Pat: You need more milk in your cereal

Pat: Girls like it wet (milk)

Elena: That’s what she said!!!

Mileage:

16,000 – AC control unit went bad, dealer replaced it for free under warranty.

22,000 – Oil changed with Mobile 1 extended performance 15,000 miles, and changed to Mobile 1 filter.

27,000 – Upgraded wheels to glossy black grand sport wheels (18×9.5 +40 front, 19×12 +59 rear), upgraded tires to Michelin PS2 ZP (275/35/18 front, 325/30/19 rear). Aligned and road force balanced. $3540

29,500 – Found stock front rotors warped, which is the source of the steering wheel vibration issue at 70mph+.

29,900 – Left Rear TPMS stopped working intermittently. Dealer replaced under warranty.

30,000 – Upgrade brake system to Z06 type $2390 ( rotors, caliper, SS lines, Hawk HPS brake pads, brake fluid DOT4)

• Originally left rear brake squeals under hard braking, new rotors/pad is very quiet
• Originally steering wheel vibrations at 70mph+, this stopped after new rotors are installed
• New SS line feels about the same as the original rubber lines, but may improve after 500 miles of driving
• Braking seems slightly improved.
• Lessens learned:
  • Turn bolts the right direction…
  • SS lines have 2 long and 2 short lines, install the longer lines in the front so it has enough length for wheels to turn. Installed backwards, had to swap at the end.
  • Inspect lines before flushing and bleeding the brake fluid system, one SS brake line connect was hand tight and leaked a lot of fluid.

Upcoming maintenance:

32,000 – Rotate wheels/tires left and right, alignment.
35,000 – Change oil

Upcoming upgrades

Sway bars ($400)
Shocks ($1000)
Upgrade Clutch ($600)
Twin Turbo ($6000) to get 650HP
Vararam intake ($500)

The CPU fan had some issues. It is a 4pin PWM fan that can be speed controlled by the motherboard. Everytime I turn on the computer, it spins for 2 seconds and then shuts off the computer for a split second then turns back on. When I tried to wake up the computer from a sleep state it that the same, except it cycles on, off, on, off in a loop and I had to completely power it down. I found out that my CPU fan mode was set to AUTO, which was the problem. I changed it to PWM. It was able to start up and wake up no problem.

Fine Tuning:

lowered CPU PLL from 1.79V to 1.57V

lowered CPU Vcore from 1.4625V to 1.45V

So far so good.

Overclocking from easytune’s 3.52GHz configuration to 3.6GHz was not easy. Here are a few things that prevented 3.6GHz:

• Unstable Vcore voltage, vdroop fluctuations
• FSB frequency was getting too high 3.52GHz (440×8) going to (450×8) which translates RAM speed to 900MHz

Solution:

I turned on load line calibration, which helped dramatically. It stabilized Vcore voltage and eliminated fluctuations. I set my Vcore to 1.475V, which gave an actual number of 1.424V.

Next, increased multiplier to 9 and dropped frequency to 400MHz, and this gave 3.6GHz. Prime 95 ran for 30 mins and the CPU was stable, but the temperature was very very high. 2 out of 4 cores were going up to 87 deg C. I then checked my fans and configuration, and it turns out that I had the CPU fan installed backwards. It was sucking hot air out and should be blowing cool air into the heatsink to move the air towards the exhaust fans. I have 2 exhaust fans, and 1 was running very slow. So the next day, I bought better fans.

I want to create a negative pressure inside the case, and this has the best cooling effect, according to this cooling guide. I got two 97 CFM fans exhausting air and also a gigantic CPU fan that goes up to 4000rpm and it’s very loud at full rpm. I turned on CPU smart fan control, so when the computer is idle, the fan speed is about 2000rpm. This is pretty quiet. But when I run Prime 95, the fan ramps up very quickly to 3500 to 4000rpm range. It does not bother me that much and this way I can “hear” if the CPU is working hard.

Final Prime 95 ran for 8 hours and no errors. The new load temperature was 73 deg C max, which is safe. I prefer not to go above 75 deg C.

Idle temp = 39 deg C.

Load temp = 73 deg C.

I don’t want to see my electricity bill.

I just got the UD3P version of the motherboard which has minor differences from the UD3R version. I tried to order the UD3R version and no one has it available. But I got the UD3P version which is basically an upgrade. I re-applied arctic silver 3 on the CPU and will have to burn it in (the thermal paste) before I start overclocking. It will probably take a week or so. Right now, the temperature is a little uneven. The new motherboard does not have Vdroop modified yet so it fluctuates from 1.216V idle to 1.18V load. I may fix this if it starts to effect overclocking.