building a post computer..

[Thomas Patrick C.]

Guys,


- it has the "slowest" of the three i-7 processors, but if 2.66Ghz speed isn't enough, you can overclock it and take it over 3.2 GHz SAFELY. Even after that almost 40% increase in speed, it is amazing how cool the air coming out of the box feels when the computer is running at full throttle...

Hey Rudi,

Wondering how you are overclocking the Gateway 6800?

I have the same computer but I see the bios is locked, no tweaker option so can't overclock it.

 

[JanneJansson]

Hi Zakaree,

I did well with a system like this:

$229 Intel i7 Chip
$350 Gigabyte X58 UD5 Motherboard
$329 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 OC 896MB GDDR3 PCIe 2.0 Graphic Card

Me too, I love all Gigabyte mobo. I used another graphic card, the ATI Radeon 4870 with 2GB. The current state of many nvidia cards is sad. More then 10% of sold cards are DOA, and even if it work it have some seriour hardware hickups. Stay clear of nvidia another year, until thay have fixed the producton again.

And I used 12 GB OCZ ram, great low-cost chip.
4 x 1 TB Western Digital RE drive in a raid-0 for pure speeeeeeed.

..and I have gone the hard road and used non "RE" (Raid Edition) drives from WD, and thay WILL crash your raid. They have by mistake/design a built in timer that in about 100 h will teporary freeze the drive. The only way to get out of this freeze state it to power cycle the drive. This is no biggi when using one drive, but if they are in a raid, the raid will assume it's broken and "deaddify" it. This freeze happen usually at same time for all drives of same series, so if you really have a hard day, the most part of a raid will apperar dead, and data will be fubar.

 

[Eric S.]

Hey Rudi,

Wondering how you are overclocking the Gateway 6800?

I have the same computer but I see the bios is locked, no tweaker option so can't overclock it.

I'm not sure if Rudi is actually overclocking his Gateway or was just giving hypothetical advice to the original poster (since the OP will be building a computer with a brand-name Core i7 motherboard, not a proprietary Gateway one).

However, if you really do want to overclock your Gateway system, it might be possible. I'm not sure if I'd advise it, but you should have a little headroom with that 500w PSU. Remember that warranties are usually voided with overclocking, but the i7's do seem to be overclocking pretty safely.

In the good ol' days of LGA 775 (core 2 duo, etc.) you could sometimes do a pin mod. Might be worth looking into, but I'd personally not seriously consider it:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/228129-28-e4300

A second option is that you might be able to overclock via software like CPUFSB. Here's a good, but old, introduction. I'm not sure if CPUFSB is still current or when / if your system is compatible, but software-driven overclock might be feasible:

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=41097

Hope those give you a good starting point in your research.

Eric

 

[Pietro Impagliazzo]

About cooling: The Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme is the best air cooler thus far.

So get one with LGA 1366 bracket and you are good to go.