So what's the big deal? Sometimes every few months I get a need to play some kind of computer games. Problem is that my computer isn't powerful enough to play modern 3D games. Now I'm using Celeron D 3 GHz with 1 Gig of RAM and Radeon 9600 PRO graphics. Works great for me, I'm usually just watching movies or using Apple iLife on it but it's simply not enough to fluent run of games like Call of Duty 4 or Crysis. Problem was that those exactly games I was interested in. I didn't to spend any money, so I decided to over-clock my machine.
I had some experiences with overclocking CPU before, but after measuring my FPS at CoD 4 I found out that overclocked CPU wasn't big improvement so I decided to overclock my graphics card. My card looks very similar to this. Note the small cooler. It was very small, powerless and noisy. I wanted to avoid noise first, so I made up some artificial cooler, showed on next pics.
Cooler is connected using just some tape. Easy, cheap and powerful but very very ugly. I made this up just for testing. For my big surprise the card didn't burn out and worked pretty well. I got some artifacts during playing, so I extended fan cooling. Look at the huge fan. It's Russian, made in '70 I guess, has 30 Watts, and made strange very strong noise.
I found out that in this is temporarily usable for some experiments with overclocking and for few minutes of playing. But then the sound started to be too annoying. So I decided to redesign cooling and made up some control system. I wanted to be able to turn fans off when I'm not playing and using processor for 100%. I decided to build the best top-of-the-line homemade just-fan cooling system possible. I didn't wanna spend money on this jerky computer. So I got 4 fans, two for graphics, one for hard-disks and one for general case cooling. It's simple, works, was cheap and pretty silent when are the fans turned off, which is 95% of time my computer is running. I also designed control system for fans. Firstly I wanted to built it up with micro-controller and with variable rounds-per-minutes but then I decided to make is simple, just with 2 buttons and 2 relays. It's more reliable and simplier.
Photos of done work:
Graphics itself:
Case overview. Extra fans are in red circles
And control panel with fans turned off and on
Okay that's it. And what is the conclusion? I'll try to report you few numbers:
CPU
originally 3060 MHz
now 3510 MHz
GPU
originally 398 MHz
now 513 MHz
Graphical RAM
originally 222 MHz
now 256,5 MHz
Those are numbers I reached. May be better, but I have no extra time for this staff. I'm happy with this, I can play CoD4 at 800x600 with maximal antialiasing and Crysis at 800x600 without antialiasing on more than 20 FPS. Pretty cool.
I'm finished today. I just wanna say, I'm sorry for miserable quality of pictures. Now I have only my cell-phone camera.
