Ladies and gentlemen I bring you the GTX 590 AHOC edition

It's huge 
It's impractical
It might not even work
But now it's finally compelete and ready to occupy the top 1% of GTX 590s

The E-power is fully attached I will be mounting the coolers and doing the final chekups tomorrow

Here are some pictures of the monster I've created.

Well it won't fit into any case I know of the the power plane leading to one of the cores seems to be shorted because I'm reading 0.6 ohms to GND. So worst case I'll have to rewire that plane. I did manage to attach pin 17 properly so if pin 16 really was GND this card will still work.
Good news there is most likely not a short on my GTX 590 because I just checked VCC to GND of my  HD 5850 and got 1.8 ohm. So assuming that the GF 110 core has around 1 to 1.1 ohms of resistance my GTX 590 where the VCC is hooked up to both cores should read 1.1/2 so 0.55ohm which would be in line with the reading I'm getting right now. So now I just have to fix one resistor which went missing and fix 2 VCC wires that I pulled when looking for shorts and the card will be fully operational tomorrow.

Sorry about the photo quality but I can't change that without getting a new phone or a camera.
Also I recently revised the support me page so please go check it out.


As always remember to checkout SiliconLottery if you are considering buying an i7 and overclocking it. They sell binned CPUs so you won't have to worry about getting a crap chip.

Bad news EDIT: Now kinda good

So I've been working on attaching the E-power to the GTX 590 and due to my lack of skill and equipment it looks like the card won't make it.
1. The VCC to GND reads 0.8ohms. IDK if this is wrong or right because that's what it read even before I started soldering and GND to GND is 0.5 ohms so maybe my multimeter just really sucks or the cores of the 590s are really low resistance or I have a short.

2. I managed to spill solder on the PCI-e gold fingers and in the process of trying to clean them I managed to completely destroy 2 of them. Hopefully they were GND pins. If they weren't this card is most likely not going to work.

The fact is I'm not really equipped to do these kinds of mods I have a 50W regulated and 150W unregulated soldering iron. The problem is that the 150W is intended for connecting metals not PCB work however low wattage irons like my 50W do not have a chance when trying to work on circuit boards that contain as much copper as GPU or motherboard. Also the PCB of the GTX 590 is a cramped mess with tiny voltage plains and no where near enough GND plain on the core side to work with. Hopefully the GTX 590 will make but right now I think the card is dead so if there is no weekend post it's because I'm digging it a grave.

Go checkout silicon lottery their my sponsor. They bin i7s so if you want an i7 with which will surely run a certain clock go check them out.

EDIT: So I just checked the pin against Wikipedia and it should be a GND pin. If it is then I'm fine. I will still finish of the E-power attachment however I will need to find new ways to mount the cooler since the wires are everywhere and the card still isn't fully grounded(18/30 wires).

A weekend of overclocking.

I didn't manage to get any full article finished for today so I'll just go over some things I've done overclocking wise.

Firstly HWbot.org has launched GPUPI. It basically SuperPi for the GPU. You can either do 1B or 32B to earn points. Currently the best card for the benchmark is the R9 290X. I did my own little session on 1B and 32B.
Here are my results:

The orange background makes no difference. However it runs best with the non transparent windows 7 theme and having as few windows open as possible does help. This is a 99.9% GPU centric benchmark so even those of you with slow CPUs can get competitive scores given that you're running a high end GPU(AMD is better). Just like SuperPi, GPUPI will complain if your OC is not stable and you get results that aren't correct invalidating your run. 1B finishes in about 20-24 seconds on an R9 290X so if your running air cooling it is entirely possible to start the benchmark at 35C and finish before the GPU starts experiencing heat related instability(for me that is about 70C at 1203/1634 +200mv). 32B on the other hand is a beast that takes 20 to 24 minutes on an R9 290X. Heat is a real problem and my GPU ended up running at 82C throughout the test so you can't use temperature buffering to run higher core clocks. However GPUPI does like VRAM clock more than the core clock so you can get a good scores by maxing the VRAM and running a slower core than for 1B.
Obviously this was my first session so I didn't test everything. I will take suggestions on what software tweaks I should try in the comments.

Other than that I also got started prepping my GTX 590 for the E-power that should arrive this week. So here are photos of the card after I gave it a bath to get rid of the mess that soldering AWG 12 wires with a 150W iron leaves:

Hey if you like reading this blog you should go check out my sponsor Silicon Lottery. They sell pre binned i7s so you don't have to worry about a chip that clocks badly.