09. I would like to trust my bios knowing what version it is more than any software. 

On another note, I tried my 150K resistor:






I was a bit hesitant to use a carbon film resistor instead of an MF due to noise they can produce but soon threw these worries over board. This is more a thing to consider in amplified circuits for hi-fi audio. And the pencil method is nothing other than applying a carbon film...

I carefully placed it on top of the marked SMD while the PC was running and saw these changes in voltage:






Seems like a safe thing to do so I will now solder it and test under load of the droop is less or if I just fixed the difference between requested and delivered voltage in idle.

But this whole bios thing is really bugging me. Old version number from flashing the new version.bin file and getting a different date... Did I create a mutant bios, a mix between the two?


----------



## Edwired (Jan 12, 2019)

Jeez erm do google about the bios update update as sometimes the bios said it erasing the old bios in order to write new codes but it could be the way the bios flasher works sometime you have to add switches in the code to force flash the new bios

Here the link for the bios update im sure it can be fixed 
https://www.overclock.net/forum/167...ios-p09-no-download-link.html#/topics/1457704


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 12, 2019)

I checked the fan settings in my bios and tried out if the thing mentioned in changelog (fan speed fixed after resuming from sleep state) for version P09 is working. Yes it is, and my post screen not only mentions the different version number but has a slightly changed font size too. Going on from this I will not bother with reflashing a dozen times and assume that I´m on P09.
Board is working, CPU-Z bench consistently gained 5 points single thread performance after the flash. Seems good to me.

Next I fought with the Vdroop mod. Even after mastering my soldering skills on a practice pcb I was not confident enough that I could solder these tiny contact points, not with other components so close by. Since there is not much difference between a carbon film in a case or just open on top of the smd I just went for the pencil method.

I lowered my voltage in bios to 1.325V and now get these numbers under load:






And idle:






Solid result. Before that I had to set 1.343V in bios and got a drop down to 1.256V under load. The rise in temperature after this mod confirms it is working as intended. Now I can set a much lower voltage resulting in happy idle temps.

To help temperatures further I then went ahead and rigged another fan (60mm) to blow some air into the fins of the VRM heatsink:






Since the only fan for the heatsink was on top of the NB I would guess that the VRM is the hottest part, only a passive heatsink that has to channel that heat all the way down to the fan with just a single heatpipe. Now it got some more airflow and the vague 'mainboard' temp dropped by 2°C during small FFTs with the case closed, as with the screenshots before the case was open!

At last I feel prepared for higher clocks.


----------



## Edwired (Jan 12, 2019)

Cool i say pretty cool as mine is air cooled i did get to boot with gskill ddr2 to run at 1200mhz while stock was 1066mhz for a few minutes before crashing in intel burn test so i know i have the ram capable of running near 1200mhz


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 13, 2019)

The day went well, I did tiny steps up and ran 2x 15 min. tests in prime95 each time. First one blend then small FFT torture.
This also was the first time that I OC a CPU and continuously lower the Vcore. I noticed an increase in MCP (or whatever TMPIN0 is) temperature by ~1-2 °C for every 50 MHz I went up and decreased Vcore in an attempt to combat that additional heat.

I had several points where one or two cores threw errors in prime and each time I just had to bump the GTL values up by +5mV to get it stable again. I´m now on 1.29V CPU in bios (1.272 in windows). Still on the same 1.2V FSB / VTT, 1.85V memory etc.
GTLs are now +60mV / +50mV / +60mV / +50mV.






I´m running out of time for today, but it will only go up from here. Might have to do another little mod and replace the thin and brittle mobo fan with a proper 60mm, tape over the gaps on the side between fan-frame and heatsink to channel the airflow. I would like to avoid temps over 80°C, especially when during summer my ambient will be 5-7°C higher. If this still does not help and this mainboard temp is the limiting factor for my overclock, then I will have no choice but to take the system apart again and fix that heatsink by either using liquid metal or installing a chipset watercooler. Which I would love to avoid since it will be a pain to undo all the things I did already...


----------



## Edwired (Jan 14, 2019)

At this moment im trying to test resident evil 2 remake by steam i can tell you it runs on my system no problem the only problem i am having is the graphic card crashing in pcie x16 slot so i would say i have to drop the card to pcie x8 slot tonight as i have done that before i was able to play for hours on end. As well i think the pcie x16 slot is faulty to a degree as i noticed one of the pins is nearly missing as well it very loose when i install a graphic card. I do have another motherboard laying about that i could desolder the slot off that and replace the one on the asus p5q premium but that will be another day "facepalmed"


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 15, 2019)

Quick Update, I bought another 60mm fan from Noctua and taped it on the board heatsink, replacing the stock fan. I had to use this white tape for now, it is the only sticky thing I have that is rated for temperatures above 40°C since I´m out of double sided 3M stuff. Might fix this later, but it does not bother me too much. 







It did help with the heat a little bit, looking at hwmonitor I can see a consistent 3°C drop from idle to load. Now it sometimes even dips below 40°C in idle! And I got 74°C max. @ 3.71GHz. That is better than the 77°C I had at 3.57GHz. 





In order to get this stable I had some more adjustments to make, again a slight bump in GTLs, but this time it was not enough (65/55/65/55 now). It still failed during FFT lengths above 700k and I had to lower the memory voltage even further. 
Now I´m at 1.825V for memory instead of the 1.85 before. I don´t know if that hints at the ram modules becoming unstable or adding signal noise when running at a voltage above their rating or if this is something the board is struggling with. In which case I would be in trouble and limited to only 1.8V RAM, everything above throws instant errors even at stock speed. As seen with 1.9V, even the 3.3 GHz would fail. To test this I have some 2.1V rated sticks incoming, lets hope for the best. 
If it fails to be stable with 2.1V memory I can still try to either increase FSB voltage one step or try to back off the GTL values a little.

However since I´m now stable at 3.71GHz I need go higher.


----------



## phill (Jan 15, 2019)

You'll never stop chasing the bigger numbers  

But congrats and nice work   Brings back memories


----------



## Edwired (Jan 15, 2019)

At the moment im getting more game stable. The crashing is related to ram on the motherboard. All the timings are set manually as auto will crash all games with or without an overclock  on the cpu, ram, gpu. The cpu is 4.05ghz, ram 1123mhz, fsb 448, first timings 6-6-6-15-5-50-7-4  second timing 8-6-7-6-7-7-8 third timing  17-5-1-5-5


----------



## agent_x007 (Jan 15, 2019)

Try setting 896MHz on Memory with CL5.5.5.15 timings + Command Rate 2T.
1,9V on DRAM Voltage isn't enough for 1066MHz.


----------



## Edwired (Jan 15, 2019)

The vtt is already at 1.3v nb is at 1.40v the nb gtl is at 0.615. Troubles starts if any of the ram timings is auto. As it already loose from the start but unstable. So i had to tweak each settings while testing games that are ram related that way i tweaking it in the correct direction at the moment im testing it in project cars and resident evil 2 remake one shot demo.

As the common errors im getting appication error 1000 and display 4101 both are caused if the timings in auto plain and simple. Not driver related as commonly seen on the internet


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 17, 2019)

I think my voltages are exactly where they should be now, with the same settings as before I went straight to 4+GHz with no issues. Still got some headroom for FSB, maybe even Vcore. The 77°C on MCP is already high but only during the prime torture tests. In typical usage scenarios like gaming I´ve not hit above 60°C yet.
BUT before I try to go EVEN FURTHER BEYOOOND....AHHHHHHHH (sry) I will wait for my RAM to arrive. I´m at a point where I run Bus Speed 1 : 1 DRAM frequency and any increase in FSB will push the memory too. And I´ve already seen that the sticks I have now behave a bit picky.





Oh and I added something else to the build, I know many have mixed feelings about case badges. I personally like them but I did not want to disturb the clean look of the case so I put them behind the front door that hides the drive bays.






Yes I know I have a Xeon and no Core 2 X, but they are kinda the same. Here is my current CPU-Z validation: https://valid.x86.fr/plcjtl
If I can convince the memory to behave I might go hunting for the single thread performance of these entry level Ryzens...

Don´t worry tho, my CPU-OC adventures will come to an end eventually, then I will get working on the GPUs.


----------



## Kissamies (Jan 17, 2019)

That sticker is hella lot cooler than a Xeon sticker.


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 18, 2019)

My hunt for DDR2 ram brought up some stuff, I now have 4 x 2GB Geil Evo rated 800 CL-4-4-4 at 2.0V. But I also found something that really caught my attention.

There are not many 1200 - PC 9600 kits to find today. I could only spot 3 offers atm on multiple platforms, two had been these guys:






2x1GB OCZ stuff for 1200 5-5-5 @ 2.1V. A little low capacity for my Windows 7 install but 4GB are in theory still enough for the games from 2008+. But there were these bad boys too:






A 2x2GB kit from G.Skill. With the date on them being late 2010 they don´t perfectly align with my 2008/9 components but it´s close enough for me. It is still DDR2 and if they work at 1200 with high voltage I might profit from them even if my board fails to be stable at higher memory voltages.
If the stars align I might find another 2x2GB kit like these some day, I will be patient. After all I managed to get the waterblocks for the 295s too.


----------



## Edwired (Jan 18, 2019)

I was able to boot at 1200mhz on 4 dimms with g-skill f2-8500cl5-2gbpk


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 18, 2019)

Sticks are in now, replacing my current OCZ ones. Before that I took each module by the hand, we made a big circle and had a brief discussion about which ones would like to work together.
The 2 x 2GB G.Skill run side by side with one of the 2 x 2GB Geil kits. It was plug and play, I immediately went to bios and put them on 2.0V.





(OH no they are burning! JK, red LEDs. Measured 29°C on the heatsink after a test run.)

Currently running some tests, no errors or crashes yet. Primary timings I choose a bit loose:  5-5-5-15 2T
Later I can decide if I want to push for CL4-4-4 or higher frequency.




Edwired said:


> I was able to boot at 1200mhz on 4 dimms with g-skill f2-8500cl5-2gbpk



Nice, did you get them stable at 1200? What timings and voltages do you use?


----------



## Edwired (Jan 19, 2019)

Just for a brief moment i got into windows then it crashed in prime95 i was somewhere between 5-5-5-15 to 6-6-6-18 with voltage between 2.10v to 2.20v that by the custom pcb reading with dmm. But that when i lost track what i was doing. I will try again another day just too much going on lately. If i had prime95 going with valley heaven benchmark the graphic card keeps crashing but the cpu and ram kept going like nothing happened. The way i see it it somewhere between the nb gtl, ram clock skew, cpu clock skew and northbridge clock skew. It like playing whack a mole all over again


----------



## phill (Jan 19, 2019)

Always overclock or tweak one thing at once, you'll just cause yourself more headaches with trying to do CPU, RAM and GPU together, stick with a solid CPU speed, then try the RAM if that's what your aiming for. 
Get to your desired CPU speed, then tweak the ram, that's what I do   Years of benching on HWbot you learn how to make things easy for yourself


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 19, 2019)

Edwired said:


> Just for a brief moment i got into windows then it crashed in prime95 i was somewhere between 5-5-5-15 to 6-6-6-18 with voltage between 2.10v to 2.20v that by the custom pcb reading with dmm. But that when i lost track what i was doing. I will try again another day just too much going on lately. If i had prime95 going with valley heaven benchmark the graphic card keeps crashing but the cpu and ram kept going like nothing happened. The way i see it it somewhere between the nb gtl, ram clock skew, cpu clock skew and northbridge clock skew. It like playing whack a mole all over again



Ahh yeah that happened to me too, I tend to do multiple things at the same time and then I don´t know which of these things cause issues. I benefit from my board as it does not have all these settings you have. I can´t adjust clock skew for example. 
I hope you get those 1200 stable at some point, I would say stick to what @phill is saying. 

Back to my project:

I start to doubt the use of prime95 for testing my system. Don´t get me wrong, it is really nice for finding issues before they show in a BSOD or failing to boot. BUT the temps it produces in torture tests are so far off from real world usage, that I´m beginning to think I´ll just blow up my VRM with it when it actually would be fine for gaming or even rendering. 

Here are temps after an hour playing Sacred 2 and running 3x Far Cry 2 benchmark afterwards:





And during Cinebench:





In gaming the MCP (still not sure if that temp is actually MCP or VRM) is over 20°C lower, cores are ~7°C lower but they are not critical in p95 so I will not focus on them. 
To get to the numbers I see during torture test I would need an ambient temp of 42°C+, I don´t exceed 30°C during hot summer days. I might see 75°C on that sensor during summer when I run 24/7 render workloads.

I say that because prime95 feels uncomfortably and unnecessary hot on that part of the board and going further from here I might see 68-70°C during render workloads, but in prime95 hit 90°C+. If this is the MCP-temp then 90°C would be the limit it can take.


----------



## phill (Jan 19, 2019)

@Dinnercore - What sort of fans do you have in the system that hits 28000RPM??!   Does the PC float at all??......

Also just a question really, with the temps you are getting with VRMs etc, are you actively cooling them when testing with fans etc?  Stability tests are fine but they do put a lot of stress on the hardware (hence being a torture test) but if you not cooling those areas they might be causing you issues 

Just yesterday a mate from work was having issues with a battery charger he had made, wasn't getting the full amount of the charge into the batteries because one of the chips were getting too hot.  With a tiny heatsink over it, it was getting more charge which in turned charged the batteries a little higher.  Cooling when testing is so important, you can't really ever have enough   I think when I used to use the 780i board, I made a very dodgy wooden frame to hold 3 120mm fans, it cooled over the two GPUs and the motherboard a little as any flow of air (big or small) can make a massive difference   (Even with hard drives but I digress...) lol





As seen here by my very poor picture lol  Temps on that motherboard were horrendous...  When I moved over to the P35 board after it, it was a completely different beast...





Ah, back in the days


----------



## Edwired (Jan 19, 2019)

I know pain in my face as im getting stable for the cpu no problem there it when the graphic card doing the heaven bench at the same time with prime95 it will disappear after a few mins with errors in event viewer appication 1000 and nvidia driver error 4101. Im beginning to think theres a problem with pcie x16 same with pcie 8 both will crash the same way as before it seems i have to use pcie x4 1.1 that will make games slow and stuttering and ya know i cant stand looking at 1910 film reels. Look like i have to try that tomorrow night if it crash one more time im gonna just overvolt everything and overclock everything till it bleed it guts on the floor


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 19, 2019)

phill said:


> @Dinnercore - What sort of fans do you have in the system that hits 28000RPM??!  Does the PC float at all??......



Oh it does not float, I have bolted it in place and filled the bottom of the case with mercury. Fans are overclocked, using the 240V outlet straight into the fan. They do get a little noisy now, as the fan blades break the sound barrier... Nah the fans don´t report speed and or the board or software wants to detect a pwm signal that isn´t there. I have 5x 120mm fans on those headers at 65% speed.




phill said:


> Also just a question really, with the temps you are getting with VRMs etc, are you actively cooling them when testing with fans etc? Stability tests are fine but they do put a lot of stress on the hardware (hence being a torture test) but if you not cooling those areas they might be causing you issues



Of course I cared for cooling, you can see the two additional 60mm fans I use in this post.
Don´t want to earn this badge:








phill said:


> I think when I used to use the 780i board, I made a very dodgy wooden frame to hold 3 120mm fans, it cooled over the two GPUs and the motherboard a little as any flow of air (big or small) can make a massive difference  (Even with hard drives but I digress...) lol



That is a clever construction, looks like you would have profited from a benchtable back then 




phill said:


> Ah, back in the days



Ah wow this is a relief to see, in bios it is all chill for me. I may get to the point at which I try higher voltages, but seems like I´m doing okay with what I use right now.


----------



## phill (Jan 19, 2019)

I was pushing the CPU and board to see what I could manage..  With two 8800 GT's overclocked I was fairly happy back then until I started seeing reports in HWBot that one 8800 GT was hitting over 100k in 3D 01, I was way off lol

Here's a pic of the voltages I was using for 4.4Ghz on my QX9650 













I was still learning at that point but it was still fun trying


----------



## phill (Jan 19, 2019)

Edwired said:


> I know pain in my face as im getting stable for the cpu no problem there it when the graphic card doing the heaven bench at the same time with prime95 it will disappear after a few mins with errors in event viewer appication 1000 and nvidia driver error 4101. Im beginning to think theres a problem with pcie x16 same with pcie 8 both will crash the same way as before it seems i have to use pcie x4 1.1 that will make games slow and stuttering and ya know i cant stand looking at 1910 film reels. Look like i have to try that tomorrow night if it crash one more time im gonna just overvolt everything and overclock everything till it bleed it guts on the floor



Have you tried another card to see if the same thing happens??


----------



## Edwired (Jan 19, 2019)

Yea i tried an galaxy gtx 660 like a few months ago same thing happened again in both x16 and x8. As well i thought that i got the asus gtx 750 ti oc in the same slots same problem comes back. I just think the motherboard just dont like any card in pcie x16 and x8. So im forced to use pcie x4 as im testing it now if it happened again i might well just replace the motherboard as i dont have spare parts laying about and trying to find another asus premium only place i can find it on aliexpress as they have  plenty of stock there


----------



## Edwired (Jan 19, 2019)

phill said:


> Have you tried another card to see if the same thing happens??


At the moment it in x4 slot it running prime95 and heaven bench at the same time no crashing yet as it just passed 1 hour and 10 mins where it could crash well before 35 mins in x16 and x8 slot. I will leave it run over 12 hours to see what the story with. The temp on the cpu is 55c hottest on core 1 gpu barely touch 60c with a mild bump in the gpu core 1280mhz and memory 2800mhz where standard is 1215mhz gpu core and 2700mhz memory


----------



## Edwired (Jan 19, 2019)

So far it not crashing the graphic looks like i solved one whack a mole on that. Now next is for faster ram freq or tighter timings or insane cpu overclock. My goal is 4.3ghz or 4.4ghz once i get that im done with overclocking and enjoy gaming when i can. Even i was able to get to 4.37ghz before just cant remember how i did it


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 19, 2019)

Edwired said:


> So far it not crashing the graphic looks like i solved one whack a mole on that. Now next is for faster ram freq or tighter timings or insane cpu overclock. My goal is 4.3ghz or 4.4ghz once i get that im done with overclocking and enjoy gaming when i can. Even i was able to get to 4.37ghz before just cant remember how i did it



That is nice to hear, always a sweet feeling when it finally stops crashing. I would however suggest you open a thread in the overclocking section, there you can post all about your system and have it in one place.
This thread I opened just for my project and to log what I do with my system. I welcome everyone to share OC results and memories, but I can´t help you troubleshoot your system here and you might find a lot more attention and people with knowledge about your specific problem in the overclocking part or if you open your own project log 


I reached a point on my X5470 where I had to raise Vcore again. Reached 4.15 GHz stable with the previous settings, but now I´m on 4.2 GHz and had the first system freeze in prime95. No errors, just a hard freeze - I reset and bumped Vcore back up one step to 1.3V in bios. 



 

 

I knew I got close to the point at which 1.27V would no longer be enough, after all the chaps on HWBOT use 1.5V+ for 4.7-4.8 GHz and 1.6V with X-OC cooling methods for 5GHz+. I imagine they use binned chips too, after all they are cheap compared to the cost of LN2.
I marked this point (4.2GHz) as a possible sweetspot. Temps are comfortable all around for daily use, the same applies for Vcore and VTT. But... I do have a spare CPU, 2 spare boards...

As reference for myself: 1.3V CPU / 1.2V FSB / 2.0V Memory / 1.3V SPP / 1.5V MCP / 1.2V HT
GTLs: +65mV / +55mV / +65mV / +55mV

Feel free to try these if anyone uses the 780i chipset and the X5470. Might need some individual adjustments to suit other chips, I´d start with the GTLs and see from there.


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 20, 2019)

Ahh the weekend, today I took the time to take more pictures. Before I come to those, I tried my luck with 4.25 GHz and it got random BSODs with the settings mentioned above.
I raised Vcore, still the same trouble. Figured it is time to increase FSB voltage. With that I have to adjust my GTLs too, so new values for 4.25GHz:

1.3125V CPU / 1.3V FSB / GTLs: +80mV / +65mV / +80mV / +65mV

With that 4.25 GHz seemed stable, it passed p95 in a 30 minute test, ran cinebench no problem but I got system freezes after leaving it running for some hours. I think it is time to increase voltage on the SPP (System Platform Processor) aka northbridge.
Btw I was wrong thinking that the MCP would be the NB chip directly under the heatsink. Nope, MCP = Media and Communication Processor and it is kind of the southbridge? Well it is the thing sitting under the miniature heatsink with the XFX logo. Sits right between the two PCIe slots I use with little to no airflow. Not that I think airflow would help that thin sheet of cheap metal a lot. Anyway, I decided to recycle the boards fan and stuck it to the waterblock of the top GPU:






Now I´m running SPP @ 1.35V, fingers crossed. Doing a long term test. Just for fun I tried 4.3GHz before raising SPP and got stuck during boot on error code 52 (memory test). Seems like the FSB clock is close to its limit.
I´m happy with 4.25GHz tho, even 4.2 for more stability.

To celebrate this, some photos:

Taken while installing the fan, note how I can just detach the MoRa but keep the loop filled. So nice to work with.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



He is green:


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



To close for today, the potentially final CPU numbers:


 



EDIT: Yeah looks like this will be it. Every time I try 4.3 I get stuck at code 52, memory just doesn´t want to go. I tried 2.1V on the memory, lowered memory frequency down to ~700, increased SPP voltage, HT-Link voltage, Vcore even tho I don´t think it is the CPU. 
The CPU has more in it, the memory runs with 900 Mhz on 4.25GHz CPU (1700 FSB), but the board says it´s enough.  I´m not done yet, but I don´t expect anything to work past this point. Time to push the GPUs next.


----------



## Dinnercore (Jan 23, 2019)

I still refuse to stop tweaking CPU settings. 






I´m stable at 4,26GHz with 1.2V FSB now and try to see if I can potentially jump that hole at 4.3. But I will not bother you with that process any longer, if I have success I will share the result at the end. 

Now I turn to the GPUs and test them out. I went for the Tropics V1.3 benchmark to test for temperatures and base performance. Had some stutter and drops below the minimum framerate of a single 295. I DDU´d my current driver and went for version 327.23 instead.

Single card result from someone who send me the waterblock:

He said the temp reached 57°C - 59°C max. on a 240mm radiator.





My current result:






I like it, quad-SLI does seem to work like it should and there is an improvement over using one GTX295 for dual-SLI. I do have a slightly higher performing CPU but this test does not use multi thread well and is rather easy load on the CPU. The G1840 is even a bit faster than the X5482 I had before, being a more recent chip.
Temps are much lower than I initially expected, partly due to the fact that the chips were never fully utilized. 41°C GPU on the hottest card (the dual pcb). The VRM sensors on this card were even lower at 39°C max.. The loop did heat up by 3°C, reaching 25°C water temperature. This is ~7°C over ambient. With the MoRa being used in a single sided pull config with 180mm fans at 40% speed.


----------



## Dinnercore (Feb 1, 2019)

I have spend the past week testing some games and got some real tears of joy out of it. I have no idea why people complain about quad-SLI making trouble but apart from scaling not really being worth it over 2 or 3-way SLI it works. And it still beats 3-way GTX280 configs in some cases, remember the 280 is actually clocked higher, has more VRAM and more memory bandwidth.

To confirm that I ran 3D-Mark Vantage, but it does not complete the second CPU-test, crashes due to some physics software issue. I now know the fix for this but have yet to rerun a vaild result because I just care for graphics score.
Got 25.178 points in graphics score as a stock baseline:





Which does put me in reach of a 3-way 280 setup overclocked to the limit on ambient cooling.





Next I did the impossible thing for hardware from that time, I ran Crysis. Crysis at 1080p with 8x AA in Very High settings!
The mighty single GPU GTX280 made a stunning 17,6 average FPS at 1680x1050 with 4x FSAA. I got it actually playable. Remember back then even 30FPS were considered playable.





Worst drops I had when overlooking the island during the sunrise. Minimum 30FPS, average around 45. No stutter, smooth as butter. Had to fix it first tho, the GoG-Version had broken 64bit binaries which made the RAM overflow after some minutes.

Really impressed with the SLI scaling, it´s definitly in the 3.X times range here.

And the water is still looking so on point even today, that my jaw dropped again after all these years.









 

 

 

 

 

 

 



After that I had some fun with Far Cry 2:



 

 



And tested older titles in 1440p with 16AF and max. AA on my main monitor (sry can´t upload high res on my pic hoster):



 

 

 

 



There was this one magic moment during a cut scene in Dark Messiah (the screenshot with the light beam and 258FPS) were SLI-Scaling went through the roof. The nvidia visual indicator hit close to the limit and the GPU usage indicates too that I got nearly 4x scaling. Holy moly.

During all the testing I´m continuously satisfied with temperature values. My gaming loads can barely hold them over 40°C.


----------



## Dinnercore (Feb 3, 2019)

I have tried some GPU oc to beat those 3-way 280s but it was not easy to do because my CPU score is holding me back a bit. For benchmark scores I would love to have a modern CPU, saw recent chips easily get 50k+ points in the CPU tests. But this is early 2009 and I´m gonna beat this QX9770 and his 3 GTX280s!

This is what I could do on all 4 GPUs:





From 576MHz Core to 709MHz (running out of slider space in Afterburner D: ), 1008MHz Memory to 1152MHz. Any higher memory clocks and I saw some interesting SLI-issues as the cards got out of sync in some places, lost load balancing and began to drop fps. I think this is due to the fact that the 2 cards are different models, one single and one dual pcb revision and after this point the clocks could not be set equal on both cards. Example: Top card could set to 1156 while bottom one the next step would be 1157.

This made me beat the GPU score by ~2k points but still not there for overall performance... I have to get the CPU higher.

And this is what I did, I was probably right on the margin hole thingy and by going straight for 4.35GHz I could jump that boot issue that started at 4265MHz and spans to somewhere around 4335MHz. At this point I needed more voltage and went higher to the point where that mainboard/MCP-temp reached the limit for what I am comfortable with. I would fry the CPU any day, because it is easy to replace and I have spare, but while I have spare mobos they are a pain to replace with all the waterblocks installed.

I settled on the very sweet number 4444MHz. Result:





Got him!  Really happy with my results and the whole project. It was a great experience to build it, test it and now it will be a joy to run it. I learned a lot, more than I thought I would.

I´m now going to give some final numbers on thermals:





This is the hottest GPU during testing, reached 43°C with the hottest VRM phase reporting 42°C.
The highest temp in my system is that mainboard/MCP sensor, reaching 77°C during the intense CPU-test in 3D-Mark Vantage, capping at 73°C after 3 Cinebench runs back to back.
CPU core temps stay within the 60s, never seen one hit 70 so far.
The water temperature in the loop settles at around 25,6 °C and the ambient for all of this was 19°C.

One final Cinebench run with the new CPU clocks:





Bios settings and voltages:

1.36125V on CPU
1.2V on FSB/VTT
2.0V on Memory
1.45V on SPP
1.5V on MCP
1.25V on HT-Link

GTLref Offsets: +75mV / +60mV / +75mV / +60mV


And with this I would like to conclude this project. The build is done, OC and testing is done, games run, quad-SLI is RIPPING in my games and words can not explain the fun and joy I had doing this. I might get into memory OC once I get decent kits with 8GB total memory, but that is for a later date.
I will continue to use this machine from now on, maybe even on a daily basis. Comparing the Crystaldisk screenshot from one of my early posts I have already put 200 hours on this system  Waterloop is leak free, pump still silent despite the high load.

Thank you all for reading and accompanying me on along the way.


----------

