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I apologize for the lapse in posting for the last week, I had been preparing and then benching at the regional qualifier for Gigabyte in Los Angeles. I flew out of Atlanta on Friday morning and I just landed 2 hours ago, safe and sound in Atlanta. Here’s a quick breakdown of the competition, I sadly haven’t got any pictures so I ganked some from other benchers/media.

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At 4:15am today my QX9650 died. I purchased this chip on January 17th, 2008 and it lasted a little under 4 months under my control. During it’s lifetime though it brought me many good moments and really propelled my overclocking career forward, revealing new doors and opening old doors. Unfortunately, last night while benching 3DMark 2003, the system crashed hard midway through a test and refused to boot afterwards. Upon further investigation, and to my hearts joy/sadness, I verified the chip was dead. I say joy as I was deathly afraid I had killed another Gigabyte board, but thankfully this was not the case. That QX9650 was a decent chip though and it saddens me to see it move on, it was doing 5350MHz with 1.78v through 3DMark 2003 and 100% stable. That would have been a killer run, hopefully it’s successor can live up to and pass this chips records. If all goes well I should get a replacement quickly as I have a lot of gear here that needs to be tested. I’ve got one more night of HD3850 benching(close to a clean sweep on records) and then I start testing Gigabyte 8800 GT’s.

I’ve been so busy the last few days that I forgot to post these results. On Friday I took a few hours out of my day to do some dry ice benching with my current bench setup and I took a few world records for my video card. The records that I snagged aren’t something to write home in regards to overall performance but for the card itself they are rather impressive. To be honest though, these are just preliminary results, expect some smashing results sometime in late April.

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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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I’ve got a treat for you guys today. This review will be one of my most complete reviews ever. On the table I’ve got Gigabyte’s flagship motherboard, the EX38-DQ6. Gigabyte is one of the major motherboard vendors and for Intel’s Core 2 processors they have a motherboard covering every price-point from $50 to $300. The EX38-DQ6 boasts many of the features one would expect to see on a top-tier board but lets see if it justifies it’s lofty price.

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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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Been a bit busy guys but I found this interesting enough. Powercolor is sponsoring a contest with the goal being score the lowest 3DMark 2003 score. Contrary to most contests where the goal is to be the fastest, PowerColor has decided to reward people for the slowest machines. The reward for having the lowest 3DMark2003 score will be a PowerColor HD3850 AGP video card, which makes sense as in theory an AGP-based system should be the slowest of them all. I find this to be great news as ANYONE can compete so long as their computer can complete 3DMark2003. I myself haven’t got any “old” computer parts lying around but I’m going to give this a shot with my laptop’s integrated graphics and maybe my desktop with my 8400GS, if I don’t blow it up for my 2008 XS Cheapazchips run this afternoon. Hope some of you decide to try your hand at this, it should be loads of fun. I’m already thinking of ways to cripple my computer, oh this has me excited.

So this is sort of what I’ve been working on lately. Inspired by some of the great overclocking legends of the past and present, I’ve decided to attempt to professionalize this hobby of mine. Living in Atlanta, I figured with a few million people within a day’s drive there must be a few people interested in meeting up to bench some hardware and my search has yielded some results. I have registered AtlantaOverclockers.com which will eventually become our accomplishment log and launch-point and I sure hope this goes somewhere. I apologize for being a bit slack around here but rather than simply dip my toe into the CCNA material I’ve decided to plunge headfirst and it’s been a shock to say the least. I’ve never felt so un-prepared for something, even those Calculus III tests and finals pale in comparison but it’s a great feeling. It’s humbling being schooled by a book, if it and I had conversations it would be straight from The Karate Kid. I’ve got some more hardware coming in for some reviews so fear not as the future is bright but first I must take care of financial business. Even overclocking gurus must work so tomorrow I’ll be trawling Atlanta in search of a sweet secondary job to bank up some funds for my upcoming trip to California. After briefly discussing it with Paul, we’re almost certain we’ll be making a Spring Break trip to California which will be a well-timed trip for some networking. Well that is all, happy Valentine’s day readers, here’s my date.

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