I'll apologize ahead of time if the blog title got your attention and you were hoping for something like...say, a half naked chick. Unfortunately for you, this is another blog about my computer (I swear this will be one of the last for a while haha).

After a talk with my bestest friend in the whole world when it comes to computer talk (and she's tolerable, which makes things better), Chili dragon, I found out that my CPU running at 68C at load is perfectly fine, I had to go and re-overclock.

I had reverted my clockings for fear of heat (I'm on stock cooling with air only), but low and behold my 3.6ghz overclock at 1.15 volts runs at basically the exact same temperature...so why not?

I then got all brave and overclocked my GPUs as well. Again, they're idling at basically the same temp which is great (41C, and 49C). At load (running 3dmark06) they don't go above 70C which is apparently not bad at all for the cards. The only game I've seen make my cards go to the max I've seen of 72C is Crysis...so whatever. My core clocks are running at 735mhz, shader clock is at 1831mhz, and the memory clock is at 1030mhz. They won't go much higher than that without crashing, so it's awesome they stay so cool.

The WOW in the title is about my 3dmark06 point increase. At stock clocks on both my GPU and CPU, I was in the 13, or 14,000s. With these overclocks I'm getting 16,600 points! I'm super pleased with this, and I can see a fairly major difference in FPS in the harsh spots during the demo so this is great.

These little tweaks, coupled with a heatsink for my cpu which will be coming relatively soon, should give me a little extra juice to keep these "older" parts a bit longer before an upgrade. If I can keep the heat down, then these overclocks shouldn't shorten the life of the parts at all. In fact, with that heat sink, the CPU's life will only be increased. Huzzah!

Anyway, I'm done rambling about my computer for a while. I'm still working through Persona 4 and will review it when I'm done.

Have a good one,

XR

Well I got bored today and decided to educate myself in the fine art of overclocking. Needless to say, my attention span for reading walls of text on the subject was a bit limited, and after 2 hours, I just decided to watch a couple of videos and print off a guide and do it that way.

The big thing for me was that I run my computer air cooled only, stock cooler on my CPU and all, and so I knew that even though my E8500 can easily get to 4ghz, I wasn't going anywhere near that. Even though I'm still a bit of a computer newb, I knew that in order to keep my CPU alive for any length of time, I wanted to keep the core temp under 70 C when under maximum load. Word has it on the world wide web that its best to keep something called the TJ Max at around 30 C (and I took that as meaning you want to keep the core temp 30 degrees below the CPUs max of 100 C).

So onward I trekked! First I wanted to go to the upper end of what I thought I might manage on air, which was 3.8ghz at something like 1.3 volts. That was a bit much as it was going to hit the 80s under a load so scratch that. Next I tried 3.5ghz at around 1.2 volts. This was much better, and I played around with the volts, eventually hitting the ground at around 1.15 volts without blue screening.

I wanted to get a bit more, so I finally fell on 3.6ghz at 1.15 or 1.2 volts (can't remember, but with "vdroop" I'm around 1.13 volts. This actually gave me temps only 1 degree above the 3.5ghz setting and so I think I will stick with this.

I'm not content with the temps entirely though. I idle around 42 C, and after running the hour long OCCT stress test (runs your CPU at 100% for the whole time, save a couple of points where it drops to 50% for a break) both cores top out at 69 C. These aren't bad temps at all, considering it's summer and my room itself is about 22-24 C.

I think I will take my good friend, Chilidragon's advice and purchase a good heatsink for my CPU. I have no idea how much of a drop that will provide, but if it can get me idling in the 30's and loading at 60-65, then I'm a happy camper. If it does even better, then awesome! I will then jack it up to 3.8ghz and have a happy party. As a side note, I should probably mention that I use Real Temp 3.0 to get my readings. My understanding is that the sensor on the chip itself is the Tcase, or the temp inside the cap of the CPU, and is usually 10C cooler than the core temp. Correct me if I'm wrong, as that would be a bad thing to mess up on haha.

Before I wrap this up, I have a question for all of my computer saavy pals. If the computer doesn't blue screen, is that a definitive sign that you're supplying enough volts to the core? May be a stupid question, but it'd be great to know! Also, any other OC tips, hints, or things to know in general, would be much appreciated!

Have a good one!

XR

Ok so I know I haven't been in the PC game a long time, but these specs scare the crap out of me. If I'm not mistaken this is the first game to have a Quad Core as a recommendation...

Windows XP Minimum Specifications
OS: Windows XP with SP3
CPU: Intel Core 2 (or equivalent) running at 1.4Ghz or greater
AMD X2 (or equivalent) running at 1.8Ghz or greater
RAM: 1GB or more
Video: ATI Radeon X850 128MB or greater
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 128MB or greater
DVD ROM (Physical copy)
20 GB HD space

Windows Vista Minimum Specifications
OS: Windows Vista with SP1
CPU: Intel Core 2 (or equivalent) running at 1.6Ghz or greater
AMD X2 (or equivalent) running at 2.2GHZ or greater
RAM: 1.5 GB or more
Video: ATI Radeon X1550 256MB or greater
NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256MB or greater
DVD ROM (Physical copy)
20 GB HD space

Recommended Specifications
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4Ghz Processor or equivalent
RAM: 4 GB (Vista) or 2 GB (XP)
Video: ATI 3850 512 MB or greater
NVIDIA 8800GTS 512 MB or greater
DVD ROM (Physical copy)
20 GB HD space

4 GB of Ram and a Quad Core for recommended specs blows my mind. Unless Bioware decided to do recommendations right and put down specs that won't run the game at bare minimum, then these are quite high. The GPU is the least most offensive thing in the list, but damn, an 8800GTS? The game looks good, but it's not Crysis for God sake hahaha.

For those of you who are buying this game, what do you think? I know that personally I'm a bit worried as my Wolfdale is only a Dual Core, and I'm running 4 Gigs of RAM, not to mention I'm skimming past the 8800GTS mark with SLI 9800GTs. I'm sure I'll be fine, but I wanted to max everything out! Who knows though, I might still be able to, only time will tell.

If you're not buying the game, still, let me know what your take on this is, I'd love to hear it!

Have a good one,

XR