System build 2010 continued (part 4)

Alternate title: F**kin' voltages, how do they work?
Alas, I appear to misplaced my trust in "easy overclocking" tools as a neophyte at the whole overclocking business. I was getting some outrageously bad temperatures in various heat and stability related benchmarks like Prime95 and the Intel Burn Test- I was worried that the application of thermal compound on the heat sink had been misapplied or something like that, when in fact the solution was much much simpler than I thought.

The [Auto] setting on my motherboard likes to send voltages into the stratosphere for even the mildest of overclocks- this may be "safe" inasmuch as it would prevent instability from too low voltage, but the power draw and temperatures created by this are nearly catastrophic for anything less than an awesome water cooling setup.

After tweaking the voltage setup I managed to push temperatures at load down to very comfortable levels, not budging past 70°C even when Prime95 and Intel burn testing. The chip I have is perfectly happy running 3.33GHz at minimum voltages, so not only is the CPU now faster than the 3.2GHz, it draws much less power and generates far less heat. 3.33GHz may pale in comparison to what some people have pushed their i7s to, but I was never going for a huge OC. Reasonably fast, quiet, and cool- I'm sold.

My DDR3 memory is also overclocked- like a madman, I'm running it at an earth shattering 4Mhz faster than stock!! (My BCLK and DRAM frequency math came out almost exactly to 1600MHz, but didn't quite hit the mark- I figured 1604 is close enough, and the RAM isn't complaining at such a low, low number over stock values.)

The Radeon HD 5850 was easily overclocked to 765MHz GPU, 1120MHz Memory. Alas, though, when using ATI overdrive to reach these numbers, you lose a good bit of the stepping ability that knocks down the clock speeds at idle. This actually raised idle temps from about 41°C to 52°C, because instead of running at 157/300, I could only run at 500/1120 idle. Big difference, so I think I'll refrain from turning it on unless I'm going to be gaming- recovering and implementing the OC settings is as simple as hitting a check box in the ATI Catalyst menu.

So far everything seems very stable and issue-free, so when the 200mm case fan arrives in the mail I'll throw it in, check the temps, and tweak the speed to keep the noise increase relatively minimal, and then I'll be ready to roll!

UPDATE:
The 200mm case fan has been delayed- it appears as though I will have to wait a few more days before it actually arrives.

Out of curiosity, though, I set up a comparably sized house fan on a stand, pointing at approximately the same area of the case that the 200mm will mount. At full tilt, the fan drastically pulled temperatures down anywhere from 5°C to 9°C, though the delta at idle was less pronounced. The GPU absolutely loved the fan setup, dropping temps down in the mid 30's at idle! Of course, this is not a particularly scientific test, since the little house fan moves a claimed 1400 CFM compared to the specified 166 CFM of the case fan. It's also much louder, too.