Steve Croft's Bump and Grind!

 This just in from Hot Hardware fan and Super Cooling Freak-Man Steve Croft!

I recently got the P3 500 and set about a maximum tweak... Brief highlights of how follow :-)

1.) Mobo BX6 r2 Bios (Ver KU) settings.... FSB set to 129 x 5 (1/4 pci) Core Volts set at 2.3V
2.) PC125 SDRAM (128MB) PC100 falls over badly...
3.) InWin Q500 full tower case with additional fan cooling (120mm input, 80mm blowing into psu, 80mm output above psu, 60mm blowing onto cpu fans).
4.) Tennmax P3 TF Cooler. Modified for greater efficiency
5.) Rear P3 case removed, Plastic pillars used to replace missing case for the cooler mounting.
6.) Small Heatsink bonded to both L2 Cache chips, fits in the gap under Tennmax cooler... (the incidental air cooling on L2 cache before this mod was not quite enough).

7.) 40mm fan mounted on back of pcb blowing onto reverse side of the cpu, (helps a lot)

8.) The 'Blue' top of the 'Olga' style cpu was found to be domed, this was machined flat, ((Note*** this is not for the faint hearted). The phase-change type pad on Tennmax cooler was removed, the area under this pad was highly polished. Thermapath white paste was used to mate the two together. That was more or less it :) I do have good cooling on this PC, which has now been running at 645MHz for 5 days, usually all day. (look at shot above for the "ground-down" CPU!)

9.) Running MBM 4.07, the cpu diode temp is around 50/51c at an ambient of 21c, whilst running SETI@Home FFT prog. Before the 'Blue-Top' was ground down, these figures would have been 10c higher approx, so although it 'Looks' crazy machining the Blue top down, it works very well, I attempted this in the full knowledge that I could screw up the cpu big time, but I can't resist a challenge :) As it happens it was much easier than I imagined. I think the blue dome maybe there to stop overclocking???? So lets get rid of it :)

Best Regards,
Steve Croft
SNC Electronics
Hitchin, Herts. UK