The stuff for my upgrade came today, I ordered:

Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz
Asus P8P67 Pro.
2 x Asus HD 6850 1GB GDDR5 OC Graphics Card
Noctua NH-D14 Dual Radiator and Fan CPU Cooler
Kingston 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz
Gelid GC-Extreme Thermal Compound

Slight hiccup I forgot to order a Sata DVD drive as my gaming comp still had a IDE one, so I popped down to my local, friendly PC shop/rip off merchant! he wanted 26 quid for a 10 quid Samsung drive! ....so after I told him to f**k off! I came home and borrowed the one out of my HTPC.

The cooler is bloody massive and has quite possibly has the worst colour scheme this side of the 70’s!




It was easy to install the fitting kit is excellent and came with a long screw driver to reach the 2 fixing screws in-between the radiators. I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t be able to close the door on my case that houses the side cooling fans, as it is about ½ inch taller than my Tuniq tower and that was a tight fit, but did get it closed with a bit of effort.

It felt very strange using a mouse in Bios! first thing I did was check the temps, CPU was in the high 20’s so set the v-core to 1.35, locked the FSB to a 100 and set the multi to 45, then installed windows! lol

Very impressed windows installed perfectly it ran any benchmark at that that speed so I upped it to 50x for 5GHz, not fully stability tested yet but it’s looking pretty good so far, temps did rise quite a bit from 4.5GHz to 5GHz, but under full load using LinX the max I have seen is 66c there is about 6 or 7 degrees difference from my coolest core to the hottest, seeing they are so close together I think the 1 or 2 of the sensor must be a little bit out? 

 I installed a couple of games WoW looks pretty in DX11 with everything at Ultra except shadow, with V-sync on I was getting a solid 60FPS and only dipping to around 50-55 in Stormwind, I also install the original Crysis seeing it is more of a performance hog than Warhead, with everything maxed out and AA at 2x I was getting 60 – 70 FPS. These card run cool I left HWmonitor running in the background the max they hit is 63c.

Here are a few screenies:







Will play some more tomorrow! 
   
   

I don't know if the below has been proved a load of rubbish but this statement was put out last month, I'd watch that VCORE does it not jump up and down a bit? or is it absolutely steady at what it is 

Hi there


Right guys myself and our technical guys have spent the entire weekend and this morning in discussions with Intel regarding the alarming amount of reports of Sandybridge CPU's dying and have been conducting our own testing as have Intel to find out what is a definite no no.


Sandybridge maximum safe voltages

Core Voltage - Not recommended too exceed 1.38v, doing so could kill the CPU, we therefor recommend a range of 1.325-1.350v if overclocking.
Memory Voltage - Intel recommend 1.50v plus/minus 5% which means upto 1.58v is the safe recommended limit. In our testing we have found 1.65v has caused no issues.
BCLK Base Clock - This is strictly a NO, anyone using base clock overclocking could/will cause damange to CPU/Mainboard.
PLL Voltage - Do not exceed 1.9v!!



Processor - Basically we recommend customers not to exceed 1.35v to play it safe, all our bundles are set at 1.3250v or lower, any competitors offering bundles above 4.6GHz you should be enquiring as to what voltage they are using as we believe anything over 1.38v will limit CPU lifespan and anything over 1.42v will likely kill the CPU or severely limit its lifespan.

Memory - Intel recommend 1.50v plus/minus 5% which means 1.60v is the ideal safe maximum, but we have found in our testing all 1.65v memory is fine. We have also found most new 1.65v like Corsair XMS3 will run at its rated timings with just 1.50-1.55v which is well within Intel specifications. So people upgrading to Sandybridge you can still use your old DDR3, but we do recommend you run it at 1.60v or less. We are shipping most of our bundles which feature Corsair XMS at 1.50v-1.55v at rated timings. We've also discussed with Asus and MSI regarding voltages for memory and they also confirm in their testing 1.65v caused no issues with reliability.

Base Clock - To put it simple if you value the life of your components, do not overclock using base clock!

PLL Voltage - Again do not exceed 1.9v!


These are just guidelines we recommend you follow, if you want to push more voltage through your CPU's then just be aware they could die on you. Your warranty is un-affected and we will honor any CPU's that die, we just won't ask questions as to how you killed them.

Not all CPU's are as fragile as others, we have experimented upto 1.50v Vcore and 1.70v memory and had zero issues with reliability, so it seems some of fine when pushing hard.

so.... how fast does it feel ?


I keep thinking about upgrading.... then I decide my rig is fast enough and it's too much hassle to mess with the water cooling.....


but then someone else comes along and posts some new pics and benchmarks and I the feelings of needing to upgrade come flooding back!

Fair enough Shaun mine despite being set to something on some settings it would boost the volts up and down above the 'set limit' when speedstep kicked in and it was running full throttle, so what should have been 1.35 max was suddenly 1.37 then at times 1.39 so I had to really keep my eye on it. That said I haven't tried o/cing again on the latest firmware revision, will you be re-enabling speedstep or just leaving it set to the max o/c?

I'm wondering if it's worth having a crack at 5GHz myself, Shaun what have you left it on as your 'daily' settings? (PLL etc) 5GHz on 1.325V is really good

new bios for the pro 1302 http://hardforum.com//showthread.php?t=1578865