Project : Double Header II - First Run

The First run of the cooling system -

As with any cooling system I build and use, I test it extensively before actual use. I ran coolant through the system for 2 hours before actually mounting the blocks, this was so I knew all the seals on the blocks were stable and wouldn't wet down my board. This was by far a more robust cooling system then my Original Double Header system.

For the first run of it, it was a cold day out and my radiator sits in front of 2 big window fans, so I can cool it down nicely. The Coolant was circulating and below 50 DegF with no power to the system.   then I powered it up and ran it at 561 first. This was the first time I could get it to run this speed. At this point the CPU's were chilling at 60deg F. Remember no pelts are being used yet.

Now of course there was NO need to stop there, I knew I could get more out of theses chips even without going to super cooling.

583Mhz was getting there. I ran this on a different day when I could not get the temp low enough to go any higher.  I was very impressed at the speed in Sandra with this.  It is smoking the DH1 setup already and hasn't even hit its top potential!

Inching closer to my goal of 600+MHZ without additional cooling, I keep pushing to 594Mhz. This is damn fast for one of these chips.   As you can tell it was another cool day and kept the coolant nice and chilly. Well no reason to stop here, onward and upward!

Well this was sort of an Anticlimax, I hit the 605Mhz stable, but the performance seems to have taken a dive  to what we were getting for the 561Mhz clocking for the ALU, but the FPU still rocketed ahead and took no prisoners. I am guessing some divisor was flipped once I hit the 110Mhz FSB. So I figured that 594 was really the optimum speed.   From here you could only jump to 124Mhz and 133 Mhz, and both those were out of reach without some serious cooling.

It was time to get serious and stop playing with just water cooling. Time to go Cryo. After a good bit of research and help from N8 on the HardOCP forums, I tracked down all the chemical goodness I could need.  Lets get to sealing this board up!