Building And Overclocking
DIYPC's Adventurer case is quite spacious and well appointed, and our build came together very easily. In the last few years I've really gotten the sense that case manufacturers have figured out the fundamentals of constructing an easy-to-assemble, spaceous enclosure, and I'm rarely disappointed anymore. Everything fit without incident, and if I have to complain it would be that the Adventurer's top removable fan grille mechanism is too easy to trigger when working with it, causing it to pop out until you pop it back in. That is nitpicking, but it's all I can grumble about.
After the initial assembly it became apparent that the ID Cooling SE-213 CPU cooler was not included in the shipment, and was sitting in our Culver city office. I went ahead and ran the benchmarks at stock settings by using a reference cooler I had lying around, and waited for the model I ordered to arrive in order to capture the temperature readings and overclocked results.
The ID-213 cooler showed up at my doorstep two days before publishing this article. Essentially this is a cooler built with native support for AMD's dual-point mounting system, with an adapter that adds a dual-point mounting bracket to Intel boards. It seems like an elegant solution, similar to aftermarket models that were available some years ago, and I installed it without incident.
...or so I thought. The cooler did require some pressure in order to seat it properly. At the time it didn't seem like any more than usual, but the system was hesitant to boot after the install. After four or five tries I was able to start it up and take the stock temperature measurements with the SE-213 cooler. Thinking I was out of the woods, I began the overclocking procedure. That's when it became apparent that the system would no-longer co-operate. It refused to boot despite a cleared CMOS no matter how many times I tried.
If you put together enough systems, sooner or later you'll run into a show stopping problem. I'm hesitant to lay blame on a specific component because I haven't even had time to properly diagnose the issue.
Ideally,I'll have time to fix the problem and run the overclock tests in the future, at which time I will update the article. I'll need to figure out what's faulty in order to make sure the system winner gets a working machine. Until then, though, we'll have to be content with the stock results alone.
