Gomeler.com

Today wasn’t so much a day as more a culmination of a few days. I’m just now getting caught up on all my work so I’ve had time to give this project some attention. I spent a few hours today calling around searching for replacement engines and suffice to say the search wasn’t very positive. In a desperation move I went to a Pull A Part knowing full and well that all the cars there would be stripped to the bone. Finding 4 240SXs on record, I began browsing the yard. The first one was an empty shell, the second one had a rusted shortblock, the third was partially dismantled, but the fourth was in perfect condition. Judging from the large marker writing on the windows, the owner had just graduated college so I suspect he tossed the car in search of a better one. Great news for me but unfortunately the block had 240k miles on it.

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While on vacation over the last two weeks I had the chance to experience a rare event. Gigabyte, the computer component manufacturer I have been working with closely, invited me along with 15 other overclockers to test their upcoming P45 motherboards in Taiwan. I flew out of Atlanta on April 26th and landed at Taipei, Taiwan on the morning of April the 28th. Here’s what went down.

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I spent last week in California making new friends and visiting various hardware venders. While traveling through the San Francisco area I had a chance to stop by Corsair in Fremont. I had spoke with Robert Pearce, one of Corsair’s Marketing Specialists, and he arranged for some time to tour Corsair’s offices in Fremont. I actually rode the BART train in from downtown San Francisco at 7am with Michal Nowicki aka bachus_anonym so I had an early start that day. When we finally arrived 45 minutes later, I was decently surprised with the amount of equipment and testing that occurs at Corsair.

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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’m almost done out here in California, tomorrow I head home back to Georgia. I’ve had a blast out here in California however I’m ready to be home as I’m getting the jitters. There is so much sitting at home waiting to be benched, I cannot wait. When I get home I should finish out the HD3850 testing, ran out of dry ice last time, and this time around I’ll have some wicked Corsair memory to push the processor to new heights. Later next week I’ll be starting some Gigabyte 8800GT benching and once again utilizing Corsair Dominators, suffice to say I’ll be setting some blistering records. I’ve been on the road for nearly 2 weeks and I have a ton of images and video to post, expect a torrent of information to spew from this site very soon.

Hello all. As per the norm, when my posts become sporadic and random it usually means something big is on the horizon. That is true five times over in this instance. I’m currently on a hobby related vacation after which I’ll be on a vacation related vacation and then I’ll jetting back home to finish blowing up some hardware. I’ve got two great post ideas cooking in my head so hopefully I’ll have the time to put the figurative pen to the paper before I lose them. I hope you are all doing well in your respective duties, now it’s time for me to take another 45 minute long shower.

Sorry about the lack of updates, I’ve been busy with a slew of things. I have made some serious progress both with Project 240SX and with benching. For the last few days I’ve been prepping the car for the engine to be pulled. There’s so many little things that have been holding me up that haven’t been post-worthy but tomorrow I should have some nice pictures.

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I didn’t get much done today as I was busy taking care of my non-240SX life. Managed to log about 2 hours of work today though and really cleared up a lot of the engine-bay in preparation for hauling the motor out. I’m still in the process of searching for a donor engine, decided to get the KA24DE as I figure if I’ve got to rip the engine and transmission out I might as well toss in a DOHC engine while I’m at it.

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