I have discovered few months ago, when I upgraded my PC, that I’m an overclock fan! These are the new pieces that I have bought:
- CPU: AMD Sempron 2600+ BOX [1833MHz as multiplier 11 x BUS Speed 166]
- Mother Board: EPoX 8RDA3I PRO [with SATA and RAID]
- Memory: DDRAM 512 Kingmax PC3200/400MHz [lifetime guarantee]
- Case: noname 400W

Now, because I had bought DDRAM at 400MHz, I was expect that I will use its power. But, surprise… My CPU have 333MHz bus. So, I have tried to overclock the CPU at 2200MHz [11×200]. Because of the poor performance cooler, this overclock failed.

I decided to buy a new cooler which can cool my CPU. I have sold my old mother board [Gigabyte GA-7VA-C] and I have bought an impressive ThermalTake Volcano11+.

This cooler is entirely built in copper and its pretty heavy [almost 500gr].

The cost of this cooler was $USD 30.00… I will tell you later if it worth is price or not.

The content of the package is pretty generous:
- the [monstruous] cooler
- installation instructions
- PCI dial adapter
- 5 inch bay adapter
- various cables and screws

The installation of this cooler was pretty painless. First, I have took the mother board out of case.

Then, I have removed the stock cooler provided with the AMD Sempron 2600+ BOX microprocessor.

Then, I added the thermal compound on the microprocessor and mounted the cooler on top of CPU. Using a screw driver and some of my right hand force, I have pushed the clip and secured the cooler.

This cooler can work in 3 ways:
- at its full speed [4800RPM]
- temperature control [fan speed auto]
- manual speed control [my choice]

Finally, I have mounted the mother board back into the case.

After adding this cooler I got these temperature values:
- Sempron 2600+ @ 1833 MHz
- Cooler: 3300RPM
- idle: 25^oC
- full load: 35^oC

But the point was to rise the FSB to 400MHz and have my Sempron running at 2200 MHz. I have made the neccessary changes in BIOS and got this temperature values:
- Sempron 2600+ @ 2200 MHz
- Cooler: 3300RPM
- idle: 35^oC
- full load: 45^oC

The system is now stabile and works at 10-20 percent faster compared with the system speed before overclock. The cooler is pretty loud when it rotates with over 4000RPM but it worth!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 31st, 2005 at 11:43 am and is filed under hardware.