3AM stupidity and Livestream Aftermath

So I've listening to way way too much Limp Bizkit recently and since everyone liked me more when I was less serious during the stream here's more stupid but in pure audio form. It's a spin off the rhyme for Limp Bizkit's song Why Try. Link

Oh and here are the lyrics.

Why try

this chip's gonna fry

Everybody knows

It's gonna fucking die

Sendin it's smoke

strait to the sky

But none of us here

are gonna fucking cry

I got no LN2

So I wonder what it'll do

when I push 2 V to the core

It'll make ma chip into silicon gore

But that's the cost of an overclocking war

Yeah they're bad but then again what did you expect from me at 3AM.


Post Stream Damage Analysis
 
The 3960X did survive the live stream. On the other hand it's ability to run 5Ghz on "safe" vcore is probably gone. So now it's running 4.8Ghz. Also the IMC is throwing up graphical glitches. So I'm probably going to have to under clock my RAM to 1866 8-9-9 or something like that on 1.6V.

The R7 260X. Well it's not dead but I haven't checked if the core is degraded because my 3960X is more important to me.

But one good thing did come from the 4 hours of computer madness. I have the first place for 3D mark Vantage. I just hope that the guy I beat doesn't read my volt mod guide and push his card to 1.4Ghz core. Then there would be nothing I could do since he has a 5960X and I have a poor old 1 legged and 7 fingered 3960X which has seen way more voltage than any Sandybridge-E CPU should ever be allowed to and survived all of it.

R7 260X Stream 2

So in the last stream I only managed to get through 1 benchmark and that was Unigine Heaven. The card managed 1447/1975mhz at 1.46/1.75V and scored 1804 points.
Since then I've prepared some other benchmarks that and I'll push the card to the limit one more time to get them too.
This time around I should be able to run a higher core clock because the weather has gotten colder and I'm going to do a fan swap from the current 1600RPM slim 120x120mm fan to a full size 2400 RPM 120x120mm fan. This should lower VRAM temps and core temps by a couple C. So 1.5Ghz core maybe?

The stream will be up on my twitch at 6PM GMT this Saturday. If you missed the last one you now have a second chance.

Live stream aftermath

I'm very happy to say the stream was an absolute success. As far as overclocking goes anyway. The R7 260X hit a monstrous 1447/1975mhz at 1.46V core and 1.75V memory and got a score of 1804 points in Unigine extreme. So that's great and all. As far as streaming success goes I think that having only 3 viewers watching the stream speaks for itself. If you wanted to watch this one and missed it well I got good news for you. I will be doing more streams. The next stream will be about the HD 5850 using the water chiller and I plan to make that one pretty interesting because I'm going to be doing the insulation and volt modding of the card on the stream not ahead of time like I did with the 260X. Right now I'm not sure when I'll do the stream but I know it will be on a weekend and it'll either be in August or October because in September I'm moving to the UK.

Also here's a picture of the setup from the stream:

As always thank you to Cooler Master for supporting me.

Live stream subzero HD 5850 and the insanity R7 260X.

I'm very sorry for not posting any actual content for the last 23 days. So to make it up to you all I've decided that I will do an overclocking live stream starting Saturday at 4:00GMT. Here are some teasers of the things getting benched:

Other than that I've dropped the you-name-it.com ad because I can't get the Athlon 460 X3 they sent me to work. Which sucks because I wanted to do 3 core Cinebench on LN2 with it. However until this gets resolved I can't recommend them as a good source of CPUs.

Thanks to CoolerMaster for making so much of what I do possible.

R7 260X VRM setup and full voltage modding.

I know I've already done 2 other post on volt modding the R7 260X. However none of them are complete and one of them is plain wrong and just like the saying goes 3rd time's the charm so here's a guide made after I actually went and tested everything. If you don't know anything about hardware volt modding do not try this. If you do something wrong your card will be bricked before your brain registers it(your brain takes 5about ms to process visual stimulus). I will make a post about volt modding basics some time soon but not now. Also I'm taking down the 2 old post because of the before mentioned reasons.
So lets run down the VRM setup of the R7 260X.

Here you have the important controller pinouts. For the FB Vcore a 22K ohm variable resistor from the pin to GND will get you a starting voltage of about 1.3V under load. For the FB aux a 22K ohm variable resistor from the pin to GND will give 1.05V under load. Cut the pins or the traces connected to the pins labeled ILIM to disable over current protection for that VRM.So if you cut ILIM AUX the AUX VRM from the first picture will no longer have a power limit.

The VRAM voltage controller is a super simple controller and does not have over current protection. All you need to do to get it under manual control is to hook it up to a 220K ohm variable resistor to get a starting voltage of about 1.585V-1.6V regardless of load.

I would like to thank techpowerup.com for allowing anyone to use their PCB pics.
Also check out my sponsor Silicon Lottery. They sort CPUs by overclocking capability. Right now you can get an i7 4790K, 5820K or 5960X in a variety of  frequencies from above average to extremely rare. For example a 5Ghz i7 4790K.

The RAM and FAN test bench overview

 Built on an IKEA pine wood wine rack. For low weight.

 With WiFi for easy screenshot uploading and maximum portability.  (Mounted with zipties)

 Based on the Gigabyte F2A88X-D3H I reviewed ages ago.
(Also mounted with zipties)

 Insulated for use with LN2.

and with a crocodile clip for reading CPU core voltage directly

Running an Athlon II X4 750K cooled by a cooler master Seidon 120V closed loop cooler.
(The rad really is just sitting there)

With video provided by my modified R7 260X
(The cooler is mounted with zipties)
(If I get a bigger PSU and another CPU cooler I will replace it with the water cooled GTX 590)







 The RAM currently in this beast is the G.skill ECO 2x2GB 1333 7-7-7-21 1.35V kit I previewed some time ago.







 The HDD is a 350GB WD blue.
(Mounted with even more zipties)

The PSU is an EVGA 430W 80+ unit.
(Held in place by zipties)

This is built from scrap parts from other projects(GPU MB and CPU Cooler) and my friends old PC(wifi and HDD). The reason why I built this is that my 3960X is never ever going to boot with RAM above 2500mhz so I can't use it for RAM reviews. This 750K already managed to boot 2520mhz on these G.skill sticks so it can do a better job with RAM than my main system. Ideally this would be a Z97 system but good Z97 boards cost about 1.5-3X what this board cost and an i5 4690K is about 3X the price of the 750K. Yes I know there is the Pentium G3258 but IMO pairing a 3000czk MB with a 1700czk CPU is stupid. Plus AMD CPUs are funner to OC.
The idea for using the wine rack from IKEA is that. It can hold as much stuff as a full tower, cost only 199czk(10$) and weighs less than any other case you can buy.
I used the cooler master Seidon for cooling because it allows me to easily swap fans for fan reviews.
If I had to change any things I would get a better PSU(750W Seasonic/EVGA) and a better MB(Crossblade Ranger).

Air benching my WTF cooling R7 260X

My good old R7 260X from WTF cooling has gotten even more WTF and now does 1450+mhz on the core.

And this is the V mod I did on the GPU. I finally got my hands on a 10Kohm potentiometer so I got the core voltage under manual control. Unfortunately a 10Kohm potentiometer is not enough to keep the voltage in "safe" territory and so the card has a minimum 3D load voltage of 1.47V. The 3rd wire on the back is hooked directly to the + leg of one of the output caps and ends in crocodile clip to allow for easy measurement of core voltage with a DMM.  

                                               Here's a shot of the side of the GPU. You can see both the potentiometer and the crocodile clip behind it

The screws on VRAM in this and the shot above are there to cool the memory because in my first runs the memory overheated and crashed when above 1670mhz. That's a massive problem on a card that has an anemic 128bit bus feeding cores 896 stream processors running at 1450mhz.

And here's the card running in my main system. The Gelid heatsink did a great job and kept the core bellow 70C° throughout my benching session. The Hynix VRAM on the other hand was terrible and kept me bellow the 1600point mark in Unigine Heaven DX11 Extreme.