E2180 overclock success on Asus P5LD2 v2

Sorry for the lack of updates recently– I’ve been busy, to say the least.

Anyway, last night I finally found some time to crack open the E2180 that was still in its UPS box. I stuck it in the Asus P5LD2 box that I have laying around (most of the owners of this exact board should know exactly what I am using it for 🙂 ) After a couple minutes of tweaking, it’s sitting at 3.2ghz. I haven’t spent too much time trying to max the clocks, but I do know that at 3.4ghz the setup wouldn’t stay on reliably– perhaps the chip is asking for more voltage, but I am unwilling to give it more than 1.4v

It is running at 3.2ghz stable. I am sure the chip can do much better in a more recent board, such as the 650i board I have sitting in the box still. But at $90, even if the chip is only stable at 3.2ghz, I’ll be OK with that. 🙂

Update: The system primed overnight at 3.2ghz at 1.3v VCore– going to try with less voltage tonight.

Even though this isn’t quite as fast as my Q6600 @ 3.6ghz, the E2180 was also less than 1/3 the price– and at 3.2ghz, it is definitely offers more than 1/3 the performance. A LOT more.

Finally found my E2180! Chip en route, overclock results to come

I’ve been doing sporadic checks on a few major vendors’ sites and on price comparison sites on when this mythical CPU may appear. As luck would have it, I finally found the CPU for sale at eWiz last night. Put in an order for the elusive thing, and hopefully I will have my hands on it sometime next week. For approx. $95 including shipping and CA tax, it wasn’t so bad a deal in my opinion.

Reports from many forums indicate that even the E2140 and E2160 are starting to show up with the M0 stepping. These things are supposed to be monster overclockers, with reports of them clocking just as well as their G0 siblings, providing the boards are capable. Now that I have my Q6600 dialed in comfortably at 3.6ghz as my workstation, it’s now time to build a new box to replace the aging home server, the Dell SC400 with a 2.0ghz Celeron Socket 478 inside. With 3gb of RAM, the CPU is practically pegged @ 100% utilization while running a multitude of services, in addition to 3 instances of VMs on VMWare. Hopefully, I can get the E2180 to the same 3.6ghz range without much trouble. Such a setup should have enough muscle to comfortably take over the same services, with maybe a few more VMs thrown in.

In any case, I am getting WAY ahead of myself here. I’ll report back next week with the results.

Q6600 G0 overclock success

I put together my workstation replacement over the weekend (finally).  It ran prime OK overnight, and now it’s sitting at 3.6ghz stable.  Love how it is dead quiet as it sits 2 feet away from me underneath the desk.  Total cost for hardware?  Let’s break it down:

Antec Solo case: $70
Coolmax 500w PSU (the 120mm fan really keeps it quiet): $30AR
Samsung SATA DVD burner:  $30
Q6600 G0: $300 shipped
Coolermaster HyperTX2: $16AR
Abit IP35-E: $55AR
OCZ Gold 2gb: $55AR
Maxtor 500gb SATA: $107  after taxes f/ Fry’s
eVGA 7900GT: Bought for $180 2 years ago
Zalman VF900: $35
Logitech G15 Keyboard: $35 AR
MS Intellimouse Explorer 4: Can’t bear to get rid of this thing.  All the new mice are crappy anyway.  Bought new for $12.

Total: $925 on hardware, counting everything.

Now let’s count software:

Ubuntu Studio: Free
Salvaged copy of Win2k for Win Apps: Do I have to count this?  This was paid on some other system.  Let’s just call it free.
Google Pack: Free
Rest of the Apps: Free (Firefox, Audacity, Paint.Net, Visual Studio Express, VMWare player, VLC, IM Proggies, PuTTY, etc…)

Total Software Cost: Free.

Gotta love price wars.  Who would ever imagine 20 years ago how fast and cheap things would get??

Q6600 G0 Stepping compared to B3.

Anand posted an article showing the improvement of the G0 Q6600. Not a marked improvement, but an improvement nonetheless. I’ve been busy enough that the chip I bought is still sitting on the desk, but hopefully I’ll have time to put the thing together this weekend. I’ll post an update then on how I fare with my chip.

Update: This post also shows that the G0 Q6600 is really an overclocking monster.

Update 2: I just finished putting together my own Q6600 monster.  Check it out here.

New project: Workstation Q6600 G0 overclock

Time to replace my cheapo Fry’s combo workstation of ECS Mobo with a BSEL modded e4300. @2.4ghz, the workstation is more than fine for what I use it for. Too bad I cannot resist the temptation of quad core divx encoding and photo/video editing. With the recent price reductions, the new gig isn’t a bank breaker anyway. Here’s what I’ve accrued so far:

Antel P180B case.
Intel Q6600
CoolerMaster HyperTX 2
OCZ memory
A yanked 7900GT
A Coolmax PSU
A 500GB samsung drive that I bought a month ago.

This will be the most expensive gig I’ll have built in at least the past 5 years. Let’s see how long I can manage to keep this one.

As for the old gig, it’s going to be converted to replace my old media center PC, an old XP-M 2500+ O/C’d to 2.3 ghz, as the old gig is having problems keeping up with 720p streams.  I will post the results soon.  Various websites have already posted great results on the G0 Q6600.  Let’s see how lucky I am.  Not holding my breath since I am using a $70 650i, but we’ll see.