January 9, 2011 - Old school analog shot of a cutting edge digital machine. No, this is not a bad thing, if fact it's very, very good. The old setup needed some updating although it served me very well for several years. Finally decided to rebuild the system during the holiday break. Now I'll throw some technical details at you: AMD Phenom II 555 Black Edition on a Gigabyte GA-880GM-UD2H motherboard liquid cooled with a Corsair H50. 4 GB Kingston Hyper-X 1333 DDR3. XFX Radeon HD5770 video card (not shown). My goal was to build a solid, inexpensive overclocking PC. Let's just say this thing rocks. So far, I have taken the system from a stock 3.2GHz to 4.2 GHz on the processor for a 31% overclock and it only runs at 52 degrees C under full load. This, combined with a 20% overclock on the video card has raised the performance of the system under benchmarking by approximately 20 - 30%. Not bad for a couple of hundred bucks worth of components and a little bit of tinkering. For those of you who know a little bit about this, 4.2GHz is a monster overclock and I think I still have room to go. Bonus: I was able to unlock the other two cores on the chip and it is now a quad core :)

Danger Den TDX copper base block for the CPU and a DD Maze 4 for the GPU were used. I would have preferred the silver base versions but I was well over budget by now..