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I performed brain surgery yesterday.

I ordered a new power supply and chipset fan to fix the issues I’ve been having.
I had to pull everything apart, given the large size of my heatsink on the CPU, and all the cables I needed to pull out, everything except the motherboard had to move.

Here’s the specs of my current system:
ASUS A8N-SLi Deluxe,
AMD FX-55 (rated 2.6ghz)
2 GeForce 7800GTs in SLi mode.
3Gig/Sec SATA2 160gig WesternDigital HD

The chipset fan had burnt out long ago, and would either make noise often, or just not spin half the time which prevented me from being able to leave it on for extended periods of time, and the power supply just couldn’t give enough juice when overclocking.

The chip is rated at 2.6, and I had it running at 2.9 but when the cards were both going full steam the power would often dip, causing restarts or errors.
I had gotten a 500W, it was cheap and an emergency purchase that only cost me $40. It wasn’t very good but it was worth what I paid.

The new one is 680W, and is made for SLi. It’s also rated for higher amperage at the various voltage levels then the previous one. It’s not all about Wattage, you’ve got to have smooth, clean, constant power too.

So to begin, I removed the existing fan from the chipset, and had to cut the heatsink mounts with a wirecutter but got it off. It wasn’t designed very well, with the housing around the chip existing solely for the purpose of screwing the fan to it.
I was surprised because where the heatsink sits is about 2 inches square, the size of a 40mm fan, but the actual chipset was barely 1cm square, more like 1cm rectangle. This is what was causing my overheating? All that heat off of one tiny little chip. The old compound had hardened, and I had to kind of chip it off to get a firm connection with the new heatsink and fan, but got it seated on there – no extra screws, it came ready to go with compound/adhesive on the bottom.

I got a CoolerMaster Northbridge chipset, it was just the right size to fit between the two video cards, and goes at a pretty good clip. Where the old one would burn me if I touched it, this was hot enough to be able to touch, even under full load. I had looked at sophisticated towers of cooling power – $35 but damn it was nice (previous links from 011605.html, I think?

The power supply went in easy enough, minus a minor cosmetic change to the fan knob. I had to pull it off to get it to fit in the case. I saved $50 by getting the non-modular power supply, but if you have the funds, get one. They save so much space and they’re just spiffy.
I’d say the computer is a good 5 lbs heaver with the new power supply though.

So I put everything in and went to town. I could finally overclock without worrying about the power dipping, or overheating my chipset. I put Hypertransport (AMD64’s internal bus that emulates 32-bit bus on chip) at 5x, up from 4 where I had it due to the overheating.
I think the chipset is rated at 1.4 voltage, I tweaked it to 1.55, but put it back down to 1.53 after it made the 12V dip under load. I went with 200mhz x 15 which got me 3gig, then upped the mhz a bit.
So running 3.2 ghz with the PCIEx clock at 110mhz to get a little more out of the 7800s, and everything was very stable, and stayed nice and cool. The chip is already working almost 1/3rd more then stock, and it could probably go higher if go slow, but the speed effects other aspects, mainly my memory needs to be faster if I start messing with the MHZ more.

I went from 10,200 to 11,870 in 3dMark2005, which may not seem like a lot, but my Half-Life 2 64-bit now runs at 96fps in 1200×1024. If only 3DMark2006 was 64 bit, then I could compare 32/64.

So all in all I believe I finally have the system I want. I have enough power to supply all the items I need, and even more. I’m sure it’s going to suck down the electricity, but I won’t be leaving it on all night either, I say this as the computer is on at home downloading 3DMark2006 via BitTorrent.