Archive for the ‘DIY’ Category

How To: Fabricate Your Own Northbridge Dry Ice Container

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

When benching there are two things you can adjust, voltages and temperatures. Increasing voltages will work to an extent but you will typically hit a wall at some point after which only dropping the temperatures will increase the frequency you can run your components at. Northbridges on Intel motherboards are very finicky chips, they will “wall” at the oddest frequencies, they will cold bug at seemingly random temperatures, but most of all they are the major bottleneck with current chips. To give you an example, my E8400 on my P35 will hit a solid 560+FSB but it walls at 540FSB on the X38. To counter-act this, I have fabricated a simple dry ice container in hopes of cracking 540FSB.

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How To: Voltage Mod Your Sapphire HD3850

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

There comes a time when your need for speed will outstrip your computers ability to supply it and drastic measures are called for. With graphics cards you are often limited in both cooling and voltages with the stock implements given to you by the manufacturer so you must take matters into your own hands. Here I will be detailing the process of modifying and utilizing the voltages possible with the HD3850 and HD3870 video cards. These cards feature the RV670 core, a derivative of the R600 core, and with this heritage comes an excessive thirst for voltages and clocks.

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EVGA 8400GS Volt Modification and Overclocking

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Title says it all. I decided to pull out the meek 8400GS for a little fun along while competing in a little competitive event over at XtremeSystems. I originally purchased this card for when I’m benching to reduce the load on my powersupply in hopes of pulling a few more MHz out of the processor. I however just couldn’t resist overclocking this card so in the original review I managed to pull 600MHz out of the core and 415MHz out of the memory. Considering the stock clocks of 459MHz on the core and 400MHz on the memory, it overclocked moderately well for a $30 card.

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DIY: Haircut

Sunday, July 1st, 2007

I’m a very do it yourself type of guy. Luckily I happen to be rather blessed with a rather sharp mechanical aptitude but in some other fields such as creative design and art I utterly fail. Cutting hair can often be regarded as an art form or an advanced form of trimming hedges, I myself happen to view it as the second option especially when it’s me wielding the garden sheers scissors. I had been saying for a few days I was going to shave my hair off completely, actually it’s been a few years that I’ve been saying that. I have very curly hair, so curly to the point that it’ll literally break hair gel if I attempt to claim control over my hair. It does it’s own thing, I do my own thing, and so long as everything goes smoothly it and I have a loving relationship. Last night I decided to mix it up a bit with a midnight raid against my hair and lets say it probably got the last laugh out of this. Enough talking though, here is how you go about cutting your hair, Chris Morrell style.

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