From: Dnali Anabuki
oh I do covet thy machine! And it answers a question I had about SLI..I can do two cards but have put off putting in the second one.
If you're using crossfire then you might be ok. I don't know if SL is crossfire friendly, I do know that there are claims out there that ATI opengl support is more reliable than Nvidia.
From: Dnali Anabuki
and maybe hope for the super fast internet our provider says is in the works.
I've got super fast internet, I don't know how quickly SL streams for you, I do know I spend (typically) several minutes waiting for everything to update after a teleport, and I've got my network bandwidth set to 1500 (I'm assuming that's kilobits). A faster connection may not help you any. I seem to recall SL loading faster in the old days, so perhaps they're running short on bandwidth, or it could be somewhere between them and me.
From: Dnali Anabuki
I'm not familiar with that motherboard usually sticking to ASUS cause that is what I know.
Can you tell me more about it?
XFX is just another company that produces reference board hardware. Their 780i motherboard is a reference nvidia board. I suspect they're just someone else with a different badge and a tendency to sell enthusiast targeted hardware.
From: Dnali Anabuki
My Athlon 64 is 2.4 gigahertz...any hints on how to overclock it? It is supposed to be overclock friendly but I find it hard to understand the process. I have a system that is so well aircooled it feels like a refrigerator when you touch the case so I should be able to tweak this a bit but really don't know how. Can you direct me to the best place to find out?
Before you do anything, understand that overclocking will void any (if you still have one) warranty you have, and furthermore, if you've never done it before chances are unless you go for only a mild overclock (say 10-20%) you will almost certainly fry your hardware. I have a box somewhere of fried, cracked, bent, or otherwise destroyed CPUs from years of doing it (someday I want to turn them into keychains). Even if you don't fry anything, overclocking anything WILL shorten its lifespan. A CPU that would normally operate seven years before failing might fail in a year, or even shorter, if you push it hard.
Google overclocking. Check out anandtech, hardocp, and for video, guru3d. There're many guides out there.
I'll try to give you a place to start, but if you toast something listening to me I won't take responsibility.
I couldn't tell you if your CPU is multiplier locked. Most CPUs are, limiting you to whatever their maximum multiplier is (you can always underclock). Intel Extreme Edition CPUs are unlocked (it's part of the reason they cost so much), and AMD CPUs used to be as well until to many people got shafted with illegally rebadged processors.
In any case, the best method of overclocking, if your hardware can support it, is to push the bus speed higher. This is both the best gain method and the riskiest. Higher bus speeds equals more throughput between devices on the bus, a corresponding boost in cpu speed (cpu speed is determined by the bus speed times the multiplier (in most cases)), and ram speed. The risk comes from the fact that most hardware out there does NOT like operating faster than it was designed to (ram in particular doesn't appreciate it, if you've got generic ram in your machine, don't mess with the bus speeds, or, and this is way beyond the scope of a beginner guide, learn how to relax your ram timings to allow faster refresh). A faster bus will affect everything. There are newer motherboards (the 780i for example) that allow independent timings between the CPU bus, the PCI bus (and PCIe), and the ram bus, which is great if you can only overclock by playing with bus speeds. But be forewarned, disparate speeds between the various buses can result in bottlenecks that impare performance worse than just leaving things alone. If you can do it, it's better to have everything talking at the same rate.
This brings us to heat. The faster you push things, the more noise you generate on the bus, in the ram, and within the cpu. So that the signals remain clear, you raise the voltages. This applies in particular to your CPU and ram. Other peripherals tend to be more forgiving (video card, chipset, etc). Raising the voltage means more waste heat. None of the hardware these days is 100% efficient, a good portion of the electricity is lost as heat, and heat needs to go somewhere or things start to melt. Air cooling, in particular for AMD's as they have always run hot, is limited in terms of heat dissipation. Air is innefficent as a heat sink. You can compensate by using bigger heat sinks (more surface area to transfer heat) and faster (more cubic feet per minute) louder fans, but air has a very sharp curve of diminishing returns. Water, on the other hand, is much much more efficient at pulling heat away from your cpu. It also allows you essentially unlimited surface with which to transfer heat into your room (bigger radiators + slower but larger fans = quieter but still more efficient and effective cooling). Check out some of the hardware available at dangerden for examples of water cooling.
A typical bus-based overclocking session consists of, with paper and pen handy to record results, you increase bus speed a little (say one hertz if your motherboad supports it). Test your machine (using something that stresses ram and cpu (prime 95 is about the best for this, it can kill stock speed machines otherwise considered stable), if it remains stable, you raise bus again. Keep doing so, in small increments, until you reach a point that strange things begin to happen (blue screens, lockups, etc). Then you raise voltages (look to both ram and CPU), test, if stable, raise speed, test, if unstable raise voltage, and so on. Most motherboards that support these settings won't allow you to push voltages to high, but even so it's still possible to fry your hardware. Do research on what others have done before, find out what limits you have in terms of voltage to your ram and cpu before you're risking the magic smoke escaping.
Good luck.
