Well a new Tech Tips is finally here. It’s not what we wanted to release (frankly) and we have some very exciting other stuff coming up soon, but we saw the weather outside, and it’s something I’ve toyed with a few times, so we thought “What the hey” and packed our junk outside.

Look for the Domino ALC to show up at an NCIX near you in the coming weeks!

Throughout the day I get quite a few emails asking me various tech & computer related questions, so I thought, “What better place to answer them than my blog?”

Q: What i have to do to overclock core i7 965 and what type of cooling to use and what memory, which motherboard and a good videocard.

A: Overclocking the Core i7 as I covered somewhat in my video here, is not all that complicated provided you have the right system components, but what I didn’t really cover is a list of recommended components.

I’ll start with cooling and work my way through the rest of your questions. When we did up that video, the CPU had just launched and there wasn’t a whole lot available! In fact, we only had ONE CPU cooler in stock that was even compatible with the Core i7! Now the situation looks a lot better and there are lots of different options.

Water cooling recommendation: The Swiftech APOGEE GTZ gets my vote. Don’t forget a hold down!
Air cooling recommendation: The Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme still rocks and comes in 1366 now.

For memory, once you get into about 1333MHz triple channel, the performance doesn’t improve much. The most important thing to consider when selecting memory (in my opinion) is the after-sales support. Almost every RAM vendor it seems offfers a “lifetime” warranty, but very few of them are actually likely to be around long enough for that to matter. At this point I can’t recommend buying 3GB of memory. It’s time to move on to 64-bit and lots of RAM!

6GB RAM Recommendation: Corsair 1333MHz C9

For motherboard there are lots of different options out there already, but my high end recommendation is still the Gigabyte EX58-EXTREME. It has a great feature set, the BIOS is maturing very fast (I use this board in my own system), and the overclocking is very good, even with 12GB of memory.

If you want to save a few bucks, the recently-launched ASUS P6T looks like a tremendous value offering (if you can call a $300 board a “value offering”…)

As for the video card, that doesn’t affect overclocking, but now that so many of the X58 boards support SLI AND Crossfire, you’re free to use pretty much whatever video card you want! Just pick the one that best suits your budget and performance requirements.

Well I had a chance to finally see one of these rare beasts in person. These boards were rare as hen’s teeth on launch, and the situation is finally starting to look a little bit better, at least in Canada.

There’s a lot of buzz around this board both because it’s eVGA’s first non-nVidia motherboard, and because some of the early overclocking results with it looked VERY impressive. We go over the included accessories and features with an emphasis on what eVGA’s engineering team has done to make this board great for PC enthusiasts.

More of an experiment than anything else at this point, but we’ve put together a quick, low production value (emphasis on low production value) video spotlight of the Rampage II Extreme. We cover the included accessories, the board layout, and we’ve got some pretty good video shots of the product itself.

As always, your comments are essential to making our production more successful.

I’ve been asked by some of the fellows over at XS to provide proof of my overclocking results with an undisclosed processor (original blog post here), so I thought what better way to launch my new video blog!

Enjoy.

I’ve had a chance to play around with a new processor from an undisclosed vendor, and there might be some other results on the web about these chips doing crazy LN2 and DICE clocks, but what it really comes down to for the end user is what performance HE can actually get out of a chip.

With modest air cooling (TRUE + random fan) 3.6GHz was doable easily with 8 hour quad Prime95 stability, and more than that with the water cooling setup featured above. We don’t know the prices of these new processors (though my crystal ball says they should weigh in under $400CAD).

Processor price is obviously not the only factor. I remember the good ‘ol days when a premium AMD motherboard cost 1/2 of an equivalent Intel one, and that’s what made it such a good value.

Well the new NCIX Tech Tips is here. We didn’t have any samples to work with until only a few days before the retail launch, so we’ve spent a lot of time playing with these chips, researching online, and putting together this overclocking guide for the Core i7.

It’s not as in-depth as I would necessarily like, but at 8 minutes long it’s already a bit of a heavyweight. The white board I had in front of me looked like some of my calculus lectures!

Well I had a chance to play with an engineering sample Core i7 with a Gigabyte EX58-EXTREME motherboard and 12GB of Aeneon DDR3-1333 C8 memory for an upcoming NCIX Tech Tips, and I’m actually very impressed with the platform.

I’ve mellowed out in the last couple years going from balls to the walls overclocking (think E6600 @ 4.0GHz 24/7 with a custom -25C chiller under my tower) to being more concerned with overall platform stability and maturity (while also loving speed).

On another note, I have a confession to make. My name is Linus and I have a memory addiction. I don’t need lots of memory. Frequently with 8GB in my system I was looking at up to 7GB of “cached” memory under Vista only being used to store frequently used programs. That didn’t stop me from salivating when I saw that high end X58 motherboards were going to feature 6 RAM slots. Naturally the first thing I did was load each slot up with 2GB of RAM.

Here’s a shot of the test bench I used including the less-than-stellar stock heatsink from Intel (got an APOGEE GTZ hold down en route from Swiftech), a 6800GT that has served me well over the years, and my ghetto sleeved OCZ GameXSTream 600W (also present in the top picture with my chiller). I will be doing a complete overclocking walk through for Nehalem on NCIX Tech Tips, but I wanted to share my initial impressions with a dog CPU, all 6 RAM slots loaded up (far more stress on the memory controller), and terrible stock cooling:

- 200x base clock multiplier without much fuss
- 1480MHz C8 @ 1.66V on this random set of 3 dual channel kits of memory primed for 12 passes overnight.
- QPI speed of over 1700Mhz without much trouble
- 3.7GHz on the CPU before running into what I think was a combination of a thermal limitation (80+C under load) and having a less than steller overclocking chip

For a terrific beginner’s guide on overclocking see this thread on www.xtremesystems.org

Intel’s first 45nm “Pentium” chip showed up quietly in the last week or two and there doesn’t seem to be much buzz about it, but I decided to take it for a spin to see what kind of overclocking results I could get out of it. I don’t know if the one that I have is exceptional or not, and bear in mind this IS a suicide run, but I think what you’re about to see may shock you.

Will update later with pics of the water cooled test bench as well.

Okay here’s my update with pictures of the test bench. I’m using a Maximus Formula X38 motherboard with OCZ Reaper PC2-8500 C5 RAM modules, a Corsair 750W power supply and a GTX 280 video card.

I’ve also included a photo of the box from the CPU I used. This is a regular retail sample. No cherry picking going on here. this is one cool chip