Widescreen Gaming Forum

Looking good! Temps seem to be pretty much at the threshold of acceptable. It's a pretty fine overclock as it is, anything more I guess would be 'just to see' rather than running it like that 24/7.

Gonna be keeping an eye on my monies anyway ... :P

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Formerly eZ`

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The 940 is NOT the same chip as the 920 right now, Its getting phased out and getting replaced by the 950 for the same price with a higher clock speed, using the same chip that the 920 has now.

If that's the case, then you are comparing the 950 to the 920, not the 940, which IS the same chip, just higher bin/settings spec. Also, I said the same PHYSICALLY. If a chip is physically the same, but is clocked and multiplied differently, it still gets back to the point I'm making, that it's achieved because it's passed thermal testing better, NOT because it's any different in physical design.

In fact, if anything, what you just said further validates the point I made. Many have complained about the 940 being double the price of the 920, but this tends to verify it's more capable than they were originally specing it to, and likely more stable for a longer period of time than the 920.

To be honest though, I really don't think that's the reason Intel is making this move with both the 940 (and 965 as I've just read whilst writing this). With such a minor increase in speed (3.06GHz, up from 2.93GHz), it's more likely they're avoiding the counter productive mindset that the 940 wasn't even a full 3GHz. Pushing it slightly over that is like consumer psychology I tend to think.

So you have what is essentially the same chip clocked ever so slightly higher, and suddenly Intel gets a sales boost from higher advertised spec and vendors being able to keep the price longer without dropping it due to this so called "new" chip,...very clever. One has to wonder with an odd speed like 2.93GHz on the 940 if they planned this all along.

There is a new 920 stepping out that is supposed to run a bit cooler and has shown better overclocking results.

Bad for old owners but good for those looking to buy now, its the same stepping the new top i7 model will use (the extreme) but only the 920 so far has gotten it.

For cooling your OC down, not sure what cooler that is you have but the Thermalright Ultra 120 was one of the best coolers I could find when I built my rig and it keeps my Q6600 ice cold even in a case without a whole lot of airflow (P182 SE) fans are important.

Also there is a new cooling compound on the block! ICD7 or ICD24 (innovative cooling diamond) it has shown very good results so far, better than AS5 by a good margin and its also non conductive. So maybe look into a tube of this stuff. I have a tube to install on my GPU//CPU in my new laptop when I get in in a couple of weeks.

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Hey Vicious, not seen you about for a bit. ;)

I've got the D0 stepping i7 920. I'm using a lapped TRUE120, too. :) I didn't know about that new thermal compound. I might give it a shot when I stick this chip under water.

...

I was coming back to this thread anyway, as I've just pulled the Akasa Amber fans I was running and replaced them with Scythe Kaze Jyuni 1900RPM ones. Noise at full speed has obviously gone up, but ambient temps have gone up about 5*C here in the last week, and my load temps were a lot higher than I liked because of it. At full speed the new fans are fairly loud... although the sound is simply the 'whoosh' of air rather than anything else. When I turn 'em down to minimum, they're quieter than the other fans were, while maintaining similar temps to the old fans. But at full clip, load temps are down a full 15*C... which says that the biggest cooling problem for the old fans was simply CFM.

Yeah innovative cooling started giving away some of the compound to get there name out. They happened to let me be one of the few to get the big tube the ICD24, and the stuff is pretty amazing, every poster so far has reported huge drops in temp from stock TIM and even semi large drops over AS5.

Plus I like the fact its non conductive. The stuff is like 97% diamond dust or something, and since diamond is like the most dense substance on earth it has very good thermal transfer properties.

Its also very thick, so people have used it to replace not only TIM on cores, but thermal pads on ram chips. So for my notebook I plan to give it a shot and replace the pads & core tim with it.

I gotta look up this cooler your both using, see if its similar/better than the Ultra 120 I have.

Im out of funds so no i7 for me but I am still very happy with my 3.6ghz Q6600 and dual 4850 setup. I think it can hold out for 2 years so I can get a larger upgrade.

Im looking forward to SSD prices droping to something more sane too. I have been tempted to pick up a OCZ Vertex or G. Skill Falcon 120gb model for $300 for my notebook, but talk myself out of it before I hit "buy".

Oh the new notebook :P

Q9000 @ 2.7ghz (mobile quadcore) and dual 4870s :P lovin it. Now I can game and encode on the go as if I was on my desktop. Its not a big ugly brick like most other high performance laptops eather, and its cool & quite.

Asus W90VP-A1

Edit: Nevermind about the TRUE 120, I found out what it was, its the same one I have just never seen it abbreviated as TRUE 120 before. I was lucky and got the extreme right when it first came out pretty cheap.

Mine is paired with a 1600rpm s-flex fan seems to be a popular choice, and it blows right out into another one that is my top exhaust.

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I've got the D0 stepping i7 920.

This is no doubt why it's common to see people running the 920s at 4GHz with no problems now. I don't like that there's no clear cut way of telling whether you'll get a CO or DO stepped CPU though.

What Intel SHOULD have done is put DO stepping on all 3 i7 models, renamed them 930, 950, 975, and clocked them at 2.9Ghz, 3.1GHz, and 3.4GHz.

the DO is supposed to be a bit better at overclocking, but by no means a land slide from what I read.

Basically you woul want one if you were buying now but if you had the older one already you shouldnt lose any sleep over it.

But yeah a 4ghz OC sounds so nice, given that the i7 is clock for clock faster than my q6600 and an extra 400mhz OC that would increase my video encoding time by a good degree.

I cant wait to see what comes next and hope it overclocks as well as these do.

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The only slight negative I've ever read about the i7s is that they can leave data lingering in cache momentarily in some calculations, keeping them from achieving their full potential. I suspect that may have been partly to do with the drivers and/or developer threading for them needing to be perfected just after their release though.

To tell you the truth, I'm not sure even the 32nm versions will be much better in performance, except to offer a bit more overhead for extreme OCing. As far as speed goes, I'd rather they offer higher stock speeds in the non extreme versions like we saw in the Core 2 Duos. I don't really like the idea of cranking them up a lot.

One would think that once quads become the norm, we won't have to keep paying a MHz penalty for the extra cores.

For now they wont because they are still cashing in on it, many people out there are still in the mindset faster dual core = better than slower quad.

Once the slower people catch on and start overclocking the quads maybe it will change :P but thats never going to happen, members of a tech enthusiast forum like ourselves are the small minority.

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Actually I think quads will become the norm soon enough, maybe about the time video stores rent more Blu-ray than DVD. One of the reasons I don't like or get into the OCing obsession much is it sets a trend for manufacturers to let the consumer clock them up, rather than doing it themselves. On the one hand, with the OCing trend you get better, more lenient warranties across the industry, esp on GPUs, but you pay for it in heavily dumbed down core speeds on CPUs.

IMO you should if you want be able to go out and pick parts that match up just fine without having to OC to avoid bottlenecks or sacrificing speed of the GPU just to match the abysmally clocked multi core CPUs. To be honest I'm seriously considering getting a 3.6GHz dual core CPU and spend a lot less dough because besides this kind of annoyance there's the fact that more and more PC games are just written and/or ported so lousy. It makes me feel stupid sometimes for taking part in PC gaming so much.

But hey, EA claims PC is the fastest growing platform for gaming lately, mostly due to digital download sales. Hmmm, wait a minute, that IS EA talking, the ones that make idiotic decisions for such type of marketing then go out of their way to try and recoup what they lost. You know, like the 100s of thousands of copies of Crysis that were stolen off their nifty predownload servers that didn't even work properly for paying customers. :roll:

Sorry to sound like a stick in the mud, but I was anticipating 2009 to be a great year for PC titles, and so far it's been anything but that for me.