Asus Sli-Premium Cooling solution & a little Raid 0 Prob

[BiGg RiE]

I'm intrested in overclocking and would like some suggestions on cpu & graphics Card cooling solutions both air & water cooled. I'm more intrested in air since I'm still a little nervous about puting water in my rig.

My specs are as follows:

Case: Thermaltake Tsunami VA3000BWA
Mobo: Asus Sli-Premium
Cpu: AMD Athlon64 3500+ Vinice
Ram: 2GB; 2xOCZ EB DDR PC-4000 1024MB Platinum Edition
Gfx Card: Asus Extreme N7800GT
HDD: 1x250GB WD Caviar sataII 3.0G/s
2x120GB WD Caviar SataII 3.0G/s
1x180GB IDE

3dmark 03: 23,132
3dmark 05: 9,399
3dmark 06: 4,892

Additionally; I originally had the 2x 120 sata II's running in raid 0 but it kept failing every few weeks & would never boot without the install disc in the drive. I used the NVraid on the mobo and when I'd fresh install it would always want to write the MBR to the ide drive anyone know what I might've been doing wrong? OS = XP Pro Service pack 2

Thanx in advance for all input.

[infinitevalence]

Well you got all the right stuff for OCing that, the only thing i dont see listed is your heatsink, so im going to assume its stock. If you want to get into air cooling your going to need a better heatsink, i would look at Thermalright, Thermaltake, and Scathe get somethign big, that fits 120mm fans and has lots of heatpipes in it. Copper is nice but not required as there are some really good aluminum HS out there. Figure your going to spend around $50 for the heatsink and a good 120mm fan like a Panflow, Sunon...

As for your Raid issue i dont like or use onboard controlers so i cant help you much there, plus i dont think RAID0 is a good thing for a desktop anyway. Its really only for highperformance non critical tasks such as video capture, or scratch disks.

[BiGg RiE]

thanx for the advice i'll look into those.

I know raid 0 might be a little overkill but i really liked that 20sec boot versus my current 45 - 65. and when playing hl2 the loads were almost seemless. It's kinda like going from a bike to a motorcycle yea the bike will get you from point A to B but that motorcycle will do it alot faster.

But I see your point, and i've all but decided that it's not worth the risk & aggrivation.

What about my graphx card do you think if i get a diferrent heatsink on that i can clock it higher i get a pretty good oc now:

stock: 350/900
oc: 461/1.2ghz

I'm inclined to think I'm not gonna get much more head room over that. I mean i've gotten as high as 465/1.5ghz stable but I get some serious artifacts in game especially NFS: Most Wanted. But I'm thinking that it's related more to heat than anything.

BTW, i usually keep it at 440/1.1ghz just so I don'tburn it up I mean thats over the stock GTX frequencies of 430/1.2 what do you think?

[bigblockmatt]

for your graphics, ive gotten several artic cooling products. Most of my cooling stuff i have gotten from Side Winder computers. [/url]

I wonder if the one FZ1 is selling would work...http://forums.legitreviews.com/viewtopi ... highlight=

[infinitevalence]

OSX boots on my 5400 RPM laptop drive in under 10 sec... its not your hardware its your operating system.

[BiGg RiE]

The quickest I've clocked a boot on my system was 15sec and that was right after a fresh install, so 10sec is insane especially for xp or any windows os for that matter. I have been thinking about that mac mini duo, and maybe making it a dual boot with that bootcamp software. In my line of work I do need a mac and if I get that I'd get the best of both worlds. There have been reports that windows runs alot smoother and faster on a mac. But at the same time I'm currently thinking about getting a laptop and if I can ge tan ibook with an intel cpu & dual boot that, it would be great for me. Only thing is they are really expensive compared to a regular laptop, i mean it's worth it but it's still a lot o mulla.