Request for comments

[Thund3rball]

That M3A and 5000+ BE is SO tempting. I have had my eye on that combo as an upgrade for a couple weeks. But I think the budget is going towards a new laptop instead. You will have to let us know more about that board and how your OC goes :)

Cheers

[low351]

I got most of my parts last night, I started the build and took some pics. I'll prolly post them here tonight.


Hey thunder, I took some special pics of the M3A. The AMD X2 5000+ BE is soo sweet I might leave my 6400+ in for my wife and keep it just for the pure overclocking pleasure. I didn't get my Mushkin yet though so I put it together with a stick of, ugh, Value Ram. Plus I want the Arctic Silver to cure before attempting an OC. I should get the memory today since NCIX was kind enough to airmail it.

First impressions... Holy Cow! The Sycthe Ninja Plus Rev B. is a M-O-N-S-T-E-R, I can't imagine what the Sunbeam Tuniq is like... And another thing, it's AM2 clip needs so much pressure you feel like you are going to put the CPU through the motherboard. They shoulda back plated this sucker.

I'm tending to my bleeding fingers... More later.

[low351]

Update: Having a devil of a time with this. I have bad luck when it comes to OC attempts. I wasn't too bright though, I did the overclock settings on the tail end of a windows update. So when it locked on reboot I thought it was my OC, nope, just the M3A with a lockup problem. General consensus is that it's network drivers or something. I've updated to a beta bios now and have a trick, unplug the psu for about 15 secs, to get it too boot.

Here's a quick pic of the installed components.

[JephDiesel]

Good job with the cable management, you shouldn't have any problems keeping that case cool. Keep us updated on the overclock, the 5000+ BE is a pretty deadly CPU with lots of potential. Personally I would keep the 5000+ BE for myself, you should be able to overclock to 3.2 Ghz with decent cooling.

As for the wife's computer it looks like a perfect candidate for a Phenom upgrade down the road if AMD can ever get the bugs sorted out with their B3 steppings. Anyone else praying for a Phenom Quad Core BE that performs and overclocks as good as the 5000+ BE?

[BALISTX]

The rig looks awesome. Nice cable management. My CM690 is on its way. I got a question for though, do you think there is enough room in that case to mount an Accelero S1 to the video card?

Anyone else praying for a Phenom Quad Core BE that performs and overclocks as good as the 5000+ BE?

That would be nice but I don't think you won't see that until the new stepping comes out.

[low351]

"I is stupid!" It's funny how muddled you can get when you're excited about something. I was puzzled by the inclusion of stand-offs with no screws with this case. Even went down and teefed a few from an old case to secure the motherboard. I noted that they were large threads too, hmm, get a clue?

Look at my own picture of the inside of the case. All the screws are stowed along the drive cages. there must be 40. And I was bitching. Can you say Oron-May.

Another thing about the screws too. Someone mistakenly pointed out that this is not a truly tooless case since you have to secure the Optical drive on the back side due to the lack of a clamp. They must be taking the same drugs I was. There's no need. The drive bay grabs and holds the optical drive snuggly all you need is the clamp on the frontside to stop it from sliding back an forth. That way you only have to unclamp with one panel off to get the drive in and out. It is tooless.

Jeph, thanks for the compliment, I fried my IDE burner by being impatient so I've even replaced that ugly black IDE cable with a sleek SATA since I bought an SATA burner as a replacement.

Your right about keeping the 5000+ for myself, I have done as you suggested. It's much more fun to play with the 5000+ overhead than the 6400+. I left the 6400+ in the Elite 330 for my wife and I overclocked the 5000+ to just over 3.2Ghz using a 14x multiplier and 229 FSB, this also gets me just over the 900Mhz mark on the Mushkins which I heard can be pushed over 1000Mhz if you reduce the timings to 5-5-5-15 from 4-4-4-12 but I wanted to keep the timings. I didn't leave it there though since I was having that trouble with the network drivers. Once I see that it's stable with the drivers now I'll overclock again.

Balistx, I'm sure it will fit. There's lots more room in the 690 than the 330 due to the size and the disk orientation. That's an HD2900 it's nearly 9" long I think. If you like I'll measure the clearances for you. The case is bigger than I thought. My 330 is dwarved. I'll post a side by side pic. I wanted to see one and couldn't find it so I might as well put one up now that I can.

[Thund3rball]

Ok I am totally jealous... that looks AWESOME *drools a little*. Nice job on the cables as noted earlier. That combo sounds like a lot of fun!

[enaberif]

Dont'cha just love that case :P

The S1 fits fine. I have one on my 8800GT

[yycraven]

I have to do that with my CM690 with the cable's, that is sweet cable management, nice job.

[low351]

It was relatively easy to cable manage, this case rules for hiding cables and you get great airflow. The most trouble I had was with the Hiper-M 880 PSU. The bugger is long and it hid half the slot for the cables. On top of that it has that wierd horizontal grouping of the rails. But I managed with a bit of care not to strip the sleaving.



Some duct tape and some zip ties an it was all good.

Bad news for me about my OC though... It started crashing and I even got a BSOD so I had to drop the FSB and simply up the multiplier to get me 3100Mhz. Still fast but I'd like to get an OC with the FSB going on. Also I'm not impressed with the temps, it's running hotter than my 90nm 6400+ with the vanquisher, I would have thought the Scythe was better than the Vanq. The 5000+ is 65nm it should run less power and cooler even at 3.1Ghz.

This is what it looks like in CPU-Z, not very impressive. Noob overclock IMO, but I'll keep trying.