---

After enjoying opening gifts and the atmosphere of the holidays I had almost forgotten about publishing a second blog. Back for the second part, here is Canadian Winter. To see the first part, click here.

So at last, here is my second winter air blog. This time, I focused more on clocking my ram up to see how cold affects that. I used the same setup as previously. This mainly consists of my trusty Phenom II 955 X4 BE, Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P, and Ballistix D9GTS 2GB DDR3 set.

Real quick I just want to share what it looks like right outside my house on these chilly winter days, and a few images of my setup and how I utilize the cold air.

As can be seen, I am simply placing my rig in my window sill, and letting it pull the freezing air through the heatsink.

Last blog I displayed how the cold allowed me to break the SuperPi 1M barrier of 16 seconds through a large gain in cpu speed. This time, I decided to see how I could keep the CPU speed slightly lower, while taking advantage of gains in memory, and northbridge clocks. This time my ambient temperature was only just around -5C to -8C.

First, here is the memory speed I reached through testing. I kept timings the same, as I have them set perfectly to my liking. So I ramped up the frequency. I ended with a bootable NB of 3080MHz, and Ram frequency of 1760MHz.

I got lucky and it just so happened that this Ram/NB clock was stable enough for 1M runs. Note that I have lowered the cpu speed since last blog’s run and still attained below 16 seconds.

I also attempted for 4.452GHz again as I failed last time. I didn’t get a validation, but I did get a snap shot.

Shortly after this was the fate of attempting a validation.

Another thing I played around with, on the past knowledge from Chew* was the voltage tolerance of my chip. He claimed that there has never been a quad to boot past 1.6-1.65V. It seems he is right. Even with freezing temperatures, I could not boot at above that threshold.

I also tried attempting some overclocking using the same method on a day that struck with -20C weather. However, I was having issues. The colder the system got, the higher my CPU temperature went. I couldn’t exactly figure it out. With some advice from Chew* and Aaron Schradin I have found it may be due to either freezing of fluid/material within the heatpipes on my TRUE 120 which stops heat dissipation dead in it’s tracks, or attributed to VRM’s getting too cold due to the ambient temps which causes fluctuation in voltages. To combat this issue I tried even insulating my board with putty! (Yes, a first for an air system, I will have pictures of this for my next blog). However this even failed to curb the issue. I finally attempted to build a cardboard “ventilation system”, which would be used to vent cold air only to the CPU. However once again failing to work. This leads me to believe that the problem lies in fact in the heatpipes of my cooler.

This concludes my second winter air blog. I hope you guys enjoyed reading it. I will be back to post more in the future.