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I have, to be frank, had an irritating day.
I woke up after about 5 1/2 hours sleep with a tickly sore throat. Shrugged it off, went to work at 6.05 am (only 5m late), had only mild irritants with bus drivers mucking about. So far, so normal. My wife asked me to pick her up from work as she's got fluid on her knee, and asked me to call her when I was 5 minutes away so she could meet me outside. So I did, and got a constant engaged signal. Then my T-Mobile pulse crashed. So I reset it, only to get a call straight away from the wife asking where I was. It turned out that she'd left her work phone off the hook.
So anyway, home, where I'd been looking forward to some serious overclocking. I've just bought an E8300 from a fellow Hexite on the FS/FT forum, and I was looking forward to winding it up well beyond the the 3.45GHz (11.5x300) that my previous E5200 had managed- a decent overclock, but hardly boner-inducing. So I spent a couple of hours winding the FSB up and testing with UBCD- first memtest86 and then Prime. 500MHz FSB would pass most of the tests but fail instantly on test7 in memtest, so eventually I established that 480 was totally stable without any mucking with FSB termination voltages and other obscure bios crap I can't be bothered with. So, into Windows at 8x480 (=3.84Ghz) for some dual core Prime action while I caught up with the news. Fired up Asus PC Probe too. It crapped out after about 20 minutes of Prime- as an old-skool Athlon overclocker, to me that's as near as damnit, so I set about googling for safe voltages for 45nm Wolfdales. Apparently 1.35V is safe so I went into the bios and bumped it to 1.35V. For good measure, I bumped the multi to 8.5 for a smidge over 4GHz, then started Prime64 as soon as it booted.
Both cores got through the 1024k FFT test. Then on the 8K test core #1 crashed out. CPU temps had been ~70 degrees throughout the test according to PC Probe. So I decided to have a feel about inside. The heatpipe arrangement on the motherboard (an Asus P5K Deluxe, in case it matters) was proper hot to the touch- not unbearable, but about 15 seconds was as long as you'd want to keep your fingers there. The CPU cooler was cool to the touch all over (It's an Akasa 965 or summat, big tall heatpipe thing with a 100mm fan). I took it off to see if it was making good contact. Found plenty of thermal goop and a couple of cat hairs between the proc and HS, so I reinstalled with a very thin layer of my 5 yr old Coolermaster goop. Processor still at 70C, still crapped out ofter 10 minutes. I poked my fingers down onto the copper plate of the cooler which sits on top of the proc and gives the heat to the heatpipes. It felt barely warm. So I figured that I needed some new thermal goop, as the old stuff was obviously too dry to be useful- if there were parts of the processor at 70C while I could rest my finger on a copper plate less than a centimetre away....
So onto Ebay to find the quickest and cheapest tube of thermal paste. £3.15 for a tube of AS Ceramique delivered by first class post- that'll do. So I hit Buy It Now, before being reminded that Paypal have restricted my account for no good reason whatsoever. The letter they were supposed to send me in the post a month ago never turned up. In hope more than expectation, I followed the "I've lost my password" procedure, only to find that....my Virgin server inbox is full, something to do with the settings I changed when I decided that I'd like to be able to collect emails on my new computer, while my wife could still get the ones that were relevant to her on the old one. Apparently keeping emails for 25 days is enough to fill up your crap Virgin mailbox, and when it happens they just send you a singularly unhelpful message about how to sort it out.
So, as it stands, I've got an almost stable awesome overclock that I don't want to try out for fear of frying the chip, I've not received a sensible email for three days, and there's an ebayer out there who probably thinks I'm a timewasting knob and who may well neg me.
Bunch of arse.
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Originally Posted by TheAnimus
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(actually you like Trappist beers don't u?)
