So got a i7-4770 M83 Tower which is gonna be a daily driver, but want to make it a "battle buddy" so n00bs can be pwned in house... well more likely the other way round, teh young uns seem to be getting plenty of practice in. But might also play with wifey in some more fantasy oriented stuff. So some bits around that weren't really the way to go for the daily, since high power high heat, but for a fun box that's not on all the time it's diff...
I wanna push a C2 Quad or a Xeon 5430 through the roof, mad cray cray speed, as pedestrian stock clocks will give too much advantage to the 4770. I've got an XFX 750i SLI, and Asus P5K3 Deluxe and P5N-D. GPU may be an R9 Fury or an R9 390.. gotta see if I've got a case that will mount the rad.
So...
XFX 750i SLI.. it's aight.. there were rumours that it doesn't like quads much... also has a damaged pin or two which I am not sure how significant they are.
P5K3 Deluxe.. Obvious choice right? Thing is... I kinda have duties for a quad with 3 PCI slots.. also all the DDR3 I've got is a bit slow.
P5N-D ... have a decentish set of RAM for it, but that could go to the XFX, this model holds a 532Mhz base clock record on HWBot, moon in sight!
Generally, I hear tell there's 200Mhz more of stability on intel than nForce, but that was earlier nForce and intel. I have seen folks struggling to get 400mhz base on the P5K3, but dunno if they're sharp cookies, or set their RAM too tight or what. XFX is meant to do 450 as promised by XFX. P5N-D as I said has a 532Mhz high, but not really expecting quiiite that high.
CPU to experiment with are 3 examples of Q6600 SLACR, one Q6700, one Xeon E5430 quad 45nm.. obv last would be best for SSE4 etc, but starts at 333/1333 and really needs the stops pulled to go high. Though at stock it is also lower watt, so one would hope better silicon, and easier to keep cool. Also avalable which might assist in probing high baseclock RAM and board settings are an E2160 which has less core and cache complications, and a Celeron 440, which has even less, both have been known to do better than 100% overclocks. (i.e. clock plus 100%, so 200% overall)
Coolers, I've got a Hyper 212, something I thought might be a scythe ninja, an older Corsair H75 (I think) closed loop liquid cooler, and that curious Ultra Fire that I got new in package this month. (Was meant to handle some opterons over 100W, but lack super good data for it)
Any specific ideas on combining what I've got, quirks of the boards etc?
Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.