Thanks Jason. I got her over 4.0 at 1.63v (1.6625 dialed in and she boots at 1.63) Nailed a nice SperPi as well with a million backgrongd programs running. I'll post in my thread with the details but the strap was the answer.

Glad that worked for you, buddy. I haven't been able to get the higher MHZ to run stable but, as I said earlier, I do think that's the key.

Right now I'm playing around with with the QX6850. VERY difficult to overclock.

Running Prime95 on four cores for two hours at 1.40 GHz there were few errors. Raising CPU voltage to 1.525, temperatures remained moderate and there were no errors after running 2 hours:

Improved SuperPi score a bit by using 333 MHz Northbridge strapping instead of 266:

12.672s

Just got my eye on this post. Nice piece of rig mate!

Alphacool reservoir and LED's (mount inside drill holes in Lucite back of res). Fittings by Bitspower.


Replacing coolant with Fluid XP. I used the larger EK res I was replacing to flush the radiator and loop with distilled water before adding new coolant and smaller, bay mounted res. By replacing the large, cylindrical res with the bay mounted res, I was able to add a second HDD caddy.


Alphacool res installed. Flooding loop


Removing Thermaltake PSU. Installing new PC P&C 860W


New res and two drive bays in place (one housing four raptors; the second containing a couple 1TB Barracudas)

Example of the couplers simplifying maintenance. Res in and out with new Tygon in under five minutes without draining loop:


By jmkays, shot with NIKON D2Xs at 2008-02-25

Temperatures inexplicably spiked this week 15 - 20C. At first I suspected the recently added couplers, suspecting a more marked PSI drop since this is a single loop/one pump. The couplers had nothing to do with the problem. PC Ice had everything to do with it!

Dye residue left from the old PC Ice coolant both clogged the CPU waterblock and took out a new pump. Fluid XP is so effective that it purges residue left by other coolants in the system. It dislodged the dye gook in the Tygon left by PC Ice when I switched coolants two weeks ago.

There wasn't much residue left in the Tygon, but it doesn't take much to clog the D-Tek CPU wblock. That's not a criticism of the Fuzion; there simply isn't much clearance between the mid-plate in the wblock and the channeled base. The pin cushion channel base clogs quickly when there's an impurity in the line and there isn't much clearance for the coolant to exit with clogged channel.

The Fuzion was almost completely obstructed by dye residue left from the PC Ice coolant. PC Ice is getting a phone call tomorrow. An expensive Petra's Tech Laing pump was also a casualty -- it gunked up the rotor so badly that it reduced effectiveness and damaged the motor.

Last time I had a problem with PC Ice dyes it was partially my fault, because I mixed two dyes -- regular and UV. This time there was only one dye used and it wasn't a UV formulation.

That's two big strikes against PC Ice in my book: (1) it's very much conductive, despite claims to the contrary (I've lost more than one video card after leaks); (2) the dye formulation was poorly executed and separates from solution, wreaking havoc with the pump and waterblocks.

What this meant was $40.00 worth of Tygon was trash canned along with 5 hours of labor to replace the Tygon, clean wblocks and reassemble and replace the pump.

On a brighter note, with all new Tygon and pump, the Q6600 is back online at her old operating temps:

Cant you just run pure distilled water with some sort of additive to stop algae buildup??

I considered that, Paul -- after the disaster with PC Ice. The problem is that distilled water would do nothing to get the crap left by the PCI out of the radiators. Fluid XP is promoted as helping flush pollutants from the line. So far it appears to be doing just that.

Flow rate and PSI seem back to where they were, so doesn't appear that the Thermochill radiator was a loss -- just the pump and Tygon.