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Posted by
Per Hansson
on May 04, 2001
Performance
As I mentioned
before, with regular air-cooling my CPU could run reliably
at 850mhz, but seeing as it’s a Duron, which are known for
their good overclocking, I wasn’t exactly thrilled by this
speed. So I was quite enthusiastic to see what speeds would
the processor achieve with water-cooling. I managed to get
it to 950mhz, still 50 left to the magic number. But nothing
I did could get the CPU stable at 1Ghz. I called a friend to
me and he came over with his soldering iron. We had to
increase the voltage beyond the 1.85v that the Socket-A
motherboards are limited to. We followed this guide as seen here
and soldered a 22k ohm
resistor onto the motherboard to give us an increased
voltage. I increased the voltage to 2.05v and this got the
processor running perfectly stable @ 1000Mhz.
By now you probably
understand that you will void your warranty and you need to
be a bit crazy to do this. The procedure consists of
soldering a wire on one extremely small soldering pad right
between the AGP socket and the big capacitors right above.
One wrong move and you have a dead motherboard without
warranty, just to make things clear you do this completely
at your own risk and it’s not my fault if you kill your
motherboard.
If you really want to
push your CPU to it’s absolute maximum you will probably
need the extra voltage. So it’s up to you if you want to
take the risk of everything and might just achieve/loose
what you risked.
Of course, as I
already have mentioned this will void any warranty your CPU
and motherboard had, plus it will substantially reduce the
life expectancy of your CPU.
The sound of the two
Sunon fan’s where a bit to loud for me, but don’t fear!
I found a great guide on how to make a “variable fan
resistor” over at Ocmod.com.
Now what this lets you do is set the RPM of your Fan’s to
anything you like, from zero up to 100% I recommend anyone
who gets annoyed about her/his computers fan noise to make
this thing, just follow the link above.
Conclusion
The water cooler
comes in at $120. Now there are quite a few things to
consider when buying this cooler, one is that it will not be
obsolete in 6 months. And the other is that it will probably
fit any new processor socket design that comes out in the
following few years.
The other thing is if
it really “pays off” to buy this thing, well currently
you can get a Duron 700 for about $70 and a T-Bird 1000 with
a good HSF for around $180.Now if those two advantages are
worth more than the security of your computer is up to you
to decide. Leufkens
guarantee that there will be absolutely no water leaks if
you order one of their “complete” kits.
I found this product
to be very good, but a more safety conscious user might not
find the risk of leakage acceptable.
BTW,
Very big thanks goes out to Boby from 3DS Forums for helping
me with the grammar, if it wasn’t for him it would have
taken you the double time to read this and your probably
wouldn’t have understood a word =).
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