[Rob Babcock]

I've been thinking of building a new PC lately as the one I use for most daily stuff is getting a little long in the tooth.  On paper the new Conroe looks unassailable, on pretty much every level.  Has anyone here actually built (or even bought) a machine with any of the new dual core Intels?

[randytsuch]

No, but I have been thinking about it too.  Will probably wait until early next year to build my machine.
If you are willing to overclock it, I don't think you can beat the bang for the buck of a lower end conroe, OC'ed.

But, it also depends on what you are going to use the PC for.  I want more horsepower for video rendering, and I think the conroe will but a fair amount faster than what I have now.  (an OC'ed P4 running at almost 3G)

Randy

[Brad]

I have the core duo chip in my laptop - it is pretty darn fast.   HP NC8430

We also just upgraded our video processing workstation to an E6600 Core 2 Duo - made for a nice drop in our rendering times.


Nothing overclocked.
Not a lot of empirical data for you, but hope it helps.

[Rob Babcock]

Thanks.  I'm not really interested in overclocking- I want stability and low temps, not the last spasm of speed.  Bone stock it should crush my antiquated 2.7 Gig Celeron!

[randytsuch]

Thanks.  I'm not really interested in overclocking- I want stability and low temps, not the last spasm of speed.  Bone stock it should crush my antiquated 2.7 Gig Celeron!

OK, it will crush your 2.7G Celery.  But one of the very nice things about the Core 2's is their overclocking abilities (at least it's nice to me  ).

The low end core 2's seem to be able to OC to speeds as fast, if not faster than their much more expensive brothers.  A 30% overclock on air is not an unreasonable expectation.  You can even overclock with the stock heatsink, although I am planning to get something better, probably a Scythe Ninja or something similiar.

I have been overclocking since for many year, started with a 300 MHZ celery that could hit 450HMZ, no problem.

For stability, I run torture tests, to make sure my system is stable, as I do value stability.  If I run into any hiccups on the tests, than I will back off the overclock until I can run the tests for many hours (or overnight) with no problems.

Randy

[ricmon]

I built one and the entire upgrade including mobo was about $300.00.  Runs great no problems.

[Rob Babcock]

Any suggestions for a MoBo with software overclocking?  I don't wanna have to mess with manually stepping up the voltage if I O.C.

[boead]

I recently gave birth to a new Frankenstein PC.

It’s benching more then 102% faster then a P4XE at 3.73 GHz which is about as fast as an Intel Duo T3000 at 2.5GHz which debuted in the Apple Mac recently. Its 63% faster then AMD’s fastest duel core FX2-62 at 2.8GHz in standard ALU/Whetstone ratings.

With multimedia extensions, its 302% faster then the P4XE, 408%Intel Duo T3000 and 276% faster then the AMD FX2-62.
Hard drives are equivalent in speed to a SCSI-3 10k Quantum Atlas used in servers and high end workstations.

Video and audio editing is frightening fast. Multitasking is fluid.  I wish I could overclock my Zen Select 



Intel Core2 Duo (E6400), Intel i965p/ICH8R chipsets
Swiftech water cooled dual radiators. 6 fan speed controller, quiet operation.

3.60 GHz, 1800MHz FSB, 450MHz Memory

2GB DDR2 Low Latency 4-4-4-12 (G.Skills)

(2) 400GB SATA-II (3.0GB/sec) RAID-1, NCQ (Maxtor DiamondMAX-11)

ATI X1900XTX PCIe16x video, 512MB DDR3
Dual DVI/HD, VIVO and HiDef component output.

Asus P5B-Delux WiFi mainboard:
Dual LAN GB/sec, WiFi 802, USB2, Firewire, External SATA-2, 7.1 Hi Definition Audio (24/192), Optical and Coaxial Outputs. Supports Crossfire.
 


Water Cooler setup but not primed.












This machine is SO FAST it’s scary! 


Software overclocks don’t give up nearly as much as hardware in most cases. However, the Asus board has ALL the BIOS support and software for all sorts of overclocking and fan control in Windows.

The Core2 chips get VERY HOT when overclocking because they require LOTS of voltage. At stock clock the voltage requirements are low, very low actually and heat is not an issue but once you start raising the voltage the heat literally climbs beyond anything I’ve experienced before. The good news is that the CPU are built for it, temps in the high 60’s C is not just tolerable it’s expected. For any amount of reasonable overclock you must have an aftermarket cooler of some kind and a well ventilated case.

[jermmd]

 
Very nice!

[randytsuch]

Any suggestions for a MoBo with software overclocking?  I don't wanna have to mess with manually stepping up the voltage if I O.C.

Hi Rob
Did not see this question before.
I think most of the big enthusists MB makers have SW overclocking.  As Boead showed with his very nice PC, the ASUS MB's overclock very well, and they do have SW overclocking.  But, there are many forums where you can find you how to overclock a PC, and this probably gives you more control over what you want to do.  However, I have never played with the new ASUS SW overclocking, so I am not sure how much they can do now.

There is a nice review of P965 MB's here
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2860

One other thing.  Is there a Fry's out by you?  I just saw their Sunday ad, they have the 6400 with a cheap P4M800 with AGP video for $200.  I was going to wait, but I might pull the trigger on this.  MB is basically free, $200 is a good price for just a 6400.  Probably the OEM version, so you need to get a heatsink for it.  I will probably use this MB for now, and upgrade later to a 965 MB with PCIE graphics.

Randy

[Rob Babcock]

No Fry's around here.  There's a M&P shop I buy a lot of stuff at, with most big purchases from Newegg.  Probably by the beginning of next year I'll be ready to build one, as I'm getting tired of this ol' pig.

[randytsuch]

No Fry's around here.  There's a M&P shop I buy a lot of stuff at, with most big purchases from Newegg.  Probably by the beginning of next year I'll be ready to build one, as I'm getting tired of this ol' pig.

To bad about Fry's.  I went during lunch, and picked it up.  And, it was a retail, boxed E6400, with the ECS motherboard.  Good deal for $200.  I was going to buy a Scythe or Thermalright heatsink, but now I think I will just try it with the stock heatsink, and see how loud and hot it gets with that one.

I will probably upgrade the MB and heatsink later, maybe next year.

Randy

[Rob Babcock]

A guy I work with was just talking up Fry's today.  Yeah, shame we don't have one anywhere's near close.

[bubba966]

Was looking at Frys website and they dont' seem to sell mobo's & CPU's on their site.

Kinda sucks.

I wish the one we have in the area was closer. It's a good hour away if traffic is non-existant. And that rarely ever happens... 

[randytsuch]

So I installed my new 6400 and MB last night.  winXP installed fine, but then I started to get errors when I was installing other programs.  Not good.   I was wondering what was wrong, and it was definitey acting flakey.  But it was late, so I gave up for the night.

I was wondering if the cheap MB was the problem, I even looked at new MB's at work today, but to get a decent MB, I would also need to get a new PCIE video card, and I should get a better heatsink as well, more than I wanted to pay right now.

Came home, and started to change things.  I thought it might be because I was using a sata drive as the main windows drive, so I changed to an ide drive, but same problem.  Could not even install windows anymore.  I had changed to some ddr2 I have bought cheap from another frys sale a while back.  This MB supports both ddr2 and ddr rams.  So, I pulled the ddr sticks from my old mb, and threw them in. No more problems.  I put back in the sata drive (it seems to be faster), and everything installs fine.

I may play with the ddr2 some more, maybe see of a bios update can make them work, but for now I am happy.  PC is working fine with my old ddr sticks, and it is noticiably faster.

One of the main reasons for upgrading was to reduce my video rendering times.  I use Tmpgenc in highest quality motion mode, dual pass VBR.  This is the best quality mode, but it used to take almost 20 hours to render one tape.  I played with it tonight, and it looks like my new 6400 will cut the time in half.  Old machine as a 2.4g P4, overclocked to run over 2.9 g.  And my 6400 is running at stock speeds.  This mb has very, very limited ocing capabilities, but I will try what it has soon.

For now, I am very happy with the results of my $200 investment.  Sometime in the future, I will probably buy a better mb, heatsink and video card, so I can do some serious overclocking, but for now, this was a nice upgrade.

Randy

[mjosef]

I have the ECS P965T-A motherboard, and had problems booting, turns out the old power supply I had on hand couldn't cut it with this MB, had to buy those newer PS with dual 12V rails. I cheaped out on the CPU, went with the Pentium D, figured by spring next year the Core 2 prices would be more in my price range.

[randytsuch]

I have the ECS P965T-A motherboard, and had problems booting, turns out the old power supply I had on hand couldn't cut it with this MB, had to buy those newer PS with dual 12V rails. I cheaped out on the CPU, went with the Pentium D, figured by spring next year the Core 2 prices would be more in my price range.

I thought about getting a Pentium D, the 805, since they are so cheap, but I decided to wait and get a core 2, and then when I saw the 6400 with a MB for $200, could not pass it up.

BTW, for anyone who wants a good memory test, go here
http://www.memtest86.com/

They have an iso file, that you can use to make a bootable cd rom.  Then, you just need to set you cd rom as the first boot drive in your bios, and it will just come up and run.

Even with my DDR ram, I am getting memtest errors, but not that many.  I guess that is why it appears to work fine with the DDR sticks.  So now, I am going into the bios, and relaxing the ram timiings, one by one, to see if I can get the memtest to pass all the time.  Seems to be getting better, but still getting a few errors.  I want to be able to run memtest overnight with no errors, then I will know that my ram is solid.

Randy

[shokunin]

Even with my DDR ram, I am getting memtest errors, but not that many.  I guess that is why it appears to work fine with the DDR sticks.  So now, I am going into the bios, and relaxing the ram timiings, one by one, to see if I can get the memtest to pass all the time.  Seems to be getting better, but still getting a few errors.  I want to be able to run memtest overnight with no errors, then I will know that my ram is solid.

A lot of memory I see these days need more voltage or the mobo is undervolting a little.  Try upping the memory voltage .1v and rerun the tests. 

[randytsuch]

Even with my DDR ram, I am getting memtest errors, but not that many.  I guess that is why it appears to work fine with the DDR sticks.  So now, I am going into the bios, and relaxing the ram timiings, one by one, to see if I can get the memtest to pass all the time.  Seems to be getting better, but still getting a few errors.  I want to be able to run memtest overnight with no errors, then I will know that my ram is solid.

A lot of memory I see these days need more voltage or the mobo is undervolting a little.  Try upping the memory voltage .1v and rerun the tests. 

Thanks for the advice.  I ended up having to up the mem voltage .2v to make it pass, but it seems to be solid now.  I am going to let it run overnight, just to make sure.  I was not expecting to need to up the mem voltage, since I am not even oc'ing the PC at this time. 

Randy