Enigma Project Part IV - Watercooling Stage I/Overclock

I appologize for those of you who were waiting for my continuation but alas my watercooling and overclock was put on hold. I guess overclocking a q6600 to 4ghz won’t be as easy as I first hoped. *Update* And now won’t happen with this processor.

The Cooling

And now to the cooling which definately does it’s job. Running the q6600 on a stock cooler just sucked but saving the money on an air system and waiting to start a small waterloop was well worth it. The trick here was how to position the loop in the case so I have some definate ideas and tips for you future P182 water coolers. First of I needed a place to put the swiftech 120mm rad and res combo. This case isn’t really designed for internal watercooling but my loop is so small I had to make it fit (not a fan of externals). The only place this worked was in the lower compartment. Once i got it mounted in I tried to place the pump between the PSU and rad which is JUST fit and ran it that way for a while. Problem was this created a quick kink in my tubing and the rad didn’t have a threadded mount that I could just get an elbow barb. After a couple of days of fighing I moved the pump to sit just below the video cards, the problem now is that gravity doesn’t carry the liquid from the res to the pump (not a good thing) and randomly I get air bubbles running through the pump. To date this is how it stands and the flow is good but I will probably get a second res above the pump to solve my random air problems.

The results? Even at 1.6v vcore and some prime my hottest core merely reaches 54C with an abient room temp of around 19C - 21C. It’s dissappointing I can’t clock it higher stably because at these temps I have so much headroom on my processor.

The Waterblock

All I can say with this is I’m definately glad I spent so much to get my Swiftech GTZ. None of the canadian suppliers I use had this in stock and from what I’ve read it is the best so I ordered it online from a place in the states. That alone made it more expensive for me at just past $100CAD. The bad part to this story, UPS charged me $30 in fees on top of my $10 taxes! Overall this block cost me a little over $150CAD to get which is considerably higher than it should have cost me. Moral of this story, get a GTZ, don’t ship UPS out of country (or sometimes in country for that matter).

The Pump

So in my inexperience and lack of proper research I bought the Swiftech MCP355. Don’t get me wrong, this baby keeps my loop running great and is a strong pump to use, but turns out they are a lot louder than I thought. One of the goals of this case was to be respectfully quiet, thus the Gelid fans, and the P182 case decision. Once I got it all back together and in my office I noticed quiet the hum coming from it, so I lowered the speed of my fans and noticed, it wasn’t my fans! The pump alone is louder than 3 other 120mm fans in my case! So now on my after build fix list is a new MCP350 which features the brushless fan and gives some 4 - 8db of extra silence.

The Overclock

The new ram is in! Well it was in a while ago, but I’m posting my results now :P. This will do me enough to continue until I order my next 4gb.

Sadly I can’t report any great news on the overclock. The ram definately was the holdback before, keeping me at a puny 3.1ghz, but no worries now. Corsair (as many of you know) churns out many high quality products and I was not dissappointed with these. They are running just over 1066mhz at 5-5-5-15 timings and I haven’t touched a thing yet.

But alas they only got me so far. Turns out I didn’t pay enough attention to the machine in the first place and my VID isn’t what I was hoping for at 1.325v. That alone means I won’t be touching the 4ghz mark like I originally wanted so once again I’ve hit a wall. Booting to 4ghz and higher is easy, but getting into windows requires just too much vcore. I was able to run a 3.7ghz (412 x 9) for considerable time but still cannot get this stable past a couple of hours.

So it seems the only stable clock I can constantly run is 3.6ghz at either an 8 or 9 multi. As anyone with a q6600 knows, this is pretty typical and from 2.4ghz I can’t really complain. Anything higher requires well past 1.6v on the cpu and I definately won’t be running that 24/7.

Now the gameplan is to wrap up this build as the parts for my next case mod are already on their way and soon I will be concentraiting on that one instead. I will need test parts for future cases so the q6600 has been considered for that job and a q9650 or qx9650 is in line to get enigma past that magical 4ghz mark.

And here is the final build without the side panel.

Go Back to Part III