Madshrimps Forum Madness - Piotke's MSI Overclocking Contest Submission

This week

As you already could see, I'm a fan of low end hardware. For this contest I'm not going to buy the fastest hardware available. But the cheapest you can find. What am I talking about ?

Intel test setup
Intel Celeron E2100. A cheap (45 euro) dual core processor build for socket 775. Fits any actual mainboard, and is a derivate of the populare Core and Core 2 architecture. Clocked at only 1.6 GHz it's the slowest, and cheapest dual core Intel is offering for the moment.

Asus P5K/EPU. The revisited version of the famous and praised P5K. This board is offering more energy efficient options. At about 90 euro the board is not the cheapest around, but surely very affordable.

Depending on the time and succes, I'll also try a second type of setup.

AMD test setup
AMD sempron LE 1150. A power efficient (45 watts of consumption only) processor operating at 2 GHz and using only 256 Kb of cache. A crippled remaining of the once unbeatable A64 architecture.... So why did I buy it ? Budget ! About 25 euro for a processor suitable for AM2 socket and thus DDR2 memory.

K8T890M2AA-KRS2H. I almost ran out of budget, So I bought this very basic AM2 board second hand. Costed me about 15 euro. I was looking around on the internet and saw that this Faxconn/Winfast board had a few overclocking options, so I decided to give it a try.

And there is more...

As a videocard I choose the Nvidia Geforce 7100 GS. About the cheapest (~25 euro) card that can be bought now. I hope to get it this week, otherwise I'll need to find me another budget video card.

Cooling...

-- First i'll test the setups at stock settings. And this with aircooling. Afther that I'll start tweaking and overclocking the setup with nothing but aircooling. Curious how far that this will bring us.

-- Then the second stage is watercooling. Processor, perhaps videocard as well (depends if I can make the watercooling fit) will be cooled. I'll try chilling the water if that would be possible. So far that's still a very affordable cooling method. (Pump 15-20 euro; block about 20 euro and some tubing. that and a bucket of water..)

-- Last week I drove to fellow madshrimper Gamer. He lended me his Single Stage Phase change cooling unit. Build by Chilly1. It's nothing compared to actual phase change solutions, as it does only -38°, unloaded even. This unfortunately is not such a cheap cooling solution. New you'll be spending about 650 Euro on a phase change. Second hand or build by an enthusiast you'll end up paying about 250 to 300 Euro. That's more affordable, but it still would cost more then both the test platforms together.

-- More extreme, but more affordable is Dry Ice. For that you'll need a tube or container (you can buy one second hand or new starting at 50 Euro, and going up to 3 digit numbers...) All depending on the design and who made it. I borrowed a copper tube, also from big spender Gamer.
The dry ice itself doesn't cost that much. 1 Euro per kg. And with at few Kg you can have fun all day.

That's it for now, I'll have to do everything last minute, as the next 3 days I'm working all day. (Today we have a strike, the first in 15 years, and I'm almost all alone in the office until 10 pm...)