Lets Speed Things Up

Well judging by the picture its pretty obvious I got her consent: 24 hours of using her OCZ RAM in the XPS! Lets waste no time!

So here I have the CPU secured in the system with about a BB-sized dot of thermal paste. Thats all the thermal paste you need. It bridges the little gaps between the CPU and the heatsink so heat transfer occurs more efficiently. If too much paste is used the system is actually less efficient at transferring heat. Lets power this up!

Okay sweet, it recognizes the CPU and the speed correctly. Check out the options under Performance. No overclocking options. One might think SpeedStep is... but that is Intel's power saving technology for your CPU that SLOWS IT DOWN to conserve power. That is why I am going to do a BSEL mod on this CPU. It will raise the bus speed of the CPU from 800 MHz quad pumped to 1066 MHz quad pumped. The real bus speed is 200 MHz (200 * 4 (quad pumped) = 800 MHz). So... that means the bus speed will be 266 MHz after the mod. Now, just like in the previous build, lets figure out what speed we will be shooting for. 2500/200 gives us a CPU multiplier of 12.5. Okay, so now 12.5 * 266 will give us a new CPU speed of 3325 MHz. So that is a (3325/2500)-1 = 33% speed increase! Here is the mod on paper:
Okay, I am going to fast forward time... Ideally this mod is done with a conductive pen you can get from Radio Shack... But because I am impatient and Radio Shack is closed, I am going to take some conductive adhesive from a hard drive and 'build' my own bridge. So, after an hour of cutting, shaping, test fitting, cussing, re-cutting and re-test fitting this is what I ended up with:

With that slight bit of adhesiveness it sticks. Check it out though: Look at the size of that sliver of metal compared to my thumb... thats a LITTLE piece of metal! Well, lets pop it in the tower and see what it thinks.



Blue lights is GOOD! If it failed I would have gotten amber lights. How modern and sleek (once the media card reader covers that ugly hole) it looks next to Y2K! I am going to boot into a program called Memtest32+ to get a realtime measurement of the CPU speed, as the BIOS just reads the CPU information about how fast it is.

Here is a snapshot of what I saw once Memtest86 loaded:

Core 2 at 3325 MHz!!! A successful BSEL mod! Maybe when I get a conductive pen I will shoot for 1333 MHz front side bus, giving me 4162 MHz. Its unlikely a speed like that will work or be stable... but I will never know until I try. If I try it... you better believe I'll blog about the results. Its RAM, hard drive, and the media card reader to go!

Until next time, as always, stay classy and thanks for reading!