If you’d asked me a couple months ago, I would have said I’d never buy Intel chip. That was before Core 2 Duo benchmarks came out. Ironically, sitting on my desk right now is an E6300 and I couldn’t be happier.
After a week of abysmal computing on an old HP laptop that barely has enough oomph to run instant messaging and a web browser at the same time, I recieved my relief in the form of a package on Monday afternoon.
Day 1
Without much trouble, I went through the task of assembling all my new goodies. First I dropped the CPU in. Those Core 2 Duos are really tiny compared to my Athlon XP chip. I also like that they cover the actual silicon with a cover so that you can’t crack the core while installing the heatsink.
Next came the whopping heatsink. You can’t appreciate the size until you hold it in your hands. You know what they say about a man? Big heatsink means…ahh, I’ll let you finish it. The heatsink instructions could’ve been a bit more clear, but I managed.
The rest of the install was pretty tedious. I took my time getting the board in the case. I’ll admit I got a little antsy and finished the rest of the install out in a hurry. I didn’t bother to route cables very cleanly, I just wanted to make sure it’d turn on.
To my surprise, Windows actually booted fine even with the significant hardware changes. In my past experiences, it freaked out pretty bad and I had to reinstall. Ubuntu, however, refused to boot fully. Not a problem since I hadn’t had more than a day or two to do anything in it. I would later decide to move my OS partitions around anyway.
I did start messing around with the overclocking options on Monday, but I ran into some trouble and it actually worried me that I had gotten some bad components. For awhile, it wasn’t getting past memory detection and a lot of times I’d reboot itself a few times before posting. I researched it and found I just needed to disable some options in the BIOS. It turns out they have stuff in place to prevent you from frying your chip, go figure. It was getting late so I retired for the night.
Day 2
I knew that when I bought the motherboard it only had 1 IDE port and thus only supported 2 IDE devices. That meant I was going to have to lose some components as I had 2 IDE hard drives and 2 IDE DVD drives. What I ended up doing was getting rid of my old 40GB drive completely and putting the DVD-RW and 120GB on the IDE. I also had just gotten a USB to SATA/IDE adapater so I put my other DVD drive on that.I cleaned up my cables and I’m pretty happy with how it looks now. Finally, I’ve got SATA ports (6 of em actually), I am itching to get rid of those cumbersome IDE ribbon cables. The case would be so much cleaner without them.
The next item on my list was installing my OS’es on my SATA drive. First Windows, which installed impressively quickly. It was only about 20 minutes. During the install I was wandering back and forth between my roommate’s room and mine, so I wasn’t sitting at the desk waiting to move to the next step of the installation right away either.
With Windows up and running I could start messing with my overclock. After figuring out what to set in the BIOS, I was off. I tried a 300MHz FSB which it laughed at. It hit 320 without a hitch. I bumped it to 350 and it was fine. So right now I’ve got my 1.86GHz (1066MHz FSB) chip running at 2.45GHz (1400MHz FSB) and I’m pretty sure I’m not done yet. I did some initial testing by running Super Pi and playing some WoW. It didn’t even hiccup. Granted, I haven’t fully put it through it’s paces nor have I checked out my idle and load temperatures, but I’d be happy with a free ~600MHz and a 333MHz bump in FSB.
As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve read these chips hit over 3GHz on stock cooling. My goal is running the RAM at spec (400MHz) which would mean the chip would be at 2.8GHz. If I can get it stable and cool enough at that I’ll be happy, but I know I’m going to push it as far as I can go.
I hit another roadblock when it came to getting Ubuntu installed though. It turns out there’s a flaw in the Linux kernel so that it doesn’t recognize any IDE drives. That means when you boot the live CD, it just dies shortly after starting. I looked into it a bit and it seems there is a patch in one of the beta kernels around right now. Something about IDE actually using the SATA bus is what I read. Anyway, that means I’m going to have to find a different way to install Linux. I have been doing some reading this morning and found that I may be able to use my USB card reader to do the install, but I’ll have to wait until I’m off work to try anything.
On a side note, Rick and I saw Unearth and Bleeding Through on Sunday and they killed it. I even took home a few marks of battle. As soon as I get a chance, I’ll post photos.
