My main workstation is getting on up there in age...it's about 27 months old, though the video card and processor were both upgraded within the past 6 months. I'm not really in the mood to wrangle together a completely new machine, so I've decided to go the overclocking route to try and eek out whatever performance gains I can. I've never been much of a hardware kind of guy, though I do remember the days of going through the tedious process of booting into the BIOS, increasing the FSB/Clock/etc a couple of clicks at a time, rebooting, and then running <insert benchmarking software here, usually Sandra or PCMark>. Lather, rinse, and repeat until you got the machine to crash, then back the settings down just a bit and voila...a faster running machine that only took the better part of a day to achieve. Now there are automated tools that'll do all of this straight from the Windows GUI, although my beloved nTune does not support dual core processors. Any recommendations, or should I just do it the old fashioned way?

Here are a couple of photos of some recent cooling upgrades I made to the machine (click for larger images):

The case is an Antec P160...notice that the drives face forward for easy access. They are dual 150gb Raptors. The heatsink is a Thermaltake V1; my CPU temperature dropped 10 degrees C simply by dropping that into my case. Total case weight is around 25 lbs.

This is another view of the new heatsink. It's actually extremely quiet...much quieter than the stock AMD Opteron fan that shipped with the processor.

Hopefully I'll get another year or so of good use out of this machine before I have to build a new one. Newer games are starting to stress it a little (although Bioshock runs like a charm with all settings maxed out). I'm always looking for an excuse to buy hardware though. 

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