[Worklog] Watercooled TJ07.

That´s 1.392 idle in windows, what is the bios value?

That´s lees than i need for 4.2ghz turbo on, mine wants, 1.42vcore idle in windows and 1.39vcore load

Vcore is at 1.400v in the BIOS, and Vtt is at 1.255v, VDimm 1.5v, IOH Core 1.140v, CPU PLL 1.300v, and QPI PLL is at 1.140v.

Under load Vcore in CPUZ says 1.376v..

I just need some better RAM so I can run it faster, I thought these Dominators would do 1680MHz at CAS9, but they just wont do it unfortunately.. :(

Though tbh, bumping Vtt would probably make it stable at 1680MHz, the last run I did before I went to bed last night with the RAM at 1680MHz LinX managed to do 15 passes before it stopped due to errors, I will try bumping Vtt up to 1.315v and see if that helps with stability..

1600mhz cl 6 is as fast as cl9 at 2000mhz

That´s a nice vtt voltage, if i lower it from 1.44 bios or 1.42 windows I can´t pass hyper-pi

Atm I´m running without turbo 20 x 200 = 4000 that is 1.36vcore idle in windows, but it still wants 1.42vtt

What about hyper-pi? For me is easier to pass linx than hyper-pi  8 or 16 treads.

Never tried Hyper-Pi, I just tend to use a mix of LinX, Prime95, and day to day use.

If my system passes 20 to 30 runs of LinX, 8 hours of Prime95 blend, and doesn't BSOD/Freeze when I play any of my games, or run any applications, I class this as stable..

When I have my system at 4GHz with 1.275v Vcore and 1.215v Vtt, it is solid as a rock, I've had it running like that for the past 3 months, and in that time I haven't had a single BSOD, I've had a few crashes but those have been because of bad graphics card drivers, and were sorted by going back to the previous driver..

I will spend somemore time tweaking my voltages and RAM over this weekend.

1600mhz cl 6 is as fast as cl9 at 2000mhz

I know this, but my RAM isn't running at 1600MHz CAS6, it's running at 1260MHz CAS6, and so obviously my memory bandwidth is considerably less than it is when the RAM is running at 1600MHz..

These DIMM's will only do 1600MHz @ CAS8, I've tried and tried to get CAS7 stable, but they just don't want to do it!!

That´s a lovely cpu, I really wonder how it will do with faster ram like the g-skill perfect storm, g-skill has life warranty.

Mine pases linx 10 passes and prime without any issue, but to pass hyperpi it wants more vtt. Still I have random crashes, normally after 5 - 8 hours idle, less vtt it crashes after 2 hours.

I will keep raising until it becomes stable or it dies. If it dies i´ll RMA so I probably end with a good batch. 4851Axx requires too much vcore and my chip wants even more than others with the same batch as eva2000 from I4memory.

cheers later.....

Hi xeon, sorry I've not been around lately, I've just been extremely busy over the xmas and new year, it's been really hectic in my house over this period!!!

Santa was good to me though, he brought me a pair of the new Kingston SSDNow 40GB drives, so I've got them installed in my rig in RAID-0 for my OS, apps and games, and boy do these things fly!!!

These Kingston drives are not like the other V series ones that use the crappy J micron controller, these are the new 40GB ones that use the new gen 2 Intel controller, some websites are actually saying that they are the best SSD's to date, and they only cost me £75 each!!

A pair of these drives end up being a lot faster than a single 80GB Intel X25M gen2 drive, and they work out being quite a bit cheaper to, the Intel one costs around £197 from the place I got mine, whereas the 2 Kingstons only costs £150..

Out of all the upgrades I did in the last year, I'd have to say that these SSD's have by far been the best upgrade out of them all.

I've actually decided to get another pair of them for a 4 drive RAID-0 array!! :D

Before I got these drives, I never realized how much mechanical HDD's were holding back my system, everything just feels so much more snappier, my games load faster, boot times are a lot quicker, the differences are huge all round!!

With these Kingstons though, you really need to use 2 or more in RAID-0, as a single drives write speeds are really poor because they are only utilizing 5 out of the 10 channels on the controller, but as soon as you stick 2 of them together, they really fly!!!

Yeah I read a lot about those SSDs last December when intel released the firmware update. This Kingston series a quite good and cheap so I heard. Keep us tuned with your x-mas presents.

Will be nice to see some test. Congrats XD

Here is a quick run I just did with CrystalDiskMark:


Here is a pic of the drives themselves.



The last 2 tests in that screen are the most important ones, these are the types of reads/writes that are performed by the OS most frequently, and as you can see the SSD's completely annihilate the SATAII drive..

As I said earlier, the write performance with these particular SSD's are starved because they only have 5 NAND flash chips onboard, so the SSD controller can only utilize 5 of the 10 channels it has, however, when you think about it, you only really write things to the boot drive once, then it just reads the data after that, so it doesn't really matter all that much tbh.

However, I will be adding another pair of these drives into my array in the next month, so things should be even better then..

I'll post up more benches for you guys later on.

The main thing that I'm happy about though, is the fact that I no longer have those horrible Raptors in my system, those things were the noisiest thing inside my case, they used to constantly grind and crunch whenever you accessed them, which used to drive me up the wall, not to mention how dire their performance was in RAID-0, because they were only SATAI drives, the performance was garbage, my single SATAII Samsung drive performed better than the Raptors...

Also, with these SSD's, the access times are insane, there is litterally no access time at all!!

Here's my AS SSD Benchmark results:



::edit::

ATTO Disk Benchmark:

The are much faster than my 4 x 1tb on raid 0

I do prefer to have space vs speed. I don´t know how much difference does it make having 2 x ssd in raid 0 just for windows and all the games in another Sata raid

Here is ATTO that I just ran on my SATAII HDD:



Mate, seriously, even a single SSD for your OS and apps will make so much difference to your system.

I couldn't believe the differences that I felt immediately after installing some apps on these things, like I said, out of all the upgrades I did in the last year, these things have been by far the best, and I did quite a lot of upgrades last year!!!

I didn't really think about how mechanical HDD's bottlenecked a modern PC, but now I do realize just how much they do hold everything else back...

As regards to space vs speed, that shouldn't really come into the equation here, after all, you still keep mechanical drives in your rig for storage, and just use SSD's for apps, games and OS, everything feels so much smoother, farcry 2 now loads in seconds instead of minutes!!!

I've not installed any other games yet, as I've been far to busy, but like I said, Farcry 2 now loads almost instantly, whereas on the Raptor array I used to have, it took forever for a level to load!!

Also boot times are under 20 seconds now, from the time I press the power button to get to a usable desktop..

Here is a screenie of Windows BootTimer:



::edit::

And regarding the speed difference between SSD RAID and SATA RAID, I just wish that I had taken some screens of my Raptor RAID-0 array, there really is no comparison mate, SSD is the future!!!

::edit::

Just noticed you said that about having only the OS on the SSD's and all games on another HDD RAID, well, I'd say that you'd want to have the games you play most on the SSD's, and the ones you only play now and again on your mechanical drives.

This is the reason that I am buying another pair, because 80GB isn't enough storage for me..

At £75 each though for these things, I don't mind spending another £150 for another pair, and the results with 4 of this drives in RAID-0 is absolutely insane!!!

A friend from another forum has a 4 disk RAID array using them, and his sequential reads are hitting 600+MB/s!!!!

Your far cry 2 now loads in seconds because you have it on the ssd, if you place it in the Sata disks it will be slow too. The same with any app.

Agree sd´s are the future and win7 has optimizations for them.

Congrats great buy

I know this is the reason Farcry is now loading quicker, I was just pointing out to you how much faster it is compared to traditional HDD's!!

These drives even have TRIM support out of the box as well, as they are basically a 40GB version of the Gen2 Intel X25M with a Kingston sticker on them, they come with the 02HA firmware already installed, which supports TRIM in Win7 (or any other OS that supports TRIM), however, TRIM support isn't currently available when you're using RAID, but Intel are supposed to be working on an update for Intel Matrix Storage Manager that will allow TRIM support on RAID arrays, so no more performance degradation with SSD's...

The Intel controller is regarded as the best SSD controller available atm, so these Kingston drives are an absolute steal imo, I am so glad that I grabbed a pair when I did, because cclonline no longer have any stock left, they are selling like hot cakes!!

If you ever do decide to get a Kingston SSD, you really have to watch, as there are a few different SSD's in the V Series, if you do decide to get some, it's the 40GB V Series you want, the 64GB and 128GB V Series drives use the crappy J.Micron controller which is known for poor performance, and suffers from stuttering...

It's sad that they're quite expensive now but this is the way to go. I would get one for Windows boot times and C:\ installed programs. I'm sure it will feel sharpish. I don't keep games on c so I would not benefit here but at least windows will be snappy.

I hope cheap large SSD will come in 1 max 2 years, as it is well known that hdds are the slowest component of a PC.

Edit: Check out this article http://psyurl.com/ssd
Too bad toms isn't that great anymore but this article is good.

Not a bad review there recon, though I started to get a little weary about their testing after I read that they used Acronis that came bundled with the Kingston SSD to clone the OS onto all 4 of the drives used in their testing..

The reason I got weary, is because I used Acronis to clone my previous OS install from my Raptors, and it ended up using the wrong aligment during the cloning process, and the drives performance was extremely poor because of this..

Have a look at this screenshot:



These were the results I kept getting consistently after I cloned my OS onto the SSD's, the drives performance were extremely poor because Acronis used the incorrect alignment for Win7, so I ended up just doing a clean install, and now my results are so much better, as you can see in the image I posted on the last page...

It wasn't only the benches that were affected because of Acronis, everything I did with my PC felt sluggish, and no better than a standard HDD, infact in some instances the performance felt worse the a mechanical HDD, but now that I did a clean install, and the alignment is correct, the drives are performing brilliantly.


::edit::

Just checked my boot time again there, and it's actually quicker now than it was in that previous screenshot:



The first boot time I posted was done just after I first did the clean install of Win7 about a week ago, the one above was done about 5 minutes ago, 13 seconds is super quick, my system used to take closer to 60 seconds with mechanical HDD's...

13 seconds is awesome, mine take ages, but i haven't made a clean install in ages.

Disabling certain unused features in win7 should make it even faster.

Yeah, I haven't even looked into optimzing windows yet, so I imagine I could speed up the boot process quite considerably yet..

Well, I've decided that I'm going to be sending my case off to Tom at Chilled PC hopefully in the next couple of days to have the internals powdercoated in black and red, we are both working out a price atm, so once we agree on a final price, my case will be getting sent to him to have the work done, I will be RMA'ing my PSU at the same time, so hopefully I get a nice Corsair as my replacement to go into my newly customized case!!! :D

I'll be sure you post some pictures once I get it back for you guys to have a look. :)

Yeah man powder coating is really nice, is going to be great.

How much do they take for the job?

It just occurred to me that going for Intel X25-M G2 Postville 80GB at 185 euro would probably get you better than 2xKingston SSDNow V-Series 40GB at 95 euro each.

What do you guys think?

My mate killerjoe ordered one of those.

Maybe he'll do some tests? So we can compare with BluntSmoker's?

I found some on the net yesterday, and i think the intel is faster with small files than the kingston v series in raid 0

I just got off the telephone to Kingston, I was enquiring about these drives, and they gave me some bad news.

Kingston have already discontinued these SSD's completely, I was trying to source another pair, but I couldn't find them anywhere, so that's why I called them... :(

Intel have released their X25-V 40GB drives though, but they are a little more expensive than the Kingstons were.

@recon, I'd personally get a pair of 40GB drives instead of an 80GB, you get over 300MB reads with a pair of drives, but a single 80GB gives about 225 to 250MB reads, also the write performance is considerably better with RAID'ed 40GB drives to.

and i think the intel is faster with small files than the kingston v series in raid 0

Nope, this is wrong mate... a single kingston 40GB is slower than an 80GB Intel, but remember xeon, these Kingstons have the EXACT same controller as the Intel, if you open the Kingston up, everything inside is identical to an Intel SSD, the only reason a single Kingston drive is slower, is because they only have 5 NAND flash chips, which means it only utilizes 5 of the 10 channels on the controller, the Intel 80GB drives have 10 NAND chips, so they take full advantage of the controllers 10 channels.

But once you pair up 2 Kingstons in RAID-0, they outperform the Intel 80GB quite considerably.

I'll have a hunt on OcUK forums for peoples benches with a single Intel X25M and then you can compare them to the benches I've posted with my drives.

Well, that's the courier been to collect my case, so off to Chilled PC it goes to get the powder coating done!!!

My PSU is now with the techs at Scan for testing, so I should hopefully get both back at around the same time, I'm hoping it's before next weekend... :)

Just to clear things up, why did Kingston discontinue these drives?