I found occasion to fire up the mighty Cedar Mill recently despite it already being uncomfortably warm in my man cave. I had some red hot new-old-stock arrivals that would not wait for cooler weather. I’m the first to admit that these are a total indulgence – they’re replacing almost exactly the same hardware that I was using previously. But those came as bare cards, and I missed the experience of opening the boxes, reading the scant documentation, etc.

The Audigy 2 ZS is a classic and despite containing mostly air, the big box is a winner too. The 8800GTX is likewise a classic, and something that I’ve wanted since release - I went with a GTS at the time and it was great, but always regretted not spending the extra for the GTX.

I was interested to see if the BFG’s factory overclock made any difference to my existing ‘standard’ version of the card, so I ran Aquamark 3 on both @ 1024x768x32, AA: Off, Ansio: 4x, Details: V High. Same drivers for both:

‘Standard’: 81,081
‘OC’: 81,200

So there it is in black and white, the ‘OC’ is faster (by a teensy tiny amount).

I broke it all in with an hour of FarCry, which still looks stunning on a CRT. The heat this machine pumps out is phenomenal but a lot of it seems to come from the PSU - maybe it’s time to look into a more modern one, which I’m assuming will run cooler?

Lovely seeing these boxes 😀

If the PSU is mounted up top, it's also blowing through the air that rises from the CPU and GPU. Most gaming cases these days have the PSU at the bottom and at least 2 large fans at the top and / or rear.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

If the PSU is mounted up top, it's also blowing through the air that rises from the CPU and GPU. Most gaming cases these days have the PSU at the bottom and at least 2 large fans at the top and / or rear.

Yes it is at the top and that's a good point, hot air rises 😀 I have one of those honking great Zalman CPU coolers that you found recently, and that sits directly below the intake of the PSU. There is also a rear exhaust fan in the mix, but it's obviously not catching it all.

This machine is just going to produce a lot of hot air I guess.

badmojo wrote:

This machine is just going to produce a lot of hot air I guess.

From what I could see from the first post you are not OCing the processor. Have you tried undervolting it to further reduce power consumption/heat generation?

No I haven't - I'm usually a 'run it as per the instructions' sort of a guy but will consider it thank you!

I recently got a bee in my bonnet about reliving the Athlon 64 3500+ system I had back in the day, but I have strict anti-hoarding guidelines which state that I’m not allowed to have multiple systems from the same era or with basically the same capabilities, so my P4 was gutted and replaced with this stuff.

The Athlon system came together easily enough, apart from the motherboard BIOS defaulting the HDD controller to RAID (not the first time I’ve been tricked by that), but some cracks appeared once it was all up and running:

- The 3500+ wasn’t quite as fast as the 3.4GHz Cedar Mill (according to Aquamark).
- Under load, the stock Athlon cooler was noticeably louder than the Zalman CNPS7700-Cu I was using on the P4.
- The socket 939 board had one less PCI slot, meaning that the Audigy was bang up against the 8800GTX, restricting its access to precious cool airflow.
- The PSU was still pumping out an awful amount of heat – I’d assumed that was the Cedar Mill’s influence, but apparently the Antec Truepower I was using just runs hot – it is 10 years old I guess.
- I missed the prestigious feeling I got from using a once “top end” (i.e. expensive) system. Intel did have to clock the bollocks out of their Netburst folly to make it competitive, but they did eventually get them to perform well in their day. I went with the Althon all those years ago because I was on a tight budget. I’m not on a tight budget anymore 😈

So the mighty Cedar Mill has been reinstated, and to make up for my infidelity I’ve bought it a nice new PSU – much cooler and quieter – and a backup NOS Zalman CNPS7700-ALCu. This model is made with a combination of copper and aluminium so is ~300 grams lighter than the all-copper model I’m using currently.

Nice stuff!

If you want some more hot air you can probably take the Cedar Mill up to 250 FSB for 4250 MHz with no or a very small voltage increase. The power usage does not get out of hand until you feed the Cedar Mill 1.4V+. My P4 631 does 5Ghz at ~1.6V while producing only ~250W* for benching. 😀

You probably need to run the memory using devider if you overclock as not all DDR memory can take 250 MHz.

*The CPU alone

A X-Fi Titanium PCIe would have fit nicely into the PCIe 1x slots. AMD had this cool & quiet technology, but you need to install the driver, enable it in the BIOS and set the power management. For more performance the FX range is worth a look, not cheap, but very fast!

badmojo wrote:

- The socket 939 board had one less PCI slot, meaning that the Audigy was bang up against the 8800GTX, restricting its access to precious cool airflow.

For the sake of the relatively precious 8800GTX's longevity, you might want to consider switching out your Audigy for a PCIe version so that it can be further away...

badmojo wrote:

I recently got a bee in my bonnet about reliving the Athlon 64 3500+ system I had back in the day, but I have strict anti-hoardi […]
Show full quote

I recently got a bee in my bonnet about reliving the Athlon 64 3500+ system I had back in the day, but I have strict anti-hoarding guidelines which state that I’m not allowed to have multiple systems from the same era or with basically the same capabilities, so my P4 was gutted and replaced with this stuff.

The Athlon system came together easily enough, apart from the motherboard BIOS defaulting the HDD controller to RAID (not the first time I’ve been tricked by that), but some cracks appeared once it was all up and running:

- The 3500+ wasn’t quite as fast as the 3.4GHz Cedar Mill (according to Aquamark).
- Under load, the stock Athlon cooler was noticeably louder than the Zalman CNPS7700-Cu I was using on the P4.
- The socket 939 board had one less PCI slot, meaning that the Audigy was bang up against the 8800GTX, restricting its access to precious cool airflow.
- The PSU was still pumping out an awful amount of heat – I’d assumed that was the Cedar Mill’s influence, but apparently the Antec Truepower I was using just runs hot – it is 10 years old I guess.
- I missed the prestigious feeling I got from using a once “top end” (i.e. expensive) system. Intel did have to clock the bollocks out of their Netburst folly to make it competitive, but they did eventually get them to perform well in their day. I went with the Althon all those years ago because I was on a tight budget. I’m not on a tight budget anymore 😈

So the mighty Cedar Mill has been reinstated, and to make up for my infidelity I’ve bought it a nice new PSU – much cooler and quieter – and a backup NOS Zalman CNPS7700-ALCu. This model is made with a combination of copper and aluminium so is ~300 grams lighter than the all-copper model I’m using currently.

You guys should read what other people writes in their posts. 😉

The picture also clearly shows the ATX Asus Socket-775 board (with a free slot in-between the 8800 GTX and the sound card), not the mATX Socket-939 board pictured in the linked "bought this stuff thread".

I know that he went back to Intel. I was just giving some tips that can be applied to address the issues he encountered with the AMD system.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I know that he went back to Intel. I was just giving some tips that can be applied to address the issues he encountered with the AMD system.

I was mostly swinging at the other member but I dislike calling out single members. 😉

It's something I see at most forums I frequent, if there are more than 3 lines of text many do not really read all of it, I'm not totally innocent of this behaviour myself.

Thanks Skyscraper, saved me the trouble! Yes this was one of the reasons I switched back to the 775 system, because I loves my Audigy, but you guys are spot on - if I use the AMD setup again in the future with the 8800 GTX then I'll have to do something else.

I could either use a PCIe card, or attempt to use the crazy looking PCI slot extention cable I bought recently to move the Audigy further away - don't know if this would work, probs would have trouble mounting it, but it would be fun to try 😀

Whoops, my bad, guess I read too quickly and missed out on a few key points in the post.