Retro OC Rig with some case modding *9 new cpu's*

[Jumper118]

Me and one of my mates like overclocking, gaming and benching pc. however testing loads of different mordern cpu's and gpu's can be very expensive, so we decided to get a 478 socket rig after i got a old dell for free with a celeron and it was mega slow. I bought 4 Pentium 4's off ebay for under £5 and so we thought we could do loads of overclocking and testing on this socket. obviously being a dell it doesn't allow us to oc anything so we went through some old threads and this is what we came up with:

 

 

The Specs and prices of stuff (the latter, mainly so i can keep track of the cost   )  

 

OS: Windows XP Home Edt. 32 bit (free, i didn't steal it i borrowed the licence key from a dead dell)

 

Case: cit 1011B with custom side panel. (free, i used to have my main rig in this  )

 

Motherboard: Abit IC7 MAX3 (£7.59, with the ddr ram and the 3.2ghz p4 ht)

 

CPU: This will vary a fair bit as it is an overclocking rig i currently have a 3.2ghz, hyperthreaded,  northwood, pentium 4 in the rig at then moment running at 3.6ghz. I have a 2ghz northwood celeron (taken from a dell), 2X2ghz northwood p4's (not hyperthreaded), 2.53ghz northwood p4 (currently in a dell) and a 2.8ghz northwood p4. Tomorrow i should have 3X prescott 2.66ghz celeron d's. (£4.96 for the 4 northwood p4’s, northwood Celeron was free with the dell and £3 for the 3 prescott Celerons)

 

CPU Cooler: Scythe Kantana 2 (£10.50, the most expensive thing yet but still very cheap)

 

RAM/memory: 2X256MB hyundai electronics pc3200 (free with board)

 

GPU: ATI radeon 7000 pci (free from a P3 rig but that’s temporary because I will be getting various agp cards to test at some point)

 

Storage: 2.5inch toshiba 120GB HDD (free, because I stole from my mildly on fire PS3  )

 

PSU: Cit pentium P4 500U (free, it came with the cit case that cost £20 oringainally. It is 500watts of pure rubbish, but it works for now)

 

(total cost of build so far £26.05)

 

 

 

The main aim of this rig is just to mess around overclocking some cheap cpu's that i don't mind killing through too many volts cos they are cheap as chips. I might do a bit of retro gaming once a proper gpu has been put in. 

 

The case will be modded every now and then when i get bored of it. I'm planning on putting a window in and maybe painting other panels and the inside of the case.

 

I will be using cinebench and the ibt for testing and stressing the cpu's at different clock speed although cpuz is a bit funny with some cpu's and i don't know what temps they are getting because speedfan, core temp, real temp and cupid hardware monitor don't show any readings and some of those programs don't even support the older cpu's. 

 

 

 

Here are some pictures of the build and case modding so far

 

 

 

This is the not yet modded case when i first got it

 

 

 

 

compared with my current case which is a Bitfenix Shinobi

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

these are pics of the inside of the rig with the specs as above

 

 

 

these are the 4 p4's i got from ebay, the 2.53ghz one is currently in my dell and they all had bent pins   currently only the  a 2ghz p4 will go into the socket but i'm working on the other too to hopefully get them in at some point  

 

These next few images are of the painting of the side panel

 

 

this is the first coat of paint which was blue. it was my first time painting a case so i spent ages getting the tape at the correct angle and an even width apart

 

 

 

 

it went better than i expected and the paint job wasn't too bad

 

 

Then i put masking tape over the blue areas i had done and went for silver

 

 

 

 

 

This is the finished product which i think is ok for a first attempt. i will try to keep this thread updated regularly with celerons ocing coming tomorrow or sunday and case window and new agp gpu's in the near future!

 

 

**Update 28/07/2013 my mate has won a fx5950 ultra on ebay also we are looking into getting a single 512mb stick of corsair platinum ram to rpleace the 2x256gb with it has in at the moment.  

[AraSarkisyan]

Pics not working for me. 

[Gamebozzo]

pics not workin fro me either

[Jumper118]

pics not workin fro me either

 

Pics not working for me. 

it should be working now its still in progress while i get the hang of things

[rustikles]

Not bad! Are you going to do anything to the front panel?

[Jumper118]

Not bad! Are you going to do anything to the front panel?

yes, maybe at some point i want to put a mesh grill and put a fan in the bottom area and relocate the switch and front i/o panel to either the top panel or one of the 5.25" drive bays.

[zxcvbnmmssdh]

Looks cool on the outside

[Jumper118]

Looks cool on the outside

yes i can see what your saying. well the case doesn't have any kind of cable management built in so i had to do my best. also the board will be taken in and out frequently so i didn'tt want to spend too much time making it look nice. i think once i get a ok graphics card in there and paint the horrible bare metal bits it will start to look better.   

[Jumper118]

O my days, i just had a 10 year old, 2ghz, northwood celeron at 3.1ghz, on 1.725v, that passed in cinebench! i will upload pics tomorrow as its 1:11am and in knacked now. thats the highest voltage i've ever put though a cpu. also i've been overclocking a asus r101 eee pc with a intel atom n450 but that is taking ages, even at 1.85ghz and a couple of different pentium 4's.

[alpenwasser]

O my days, i just had a 10 year old, 2ghz, northwood celeron at 3.1ghz, on 1.725v, that passed in cinebench! i will upload pics tomorrow as its 1:11am and in knacked now. thats the highest voltage i've ever put though a cpu. also i've been overclocking a asus r101 eee pc with a intel atom n450 but that is taking ages, even at 1.85ghz and a couple of different pentium 4's.

Haha, I can hear something cooking :lol:

[Jumper118]

Haha, I can hear something cooking :lol:

i don't think any thing was getting that hot because even though i was running it at such high voltages the massive heatsink was barely even warm :o i don't really know though because none of the monitoring programs work, even cpuz does come up with the correct clock speeds and voltages. I'm uploading all the pics and settings now :D     

[Ultimate_PIMP]

That's a sweet paint job

[Jumper118]

Yesterday my mate came round for the first proper overclocking session with this rig. I had a 3.2ghz P4 HT in the rig already running at 3.6ghz on 1.55volts. So first we tried to get a bit more speed out of it….. We then planned on test a few other cpu’s including some Prescott Celeron d’s with are notoriously hot. *note that cpuz does not work very well at all with this old setup, it was overreading both voltage and frequency values that i had set in the bios so i just used the system which is in the control panel and also cinebench told us the clocks*

 

This is what i had the pentium 4 at to start with. These cpu's are harder to oc than mordern unlocked cpu's because you can't change the mutiplier so everything is done on the base clock which overclocks the ram as well as other parts of the motherboard pci/agp lanes and the ide/sata buses did not like being oc'ed at all so i had set them to fixed settings the whole time.

 

 

i managed to squeeze an extra 50mhz (in the bois the system rounded it up and down a bit) using 1.6volts but it really wasn't going any high and i think this was due to the ram being oc'ed from 200mhz to ~250mhz. This was later confirmed when the other cpu's i tested had the same result, i would get up to a certain clock speed on the cpu but if the ram went over 250mhz even on the loosest timings then it wouldn't even post. the ram timings i used for the very high runs were 3-8-4-4.  

 

 

 

We then decided to run the rig outside the case to make it easier to swap out all the cpu's. For our open test bench we used a gigabyte Z77 D3-H but the same internals as were in the cit case apart from we now tested a 2ghz pentium.

 

We manage to get 2.6ghz out of this chip on 2-7-2-2 ram timings, but i didn't try to go much further with this chip because my mate was keen to get a prescott in the rig. i probably could have got to 2.8-3ghz with looser ram timings but this would also have required a lot more voltage as the northwood chips start to use a lot power around 30%-40% oc's.

 

We did try the first prescott chip which was a 2.66ghz celeron d but the board did not like it and would boot with the chip but it would not let us oc it at all :( so we did a run at stock on cinebench just to see how they stacked up with to northwood p4's. 

 

 

 

 

My 2ghz northwood celeron was up next. This cpu has been in a small form factor dell, that is 10 years old with a tiny aluminium heat sink on it. At first i got it put it in with stock volts and got it to around 2.4ghz. Then 1.575 got it up to the same 2.6ghz as the 2ghz p4 as the bus and mutiplier are the same, the only difference between these chips is the celeron has 1/2 as much cache. i loosened the ram timings to 2.5-7-3-3 i managed to get it to 2.8ghz. I thought i could push it even further as the ram was only around 200mhz at this point and i knew that the ram wouldn't give up until 250mhz. so i put a 80mm fan pointing at the vrm's and a 92mm on the radeon 7000 as by now the gpu was getting a bit toasty. My mate went home around 8.30pm, but i carried on without him. this also gives you an idea of how long it took to get it stable over 2.8ghz.

 

*note i was ocing this celeron until around 1am this morning so those pictures of the rig were taken this morning but i hadn't moved anything from last night. *

 

 

i managed to get it to cinebench stable at 3ghz on 1.65volts! that was a 50% overclock  :P it didn't get a higher score though so i set a limit for myself of 1.7volts because i really didn't want to kill the board even tough the board will let me put 1.9volts though it. 

 

 

BOOM! at 3.1ghz, on 1.725volts, i smashed the score with this celeron. i had tried to boot at 1.675v nothing, at 1.7v it got into windows then crashed openind cinebench. The ram timings were at there loosest settings 3-8-4-4 running at 2.7volts from 2.5volts.  :blink: . It took over 30mins to complete cinebench and i was ******** brick the whole time but it completed it with the highest voltage i've ever put through a cpu. Thats a 55% oc!!!  :D  :D  :D

 

I will upload pics of the cinebench score in a bit. i forgot to do them cos it was pretty intense  :rolleyes:

[alpenwasser]

i don't think any thing was getting that hot because even though i was running it at such high voltages the massive heatsink was barely even warm :o i don't really know though because none of the monitoring programs work, even cpuz does come up with the correct clock speeds and voltages. I'm uploading all the pics and settings now :D

Huh, all the more impressive! :D

[Jumper118]

That's a sweet paint job

thanks i intend to do some more painting at some point   

Huh, all the more impressive! :D

thats the good thing about celerons. they are single core and very low tdp so you can run it at high volts even on air. i would love to see what it would do on ln2  B)

[Jumper118]

i have got pictures of the scores now 

 

 

 

 

One day i might go for the world record with that 2ghz celeron which is 0.4 points with the cpu at 3.639ghz on 1.84volts. i need some better ram first though!

[Jumper118]

this is a picture from hwbot of the world for a celeron 2ghz  doing performance test 8.0

 

 

This is what i've just got now. Is it me or is that a world record?

 

 

a run at 3ghz got a few more points. the fx5950 ultra should bring even more points.

[Jumper118]

look what i've found in a asus desktop in a skip.........

 

 

 

its another radeon 7000 but this one is agp, from 2003 and has a nice red pcb. i'm not sure whether it will work yet because it was dirty and wet frim being in a skip outside but once it has dried for a few days i'll try it. if it doesn't work then its a nice key ring! also...

 

this is a stick of ddr ram which had a ddr2 sticker on it and this was also in a skip... it might work but then again i might have another keyring!

[Jumper118]

Ok i had another go at the 2ghz northwood p4 yesterday. on saturday i manage to get it to 2.6ghz with changing much, apart from the bus speed and the cpu voltage. after some ram tweaking and some more voltage, i got this....... 

 

 

its a 45.5% oc and i managed to just sqeeze this speed out of the chip by putting the cpu voltage to 1.8volts  :blink: :wacko: and loosen the ram timings and overvolted that to 2.8v.

 

 

It booted into windows on 1.775v but it needed the 1.8v to run a full cinebench run. It managed 0.41 points which is a big increase from stock. The cpu survived at 1.8v for over 20 mins and is still alive. Its also the first time that the katana 2 has actually been warmish and not stone cold.  :D  I didn't manage to set any records, but i'm working on that.  ;)

 

In other news my mate has received the fx5950 ultra so this will soon be replacing the radeon 7000.   

[Jumper118]

ok the fx5950 ultra arrived! The ultra version of this card is very much like a titan, as there are memory chips on both sides of the pcb. It had about 10 years of dirt and dust in the shroud but after a good wash and reapplying thermal paste it looks much better. It was running at 66c on the stock clocks which is good but its now getting to 52c with a fairly big oc. it is 475mhz at stock its now 625mhz with 1000mhz on the memory, its a 31% oc and it will not let my go any higher on afterburner but its fast enough.

Now some pics:

 

 

 

 

 

On the bench:

 

 

 

[Jumper118]

Ok the corsair ram has come finally :D the rig is pretty much complete and fully benched for now. I have put it back in the case but these are the last few pics of the benchmarks with the new ram and back in the case at last.

 

 

2X512MB of the finest, corsair XMS platinum ddr ram. it matches the paint on the outside of the case  B) .

 

 

The new scores with the xms ram which can overclocks to a massive 260+mhz (520mhz). It got a extra 0.02 points because of the faster ram when doing multi-threaded rendering.

 

 

it also improved the single threaded score.

 

 

i did manage to get the cpu to boot at 3.81ghz, but with 1.8v going though the cpu and the ram bottleneck gone, it still wasn't stable enough to cinebench and the heatsink was getting rather warm as you can imagine, so i didn't want to push to any higher voltage. the highest i manage to cinebench the cpu was 3.76ghz but it seemed to perform better at 3.72ghz because the screen was flickering at 3.76ghz.

 

 

 

 

It is now back in the case ready to be used for gaming. i am keeping the cpu at 3.6ghz in the case because its not very practical to keep the cpu at 1.7v when gaming because there is a lot of heat being dumped out with not much performance increase. 

 

 

finally i overclocked the gpu back to some sensible clock speeds and i'm currently playing through gta san andreas with all the settings at the max. the gpu is running well and hasn't missed a beat.   

 

I have also been doing some more case modding so that the case can 1) get more air flowing through it and 2) put some positive prussure in the case to prevent the collection of dust, to reduce temperatures and maintenance.

 

 

first i took the front i/o and switches off and separated the front panel because it can be split into 2 pieces.

 

 

i then drilled a few rough holes around where i was going to be mounting the new 120mm bitfinix case fan from my shinobi, which now has a corsair af 140mm instead.

 

 

i then screwed the new fan in with 2 screws, in opposite corners.

 

 

This is what the fan looks like on the back of the front panel.

 

 

 

I then replaced the front i/o and restart switch, but not the power button because the new fan sits in the way. I am planning on installing the switch in a different location at a later date.

 

 

Finally i tied down the front i/o wires that go off to the motherboard, so that they did not obstruct the airflow or get court up in the fan.

 

I may change the set up at the front in future to make the case look nicer by replacing the drilled plastic with some steel mesh as well as spraying the inside of the case and maybe putting a window in. 

 

This may be the last on this pc for a while though because i'm already starting and gathering parts for the next 2 builds: a socket 462 athlon xp rig in the next few weeks and a socket 775 rig which i am hoping to start well before christmas.

[alpenwasser]

I remember that RAM! :D

[Jumper118]

I remember that RAM! :D

its brilliant compared with that Hyundai stuff i had before. its nice to see the cpu reaching its full speed at 1.8v without being held back  :D . i really want a 4ghz northwood p4 now, but that will have to wait for now unless i can find a dirt cheap 3.2ghz ht one, which can oc better than the one i,ve got.

[Nicktrance]

Nice Corsair Dominator Platinums :lol:.

[Lord Pantaloons]

I love this