Our Computers

The Pellegrini family is now an all-DFI household. All three of us now have DFI Lanparty nF4 DR SLI boards:

Our current comps:

We still have a couple of the MSI K8N Neo Platinum (socket 754) boards running in backup computers:

Update - 4-24-7

Over the past few months, we upgraded everyone to Opteron 170's. Trav and Mason's are running at 2.75 GHz - which was a quick and dirty overclock - I never pushed it with their comps. I also upgraded both to 2 GB's of RAM - the Patriot PDC2G4000 ELK, which has turned out to be just great.

My comp, I upgraded several months after Trav and Mason's, and I ended up with an Opty 170 with a different stepping.

I spent a couple days pushing my comp and was able to get it to run stable at 2.9 GHz at 1.4 vcore. I was able to get it to boot into Windows at 3 GHz - at 1.50 vcore - but it wasn't totally stable (Failed Prime). I think it probably will run stable at 3 GHz, but I'm guessing it might take as much as 1.525 or even 1.55 volts to do it and that's kinda high for air cooling. I may try it later after the chip has burned in, just for the hell of it.

Even so, a 900 MHz overclock is pretty damned awesome!

The OCZ RAM I had running with no problems at 273 MHz - it passed 4 hours of Memtest. Pretty damned impressive. I may push it more later (and try to see if it'd run 1:1 at 290 MHz).

Strangely enough, at the same speed (263 MHz), my Sandra Memory Bandwidth test is about 200 points lower with the new processor. Same exact RAM settings as I was using with the 3700 San Diego.

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I'm extremely happy with the DFI boards. All three boards have proved to be exceptionally stable - and good overclockers.

I've had mine running stable 1:1 at 275 MHz - where it passed 6 hours of Memtest and 2 1/2 hours of Prime. Unfortunately, 3D applications won't run properly - I get what looks like video errors - artifacts and some pretty severe stuttering in 3D Mark.

It really does look like a video problem - which doesn't make any sense, because the PCIe bus is locked at 100 MHz.. I've tried under-clocking the video card, and it doesn't make any difference. Like I said, Memtest and prime run just fine for hours without any errors. All the Sandra tests run okay. But it won't run any 3D application - I get the stuttering and and artifacts right away when I launch 3D Mark (2001 SE, 03 and 05).

I've tried loosening the RAM timings and it doesn't seem to make any difference.

I've tried lower FSB settings close to 275 MHz. The first time I tried it, it wouldn't even run at 270 MHz, but then I re-tried it a few days ago and it was very nearly stable - the amount of stuttering and artifacts was substantially reduced.

I'm hoping that in a few weeks, after the comp is well burned-in, that I'll be able to do 270 MHz without any problems.

I haven't come close to finding the max on the CPU yet - this San Diego seems to have few limits. Right now it's doing 2.65 GHz on 1.41 volts. Plus it seems to run really cool. Even when I had the vcore jacked up to 1.57 volts, it still only topped out at about 47c under load, with medium fan settings. I'm hoping eventually that I'll be able to run it at 2.8 - 2.9 GHz on air.

I haven't really explored the limits of the kid's computers yet - they don't want me to, because they're afraid I might kill the comps trying to push too far.

Both comps are running on the shipping bios's. Eventually I'll change them to the 704-2bt bios - which everyone seems to agree is the best - and then have another go at it.

I have my second comp on a KVM switch, so I'm actually using both right now.

My saga with MSI mainboards is here.

Here's a picture of my office:

Trav's computer room:

And Mason's