Help required with the items below. Many Thanx in advance.

1. The cooler/fan boxed with an Intel core 2 Q cpu came with three strips of paste on its base for making contact with the cpu chip surface.

The instructions do not mention of paste added.

Is it necessary to add extra paste on it?

2. An asus P5K mobo looses one PCI slot as the 9800 grfx card takes two slots.

Any way to fit another pci slot for my internal modem & possibly for a sound card if the onboard fails (as usual with asus mobos).

It also lucks the parallel port for my old printer, can I add one somehow?

3.  The mobo book says tha the bios must be adjusted accordingly if a DDR2-1066 memory module is fitted.

My ram specs below do not say if my ram is 800mhz or 1066mhz. How can I find out.

crucial ram
Package: 240-pin DIMM
Feature: DDR2 PC2-5300
Specs: DDR2 PC2-5300 • CL=5 • Unbuffered • NON-ECC • DDR2-667 • 1.8V • 256Meg x 64

luke wrote on Sep 18^th, 2008 at 7:37pm:



1. no

2. You should still have 2 PCI slots available, the second PCI slot from the video card may block cooling of that video card if a large PCI card is fitted to it. Some modems/nics etc are very low profile, so they might be considered if you need to use that nearby slot.

Well finally I made the plunge with the savings in danger of dodgy banks today.

Went all the way, after first trying the EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX grfx on my existing system. For some reason it was still kinking or missing now & then as before & did'nt have the patience to start fidling with it.

I got the rest of the bits as per signature below.

All went well & in a couple of hrs (had the box emptied the previous night) it fired up & installed itself out of the CD/DVDs

BUT...... what ever combination I try (blind) in the Display configs & nVidias settings Antial/Anisotropic etc, it is still stattering, kinking or missing now & then, seas have water texture (nothing bright though) & lakes near Cranfield (UK) show up with water (landed OK) but not so the lakes near Denham, they are fields.

I downloaded the latest nVidia drivers & the scenery.cfg is same as before.

Even without the demanding Fotografic scenery S UK the above prevail.

I was expecting better performance with the new expensive specs, but most probably is my inadequate setting up.

The clouds are stanning though!!!.

Can anyone help? Thanx           luke
hope these aren't too large :

I understand higher ram speed & 3gb is better. but now trying to solve the mistery of the dry lakes around Denham (UK), which I did not occur with my old rig.

Have tried to follow NNick's info with old rig but couldn't hag it.

I found this below, if anybody has that elusive fix please let me know.

"...........The misplaced land/water near Denham is a known fault needing an upgrade/fix, but the link below for the update is no longer working . The link to the entire VFR Terrain Update page is broken.
http://visualflight.info/products/vfrterra...or-vfr-terrain/

Tried going in by products>VFR Terrain>Support as below but still no luck
http://visualflight.info/products/vfrterra............"

thanx ,     luke

This is the bit I like....the old Camp Fire!...>>>>



That's 25 degrees Centigrade hotter than boiling water... ...!

Time for a fry-up?... .... ....!

F....G-BPLF... ....!

luke wrote on Sep 19^th, 2008 at 3:52am:


Hi Luke,
It blows out the back of the case thru the psu.
Your hardware seems adequate, so likely your software setup needs to be fixed.

It's an S1 Accelero, a bit of a waste on this card because it doesn't overclock very well, but it keeps the card very cool all the same. The fans just barely spin and it's silent, so that's a plus as well.

As far as the PSU goes, you should aim for a reputable PSU with a high efficiency rating. High efficiency points to quality. Reputable does not mean popular by my definition, it means well proven.

I can link a site that provides decent reviews, but I'm not going to recommend one, as I have no idea what is available to you.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/section10.html


Look here for some cooler info:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article30-page1.html

With a Q number of 7.5, the Zalman CPS9500LED on that list cooled an E8400 @ 3.6ghz a full 10*C at both Idle and Load on a recent build I did.

The Thermalright Ultra-120's seem good but I think you need to buy a fan for them.

You won't need another PSU to overclock unless the present one is faulty or inadequate in some way. You may not have the best PSU, but it should provide the ability for some basic overclocking, without load conditions at least. You won't need a cooler either unless stress testing, but you won't know until you test the temps at load.

Maybe the PSU is not your current problem, (no pun intended).

No PSU or Cooler will help if you don't understand the basic O/C fundamentals.
With modern Intel based systems this is fairly easy if you simply twist the logic a little. (assuming your hardware is capable, and it probably is)

Forget all about everything you read about bus speeds, memory speeds etc, and take a fresh look.

Assume a CPU-FSB speed of 400mhz for starters, then you can improve upon that later if you wish. So you set 400mhz FSB in bios.

Set the FSB/memory ratio at 1:1, this means the 667mhz setting in your bios.

On the P5K, the 667mhz setting IS the 1:1 ratio lock. It is decieving, but think of it this way, if the FSB is set to 333mhz, (default for P35 chipsets) the ram will be running at 333mhz (DDR667), obviously the 1:1 ratio.

Lock the PCI and PCIe buses at their default speeds of 33 and 100mhz if your bios allows it.

Set an 8x CPU multiplier which equates to 3.2ghz for the overclock speed of the cpu. (400fsb x 8 = 3200mhz).

The ram will be running at 800mhz, and your ram is only rated for 667mhz, so, the ram may fail at 800mhz, and this will be the bug in the ointment.

If your ram is currently defaulting to cas 4 timings by SPD, then you may find that it will crash at 800mhz, yet if the timings are set to cas 5 figures, the ram may be fine at 800mhz. Obviously. if the ram is stable at cas 4 timings, then leave it there.

Often, bios will not configure ram correctly at overclocked speeds, and this can result in instability if the timings are left on automatic/SPD.

Sometimes, you can just boot the PC at default bios settings, then go into bios and lock the ram timings by setting the timings to manual configuration, and don't make any other changes to them. These locked timings may work well with the overclock, and they provide a base from which to make timing alterations if no other information is available.

If your PC5300 is unstable at 800mhz, you may stabilise it with some extra ram voltage, but do this in small steps, ram can be easily burnt. Some ram just doesn't seem to respond to voltage increases at all.

While setting up the clocks, turn off all auto clocking options in bios, so your software reads the correct speeds and you don't get confused, you can re-enable them later with luck.

You may still find instability at the above settings, even if your ram and timings are correct...... indeed, you may need a slight vcore increase or chipset voltage increase, but take it all one step at a time.

If you cannot get the ram stable at your overclock, you need better ram, and no PSU or cpu cooler is going to help you there.