i should have made my post more specific, FlyBy.
- i was asking RT, what kind of CPU cooler he uses and if he uses Turbo.

i have a Thermalright Ultra Extreme for my Q9550s at 4.0 GHz but i don't believe it will fit i7
- so all i have currently is the very budget ($30) CM Hyper N212 - which is fine for most CPUs, but i7 has unreal heat on an overclock; even 2- 120 MM fans will not allow an OC over 3.8 GHz with Turbo enabled (3.97 GHz effectively)

Noctua - an Austrian company - asked ABT if we would like to test and review their new i7 cooler
- how could i refuse, it will be here late this week or early next.

excellent stuff! I can't wait until your review.
Flyby out

Well, i have one coming up in the meantime - with i7 clocked to 3.8 GHz vs. Ph II at 3.9 and Q9550 at 4.0 GHz. i am done benching and working on the charts now
- the one with the Noctua cooler will be part 2 or part 3

thanks for the link, might just get this thing

you're welcome.
Flyby out

Thanks, as far as cooling I have a single loop liquid build with the primochill typhoon 3 reservoir and a d5 pump. I am using a triple rad with two scythe kaze fans on push and a cooler master on pull. I have the enzotech sapphire water block and 1/2' tubing. I idle any where from 28-36c as my office tends to have a high ambient temp but running prime 95 for 10 hours never went above 70c. Also the 8800gtx as many know produces a massive amount of heat.

Yes turbo is on, also hyper threading, and my multiplier is x21

hey rt, what are you using your system for primarily? I see you have 12gb of ram. maybe running some strong programs?
Flyby out

System is used for animation, video rendering, programming java, c++, c#, visual...ect It's nice to have the ram when you mess up in a program and instead of getting the bsod all your stuff gets dumped into the ram and at 12 gb its all handled and you can shut off the process before a crash but it's mainly for rendering animations and video rendering. Though I do play a lot of games as well and have been saving to purchase 2 hd 5970 for a quad-fire configuration.

edit: Forget to mention I also have 3 screens only 2 utilized at the moment but I run everything at once, usenet downloading in background, zbrush, photoshop, 3dsmax, maya, eclipse, and a lot of other stuff depending on the day and when I need to submit things.

I didn't mention my system boots in 10 sec or less, ssd is an amazing technology. edit: (It was late wasn't trying to brag here just saying ssd has come a long way ;p)

One more thing about asrocks motherboards, they feature a nifty little utiility called instantboot. I have not tried this yet but it looks nice. It will allow your computer to go into a special suspended animation and when you want to turn it on its almost instant and supposedly consumes very very very little power.

rgrt rt,
I didn't figure you were just playing PC games on that rig.
Flyby out

rtaylor07 you mentioned you have your I7 920 running stable at 3.999 with the x58 extreme. I too have a 920 with this MB but I am having trouble with Asrock's BIOS information strings, they tend to use a different language than the standard board.

What are your OC settings? I've been doing some research and found some settings for 3.8 (181/21/1.25 bclk/multiplier/CPU Voltage).