I have 8GB of DDR2 1066, your CPU has a 9X multiplier & mine is only 8X. That gives you some options I don't have. I didn't see what motherboard you have but the only X48 board released after the Rampage Formula was the Rampage Extreme at least in the Asus brand so I doubt the chipset is different and it has factory copper heatsinks all over it. If its a P45 board you may have a good point. Some P45's are exceptional for overclocking. I can't wait to see how the Nehalem systems do. We will be getting new PC's here at work soon and I spec them out so buy that new hardware guys, I need to make an informed recomendation.

The new i7's don't have a front side bus so overclocking is difficult if not limited to the $1,400 965 unit.

I want to bring up a subject not seen here before. Matt is getting great times from a machine that's very similar to mine. His OC1 is 3.6Ghz & 3:48 where my 3.8Ghz runs 4:00. I can't even reach 4Ghz but why? As time marches on CPU makers tweak thier designs to run faster or cooler and this is called stepping. My 6 month old X3350 has an early stepping and Matt just bought his so he has a later stepping. I would have to buy a CPU with the same or later stepping to catch up. This is just one more reason the results one person gets may be quite different from another with seemingly identical hardware. BTW, nice result Matt!

quote: Mike the Vista I have is 32 bit Home premium SP1 that now sees when you have 4gigs of Ram.Vista has always seen all 4 Gigs. It has to allocate the same RAM amount with the memory of the video card. If your video card has 512 RAM and your system has 4GB RAM then you should have 3.5GB available for system use. This is why the Quadro FX5800 card that has 4GB video RAM is 64 bit only. It would devour all RAM in a 32 bit system.

Just use the FX3500 unless it develops a problem. That Quadro FX5800 is just too much. Too much power which will turn into too much heat, and too much RAM. The OS usually matches it's RAM with the video cards RAM so you lose 4GB of RAM for your OS and apps. just plugging it in. This is why you never see full 4GB RAM in a 32 bit OS machine. The OS has matched the 512MB or 896MB on the video card leaving 3.5 or 3.2GB.

quote: Does anyone make a Refrigerated PC Case?????? Yes they do and if you really want to go fast this is a way to do it. http://www.trustedreviews.com/peripherals/...ated-PC-Case/p1

Its just an upper limit. I just tried it. Set to 100%, loaded a good size file then launched I.E. & MS Word & everything worked normally. Then launched Catia, loaded a big part. The setting appears to just tell MC it cant use more than X% of RAM.

quote: I am dying to see the Bench times you get with theseI don't think Matt has any overclocking experiance but even so he should be able to reach 3.2/3.4GB almost on auto for 4:20/4:40 minute bench.

Vista Ultimate is the best x64 candidate. Vista was written as x64 and will handle up to 128GB of ram. XP x64 is XP 32 bit modified to run x64 and can see only 16GB ram.

Go to event viewer in administrative tools, then look at events in both system and applications. Any thing with a red X was a problem and you may then have a clue what's causing the problem.

PC Power & Cooling is one of the top brands as is Antec, OCZ, Thermaltake, Silverstone. I have the 700W OCZ your looking at but yesterday the one I listed seemed the best value. I searched those brands in 600-800W range. That one just happened have excellent customer ratings too. OCZ makes some of the best RAM and now PSU's too. I have an older case, a 2 yr. old PSU, C2D dual core CPU from a build that died and RAM I just pulled to install my new 8Gig's of RAM so Just a MB and video card and I'll have another screamer using that same Gigabyte MB and left over parts.

quote: One thing I'm a bit concerned about though is the high voltage requirement on this memory of 1.8 volts. They have a similar product at 1.7 volts, but it's slower. What's the effect of higher memory voltage on the CPU?Not that high, my DDR2 stock volts is 2.3. It's common practice to jack up volts on RAM or CPU when it wont go any faster. Sometimes it works but getting to it's best speed without giving it more volts than it needs causing excess heat is part of the juggling act of overclocking. So seeing faster RAM requireing a little more volts is normal. The new Nehalem (LGA1366)CPUs and MB's are arriving. It will be quarter 2 09 before prices come down and parts easily available. Can't wait to hear about the first one running MCX.

Better look harder Matt. You've speced an LGA775 CPU and a LGA1366 board, it won't fit. Now here's what I'd get, all prices are from Newegg.com GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P motherboard. $116 after rebate. Good rating by owners at Newegg, this board is getting insanely high FSB speeds if you intend to overclock. Supports 16Gig of RAM if you could ever get that much in it. G.SKILL 8GB (2 x 4GB kit) DDR2 PC 8500 Model F2-8500CL5D-4GBPK $159 Just bought this myself, fast reliable and good price. Xeon X3370 quad core 3.0Gb 12Mb 1333 FSB cache $579 or the C2D Q9650 equivalent. I have an X3550, maybe 400Mhz less OC but I saved $250 that way. PC Power & Cooling S75QB 750W $99 after rebate, 5 egg rating by purchasers and plenty of power for future upgrades. Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS 300GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive $270 Fastest hard drive around but if you don't need much storage you could go for a solid state drive instead with the $550 you still have left. Vista Ultimate x64 $169 Makes use of the 8Gb of RAM I assume you already own keyboard monitor mouse & case. Or get one of those refridgerated cases where the CD tray opens to deliver you a cold one at the end of a day writing more code than anyone else in your office!

Way cool John. Getting to the point where tenth's of a second seperate the best times. My 8GB RAM kit will be here Tue. for my Vista x64 partition. I'm doing some cooling mods & updating the BIOS too. I'm also adding a 4GB RAM drive to my XP x86 boot partition to make use of the excess RAM. Maybe I can close some of that 15 second lead you have. Might have found another secret weapon. I'll tell you if it works, for now I'll only tell you it involves a Penguin.

I've noticed on several occaisons the last few years that when surfacing a round concave or convex surface my finished part had 2 areas of facets and 2 areas of smooth machining. I know MC is doing it not the post or CNC machine because during backplot there is a quarter circle of red (where tool is about to move) then a quarter circle of tiny short straight line moves, 1/4 turn of arcs, and quarter turn of lines. Looking at the NC code generated backs that up. Sometimes I can use filter/path settings to make them all arcs but sometimes nothing helps.

quote: My guess is you will see multi-core support long before you see Mastercam as a 64 bit application. Maybe not as long as you think. Microsoft changes thier positions on a whim and might here too, but I read that Vista was Microsoft's last new 32bit software (OS or app.) and only support for previously released software would be in 32bit. If that holds MCam may have to make x64 a reality.

quote: Can you go with LOX or LNActually yes we can. In research tests for high altitude we use LN and there are lots of LN tanks scattered about NIAR. Unfortunately we're forced by state contract to buy Dell or HP. That board on LN has run at 6.4+Gb, catch me if you can.

On this review it was water cooled but it comes with water cooling hardware. Temp is limiting mine to but it's the northbridge not the CPU. If NB gets over 55C a core errors out in Prime 95. Will be addressing this soon, maybe then I can pump up the volume a little.

quote: Windoze uses CPU 0 so why not use CPU 1 should run quicker because it's not running anything.Windoze is multithreaded, I've read that all Microsoft apps and OS's are. Confining MC to 1 CPU might be faster but I doubt it. Affinity is set in taskmanager by right clicking on the app or process. Why don't you find out? Run the benchmark with and without affinity set and see. I'd like to know myself. Just be sure to reboot between runs so each run starts even.

quote: So how do I set the affinity within MC?Don't bother. It can't be done in MC. Affinity just limits an app to one CPU and MC can only use one so why bother?

You liked my screen captures. Did you notice my video card?

Not entirely correct. MC uses only one CPU core but there is a speed boost from the larger L2 cache size of Intel quad core Xeon's.

Any of you that are thinking of building a new machine might want to read about this one. This CPU-Z speaks for itself! http://www.hardwarelogic.com/news/132/ARTI...2008-10-20.html quote: My jaw dropped as I found myself hovering over 600 FSB with little difficulty. After some time of finding a stable OC, I settled on a blazing 4.8GHz overclock via the 600 FSB and 8x mulitplier. [ 10-22-2008, 01:19 AM: Message edited by: bogusmill ]

Thanks Eric, we'll give it a try. Greg, it is a very nice setup but it's at home. Here my Dell workstation is almost 4 years old and takes 4X longer to run the benchmark.

Two problems. 1.Sometimes the whole operations manager goes blank for a few seconds. The window frame is still there but everything inside it vanishes but always returns. 2. One guy here likes his op manager window the full height of his monitor. When he deletes an op or changes between machine defs it goes blank & resizes itself to about half screen height so he has to scroll to ops that should be showing. We all have dual 24" monitors and keep the op manager on the right screen and MC on the left.