Fan Speed Question

+1 to amuffin, however just because we can stick a closed loop cooler doesn't mean you achieve that magical overclocking goal of 4GHz without facing pandora. There are a lot of factors involved in going to that number.

* just remember to have the pump header off of a fan header on mobo that is set to run at maximum in BIOS, you could damage it by providing less power than it needs.

Yes, the pump header was previously connected to a sys fan header on the mobo, I plan to keep it that way. Here are the full specs.

MSI P45 Platinum Mobo
3.16 Ghz Core 2 Duo
Win7 64-bit Home Premium
16 GB DDR2 800
Palit GTX 260
Asetek CPU cooler
Ultra LSP 750w
1 x rad fan
6 x case fan
Scythe Kaze Master Pro Ace fan controller

I think I should be able to run a stable 4.0Ghz overclock with those components. Any comments are welcome.

Overclocking rarely is limited by the CPU cooler but rather by the user's ability to overclock and the components being used to do so. The issue isn't whether the Asetek cooler is going to allow you to reach 4.0ghz, it's whether or not your CPU and MB are well-suited to allow this and if you have the patience and understanding to go through the BIOS settings to get you where you want to be.

I have been pouring through the Core 2 OC guide for the last day or so. I have a pretty solid understanding of what is involved. I believe the Wolfdale and the MSI P45 are a well matched pair for the OC goal that I have.

Best answer selected by Kittrell.

The P45 doesn't support over 8GB of ram. Check with Intel and MSI. Like mentioned by Rubix - the chip may not allow you to go to that number...

I'm not sure where you got that from but the P45 chipset absolutely supports 16GB of DDR2 RAM. Perhaps you are thinking of the P35.

Sorry, thought that it had support for max 8GB, after all it was released soon after the X48.

How are those 16GB's populated on your mobo?

I couldn't tell you just yet. Currently running Vista-32, installing Win7-64 as we speak. I just got everything installed in the new case this evening.

???its a simple question, how are the dimms arranged..? 2x8GB? 4x2GB?

just remember to have the pump header off of a fan header on mobo that is set to run at maximum in BIOS

I haven't popped in the new ram yet, but it will be 4x4GB.

Hate to break the bad news, but you'll have a much tougher time reaching high OC's with all dimms populated and that too at max ram support. On top of that, if you manage to get your clocks right, tweaking them would be a PITA as the NB would dump a good amount of heat aka your memory controller.

The Win7 install made me want to slit my wrists. If I can't make it to 4.0, then I'll run whatever stable OC I can. That was just the goal on paper after reading through a lot of the Wolfdale threads.

I love Win7 x64 even more than I loved XP SP3 back in the day. Windows 7 has been one of the best Microsoft OS releases ever, if not the best.

What are you having issues with when it comes to Win7?

I agree, I have Win7 Ultimate on another machine and love it. Just the OEM install from Vista-32 did not want to happen. I had to employ quite a bit of trickery to get the install dvd to boot. Up and running and installing updates now.

I avoided Vista and held out for Win7. I've heard nothing but nightmares about it until they released the SP's for it which ultimately was to try and convert as much Vista code into Win7 code.

Best choice would be to take a backup of as much data that you can keep, format and clean install Windows 7 and copy your backup data back in.

Yeah, it's already done. I did a clean sweep of the HDD. Required going from 32-bit to 64-bit.

Yeah, I too made the jump from XP ~> 7 never felt better, thought vista was crap(courtesy of a pals installation needs) and what Rubix said is spot on, clean installs are the way to go with 7, vista also likes to throw any rotten vegetables at you whenever you want to migrate...Just an FYI in-case you do this with any other machines.

I think I have a happy tower at 3.70 Ghz. 4.0 would not even boot, 3.9 was intermittent. 3.8 would boot but I had what I think was a RAM failure 1 hour into the load test. I ran one 13 hour load test at 3.75 with no issues. I don't like to run on the edge of stability so I dropped it down to 3.70 Ghz. Currently running a 24 hour burn test on it, I do not expect any issues. CPU temps do not go past 58 degrees at 100% load. It's running smooth as silk right now.