Final! I've been using this system for just under one month now, and I'm very happy with its performance. It's great to see it plow through Visual Studio builds using all four cores, even if many other applications only use one processing thread. I was able to get it to 3.28GHz and still be stable after 16 hours of torture testings with four copies of Prime95 running. It wouldn't screen at 3.6GHz, even with a voltage increase, but it booted into Windows at 3.4GHz with a voltage boost. However, at 3.4GHz, it failed a torture test after a couple of hours.

I ended up with a B3 stepping version of the Q6600, even though I originally wanted a G0. Still, I'm impressed with the B3, as I only see a couple of degrees Celsius difference between the two on Scythe Ninja coolers. Still, mine is lapped, so that might make the spread as high as 3 or 4 degrees different at the same overclock.

The final part to wet sand and polish was the left side panel.



I added the system specs and signed the case on the back of the motherboard panel:



System installed and running smoothly:





A coworker of mine stopped by today and wanted to use our lab's table to take some photos of his test equipment. He's planning to teach a seminar this week and wanted the pictures to show his class of 70+ people. To my surprise he pulled out an infrared camera that takes "thermographic" images. Sweet. I asked him if he would allow me to use the device to take a few shots of my PC. He graciously allowed me to use the camera, and gave me a crash course in its operation.

We then opened the data on his PC and found a way to save the images as bitmaps. Unfortunately, the bitmaps do not contain the reference temperature range of spot temperatures. Since these are not high resolution images, I simply took screenshots of the images and data. Here are the results with the side panel removed, after the system has been in use for approximately 4 hours (using a FLIR Thermacam PM675):