30 MAXIMUMPC FEBRUARY 2007
$1,
ULTIMATE11
POWER HER UP
It’s time to supply power to your
components. First, make sure your power
supply isn’t plugged into the wall. If it is,
unplug it and wait a minute for the power
to dissipate. Find the six-pin PCI-E power
cable and plug it into your videocard
(image A). These newfangled power con-
nectors supply up to 75 watts of power—
high-output graphics cards won’t workproperly without the extra juice. If your
power supply doesn’t have a PCI-E power
cable, we recommend that you get a new
PSU instead of trying to use an adapter
cable. Your PSU may not have the power
output for new hardware.
Next, locate the eight-pin power cable
(image B), which supplies power for just
the CPU, and plug it into the motherboard.
Like the PCI-E connector, it’s keyed andshould fi t only one way, so there’s no risk
of putting it in backwards. Finally, you’ll
need to power up the motherboard by con-
necting the 24-pin main power connector
(image C). If you haven’t already plugged
in your optical drive’s four-pin Molex and
the hard drive’s power, you should do that
as well. Remember, if the hard drive has an
old four-pin Molex and a new SATA power
connector, use only one, not both.A B C
12
INSTALL THE OS
The BIOS on the EVGA 680i SLI
board defaults to boot from the fl oppy drive,
then the optical drive, and then the hard
drive, so your BIOS tweaks will be minimal.
One thing you may want to do is disable the
fl oppy drive support if you didn’t install a
fl oppy (image A); otherwise, the board will
show an error every time you boot.
Assuming everything went OK, your
new rig should boot without a problem.
Hook up your monitor, keyboard, and
mouse and then hit the power button.
When the machine is powering up, insert
your OS disc and hit the space bar when
you’re asked if you want to boot from the
optical drive. Install Windows XP, following
the onscreen prompts. When you’re up andrunning at the desktop, you’ll
want to fi rst install your chipset
drivers and other device driv-
ers from the CD-ROM included
with the motherboard before you
install your graphics card drivers.
When you’re fi nished,
you should verify that the OS
sees both cores by checking
the Performance tab in the
Windows Task Manager. You
can also check clock speed by
viewing System Properties. Stock clock
speed should be 1.86GHz. We were able
to overclock our CPU to 3.06GHz by sim-
ply cranking the front-side bus from its
stock speed of 1,066MHz to 1,752MHz
(image B). If we’d had the money for abetter heatsink, we could have cranked
the FSB up at least a few more notches.
Our overclocking was aided by adding a
tenth of a volt to the CPU (image C), RAM,
and chipset, and we also set the RAM and
front-side bus to unlinked mode, so we
could keep the RAM
at its stock speed of
800MHz. The over-
clocking utility included
with the EVGA board
lets you overclock from
within Windows, but we
opted for the old-school
BIOS adjustments since
we’re, well, old school.C
A B