Just how fast can a PC run when cooled on nothing but air, and on a budget?
Over the course of the last 3 months I have overclocked and benchmarked every PC in the house, with my PC in particular having had many hours being tampered with, adjusted, tuned, retuned and modded. However there comes a point when you dare not push any harder for fear of loosing data such as accounts / work etc. I have therefore had my eye on building a dedicated benchmarking rig for a little while now, and recently the opportunity has arisen.
The majority of us use an air cooled CPU - but how far will one go on air before giving up the ghost? Also, most graphics cards are air cooled - but what can be squeezed out of one when you cool it properly? So how fast can you run a PC, using nothing but good ol' fashioned air to cool it? I had a think, and decided to focus on cooling the following components:
- CPU
- Graphics
- Northbridge
- RAM
- Southbridge
I then had a think about what my student pockets could afford and came up with these ideas for a system setup:
- AMD Athlon II X2 240 2.6GHz
- MSI 785GM-E51, AMD 785G chipset
- 2x1GB SuperTalent DDR3 1333MHz
- Zotac 9600GSO ECO Edition 512MB
Case
I haven't got a case free to put the project in at the moment anyway, so I thought it might be an idea to cut up a beige box el-cheapo case and turn it into a reusable frame for any future benchmarking. Although the main requirement is to flip the motherboard tray, I will be doing some aesthetics mods too.
So thats the basic outline. Hopefully the project will be completed over the next few weeks, with the benchmarking happening one weekend when I find time. Thanks for reading, and please feel free to comment!


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? Also, most graphics cards are air cooled - but what can be squeezed out of one when you cool it properly? So how fast can you run a PC, using nothing but good ol' fashioned air to cool it? I had a think, and decided to focus on cooling the following components:
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Some of them are tagged as Eco editions, but some of them you'll just have to read the reviews and see what you get!
I have yet to decide on a GPU cooler, depending basically on which GPU I end up getting!

) have agreed to give me 2 X 2GBs of their range topping DDR3 Ballistix Tracer memory, specs and picture below:
How did you get sponsorship?

That really is good planning on my part!
to take my pc apart to fit the back plate just to test it.