Specifically-built 939 setup - want to go a bit Xtreme - Questions!
In '08 I built two 939/AGP rigs, both with modern and capable PSUs:
- an XClio Goodpower 500W (which recently proved its mettle in an OCed x3 @ x4 rig with a GTX 465)
- and an Antec EA650 (which I tested for a month successfully with an nforce 980a mobo, x6 1055t and 2x GTX 570 in SLI)
... Both 939 rigs had Asus A8V Deluxe motherboards. I had good cooling (an Opteron heatpipe copper cooler on one and a Freezer Pro 64 on the other)...
... I used several CPUs; an x2 3800+, an Optron 165 and an x2 4800+ toledo with 1mb L2.
... for GPUs I used Radeon HD 3850 AGP.
... I used RAID 0 for my hard drive setups...
... and as I only had 32 bit OSes at the time, I populated all 4 slots of both motherboards... 2x 1gb and 2x 512mb.
I built these rigs because I really liked Socket 939, DDR RAM and AGP GPUs, and I wanted to give the platform one last go before it shuffled off into irrelevance. And go they did. Honestly, these two setups were REALLY enjoyably fast in desktop use, media playing and most of all gaming.
But I couldn't OC these setups like I wanted to. I ended up just being happy that these 939 systems were performing adequately at stock speeds.
I sold one 939 setup in June of 09 and replaced it with an AM2+ rig with a Phenom II x3 720BE and an HD4870. I sold the other after Bad Company 2 beta came out and showed me how long-in-the-tooth the rig really was, and replaced it with another AM2+ setup with an Athlon II x3 425 and an HD 4850.
But some of these parts I sold were never used by those I sold them to, and I bought some of the stuff back, and now (for the hell of it, for the love of Socket 939) I want to make another effort at building a very aggressively air-cooled overclocked x2 939 setup. So my starting point is an Opteron 175 (2.2ghz), a lapped Zalman CNPS 9700 LED, an Asus A8V (non-deluxe) and an HD 3850 AGP. I want to build this right, cooled right, parts matched up right, so I can really have a good chance of attaining an aggressive and stable overclock.
Obviously my PSUs were up to the task.. or so I think.
QUESTION: If trying to overclock a 939 setup, do modern enthusiast PSUs properly cater to the older power phasing setups of Socket 939? Or is this a situation where the best OCs will come from older PSUs manufactured/engineered in the 939 days?
And as for RAM, I'll be getting just two 2gb sticks; I won't populate all four slots. That was probably limiting me before, no? ... any suggestions on some DDR in this day & age, or should I worry less about RAM bandwidth and run @ a divider that kicks the memory down to a safe speed? I'd certainly rather run some DDR at as fast of speeds as possible if I can.
Hard drives: Might the RAID 0 setups have aided in limiting overclocking? If so, I'll just stick with a single fast hard drive... maybe get an SSD some time for the rig.
The Asus A8V/A8V Deluxe motherboard: I know this wasn't the absolute best overclocker's board, but from what I hear it wasn't the worst, and for having the K8T800Pro + VT8237 it did pretty well for itself... might there be some things regarding this VIA chipset that I should better heed in order to get a better OC? Any mods I should consider?
In a day and age where a socket 939 setup is but a memory to modern gamers, I'm putting this together just out of love for this slightly-older tech. I do want to push its limits further, and do so better than I did previously. Oh and for what it's worth I'll also be exploring voltage modifications or any other scary stuff I can do (with air cooling) to help the HD 3850 AGP.
This is about the only place that can help me these days with this stuff; any where else I'll get a good amount of "just buy a new Intel setup" ... and I don't want to hear that right now (and I've never bought Intel dating back to 1992, lol; I've always bought AMD).
So any assistance is appreciated. :)
