A couple of weeks ago, hardwarecooling.com finally got around to calling me back about my order. At 3 months, I couldn’t have cared less, but I let them ship me the stuff anyway. So now I had a spare set of duct modding components. What to do.. what to do?

Time for Power Tools
What better way to start the weekend than a nice little modding project! As it turns out, my wife’s machine needed a little tweaking. Nan’s machine has virtually the same configuration as mine, but it’s all stock. The combination of the case design, power supply, and the retail AMD heatsink meant there wasn’t going to be any overclocking on this puppy. (well, not yet at least..) A few hours of work and the result is a system that’s at least 10°C cooler at all loads. For more info on what I did, click here for the whole story.

Over the course of the week, I noticed my system wasn’t performing quite as good as I’d expected. Though my system appeared stable, hosting a game of UT2004 revealed some instability. I knocked the speed back down to 3000+ for the game, but was determined to get that speed back.

Tuesday evening, I returned to explore the source of the problem only to discover I had forgotten to up the core voltage on the CPU when I pushed it to 3200+. Upping VCore to from 1.65 to 1.675 did the trick. The next boot was fast and clean, and everything performed just as expected. I wasn’t quite done yet though. I finally felt the need to find the upper limit of my CPU.
So, back into the BIOS I went. I was pleasantly surprised. Set the multiplier to 11.5, post. Back in to BIOS, check health.. still good. Reboot into windows and benchmark it. Still no problems. 12x is where the party stopped. At 2400Mhz my trusty Athlon XP 2500+ (a 1.8Ghz CPU) would post, and appeared healthy, but wouldn’t boot into Windows. I left well enough alone. 🙂

The above results were generated by SiSoft Sandra v2004.10.9.89. At 2300Mhz, my Athlon XP managed an ALU score of 8720 MIPS, and an FPU score of 3591 MFLOPS. That top mark that it’s beating is an Intel P4-B 2.8Ghz CPU with HyperThreading turned on. The FPU scores are the Yellow and Red bars. The yellow is the closest to an apples-to-apples comparison as it leaves out iSSE2 which is only available on the P4. The scale on the graph is from 0 to 100,000.

I had originally intended to complete my HSF duct mod before the last LAN party. Unfortunately, I got stiffed by hardwarecooling.com. Over the weekend I reordered the same parts from another vendor, casecooler.com. (got the parts 2 days later.. now that’s service!) With the parts in-hand to complete my HSF ducting mod; I tore open the packaging, unable to resist the urge to push my CPU a little harder… 🙂

Fans & Ducts
I tend to be somewhat of a conservative overclocker. I’m not all about coming up with exotic means of cooling down my hardware so I can push it over the red line. I prefer to make optimum use of conventional (and cheap) methods that still let me push my hardware towards that red line, but staying far enough back to avoid thermal death.
Here are some pics of the completed HSF duct mod. If you’re interested in the specifics, a more detailed article is available. This mod is currently perfoming at or below 40°C at the fan’s lowest speed. (AXP 2500+, FSB=400Mhz, CPU=2.21Ghz, PR=3200+)