13
INSTALL THE OS
Here’s a rule when building a system: Never put
the sides back on the case until everything is
running smoothly. Otherwise, you’ll anger the
PC building gods, who will punish you with a no-
POST condition. Flip your system upright, make
sure no cables are jammed in the fans, and plug
the puppy in. Plug in your monitor, keyboard, and
mouse and hit the power button. If you followed
our instructions to the letter, your PC should boot
with no problems. If nothing happens, here’s a
quick checklist: Is the PSU’s power switch turned
on? Is the power strip you’re plugged into turned
on? Is the videocard properly seated? Is the
RAM fi rmly inserted? How about the 24-pin main
power connector and the eight-pin power con-
nector? And, fi nally, are you sure you wired up
the front-panel connector correctly? Perhaps you
mixed up the power switch and the reset switch.Assuming everything is working now, it’s time to confi gure
the BIOS. You’ll need to hit F1 during boot and go into Advanced
BIOS Features > Boot Sequence to change the boot
order to the optical drive (image A). If you don’t see
the hard drive listed by model, your SATA drive is
likely either not powered or not plugged into the
correct port or the data cable is loose. While you’re
in the Advanced BIOS Features section, you should
also disable boot sector virus protection or the BIOS
will confuse your OS install as a virus. Also go into
the Integrated Peripherals section and disable the
HD Audio since we’re packing an X-Fi.
Drop your XP disc into the optical drive and
reboot. Hit the space bar when prompted and fol-
low the Microsoft questions to get the OS up and
running. Now install your motherboard, GPU, and
soundcard drivers from the discs that came with
those parts. Once that’s done, it’s time to overclock.
Reboot and go back into the BIOS—MSI lets
you overclock automatically through a Windows
application, but we prefer the old-fashioned method.
Go into the Cell Menu section. Under Adjust CPU
FSB Frequency, you should see the default setting
of 266MHz. Raise it by 5MHz or 10MHz increments
at a time until the system becomes unstable, then
gradually back it down to its maximum stable speed.
To get to even higher clock speeds, you’ll also have
to add more voltage to the CPU. We set our Rev
G0 Q6600’s FSB at a conservative 310MHz, which
gave us 2.8GHz, or a 400MHz overclock (image B).
To increase voltage to the CPU, select CPU Voltage
from the BIOS menu. Use the plus and minus keys
to make adjustments. We set ours at 1.4 volts, which
isn’t too dangerous to the health of the chip. Your
overclock will also OC the RAM. If you want to keep
the RAM within spec, you can change the FSB/
Memory Ratio setting. We set ours to 1/1.25, which
ran our DDR2 at 775MHz (image C).
Reboot and run a stress test such as Prime95
( http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm ) or 3DMark06 ( www
.futuremark.com/ ) to determine if your overclock is
stable or not.32 MAXIMUMPC | APR 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
A
B
C
$1,500 PC