- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Ah, so the San Diegos came out with the Venice cores? Had no idea, probably because I don't snoop around at articles about FX's :P
Liquid cooling is never a necessity. And with Venice/SD cores they run cooler than the previous gen, though the San Diegos are hot nevertheless.
I'd say just normal cooling, like an XP-90 heatsink with fan, or something to that effect.
Controller cards go into a pci slot to control an scsi drive...if you don't know much about them just scratch the idea and get a raptor.
Overclocking...I can only give you a synopsis. Go to guru3d.com and other overclocking sites to find articles.
What do you want to OC?
The FX processors have their multiplier unlocked, which means good OC abilities.
FSB: system speed, in this case 200MHz stock
Multiplier: FSB x multiplier = CPU clock
Hypertransport: HT multiplier x FSB x 2 = Hypertransport, and hypertransport must be < about ~2000 to ~2200
Basically, in your BIOS, jack up the FSB 5MHz at a time and run a torture test like Pi or two runs of PC Mark 04. Keep doing that until you get unstable, then add one increment of voltage to the CPU. If that doesn't do anything and it's still unstable, add a bit of voltage to the RAM.
But, since you have an FX...put the multiplier down to like, 6x, and pump the FSB up, slowly, taking into consideration the hypertransport must remain below 2000, ideally, 2200 absolute max. Adjust ram voltages and slowly relax timings and such, until you have your max FSB. For OCZ, PQI, or any TCCD/Brainpower RAM, you can probably reach 280+. I have gotten the FSB on my pc past 290, but at that point I run out of voltage to use on my RAM :(
Once you reach your max FSB, increase the CPU multiplyer by .5x each time and run torture tests.
When you finally have what you think is the absolute max, run an overnight test of Pi or some similar program. If you wake up and see no errors, great. If you do, bring it down 5-10MHz and try again.
That's a short summary. Best for you to go to an overclocking website. I will say that a good CPU copper heatsink and good case cooling are musts for overclocking.
[Edited on 5/22/2005]