I went to Kev’s yesterday and this morning to build his new PC. I was tempted to get something similar but held off until we could see how well Kev’s build went.

It took 2.5 hours to build, and under an hour more to install Vista and overclock. This has got to be some kind of record as usually I take a day to build and gradually overclock. He’s got a 2.4GHz Core2Quad Q6600, well we got it to just over 3.2GHz rock solid stable!!!! That’s a 33% overclock on air with no voltmods.

It wouldn’t POST at 3.3GHz – probably the RAM needed some more voltage to run at 1500 FSB, but frankly I hate voltmods – they reduce the lifetime of the parts and increase the heat a lot. We did a couple of hours or so of SuperPi and Prime95 running all four cores to 100% and never got more than 57C, usually getting around 45 and idling at 31. Those temps should be illegal – my Prescott boots at 50C and easily gets to 60C under load without even overclocking!

My previous overclocks pale in comparision to this one:

Pentium4 Prescott 3.0E: 3.0GHz stock, does 3.2 stable, has done 3.4 (7-13%)
Athlon Thoroughbred Mobile 2600+: 2.13GHz stock, does 2.43 stable, has done 2.51 (14-18%)
Athlon Thunderbird 1400: 1.4GHz stock, stable at 1.6 (14%)

The case in unbelievable too – there’s almost no noise from the 9 fans he has in there and its nicely built with drive cages and PSU at the bottom, plus plenty of additional 120mm fan mounts.

I was thinking of something very similar but without the SLI motherboard/GFX card and a bit more RAM, as I’m not much of a gamer – although you can (or will soon be able to) get Unreal Tournament 3 for Linux!

Kev’s blog post.

Update: Just watched Bag Boy, which was pretty naff for National Lampoons. Definitely, Maybe was much better – about a guy telling his daughter how he met her mother.