Project WILDCAT

Hi Folks!

After 8 days of a lot of work and frustration, I can proudly present you my latest buld this far:

The WILDCAT!

Introduction

I got a lot of parts from a friend who moved over to America, some of them were simply wasted (blown up psu, fried ram modules and nearly dead disks) and everything REALLY dirty (nicotine and sticky dust on them). But I also got some good stuff: 2 Gigabyte MoBos.

GA-EP45-DS5


GA-EP35-DS2


The EP45 was my first choice, with it's cool looking heatpipes and the status LED that flash during POST, but it wasn't the best choice.
At first I had to buy some RAM, as only 2 GB survived. If anybody would have told me before, that these boards are catastrophic when it comes to choose ram for them, I would have bought another board instead of ram for them.
Bought 8 GB of Corsair Dominator DDR2 , 2x2 GB for one board, 4x1 GB for the other.





And then the problems begann...
1.) The 1 GB modules only work together, but not in combination with the 2 GB modules.
2.) One of the 1 GB modules just ran as PC6400, not PC8500 as labeled.

So I continued with just 4 GB, still enough for the project.
While testing the systems stability with OCCT, an Error occured: fried MOSFETS !
I have to admit, at this point I wanted to throw the whole stuff in the dumpster, but luckily I did not.
I exchanged the EP45 with the EP35, which is still ok, but misses some features.

After testing all over and over again to be sure it runs WITHOUT any errors, I started the REAL PROJECT WILDCAT

Part One - Setting up the beast

First step: Bios update with modified microcodes.
A bit tricky, but with some good instructions from the net won't cause too much trouble.
Next one was a bit more exciting...

A Xeon L5420 Socket 771


A Modsticker 771 to 775


Put this together (a deasaster when your hands are XL in size...)


And some serious cutting action


But in the end everything went fine without any problems.

First boot after modding


second boot, now with detection but false FSB


corrected FSB


first run of CPU-Z


Xeon runs stable on the mobo.

End of part one


Part Two - The OC

Now the main goal was getting the Xeon to a stable OC level, started with setting the FSB to 380 MHz and raising Vcore to 1.375V.





4 hours of OCCT and 30 minutes of Prime 95 with an additional delta cooler for keeping the temperatures as low as possible later, it still ran stable.
I stopped at 390 MHz FSB as I noticed, that the standard cooler won't do his job in a proper way anymore, so I bought this "little" sweetheart on ebay:

Scythe Katana


390 MHz FSB



OCCT


Delta "Turbine"


End of Part Two


Part 3 - New components finally arrive

Well, at first I wanna shout out a big THANKS FOR NOTHING to our "beloved" DHL for messing up my stuff, it took 4 days to arrive from just 60 km away (and there was NOT a weekend between the days).

As I still wasn't sure about the stability of the poor old gigabyte board, I decided to get an other mobo...
While I was looking around on the web, I came across an ASUS P5Q Board with 4 GB of Mushkin RAM plus a Intel E7500 for a few bucks.

ASUS P5Q


After everything was cleaned, I screwed it on my selfmade benchtable and prepared it for being part of the WILDCAT.

Benchtable (WIP !!!)


Well, as the Mushkin don't wanted to be OCed, the reliable Corsair Dominator tool place on the mobo and was instantly ready for action.

Mushkin


Reached 3.0 GHz !!!





Current OC state: 3.2 GHz




End of part three


Part Four - The Case, final home of the WILDCAT

I'll edit the text later, I'm pretty tired right now, took me over 2 hours to prepare & upload the pics, write the text, write the text CORRECTLY, edit the text over and over and over again...
I'll just let the pictures speak...

Chieftec Dragon dirty


removed noisekiller


removed the sticky remains


Moved-in hardware


PSU


FINALLY FINISHED !!!

Fantastic work, wait until SpruceGuy see's another Cheiftec Dragon - his is massively modified but he has been running it daily since he bought it in 2003-ish!

looking forward to seeing some benchmarks of this beast, we were just talking a few weeks back about doing a 771 > 775 mod build too!

is this going to be your daily driver or is it just a machine for a bit of fun?

Thanks for the compliments, Martin.

I already benchmarked it and it was surprisingly good for it's age.
Screenshots will follow, have to set the machine up back on my desk.

Well it really can't replace my actual daily driver (it's the one inside the Coolermaster case) with it's FX-8350, 8GB RAM and the GTX 960, so it's gonna be a just for fun machine. But I will install some older games to have fun with it.
I hope to find some matching RAM modules in the future, so I can upgrade it to 8 GB.

ah sorry I forgot about your other machine! Its however surprizing how these old Core 2 Duo/Quad/Xeon machines cope with todays tasks, of course the latest games are going to be a struggle but for general web browsing, multi tasking, media requirements etc they cope fantastically! Ive built a few core 2 duo/quad machines for people on a budget just for basic tasks and especially when you pop a cheap SSD in they actually work really well!

I have 4 WD Raptor 74 gb drives (10k RPM !!!) waiting for action...
Maybe I'll set them up as a raid, gotta check their condition first.

Settings Overview, taken from HWInfo64 & CPU-Z





















A little comparision...







Sensors when idle



Benchmarks



Sensors logging during benchmark




And of course I forgot something really impotant to mention this morning...the soundcard and the Geforce 560!
I put in this unused Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio and reworked my old Geforce 560 Ti from Zotac.





You can barely see it in the pictures, too.

Geforce overhaul















Do you have any suggestions about another benchmarking prog?

Need some help.
Got another pair of 2x 2GB Corsair Dominator RAM like the first pair, but Windows won't boot with the complete set of 8GB.
Each pair alone runs fine, but not both together...

I can get 6 GB to work at 851 GHz, but is still fails with 8 GB...
NB Voltage is set to 1.20 V, VCore is 1.385V, RAM runs at 2.10V (as it is printed on the modules)...

That's an odd one, have you tried running all sticks but juggling them between slots? Unfortunately I don't have a lot of experience with Intel boards from that era but I remember AMD boards sometimes being very picky with memory and if it was running in dual channel mode it wanted the matching pair on the same channel. (even although you have 2x matching sets but probably from a different build week etc)

It's now running with the full set of 8 GB @ 851 MHz.
I found the same problem mentioned in another forum and they said, it's quite impossible to get the full clockspeed with maxed out RAM. And when you OCed the whole stuff like I did, you have to find out for yourself what's working.

Besides the RAM problems, here are som new pics from what I've done with Wildcat...

Full Banks just look better.




Completed the original mounting rail storage




Yes, that's a floppy drive with adaptors...
As the chieftec's drive mounting system won't work for the Aerogate mounted in the front, I just put in this floppy drive as a spaceholder. Gonna build a better adaptor later. Pure improvisation.




the "dirty side"



and the "clean side"




FINITO!




and some impressions from during the mounting.
I wanted to show how what I'm doing to hide the cables as good as possible.








P.S.:
I know, smoking is bad.

8 gb @ 851 MHz --> errors in prime95, back to
4 gb @ 1066 MHz --> no errors in prime95.

SpruceGuy was telling me he had that exact same motherboard for a customers machine a few years back and had a very similar issue, couldn't get it through a full windows install without crashing, tried the memory in another board and it was working fine, yet when he used Kingston memory in the board it worked no problem, I wonder if its just a fussy board for memory?

solved the mystery.
it's just too hard oc'ed to handle the full set of ram.
with everything set to basic, it runs 8 GB RAM @ 1066 MHz.
So to compare directly, I ran 3DMark Vantage in 3 diffrent setups:

1. 4x 2,5 GHz @ 334 MHz FSB; 8 GB RAM @ 800 MHz; VCore 1,128V; RAM Voltage 1,80 V
2. 4x 2,5 GHz @ 334 MHz FSB, 8 GB RAM @ 1066 MHz; VCore 1,128 V, RAM Voltage 1,80 V
3. 4x 3,187.5 GHz @ 425 MHz FSB; 4 GB RAM @ 1066 MHz; VCore 1,360 V, RAM Voltage 2.10 V (OC)

1. 
2. 
3. 


So even with just half of the RAM as in standard, it still is a killer machine !.

ah interesting results, I suppose going back a few years, playing games from 2010-2014 era then 4gb of ram is more than enough! its only lately that 4gb of ram would start to hold you back in gaming