The overclocking Mission

[Chameleon]

Let me tell you about myself,
I am an Aircraft Electrion and a Partner in a Computer small business. Overclocking CPU's has caught my intrest after reading a few posts. But I still don't know much about it.

What I want to do is design a case to help solve some of the coolong problems.
(Inspired by spdsk8r)

What I need from you is the know how.
What are the keys to overclocking?
What problems have you ran into cooling or otherwise?
What are the best computer componets for overclocking?
Where are the Hot Spots?
Where have you had problems with moisture?

I will do the research if you can point me in the right direction.

I will keep you posted on what I find.
I hope I can help us all reach higher hights in the world of overclocking.

[KillerBug]

First, I would like to say that if you write a web site, or even just some txt documents and send me pictures so I can write the site, I would love to put it up on my new server (should be fully operational by 4800 from now). Hot spots are just about anything nowadays, but here is a list:

1.) Hard drive
2.) CPU
3.) Power supply
4.) Any Video Card
5.) High-speed CD-ROM drives
6.) Overclocked Ram (I mean like if you got PC66 to 133)
7.) Chip on 32+ bit silngle-chip cards
8.) 440BX chip

A beutifull case would be totaly frozen. You could go to the higher bus speeds and overclock your cards safely. I would just like to put in these requests: 300W power supply, room for 4 hard drives, 2 external 3.5, 4 external 5.25. And please, Please have a reset button. Also, freezing the hard drive may cause problems, and freezing the quartz on the mobo would also cause problems. It would also be cheaper to buy a faster CPU than to pay the electric bill on freezing the whole system. Perhapse just like to the video card and the CPU, but is is your choice.

[Dominus]

The keys to overclocking are:

1.) Finding a good CPU with a high quality core (made from the center of the silicon wafer) Ideally, the CPU would have a fairly low multiplier to allow for smaller jumps in speed as the FSB is changed.

2.) Having devices that respond well to changes in the PCI bus frequency. As you raise the FSB from the standard frequencies of 66, 100 and 133, the PCI bus is raised accordingly. FSBs from 66-100 have a "PCI divider" of 1/2, FSBs from 100-133 have a divider of 1/3 and frequencies above 133 have a divider of 1/4. Some motherboards have the option of variable dividers in FSBs above 103.
Since CPUs are designed to run at different speeds so they can be marked as demand changes, they are more tolerant to frequency changes. Devices that use the PCI bus frequency (such as PCI cards, AGP cards and IDE Channels) are not so tolerant, as they were not designed to run at multiple speeds.
This is often a problem with HDDs and video cards that causes trouble for some OCers.

3.) The big one: Heat disipation. Obviously, as devices run at higher frequencies or voltages, they will produce more heat, which decreases the life of the CMOS device, lower it's overall performance, and cause it to malfuncion/produce errors. Most devices however, have very wide margins for enviromental conditions, which under normal circumstances, are never exceeded. But when overclocking, these margins can be breached, causeing errors, instability or the death of a component. Therefore high quality heatsinks, fans and ventilation are crucial for overclocking.

I have had only a few problems in cooling. While OCing from 333mhz to 450, I had to replace the OEM heatsink on my PII with a GlobalWin VEK12 w/ thermal grease. I also had to add 2 extra case fans to lower the case temp, since an air cooled CPU (and other components) can only get as cool as the air surrounding them.

The main hot spots in a computer are the:
1. CPU - these can operate normally up to 70 C according to Intel
2. Hard Disks - 7200 and 10K RPM drives can get fairly warm.
3. Vid Cards - these get **** hot if you use graphics intensive games alot
4. Power Supply - A bigass 300W PS can put out a great deal of heat.

There is an IR photo of a Super Socket 7 motherboard here:

http://www.overclockers.com/tips27/

I've never had a problem with moisture, but I have had several problems with dust buildup.

I hope this helps you in your research.
Feel free to ask anymore questions that you have about overclocking.

As for case suggestions, perhaps a separate air-cooled area for drives (please with 2 external 3.5 bays) and a super-cooled area for the CPU, mobo, RAM and cards. A 300W PS would be nice too.

[Chameleon]

both of you talked about freezing the cpu and the cards. do all the cards need to be frozen or just the video card?

I was thinking about inclosing the cpu and cards on a differnt board with jacks for the cpu and other cards. Then running ribbon cables from the jacks on the board in the mother board. Once they are inclosed and insulated it should be easy to freeze the cpu and cards separate from the mother board and hard drives ect.

[KillerBug]

Agreed, 1gh/s is a little fast for extenders. Of course, you could do this:

Get a small case with no holes in it,

Put in all the stuff other than HD and CD-ROM

Run th EIDE cables out to them, and set them on your desk. Freeze the case, the only problem would be the quartz, perhapse you could put like 4 christmas tree light around it, or better yet...pull it up, soder wires to where it was on the mobo, run those wires out of the case and hook it up to the wires.

[Roy]

The extended trace lengths would likely keep the setup from running. Things get touchy at 1/2GHz data rates.