Acis & Galatea

I've always enjoyed the paintings of landscape artist Claude Lorrain, as well as the writings of Dostoevsky. And there is a connection between the two. In one his novels, Dostoevsky describes a sinless paradise as portrayed in the Lorrain painting "Acis and Galatea." I've always found something relaxing about Lorrain's paintings. When I lived in the Washington, D.C. area I used to visit the National Gallery of Art which has a number of Lorrain's works.

Italy

Several years ago, my wife and I had a chance to visit Italy's Tuscany region. We stayed in Florence where our son was studying. If you've never been to Italy, you owe it to yourself to go there. It is one of my favorite countries. The picture shows the church where Michelangelo is buried. Inside are fresco paintings by Giotto and other famous artists. Unfortunately they won't let tourists take pictures inside.

Multi-media

Sandra Multi-media is another benchmark at which Kentsfield excels. On any bench that involves rendering, Kentsfield is king.

Kentsfield, part two

The P5B Deluxe is the best board for Kentsfield, if high FSB is what you're after. It's the only board I've tested that will do 400+. I finally managed to break 2000 in Cinebench on air cooling. :)

RAM testing

I've been testing to see how high I can get my DDR2 using various memory ratios. Both 4:5 and 2:3 seem to top out around 530-540MHz.

Conroe & P5WDG2 WS Pro

I tested the board with my Conroe 6600ES. FSB seems to be limited to 470-475 regardless of which multiplier I used. Top speed is decent.

Kentsfield & P5WDG2 WS Pro

This board allows me to get higher clocks with Kentsfield. Interestingly though, I think the P5B Deluxe is a little better in the rendering department. Good excuse to have both boards. ;)

P5WDG2 WS Pro

I think I found a winner. The Asus P5WDG2 WS Pro is a workstation board. And it works great with Kentsfield. The beta BIOS allows me to use multipliers from 6 to 20. Initial tests are promising. Can boot into Windows at 3.8GHz.

Foxconn

This is the first time I've used a Foxconn board. The current BIOS does have the VCore issue. Can't get more than default voltage which of course will limit the overclock. Otherwise, it seems like a solid board. It's a lot less quirky than the MSI mobo.

Not a whole lot of extras in the box. But I never use the extras anyway, so it's no big deal.

Stability testing

I do occasionally run Prime, though not often. The above test was done with Kentsfield at default VCore. The MSI board has major FSB limitations. I can get Kentsfield up to 3.3GHz reliably, but that's about it. The Asus boards will allow me to run at 3.6-3.7GHz. I was hoping to get a good 975X board for the CPU. But I will have to keep looking, or settle for the P5B Deluxe which does a decent job. The P5W DH is limited to around 350FSB with Kentsfield. But the BIOS will allow me to use higher multipliers.

Clovertown

kaz-n in Japan has two Clovertowns (Intel quad-cores) running in a Supermicro board. The rendering power at only 2.4GHz is unreal.

MSI

Against my better judgement I decided to give the MSI 975X a try. So far this board has been a real pain. FSB with Conroe seems to hit a wall at 375MHz. The board is desperately in need of a better BIOS. Also the board has an annoying habit of not restarting every time I reboot. I have to turn the PSU off for a second, and then back on to get it to post again. Ah, the joys of overclocking.

Takamine Hideko

Takamine Hideko is one of Japan's greatest actresses. Her work is not very well-known in the West. Many of her films were lost during World War II. She is probably best known for her role as a school teacher in "Twenty-Four Eyes," one of Japan's most beloved films. I also liked her role as a bar hostess in "When a Woman Ascends the Stair". She did a lot of work with director Naruse Mikio. Her acting had great range. There's a very nice profile of her on the web.

http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/hfxgp941.htm

Cable

I switched from DSL to Comcast cable about a year ago. The internet service has been pretty good, though Comcast takes the system off-line late at night on too many occasions to do maintenance. That's when I'm most active. You can see the kind of download and upload speeds I'm getting in the above screenshot. My wife has become addicted to cable tv. Although there's a lot of junk on cable, I must admit there are some interesting programs. My wife loves Project Runway and I like the Court TV crime documentaries. Even though I work in the television industry, I watch very little tv at home. Maybe it's because I spend a lot of my time at work, staring at monitors.

Forums

I've about had it with forums. Just a bunch of clueless people with their own prejudices. Most of them are not interested in learning. And the "if it's not Prime-stable, then it's not stable" people have become an epidemic. Maybe some of us don't care whether a system is Prime-stable. Where do these people come from? Is that all they do with a computer? Run Prime? It's enough to make me want to scream. I think that's going to be my forum sig: "Don't ask me about Prime because I don't care."

Zippy

After two and half years of use, my trusty OCZ PowerStream 600W appears to have finally kicked the bucket. I've ordered a Zippy/EMAC similar to the one in the above photo. Let's hope it lasts a long time.

Board deaths

Just a word of warning to those of you planning to use sub-zero cooling with Conroe. The motherboard kill rate is much higher than on other platforms. A number of people have had boards die on them. I've lost a few. I think part of the problem is all the capacitors and voltage regulators near the socket. Even insulating the boards doesn't seem to help a lot. In the future, I'm going to be more careful and probably stick to air-cooling most of the time.

Highest

The highest I've managed to get my 6600ES is 4570MHz. Also managed a new world's best in the Mandelbrot rendering bench using Kentsfield. The quad-core is king when it comes to rendering speed.

Cinebench @ 500X9

Ran Cinebench with 6600ES @ 500X9. Results are good, but still fall far short of Kentsfield's rendering power.

E6600 @ 4.5GHz

I found out that the Asus P5B Deluxe and Conroe 6600ES work well together. FSB over 500 and there are no mods to the board. Dry ice cooling. Unfortunately, Kentsfield FSB max with board is only 400.

Mandelbrot

Mandelbrot is a rendering bench that the Japanese use. So far I have the fastest time. Kentsfield really excels at this bench.

Quad-Prime at 3.4GHz

Still working on finding the maximum stable speed on air with Kentsfield. 1.45v.

RAM Speed

Many people caught up in the Conroe craze seem to be obsessed with FSB speed. What I try to tell them is that memory speed is just as important. Above are two examples, both at 3600MHz. The first was done running 1:1 with memory at 400MHz. The second was done with 2:3 ratio and memory at 540MHz.