Aging warhorse lives on :) (overclocker nostalgia)

CaptainStoner

Hi yall. I'm an old skool overclocker with an old PC. I haven't felt the need to upgrade my system really in four years, but an upgrade is coming in the next year. Its nice to still be using a rig that's old and you built and tweaked yourself.

My rig is an old AMD Athlon Thoroughbred B XP-M1600. 45w 1433mhz. M/B DFI Infinity Rev1 Nforce2. 2x256mb ADATA BH5 CL2 DDR400 ram. now upgraded to 2x512mb Corsair BH5 CL2 DDR400 ram. Asus Geforce4 Ti4800 256mb Rev1.1 AGP8x graphics, Tagan 480w PSU, Coolermaster ATCS-201 case, random fans, Pioneer DVD+/-RW 16x x2, WinXP.

This rig has been in many states. In the early days I had it on a DIY watercooling rig that kept it really cool at 2.74-3.1ghz. BH5 ram is supreme overclockers ram, all of my sticks easily run 274mhz fsb (DDR548) at tight CL2 timings.

Nowadays I have it at 2470mhz 10x247 1.60v (from 1.45) on a modified Coolermaster 80mm HSF. I get about 40*c full load in a 26*c room.

It unrars a 700mb movie from 14mb rar files faster than a core2duo 1.73ghz 2gb ram laptop i used recently that had vista. I use a stripped, tweaked XP that runs well in low ram on slow processors. This OS is stripped so it can run on really old laptops with minimal ram. I use a slightly fuller setup but i have enough ram. It's always been close to silent or silent.

It does what I want it to for now, which is browsing the net, and storing/playback of video and music files. I have 2x500gb, 2x750gb and one 80gb C: Hard drives in it.

I posted this because of the upgrade to 1gb ram. I can feel the extra headroom it's given me. Tabbed browsing in IE still eats ram. I did it in the last hour.. Sticks kindly donated by a mate who has upgraded them out of his system. This system didn't cost too much when i bought it as the CPU was cheap, the graphics was a card someone had tried to modify, knocked a component off, and couldnt figure out how to get it back on. I resoldered the SMD resistor and fitted a arctic cooling rear exhaust cooler. I've spent extra cash on hdd's over the years but i consider a large hard drive array a necessity.

This system has run pretty much 24/7 since its build date 3-4yr ago. It ran 100% load for the first two years. Just shows that a well made pc can be useful for years.

Anyone else got similar here?

Sock

I hear ya on the old machine.. I gave up on the overclocking years ago, just happy for a stable machine.

Still running a homebuilt intel p4 2.6 w/ 512mb of 333 Ram. would love to upgrade the ram, however after recently pricing 333 from newegg, i found it cheaper to wait and do a whole upgrade motherboards, cpu ect.. later. Guess I could find some used 333 on ebay. The MB wont handle anything over 400 and max 1.5 gig of ram...:(

The pc still pokes along running XP SP2.

It is gettign really slow and tried these days with all the new programs eating up all the resources.. Have 2 dvd burners, lite-on and someother brand that was onsale at newegg, primary HD is a 20gig and secondary is an 80gig.

For todays standards that is old school...

Sock

CaptainStoner

Yeah I'll be overclocking my new rig when i get it, just to see what it can do, but then i'll turn it back to standard. All the old overclocking knowledge will be used to make it more reliable, cooler running etc. Might even underclock it.

I could not make do with only 100gb of hd mate, you must have supreme talent in space management. Your rig would REALLY benefit from another half gig of ram, i really recommend looking for a cheap stick as you'll probably get another year of useful life out of that old warhorse with more memory

Sock

Yeah I know I need some more Ram, just kills me to pay the retail for it.. The new PC2 6400 SDRAM is cheaper for 2x as much... Well I say that, I will have to check, it's been 6 months are so..

Hmm looks like I can get a gig for around $30 USD now, Dang they have a PQI brand for 15.99 on a 512MB chip.. Heck shipping is $7, so might as well get the 1 Gig..

I keep gimping along and am sure I can find plenty of grow room stuff that will eat that $30 up real quick...

Got to keep my priorities straight..LoL

Sock