December 2005 - Building a High Performance Gaming Box

Introduction

Here in the labs we test for compatibility, performance, and stability (though not necessarily in that order). Today, though, we've taken a time out from absolutely punishing ICs from different manufacturers with cruel devices of torture known as voltage and frequency to bring you a step-by-step guide on how to build an extremely powerful home system.

This isn't going to be a "state of the art" system with liquid nitrogen and car batteries that requires protective eyewear and a good knowledge of spot welding and theoretical chemistry to build. This is something anybody can do with a little bit of patience and some basic knowledge.

ID2_finishedsystem.jpg
 

Component Selection

We'll start off with choosing our hardware. Since this is going to be a near top-of-the-line system, we're going to use performance parts across the board.

Here's a quick picture of all the hardware we're going to assemble.


Let's break it down bit by bit, shall we? Starting with the thing most people decide upon first, the processor. Right now, for gaming, the Athlon64 processor is the best choice when it comes to performance. However, this system is going to do much more than gaming. The average enthusiast probably spends a lot of time watching movies, listening to MP3s, encoding TV shows and other media files, and browsing the internet. In fact, most of the time, we're doing this stuff all at once. As a result, we decided to shy away from the Athlon64 and go with the Athlon64 X2. The X2 series processors are dual core, which means that there are two separate cores that allow the operating system and all multi-threaded applications to balance load across them. This means that we can encode a DVD and listen to MP3s and write a term paper all at once without worrying too much about CPU utilization.

Our processor is the Athlon64 X2 4200+


The Athlon64 X2 4200+ runs at 2.2 GHz and has 512K of cache memory per core. While there are faster X2 processors out there (the 4600+ runs at 2.4 GHz) and processors with more cache (the 4400+ and the 4800+ have 1MB of cache memory per core), we decided on this one because we just love a challenge. The other processors are significantly more expensive, and we're convinced that we can get this machine to beat the performance of a 4800+ based system with some tweaks, some high performance components, and of course, overclocking.

The Athlon64 X2 processors are all Socket 939, which means we want a Socket 939-based motherboard. Since the fastest gaming experience available today is through nVidia's SLI technology, we looked at Socket 939 boards based on the nForce4 SLI chipset.

We decided on a fairly popular board from Asus, the A8N-SLI Premium


This board supports dual PCI-Express video cards in SLI mode, all Socket 939 CPUs, and comes with a host of other goodies like dual integrated LAN, firewire, USB 2.0, 8 SATA ports, and a passively cooled chipset utilizing heatpipe technology. This is advantageous because heatpipes have no moving parts, thus there's no fan to fail or make noise.

The next step was finding a CPU heatsink/fan combo. While the stock fan is fairly decent, it can be loud under full load, so we decided on something a little quieter that would still get us great performance when we decided to overclock.

Our choice was the Zalman CNPS7000B-CU LED


Zalman makes a variety of different heatsinks for chipsets, video cards, processors, and more. This one is made entirely of copper with a blue LED fan integrated into it, as well as near silent operation at idle and very quiet operation at load.

Now for the memory... where could we get some memory?


We decided to use our TWINX2048-3500LLPRO modules. These modules are rated PC3500 at 2-3-2-6 latency, and integrate our cool activity LEDs into the top of the heatspreader. Best of all, they are two 1GB sticks, and since some current and upcoming games are making use of memory over 1GB, we decided going with 2GB was the best course of action.

Here's the rest of the hardware:

Logitech Cordless Desktop MX3100


This utilizes the MX1000 laser-based mouse and a cool keyboard, but best of all, it's wireless!

Two eVGA GeForce 7800GTX PCI-Express video cards


The fastest card you can buy, and we've got two of them for SLI. Plus, a lifetime warranty and a free copy of Battlefield 2? How could we go wrong?

Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic


Based on the new X-Fi chip from Creative Labs, this is one of the best sound cards on the market for the average user. It has great gaming performance due to EAX 5.0 as well as great playback for MP3s and movies.

Western Digital Raptor 36GB 10,000 RPM SATA Hard Drive


One of the fastest non-SCSI drives you can buy, we're going to load our Operating System and games and applications onto this drive. 10,000 rotations per minute means that all the games, applications, and other programs we run will load quickly, but 36GB isn't really enough for a storage drive. Where are we going to put all our MP3s and DivX movies and Linux ISOs?

Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 300GB SATA Hard Drive


300GB is plenty of space for the average user, and the Barracuda drives have a reputation for being reliable and while they aren't as fast as the Raptor drives, definitely are not slouches when it comes to performance.

Antec NeoPower 480W Modular Power Supply


Antec makes a very decent power supply, what we liked about this one was its single 120mm temperature controlled fan and its modular cables. It has plenty of power for this system, with dual +12V rails, and the modular cables mean we can hook up only those cables we are going to need for our system, making cable management much easier and cleaner.

Other drives:


Top DVD Drive: NEC-3540 DVD+/-RW drive. Found online for around $50 at the time of writing, this drive does it all. Dual Layer, DVD+/-R, DVD+/-RW, and what's more, we can order it in black, silver, or white to match the case we're using.

Bottom DVD Drive: Sony DVD DDU1615. Sometimes you may want to copy a disc for backup, so having a basic DVD reader is always a bonus. It means you don't have to copy to the hard drive first, you can just copy from one disc to the other.

Floppy Drive: Yeah yeah, we know, nobody uses them anymore. Well we do. For flashing a BIOS to installing SATA drivers during the Windows setup, floppy drives still have their uses. The only thing extraordinary about this one is its black faceplate. I mean, it might as well match the rest of the case, right?

Which, of course, brings us to the case...

Lian-Li V1000B-W Aluminum Case.



Black as night, with excellent cooling and a chic appearance, the V1000B-W sports a side window and three separate cooling zones.

As you'll notice from the back, it's basically turned all upside down! This is to provide for better heat dissipation. By putting the processor and PSU closer to the bottom, we allow heat to rise up and out of the well-ventilated enclosure. It's a brilliant decision, and reminiscent of the BTX design that will be prevalent sometime in the next few years.

Well, that's the hardware. Next, we'll start at putting the processor on the motherboard and the motherboard into the case, and end up with an overclocked monster of a system that will run any game we throw at it with ease.
 

Preparing the Case

Now for the fun part: putting everything together. Like any puzzle, this machine is going to have pieces, and those pieces will only fit together one way to work correctly. Unlike a simple puzzle, however, computer components cost hundreds or thousands of dollars and can be completely destroyed by improper configuration.

No pressure, though. This is pretty fun to do, once you get the hang of it.

Preparing the Case

First, we take the side window off the case


Some cases have the motherboard mounts pre-applied, in which case this next step is unnecessary. This case, however, allows us to place the mounts wherever we want, so we just inserted them in the holes that matched our motherboard's holes.



All done
 

Installing the Power Supply

Installing the Power Supply

Every case handles the PSU slightly differently.

This one has a mounting bracket that comes fully off the back.


Luckily, it has thumbscrews.


Once it's off, we just line up the holes on our PSU with the holes on the bracket:


Then we screw it on there.


Once we get that all lined up, we slide it into the case, and hand screw the thumbscrews in. To make sure they're tight, we fasten them with a screwdriver a bit at the end.


All done here, too:
 

Installing the Motherboard I/O Shield

Installing the Motherboard I/O Shield

First things first: we open the box to the Asus board.


Like most Asus boards, this one comes with oodles of hardware. 8 SATA cables, 4 IDE cables, a floppy cable, all manner of USB ports, the SLI bridge, a bracket to hold it in snugly, and other things are all included. The most important thing for us right now, though, is the I/O shield.

Almost all cases come with an I/O shield of some sort. However, with most modern motherboards, it doesn't fit the right amount of plugs. With a zillion varieties and combinations of USB, Firewire, PS/2, Serial and Parallel ports, not to mention other possibilities, case manufacturers play it safe and give you a standard shield. However, pretty much all modern motherboards come with their own I/O shields.


You can see the old one in the case, and the new one right next to it. There is quite a difference there. The old one pops out just by pressing on it, and the new one snaps right in easily.



Back to the motherboard, we open it up a bit more.


And out of the protective wrapper:
 

Installing the CPU

Installing the CPU

First we open up the ZIF socket arm. It's a little metal (or sometimes plastic) arm next to the socket, and by pulling it upwards we ready the socket for processor insertion.


Notice that on the left side corners on the socket, there is a missing series of pins. You can match this up to the missing pins on the processor:


This means that the processor will only fit one way. It doesn't take any pressure or pushing at all to put the processor in the socket; if it does, you might have it keyed incorrectly.


It drops right in there! Then we just close the socket lever (this part does take some pressure)


and VOILA! Le CPU is installed correctly.
 

Heat Sink Installation

Installing the Heatsink
Man, there sure are a lot of components to the Zalman heatsink we chose. But that's only because it uses a custom bracket design. We'll get to that later. Here's what we see when we open up the box.


Note: Do not eat the Silica Gel. I know it's tempting, it looks like such a tasty snack after a hard afternoon of computer building, but trust me, it's just not worth it.


The Zalman heatsink comes with its own thermal paste, but we threw that away the second we saw it because we have Arctic Silver 5


Arctic Silver provides for better thermal conductivity between the copper heatsink and the heatspreader on top of our Athlon64 CPU. Regular thermal paste works well if you're not overclocking much, but when we want the absolute best, we refuse to settle for "works well" and require "impressive" or "outlandishly unnecessary" levels of performance.

First step, remove the bracket around the Socket 939 CPU


Here's what it looks like when we took both the front and back bracket off


Next, we put two small cardboard washers on the gold thumbscrews that go into the bracket. This is to keep the metal from scratching the motherboard's PCB.


Then we put the new custom bracket on the back


And screwed the thumbscrews in


We also located the CPU FAN header on the motherboard. It's in a different location on every board, so make sure you find it on yours. Some boards refuse to post if there is no fan plugged into this header.


Now, when applying the arctic silver, you don't need a lot. Just a little pea-sized drop is more than enough. Put it in the center, like this:


Now, you can rely on the pressure between the heatsink and processor to spread it out, but I like to spread it out a bit myself. I did this by putting my finger in a ziplock bag and “sponge painting” the thermal grease around a bit.


Once that's done, we put the heatsink on, and line up the holes in its mounting bracket with the holes in the thumbscrews


Then after screwing them in with the provided screws, we see this


Now the heatsink is firmly attached and all that's left is to plug in the fan header to our motherboard
 

Memory Installation

Installing the Memory
DDR and DDR2 memory are keyed differently, but the logic is the same. We're using standard DDR memory. Well, standard form factor; our memory is anything but standard when it comes to performance and appearance.

We have to line up the slot in the memory socket to the slot on the module


Then we insert it and push it downwards. Don't press too hard, it should go in with only a bit of pressure:


When the quick release doohickeys (technical term) on the sides of the RAM slot look like this, you should be okay


Complete!
 

Assembling the Motherboard Into the Case

Now we plug the motherboard into the case. It's actually fairly simple now that we've got our Asus-supplied I/O shield in there!


Once we've lined up the holes in the motherboard with the motherboard mounts from earlier, we screw the motherboard into them with the screws that came with the case.


Finished with that


Notice, ours is upside down a bit. That's the way our case is designed. Chances are, yours will look similar to this but with the CPU near the top.

Next, we insert our PSU connectors. This is the 24-pin ATX connector, the main power for the motherboard.


Then we plug that in


This is the 4-pin power connector, this provides separate power to the CPU itself.


And we plug that in, too


The case has its own connectors for the front panel. Some cases have more than others, ours has Power LED, Hard Drive LED, Power Switch, and PC Speaker. Some cases don't have the speaker and some include a separate switch for RESET. Check your motherboard manual for where your jumpers are.


Now, on the other side of these connectors, you'll notice that there is an arrow. I've highlighted them in red here to make them more obvious.


That indicates Pin 1 location. The Pin 1 should be plugged into the lower numbered pin on the motherboard. You should be able to determine this from the manual. Luckily, our motherboard has Pin 1 marked with a + sign. This makes it fairly easy. Check this horribly exposed picture below for a better representation:


Again, the red circles indicate Pin 1 location.

We install the connectors to the right area, and again, miraculous wonder occurs.


They are all installed correctly now.

Our case also has from Firewire, USB and Audio connectors for Headphones and a Microphone.


These plug into the appropriate connectors on the motherboard. I'm not going to be using the front panel audio connectors, but the Firewire connector (top right inside the red circle) and the USB connectors (top left inside the red oval) will both be utilized



Whew! That's done! So now, our heatsink's on our processor which is in our motherboard which also has our memory in it and the whole deal is installed in our case. Come back soon, our next step is going to be hard drives, floppy drives, and optical drives, with some tips on cable routing to make your case look clean when it's done!
 

Installing Floppy and Optical Drives

Let's start off with talking about what we need to do. We still need to do the following:

1) Install our Floppy Drive, and our Optical Drives.
2) Install our Sound Card and Video Cards
3) Install our Hard Drives.
4) Clean up our cables so everything looks pretty and we get good airflow.

To start, let's take a look at the back of our drives. This is the back of our floppy drive. At the top right you can see the 4-pin power connector, and under that, the floppy cable connector.


The back of one of our optical drives. I highlighted in red the area that we need to pay attention to. Our optical drives, like most optical drives, still run off the IDE channel. As such, they require jumper settings. Almost all modern drives have three settings. Cable Select, Slave, and Master. The easiest thing to do is to move the jumper on all your drives to Cable Select (highlighted in yellow). If you're using a modern system, this should not cause any problems for you, as it allows the motherboard to assign master/slave status to the drive instead of your jumper settings.



If your drive doesn't have an embossed label like that, it might have a printed label, like this:



Which corresponds to this:


Once you get your jumpers set right, it's time to put the drives in your case. Not all drives are the same length, our NEC-3540 is considerably longer than our Sony DVD reader. However, they both fit just fine.


We make sure they are mounted flush with the front of the case:


Then we screw them into the case with the provided screws.


The floppy drive is done identically to this, so I won't cover it here.

Now for the cables. You'll notice that on our motherboard, we have some connectors for various devices. Here's a picture of our floppy cable (we're using rounded cables, but most of these look like long ribbons) plugged into the "FLOPPY" header.


Then we take the other end, and plug it into the floppy drive. Our cable is keyed so it only fits one way on our drive. In this picture, the power cable has already been plugged in. It, also, will only fit one way.


By "keyed", I mean that there is a small plastic notch in the connector for the cable. Here's an example:


You can see the small plastic notch in the top of that connector. Well, that fits perfectly into our DVD-Rom drive:


See how there's a notch at the top of the gap but not at the bottom? This means the cable can't be installed incorrectly without a ton of effort and breaking things.

Here's a final shot of both our floppy and DVD drives plugged in and fully installed.
 

Installing Sound and Video Cards

Now for the Sound Card



This is a PCI sound card, as almost all of them are right now. You can see the connector at the bottom is keyed specifically for a PCI slot.

We have one at the top of our case, so I remove the PCI-slot bracket cover from the rear by taking out the thumb screw


Then, it's as simple as plugging the card into the PCI-slot, and re-inserting the thumbscrew so we get a firm and snug fit


Then we repeat the process with the Video Cards

We're using Dual 7800GTX cards from eVGA.


You can see the connector is different. That's because these cards use PCI-Express slots instead of standard PCI slots. There is a much higher bandwidth over the PCI-Express bus, and that means video cards can transfer data much faster between the CPU and Memory and GPU when placed on this bus.

Here's a shot of our two PCI-Express slots (Black and Blue) and a couple standard PCI Slots on top (white). The two slots between the PCI-Express slots are lower bandwidth PCI-Express slots. Since PCI-Express devices require different bandwidth (for example, a video card requires more data pushing power than, say, a sound card or firewire card) the PCI-Express "X16" slot (the longer ones) are designed for Video cards, while the smaller slots (X4, X2, or X1) are typically designed for slower, low bandwidth cards.


The video cards are installed, and we screw them in.


Our cards require external power, so we get our 6-pin PCI-Express video card lead from the PSU (not all PSUs have this pin, some require an adapter, but it's typically free and comes with the video card)


And plug them both into our video cards.


Now, because we're doing SLI, we have to install our SLI bridge:


This is a small PCB with two connectors that connects the two video cards internally, allowing them to communicate with one another when in SLI mode (which we'll get to when we do the software load).

To keep our SLI bridge in place, Asus supplies us with a slot-bracket mounted bridge securer. It screws in just like a video card and keeps the bridge from falling or getting knocked off the top of the cards:


All done, here's what it looks like from the back right now:
 

Hard Drives and Cable Management

Now for the Hard Drives

Our case is a little strange, it doesn't require you to screw the hard drives into the case like most do, it comes with little custom screws that you screw into the side of the hard drive before you put them in the case.



After that, you simply slide the drive into the mounting area, and secure the little bracket.


On most cases, installing the hard drive is pretty similar to installing the optical drive. In our case it's a bit different.

Now, because the Hard Drive cables are the last cables we're going to run, I'm going to integrate cable management and running our hard drive cables into one section.

The most important things to know about cable management are that it provides much better airflow, makes your case look cleaner (especially cool if you have a window) and and requires a bit of patience and quite a few zip ties:


I ran our front panel, USB, and firewire cables all together behind the motherboard tray, and zip tied them together.


I plugged in our SATA cables


Then I zip tied them together and ran them the same way


Here's a shot of the cables all running down the back of the motherboard tray


…and through the cable routing hole this case comes with.


Finally, plugged into the hard drives next to the SATA power connectors.


Now, as for fan cables, most fan cables are 2 or 3 wires and look messy. An easy way of fixing this is by straightening out the wires, then wrapping them around the shaft of a long screwdriver like this:


Then, when you remove the screwdriver and plug in the connector, you get this nifty slinky-type effect:


And voila! Now that everything is installed, our case looks clean!


And from the front, it's gorgeous as well!
 

BIOS Configuration

Many of you guys have done this stuff a million times before, so this will be nothing new. Many of you guys have never done this before at all, so consider this a primer. I'm trying to go step-by-step, but there are some things I did not think were necessary, like taking 1000 pictures of each “Click Next” driver dialog box. If you're smart enough to find this build log, you're smart enough to click Next and Submit a few times on your own.

I have faith in my readers.

Without further ado, onto the BIOS!

This is the post screen we get with the A8N-SLI Premium. I pressed the “DEL” key to enter the BIOS setup utility.



And we get to this:


In this screen, you'll notice we can set the time and date and language, and identify all our hardware for the IDE and SATA drives. The primary IDE Master and Slave are our optical drives, and you'll notice the First SATA master identifies a Hard Drive, this one is the 300GB storage drive. Our Third SATA master identifies the 36GB Raptor drive, that's where we're going to be installing our OS.

I have left HDD SMART Monitoring disabled by default, but enabling it can give you a heads up if your drive is getting bad sectors or is about to die. I don't have much use for it here (dozens of hard drives surrounding me) but at home, I have it enabled.

Going to the ADVANCED tab up top, we see this:


These options are all in the manual for the board so I'm not going to go into all of them, but I'll go into the ones that we are changing for right now.

Like this one, CPU Configuration:


You'll see it correctly identified our X2 4200+ processor, and has an option for DRAM Configuration, which we'll see here:


It's on Auto by default, but it identified the SPD on our modules incorrectly. It identified 2.5-3-3-6 and 2T, we're going to fix that by going to MANUAL and changing the settings to the 3500LL's rated latency, 2-3-2-6 at 1T:


Once that's done, I hit escape and go back to our CPU Config page, where I manually set Hyper Transport Frequency (going to call this HT from now on) to 5x. This means that our HT is going to be 5x whatever our clock generator is. By default, our clock generator is 200 Mhz.


In Onboard Device Configuration, I like to disable the things I won't be using. You don't have to do this, but it can sometimes make booting into Windows faster and can solve hardware conflicts occasionally. Pretty much all I left enabled were my two LAN ports, my Firewire port, and my USB stuff. I disabled our Silicon SATA Controller because I'm using the nForce4's SATA ports instead.


Here's a shot of Jumperfree Configuration, where I set it to Manual because I wanted to set our DDR Voltage to its rated 2.7V instead of the stock 2.6V. All other settings were left default, for now. When we overclock, we'll come back here and change our CPU Frequency, and maybe some other voltages.


In the Hardware Monitor tab, you can enable the Q-Fan Controller, which really cuts down on CPU Fan Noise.


And of course, in the Boot Menu, under Boot Device Priority, I changed the first boot device to CDROM, because we're going to be booting from the Windows XP SP1 CD instead of the Hard Drive, which is completely blank.


Fun fact: Almost every BIOS in the world uses F10 as its default “Save changes and exit?” option. So I hit F10 and got this:


Why yes, I would like to save and exit. Thank you.
 

Loading Windows

When your computer starts up, make sure you have your Windows CD in the CD-Rom drive. You'll get a screen that says “BOOT FROM CD (Y/N)?” or possibly “Press any key to boot from CD”, when you see these, hit Y to boot from the CD. In a few seconds you'll see this:



Now, if we were using the Silicon SATA Controller, we'd have to hit F6 here and follow the on-screen instructions to load the SATA drivers from a floppy disc that came in the Asus's motherboard box. However, the nForce4's SATA controller works fine with most versions of XP.

Our next screen:


Hit enter, and here we go:


Of course it doesn't see any partitions, both drives are new! So we have to decipher which drive to partition for our OS to reside upon. The size of the drives (35300 and 286,166) make it clear. The top drive is our Raptor, so we'll use that. I hit C to create the partition, and formatted it in NTFS. It took me back to the screen, which now looks like this:


I hit Enter, and it started copying files:


A reboot after about 5 minutes of file copying, and we get the EXCITING NEW LOOK


Some assorted screens that are fairly self explanatory. They involve answering the typical Windows personalization prompts and clicking next a series of times.


Not my real registration key:




I named the computer after one of my favorite comedians.








And after all that, a reboot, and we get into Windows for the first time:
 

Configuring Windows

Our standard Windows XP Pro theme, which both sickens and angers me. Some people like this, but some people are vegetarians, too. I am neither of these people, so I feel like I can change Windows to suit my tastes better. I like the streamlined look of Windows 2000.



First step to 2k, right click on the start menu and go to properties:


Once there, click on “Classic Start Menu”


Second step to 2k, right click on an empty area of the desktop, go to properties:


Go to the Appearance tab:


Select Windows Classic Style and click “Apply”:


Ahhhh…so much better. No giant blue taskbar with garish green buttons. The Fisher-Price version of Windows XP has always bugged me a bit. I feel better, now.
 

Driver Installation

When you first install Windows, it loads generic drivers for everything it can, but most of our hardware didn't exist when Windows XP was released, not even SP1 or SP2. So we have to check what drivers are loaded.

Right click My Computer, and go to properties



Click the Hardware tab and go to Device Manager:


You'll see all the hardware you don't have drivers installed for under Other Devices:


Notice a bunch of really bizarre stuff? Well, let's start loading some drivers to get rid of these.

The first thing to install should always be your chipset drivers. The chipset on our board is an nForce4 SLI, so I downloaded the newest drivers from nVidia's website http://www.nvidia.com on another computer, and copied them to my handy USB key


If you don't have this option, Asus includes all the drivers you need to get up and running on its Driver CD,


However, the drivers on nVidia's website are updated every month or so, and I wanted the newest ones. You can always load the CD version first and then update later, but I already had the files on my USB Key by this point so I just started installing them:








This is the only thing I say no to. I personally don't really like the NVIDIA Firewall or ForceWare Network Access Manager and have no use for it, so I click No.


I selected not to restart, I have other things to install, but you can restart here just fine most of the time.


After the series of Next buttons, we go back to the Device Manager and see what's left:


Wow, that got rid of quite a lot of stuff! Let's see what else we need to fix, video drivers? Same method, downloaded a set of beta drivers (the older 81.94s, as of this posting, the official 81.95 drivers are on nVidia's site. They are WHQL certified, while the .94s are not)




Now, if you have WHQL certified drivers, you won't see this screen. Mine were BETA drivers, meaning they are pre-release, so Windows doesn't know they are compatible for a fact. I click Continue Anyway because I know they'll work.


But I'm not restarting yet, either:


Because I have to install my Sound Card Drivers from Creative:


Click next, try not to punch the guy in the picture. It was hard for me.


You'll get some options, since I'm going to be using headphones with this machine and it's going to be used for gaming mostly, I selected those two options in the setup program.




Of course, we still have to load the other Ethernet driver, the Marvell Yukon. It's on the Asus CD, so here's some screenshots that are fairly self explanatory, once more:










After that, it just says Finish, like every other driver installation wizard.

At this point, I rebooted the system.

When I got back, I went back to Device Manager, and VOILA! Not a single piece of unknown hardware!


Our video drivers are installed correctly now, so I right clicked on the desktop again


To get to display properties, where I went to settings:


800x600 resolution? Please…


The LCD monitor we are using has a native resolution of 1280x1024, so I set it to max and hit apply.

After that, I hit the Advanced button in the corner and clicked on the GeForce 7800GTX tab


You may remember, we installed two video cards to do SLI? Well, we have to enable that. In the SLI multi-GPU menu, there's a check box for it.


I then went to Windows update and downloaded all the possible updates for my machine:


Then restarted:


After that, I downloaded a few more updates, including Service Pack 2, which works quite well I think


One last reboot, and I decided to check our memory timings using CPU-Z, available for free from www.cpuid.com

Our initial screen:


Our Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (Manchester core) is identified correctly, you'll notice Asus kind of cheats a bit on the speed, instead of the stock 200 Mhz, it's rated at 201 Mhz, which gives us 11 Mhz faster than our stock 2200 Mhz (2.2Ghz), a tiny cheat, but it would show up in benchmarks. Most enthusiast board makers do this now.

So let's check our memory settings


Frequency 201 Mhz (instead of the 219, because we're not overclocking yet)
Our latencies are 2-3-2-6, it detects the full 2GB of memory!

So now our system is ready for the fun stuff, loading games, overclocking, and seeing if we can make something burst into flames. With all our drivers loaded, the hardest and most time consuming part of our system build is over!
 

Overclocking and Benchmarking

And now our final segment, the overclocking.

We're not going to do a max overclock here, this is just to show you the main techniques used to overclock a system, and how to test for stability once you're in Windows.

First, here's our score in 3DMark05 with all stock settings:



We'll be using this to compare our overclocking settings later on.

Now, I'm going to reboot and enter the BIOS again. On this ASUS board, the main overclocking segment is in “JumperFree Configuration”


Which looks like this when you change it from Auto to Manual:


The first thing we're going to change is the CPU clock frequency. This used to be known as the FSB or Front-Side Bus, but Athlon64 systems don't use a real FSB.

Since our ram, the TWINX2048-3500LL, is rated at 219 Mhz, I figured I'd target that area first, knowing that my RAM could do it at its rated latencies.


Keep in mind, when you're doing this yourself, you're going to want to take baby steps to find your maximum overclock. I jumped 19 Mhz in one go, but a lot of people go 5 Mhz at a time and test, then another 5 Mhz and test. When I overclock my home system, that's what I do. For this example, for the case of brevity, I jumped right to 219 Mhz

Just to be safe, I increased our VDIMM to 2.8V


And our Chipset voltage and HT voltage were increased to 1.6V and 1.25V respectively:


The extra voltage will produce slightly more heat, but will also help our overclocked system stay stable. This was probably not necessary, and you may not actually have to do this. I covered it here because sometimes increasing voltage even a small amount gives you that rock-solid stability you were looking for.

Our CPU multiplier is important. The multiplier times the clock frequency (CPU frequency) equals your processor's new clock speed. Our default multiplier is 11, and on Athlon64s you can't go any higher. However, you can drop the multiplier.


This is good for testing if your CPU is holding you back or if your RAM or motherboard is holding you back. Since clock speed = (Multiplier) x (CPU Frequency), our default of 11 x the default of 200 would equal 2200, or 2.2 Ghz, our stock settings for an X2 4200+ processor. Our new settings of 219 times the multiplier of 11 equals 2409 Mhz, or a 209 Mhz overclock. Not huge, but roughly equivalent to the more expensive 4600+ processor.

I increased the CPU voltage as well


And because I have a PCI slot device (my Sound Blaster X-Fi) I have to make sure that the PCI Clock Synchronization is locked into 33.33 Mhz. Some devices are not fond of running out of spec, but most modern motherboards allow you to lock the PCI bus.


Now to CPU Configuration (which, oddly, has nothing to do with configuring the CPU)


There are three items on this screen, DRAM Configuration, Hyper Transport Frequency, and Cool N Quiet Control.


DRAM Configuration was covered in the install, it is where you go to mess with your latency settings and command rate. I won't be covering it here, because it's already set correctly, see Volume 5 of our system build log to determine how to set your timings right.

Hyper Transport Frequency works like the CPU. On most socket 939 CPUs, the HT Frequency is 1000 Mhz. This is reached by the multiplier times the CPU Frequency setting from earlier. Here are our multipliers:


Keep in mind, most boards/cpus will run fine up to 1100 Mhz HT, so keeping this at 5x multiplier will be fine, giving is 1095 Mhz HT.

Cool N Quiet is not going to be enabled, but if you're concerned about the noise of your system, it can be effective.

Now we boot into Windows to double-check our settings with CPU-Z (www.cpuid.com)


As you can see, we're at 2409 Mhz, with a 219 Mhz FSB (technically a clock gen, but whatever) and an 11x multiplier. It also identifies what version and code name our CPU has.

On the memory tab, we can see it detects our memory frequency and latencies correctly as well.


It also reads the SPD on our modules correctly:


To determine stability, I like to use Super-PI. Some people use Prime95, or looping game demos, but I've found that any system that can pass a 32M Super-PI is almost 100% stable.

Super-PI can be found by searching google.
Here's a screenshot:


Now I go to click on Calculate, and voila!


I choose how many digits of Pi I want my computer to calculate. For most examples, 32M should be used. I used 4M here because I didn't want to wait 10 minutes.


It ran and gave me the results, it took this computer 2 minutes and 52.672 seconds to calculate 4 million digits of Pi. My old AthlonXP 1 Ghz takes a lot longer.

Okay, so we know the processor is stable, how do we overclock our video cards?

Well, with nVidia cards, we can do the CoolBits tweak. I'm going to show you some registry tweaks here that I only recommend doing IF YOU ARE COMFORTABLE WORKING IN THE SYSTEM REGISTRY. Do not do this if you are worried about making your computer explode into a pile of red-hot ashes. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but always export and save a copy of your registry before you change anything, this way you can change it back easily.

Open the Start\Run dialog box, and type “Regedit” and hit OK

Anyway, here's our shot of the key we need to edit:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NvTweak\

Browse to it, the right click and go to “New” and choose DWORD Value


Rename the DWORD value the comes up to “CoolBits”


Right click on it to Modify it


And then change the value to 3 and the base to Decimal


Once you do this, go back to your nVidia control panel that we talked about in Volume 5. You should see some new options. One of these options is “Clock Frequency Settings”. Select this, click “Manual overclocking” and then hit “Detect Optimal Frequencies”. I've found this to be fairly reliable.


This will run a series of tests to determine the maximum speed your video cards are able to run at and remain stable.

Once you've done that, feel free to click apply and then load up one of your favorite games. Right now, mine is Battlefield 2. I like bombing people with the plane, it's cheesy and ridiculous, but it's so much fun.


Oh yeah, and of course, we run the 3DMark05 test again to compare scores:


Almost a 1000 point difference! For free!

Now, I could have gotten a little more performance out of this system had I tweaked our BIOS settings a bit more. I know this processor is stable up to 2.75 Ghz, because I've clocked it there before. I know our memory can do faster than 219 Mhz if I relax the latencies a bit, but that's all doing the same thing over and over that I've already done once.

If you want to overclock, follow the basic steps, change the settings, and run some tests to ensure stability. I recommend super-pi, memtest, and prime95. Make sure you get at least a couple of hours on these if you're concerned about stability.

Some of the other benchmarking programs you could use that would show more of a difference include SiSoft Sandra 2005, Everest UE, and Science Mark.

This is in addition to 3DMark05, PCMark05, and for full system benchmarks that are less affected by video cards, 3DMark2001SE.

Keep in mind, these are all synthetic benchmarks, and may not relate well to real-world gaming performance. The only way to measure real world gaming performance is to play the game and determine if it's fast enough for you. Some people have different standards as to what they believe is playable. I might think 60fps is playable, and my friend might accept 30fps. Turning options on and off can make a huge change in performance, as well, as can changing resolution.

The sweet spot for resolution right now seems to be 1280x1024, which is the native resolution of most 17" and 19" LCD monitors. In a newer game like Call of Duty 2 or Battlefield 2, even the top-of-the-line video cards like the 7800GTX and the X1800XT show slowdowns with all options enabled and Anti-Aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering turned all the way up. They're still playable, but they're faster without those options.

Part of the fun of a system build is the tweaking, changing settings this way and that way and experimenting with performance. It's a task that never really gets finished, as anybody who's built up an engine or done a case mod can attest to. Nothing is ever really finished, there's always a little more performance, one more little thing you can change that will make you more satisfied.

As for us, we're done with this build for now, but I'll still be tweaking it and messing with it, and this system might even end up at some of our trade shows. I've got a good idea of what I'm building for the next system build, but I don't think I'm ready to let the cat out of the bag yet. Let's just say I'm going to be keeping quiet for a bit.

Feel free to post questions and comments in the discussion thread, located HERE