Out of curiosity, did you add the extra heat sinks
yes
and glue the large
fan on?
The heatsinks (all of them) have arctic alumina epoxy.
On flipchips there's often loops or throw-holes for a clip
instead, it wouldn't be good to epoxy a big 'sink on an open
flipchip, though ok if it has a well-secured heat spreader
integral.
How did you mount the fan without screws, or did you epoxy
on a
set of matching screw threads as well?
The northbridge sink has the fan screwed onto it on one
side. While it looks like the typical little socket 7 era
heatsink, this is a particularly thick & sturdy 'sink, it
holds the fan quite well.
How do you know the ins & outs of all these hardware bits & pieces?
Experience, training, both?
I've been at it from several angles for quite a while
including sales, electronics, repair, overclocking, and just
a general desire to make anything run at peak performance
forever and a day. Plus it doesn't hurt to have drawers
full of leftover heatsinks from the various eras of CPUs and
enough tools to force my will upon them. Motherboards are
fairly easy, it's video cards and some of the chipset 'sinks
with limited clearance that require more careful heatsink
selection, often shallow 'sinks that may not fit so well due
to nearby surface-mounted board parts.
Even that can be overcome though, the most useful thing I've
learned is probably to buy the system case ahead of time and
look at what the parts' requirements will be. Given
forethought, a lot of difficult cooling problems can be
overcome. Drill a couple holes in a motherboard tray and
you can mount a fan on a bracket, that blows across an
nForce4 chipset 'sink if there's no room on the 'sink for
one. Plus, I always try to be rid of tiny fans, they never
seem to last very long.
My first and last experience with MSI was a twitichy Socket A board.
Kept on rebooting and freezing. It was a pain to diagnose between the
usual suspects (and lockups); faulty RAM, CPU, etc...
I had a few of those, but I forget the model numbers. One
had a peculiar fault where it'd run the memory at 133MHz but
not even 1MHz higher... it had some vacant spots around the
DIMM slots so I added a capacitor or two and got another
10MHz out of it, which wasn't much but I wasn't comfortable
running that system for any serious use with a mere 1MHz
stability margin. I think a friend of mine has at least two
different MSI skt A boards I sold to him, they might've been
K7T266 Pro2 and K7T Turbo 2, but it's been awhile, I might
be wrong.
Come to think of it, I still have a Tualatin Celeron system
here with an MSI 6368 (PLE133T, mATX all-integrated board)
in it, that board had the defective (GSC?) capacitors on it
and I replaced those. Seems like I bought another MSI board
a few months later, a KM266 something-or-other, not the
later one that took both PC133 and PC2100 memory but the
earlier version, might've been a 6390. It was a better
board, by that point MSI had stopped using the bad GSC caps
and went with Rubycons, IIRC.
I suppose every batch has its rotten apples, given that you've got more
experience with hardware issues.
IMO, every single board has some kind of significant
problem, it's just a matter of whether that problem randomly
effects you, or effects somebody else instead. IOW, it's
easy enough to populate a board then then-popular parts and
have it work fine but throw in a different part or use the
system for something that stresses a particular subsystem
more and your luck may run out.
Yeah, that was what I was thinking. Wasted £30 on a cheapo graphics
card for my Asus P5ND2-SLI which did not have integrated graphics. It
had a good "AI Overclock" feature in the BIOS though, which
automatically set the voltages, etc. to get a good overclock. All I had
to do was define "Stable overclock" and it settled at 3.33GHz from
2.66GHz.
yep, integrated video can be great if you don't have to do
anything graphically intensive on a system, nor have any
special needs like DVI output because you're not even
sitting in front of the system. Then again, for most uses I
could get by sitting on front of an integrated video based
system since I have a separate gaming and multimedia
systems.
The job I'm running is a finite element program LS Dyna, run hundreds
to thousands of times on smaller, simpler models than once on a complex
model (thats the nature of my work). An educated guess would be that it
is mostly floating point calculations with some integer calculations.
YMMV with LS Dyna benchmarks because I have yet to see a site that
comprehensively lists hardware comparisons like Tom's Hardware does for
games.
I agree with you that its better in most cases to build a few cheaper
systems, as you have commodity pricing of mass-market off the shelf
components on your side.
I like economizing in some ways, but I hate the thought of
some of the cheap motherboards. I'd proably go with MSI or
Biostar, maybe splurge on Asus for a mATX board with
integrated video, but to a certain extent the mATX boards
are more alike than diferent, so long as they use the same
chipset. I'm just glad so many features are now being put
into southbridges or single-chipset solutions, even if I
don't want those features on my primary use systems, it's
nice to be able to retire a system from a primary use to a
secondary one where I don't have to dig up a NIC or sound
card, etc.
