Realizing my childhood dream [LGA775 / Nvidia SLI]

[Dinnercore]

@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.

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:

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

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.