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Case 3: Roy Fullbrook

Officer in charge of overclocking: Gareth Ogden

Roy ordered his PC ready-built from www.pcnextday.co.uk, but has since upgraded some of the components following our recommendations, including changing the power supply to a Seasonic S12-600, and the motherboard to an Asus P5B Deluxe. With its Antec P180 case and 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E6700 processor, this is a great machine. However, Roy explained, 'I feel there's a brilliant computer in here trying to get out, but I don't have the skills to get the most out of it.'

Don't worry, Roy, we know exactly what to do to make your PC significantly quicker. As with Berkant's PC, the PC's core components were wisely chosen, but while Berkant's Opteron 144 could be massively overcloked using air cooling, Roy's CPU would only go up to 3GHz (with a voltage of 1.45V) before it spat its dummy out during the Prime95 Torture test.

A more extravagant cooling system was required, and we decided that water cooling was the way to go. We based the water-cooling system around a Swiftech H20-120 Premium kit, which includes all the essentials, but we also added a Swiftech MCW-30 Northbridge block to get as much as possible out of the motherboard's Intel P965 chipset, and we also added an XSPC R120-S radiator.

We also replaced the reservoir and pump in the kit with a Swiftech MCRES-1000P reservoir and pump combo kit, which neatly fits into a 5.25in drive bay. This saves space, although the reservoir and pump supplied with the H20-120 Premium kit will do perfectly well for most people.

With the water loop installed, we were able to start really overclocking the PC, and the water loop made a massive difference. We could now overclock the front side bus to 340MHz, resulting in a 3.4GHz CPU, which was achieved by upping the vcore to 1.5125V, the Northbridge's voltage to 1.45V and the FSB termination voltage to 1.3V. With these settings, the PC was completely stable, even when running two instances of the Prime95 Torture test.

In fact, we found that the CPU could be stably overclocked to 3.6GHz using a vcore of 1.5375V, but decided that this would be taxing the motherboard's VRMs a bit too much, and advised Roy to overclock further at his own risk.

This overclock made a massive difference to performance, which is quite an achievement, as the machine was already very fast at its stock settings. Every test in our Media Benchmarks 2005 suite ran significantly quicker after the overclock, and the dual-core CPU meant that our multithreaded video encoding benchmark was also much quicker. If you're serious about overclocking your Core 2 Duo, you'll get much more out of it by splashing out on a decent water-cooling setup.

Officer in charge of overclocking: Gareth Ogden

Roy ordered his PC ready-built from www.pcnextday.co.uk, but has since upgraded some of the components following our recommendations, including changing the power supply to a Seasonic S12-600, and the motherboard to an Asus P5B Deluxe. With its Antec P180 case and 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E6700 processor, this is a great machine. However, Roy explained, 'I feel there's a brilliant computer in here trying to get out, but I don't have the skills to get the most out of it.'

Don't worry, Roy, we know exactly what to do to make your PC significantly quicker. As with Berkant's PC, the PC's core components were wisely chosen, but while Berkant's Opteron 144 could be massively overcloked using air cooling, Roy's CPU would only go up to 3GHz (with a voltage of 1.45V) before it spat its dummy out during the Prime95 Torture test.

A more extravagant cooling system was required, and we decided that water cooling was the way to go. We based the water-cooling system around a Swiftech H20-120 Premium kit, which includes all the essentials, but we also added a Swiftech MCW-30 Northbridge block to get as much as possible out of the motherboard's Intel P965 chipset, and we also added an XSPC R120-S radiator.

We also replaced the reservoir and pump in the kit with a Swiftech MCRES-1000P reservoir and pump combo kit, which neatly fits into a 5.25in drive bay. This saves space, although the reservoir and pump supplied with the H20-120 Premium kit will do perfectly well for most people.

With the water loop installed, we were able to start really overclocking the PC, and the water loop made a massive difference. We could now overclock the front side bus to 340MHz, resulting in a 3.4GHz CPU, which was achieved by upping the vcore to 1.5125V, the Northbridge's voltage to 1.45V and the FSB termination voltage to 1.3V. With these settings, the PC was completely stable, even when running two instances of the Prime95 Torture test.

In fact, we found that the CPU could be stably overclocked to 3.6GHz using a vcore of 1.5375V, but decided that this would be taxing the motherboard's VRMs a bit too much, and advised Roy to overclock further at his own risk.

This overclock made a massive difference to performance, which is quite an achievement, as the machine was already very fast at its stock settings. Every test in our Media Benchmarks 2005 suite ran significantly quicker after the overclock, and the dual-core CPU meant that our multithreaded video encoding benchmark was also much quicker. If you're serious about overclocking your Core 2 Duo, you'll get much more out of it by splashing out on a decent water-cooling setup.

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