Hardware Used

SLA9U powah!

All three of us Tech ARP overclockers bought the Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 'SLA9U' processor. As you can see, my unit was fabricated in Week 23. If I am not wrong, Chai's and Max's processors are from Week 22.

For my system, I chose not to skimp on the motherboard. With overclocking and usability in mind, I decided to go with the ASUS P5K Premium with its combination of a cooler 8-phase PWM as well as great overclocking features. It is also catered towards the watercooling crowd by supplying fans for those passive heatpipes. Plus it doesn't suffer from the vdroop problems that plagued the ASUS P5B series.

I looked towards the 2GB OCZ DDR2 PC2-8500 Reaper HPC Edition memory kit to give me some added headroom in the RAM dividers. Also, if all went well, the processor could run at 4 GHz with the memory modules running at full rated clock speeds. Of course, these top-notch hardware would be all for naught without a great power supply unit (PSU). For this, I looked to the Silverstone OP650 that features a single, big 12V rail.

For cooling, I relied on a watercooling setup using the following components :

• Dtek FuZion CPU block (mounted this with a Thermalright backplate to prevent bowing)
• Swiftech MCW60 with 8800 chipsinks
• DDC with Petra's Top
• Swiftech MCR320QP

Hopefully, this cooling will yield some favorable results!

Software Used

For stress testing, I used Prime95 v25.3 primarily. The test used was Small FFTs as I wanted to make sure the CPU was good. A blend test would be used later on. I initially used Orthos for Small FFTs. However, the three of us quickly determined that Prime95 was a better way of testing.

We found out that a particular overclocked processor could pass Orthos but not Prime. This is due to Orthos only testing 8K by default, unlike Prime95's variable size. Keep in mind though that you can get Orthos to run using variable sizes by manually setting it.

For temperature monitoring, I used the included ASUS PC Probe II. Like many users, I am still a big fan of MotherBoardMonitor 5. However, they stopped developing or updating it over 3 years ago. Man, how time flies! CoreTemp was out of the question as it did not officially support Windows Vista (at the time of writing).

I initially used Speedfan but since its readings were off from the others (Intel TAT and the ASUS PC Probe II), I didn't think too highly of it. After it let out a warning siren (I thought there was a missile silo ready to go off inside my apartment!) after incorrectly reading my power supply's 12V rail, that was the last straw. It claimed the voltage was only around 7V whereas my handy-dandy multimeter showed the voltage to be spot-on. Needless to say, it saw a swift departure from the confines of my system.

For the CPU, I used trusty old CPU-Z to show me what's what in my PC. It's really cool that it shows the clock speed live for Intel's SpeedStep and such. However, I overclocked using the old-fashion way. Not that I could help it. The included ASUS utility was non-functional - darn it!