Wish me luck
 

well, I'm going for it:


Fingers crossed.

Good Luck!

Only two problems with my build - received an "experienced" mobo that had a blown firewire port, returned, and that i7-920 sure runs hot. Will have to add aftermarket CPU cooling.

Otherwise, I'm pretty happy with it! Friday, I batched 51 Canon 7d clips out to MP4, the most stable between V8-32bit and V9-64bit turned out to be V8 with the 2GB memory flag fix. Oh, and, uh, you shot this stuff, Burk! Managed to get it posted Friday before 5pm.

I also second the aftermarket cooling. With a decent aftermarket heatsink and fan, you can EASILY go to 3.6ghz, safely.

I've now built several i7 920 based, overclocked editing stations... They serve us well.

One thing though, a heads up. Those ASUS motherboards have a feature, where, if your overclock fails or freezes the machine, it will automatically load your cmos/bios settings back to default. The feature is great during testing and stabilization of the rig, but, sometimes, if you hard crash your machine, or are forced to restart the computer using the power or reset buttons, the motherboard, sometimes will incorrectly interpret this as an "overclocking failure" and proceed to reset your bios settings to default.

The best workaround is to use the "overclocking profiles" in the bios, name it well, so you'll know which one to reload if you ever experience what I described above.

-Adam

Actually, with a good aftermarket cooler, a D0 stepping of the 920 (stock speed: 2.66GHz) can easily reach 3.8GHz or above - in fact, with the right aftermarket cooler, one can exceed 4GHz on relatively low VCore and VTT (QPI/Uncore) voltage settings (1.35V, the Intel-recommended maximum). With just the stock retail-boxed CPU cooler, you can go to 3.4 or 3.5GHz tops without significantly exceeding the 70°C Intel-recommended continuous maximum temperture (TJunction) at 100% load.

I have an Intel-brand motherboard rather than an Asus motherboard. But I still achieved an overclock to 3.5GHz with just the stock cooler and a 1.2V setting for both VCore and VTT (which is slightly higher than the stock 1.15V for either) on my i7-920 system. I could go to 3.6GHz or higher, but I would have to get a good aftermarket cooler if I don't want temps to go into the 80s under even a medium (about 60%) load. (As a reference, at this 3.5GHz overclock, transcoding MXV to AVC in Sony DVD Architect Pro 5.0b took less than 25% of the CPU's processing power - all that while taking just under 7 minutes of transcoding for every minute of video content.)