Q9550 overclocking. Is 8Gb ram holding it back?

Stonedofmoo

Stonedofmoo

Stonedofmoo

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Hi overclocking guru's

I've seen a lot of you on here with Q9550's running around the 3.8Ghz mark.
My Q9550 seems like a good chip. It runs at 3.4 undervolted by a good few notches without a hiccup, and does 3.6Ghz at stock volts without a issue.

However when I tried the next logical step of 3.8Ghz I get instant lockups, freezes etc.

I'm not too bothered if I'm honest because I was only looking for a little extra power for Battlefield Bad Company 2, but I just wondered what the issue was.
I have 8Gb RAM in 2Gb modules. Geil DDR800 rated at CAS4 (They were quite expensive). I'm actually only running them at CAS5.

Is it likely the 8Gb of RAM that prevents me from going higher so suddenly?

Cheers
 
HW91 said:
amount of memory should make no difference to OC because the memory controller isn't on the CPU
Click to expand...

The memory controller is still being stressed more by having all the slots filled regardless of its location (in this case, the northbridge). As the OP is overclocking by FSB, not multipliers, the northbridge (hence the mem controller) is still having its frequency increaced, and even more stress is being put on the controller.

long story short, more volts on the northbridge should help :)
 
Ah I wondered if it was that.
When I'm at 3.6Ghz which is DDR850, I can run that on the memory at stock volts of 1.8v, so memory is hardly stressed.

When I tried for the 3.8Ghz which is DDR900, raising the memory voltage to 2v or 2.1v made no odds so I assumed it was something other than the memory itself, rather the mobo's ability to handle it.

As I said I'm not too fussed. 3.6Ghz is more than enough power to push a single GTX460.
I just like to know why things don't work like I expect :)
 
Had the same problem with a q6600 and my current i5. Wasnt able to overclock much with 4 sticks of ram, but when going to 2 sticks I could overclock much further.
 
thingemajib said:
long story short, more volts on the northbridge should help :)
Click to expand...

Hi mate

Just a quick question. On my board the MCH (Northbridge?) Voltage default is 1.1v.
Would a small increase to say 1.15v help with stability at all, or do you mean higher such as 1.2 or 1.3v?

Cheers :)

Edit: Also one more thing, is there a program that would let me see my Q9550's default VID? Annoyingly my BIOS doesn't tell me. It just says 'Auto' and the options around it are far too low to be the default.
 
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Stonedofmoo said:
Hi overclocking guru's
...I have 8Gb RAM in 2Gb modules. Geil DDR800 rated at CAS4 (They were quite expensive). I'm actually only running them at CAS5.

Is it likely the 8Gb of RAM that prevents me from going higher so suddenly?

Cheers
Click to expand...

Well there's one problem. Your Ram is rated at 800MHz but the minimum speed for a 3.8GHz is ~900MHz which would be overclocking your RAM and possibly making it unstable. But to be sure, try overclocking using only 4GB and see if it works

Edit: core temp shows you your chip's vid. Try the Northbridge voltage at 1.25
 
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When I had my Q9550, it would OC to 3.2 on default Voltages. The only problem I had was my DDR2-800 memory could not go any higher than 850mhz, it was Geil that I had too. I grabbed 2 sticks of Kingston PC8500 from O/clockers and managed to get it up to 4ghz without much trouble after that.

Your RAM is going to be the problem i think, plus you'll need to pump the NB up a fair whack to get those 4 sticks of Geil to play.

AM
 
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