I thumbnailed the pic, it was annoying to read when it stretched everything.

Shame about no pics, though I look forward to seeing the real thing.

You may have to excuse me from tonights training session - just in case I am back home late and don't get the time to reinstall the processor cooler.

training isnt till 9 how late would you be home o.O

Maybe about 7:30 or 8ish tonight. I need to allow an hour to remove and replace the cooler. But I also need to finish downloading TF2 as it's only 50% through.


Watch this video on Youtube.

You can join us half way through, if you're late.

Damn! I want these naked mankini shots already!

Have another tube video for now...


Watch this video on Youtube.

Pictures! DEMANDZ! (of the insides) Or does the sheer heat it produces melt your camera?

LOL @ one handed playing.

I need to try UT3 again. Probably install it on my new comp when done.

Loads more photo's to come later tonight... gonna do a proper photo shoot Mankini possibly included

Here are the 3 photo's I managed to take:







And this is what I see when I am in bed...

Huh, I'd swear you said you were getting the down facing flower cooler

Looks cool, thoug.

P.S. Your sig is broken.

Thanks for the sig comment, it has since been fixed

I decided that the airflow inside the system is more than enough, plus I have a centrifugal fan on top of the Northbridge chip. Therefore I went with the better looking cooler (I am sure you will agree!)

By the way, pictures:

Please bear in mind that the system has not been finished properly yet, so the cable job is not tidy, and the support bracket for the graphics cards has not yet been installed. I still haven't had the time to do these things! I am still testing the stability of the system so need to be able to work on things quickly.

Yeah, it's a much nicer cooler, just remembered talking about the 7 series, lol.

Heh, still fairly tidy cables by my standards, though I guess that's because of the modular PSU and massive case.

What's in the top PCI(E) slot? I would guess soundcard, but it doesn't look like any I know. Unless it's one that comes with the mobo

You missed off the picture of my PC installing locomotion faster than yours :O

Quiet you! This never happened...

Well... I've not been having such a great time trying to play games recently!

There seems to be a problem with the 4870X2 Catalyst 8.8 drivers that cause the system to become unstable. I thought this would be a brilliant time to just make sure that there is definitely nothing wrong with any other component in the system...

So I set to work.

Prime95 downloaded. Excellent.
RealTemp also downloaded. Good.

I thought I'd run a quick stress test just to see what temperatures I get under load. Now, remember that this is a 3.4GHz quad-core and it's being air-cooled...

The 100% load temperature was 68 degrees C. Yes, that's about 3 degrees off Intel's thermal specification for this processor.

I checked my Asus AI Suite software and it said my voltage was 1.35v. That's supremely high! I went back in to the BIOS and whacked it down to 1.3v to see if a) it was stable and b) if it was cooler.

So here I am right now running Prime95 (it's been running now for 15 minutes with no errors) and my 100% load temperature is 38 degrees C. That's the hottest core (core 0), the other cores are 35 degrees, 29 degrees and 27 degrees. Yes, this is at 100% load on all 4 cores with an air cooler...

So anyway, I just hope 1.3v is good enough for 400MHz FSB on my X48. The next step is to reduce the NB voltage until the temperature of that becomes acceptable... It's currently at... 56 degrees C.

Oh damn, now the AI Suite is worrying me. It says my CPU temperature is 77 degrees C which is well over the thermal limit.

OK, I've just opened the case and the heatpipes on the processor aren't even that warm... so I think AI Suite is lying to me. People live by the figures in RealTemp as it's more accurate so I am going by what RealTemp says today

I don't know what some of those AsusSuite things use, but the realtemp uses the on processor themal sensor, so it's the most accurate.

Turns out Intel never made their TDS's to report accurate idle temperatures... it can set load temperature readings off as well. Even in RealTemp.

I know this sounds bad, and like a repeat of what happened in my last system...

But I have submitted an RMA for my motherboard. It's having 'issues'.

Just a thought, tried folding on your GPUs?

Unfortunately it doesn't work well on the 4870X2 in Quadfire due to bad scaling
It works on one of four chips I think.

Well it's better than none, lol.

I have just received a response from Overclockers UK... They want to replace the motherboard. I'm happy to do that. I kept all the boxes and parts intact just in case this type of thing happened... Yes, for once I even kept the LGA socket protector!

This means that I probably won't be able to take part in CutThroat!

After a BIOS re-flash, and some tweaking of XML files...

I can say that my system has no issues, OK apart from the not picking up my keyboard thing, I still get that issue. But other people are getting that issue also, and I assume it will be fixed in a BIOS update some time in the future.

Now, for the lulz, I have attached a screenshot showing some temperature monitoring software... just to show you how bad this situation currently is with Intel processors - they cannot accurately report idle or load temperatures.