Di@blo'S PROJECT X - Page II

   System mods : This computer wouldn't be a Project X if there were not some modifications - right?
   - Let's begin with the most important mod : The casemod!!!   I painted the whole thing black, drilled 3 holes in the side panel ,mounted a plexi window and added a blacklight inside + switches to control the extra fans and the blacklight. The pics are not of the best quality, but that's what I have for the moment. I will update them if I have some new foto's. Click on the pics if you want a larger view....

                         
             Full case             Window zoom         Case @ Lanparty           can you see the blacklight?

  - A 1GHz cpu simply asks to be overclocked!!! First thing to do is to unlock the cpu's multiplier which is locked at 10x for the moment. To do this, I used the "pencil trick", explained at Anandtech, Tom's Hardware Guide, Hard|OCP and thousands of other sites. I managed to get this baby (blue core AMD) to 1150MHz with conventional aircooling but my system wasn't 100% stable (GPF's random crashes etc...) , Sisoft sandra ran without problems though. After playing with the bios cpu settings, I found that the cpu would run 1133MHz rock stable (No crashes at all...) with the voltage set to 1.85V. I know that 133Mhz is a poor overclock but that's what you can expect from an already high perfoming chip. I you use watercooling , the chip easily reaches 1200MHz (check out the Hard|OCP link above). If you want some benchmarks, please check out the next page.

  - All 3dstudio MAX lovers know that a good opengl gfx card can play an important role when dealing with complex scenes, so I decided to do the "geforce to quadro mod". I'm not going in too much detail here, there are already an assload of sites covering this topic, here is a link to one... Basically the mod consists of "fooling" the geforce chip (and the driver) that it is in fact a quadro chip (both have exactly the same core) by changing some resistor values at the chip's ID pins. I included some pics for your viewing pleasure (Geforce pics are ripped from mellenger.com)....

                      
                   Soldering smd parts is very tricky...                        A screenshot of my desktop...(100K image!!!)

  - I did also some minor "standard" mods like rounding the IDE cables and putting a blue led in the optical mouse (not done yet).

 

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