Basic Guide For Overclocking Q6600 on Asus P5K-E (and similar) Motherboards

Pneumonic said:
are you running 4 sticks? if so up your Northbridge voltage to 1.4v

Also I assume you are running the RAM @ less than 400mhz?
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aah yeah 4 gigs(4 sticks) , dram freq shows as 400.9MHz in cpuz.

After changing the timings to 4-4-4-12 2.1v AND NB voltage to 1.41v, it still says overclocking failed :/,
 
Ok make sure you have the DRAM Command Rate set @ 2T (might be 2N if you have a latter BIOS) if that fails...

set your FSB to Northbridge Strap to 333mhz and readjust your DRAM Frequency so it is @ or under 400mhz (might display as DDR2 Rate In which case under 800mhz)
 
2T was set already as default, set strap to 333mhz and as a result max dram frquency selectable was DDR2-640mhz, timings set to 4-4-4-12 2.1v(NB at 1.41v) ,starts up fine though I wonder where the difference lies in having low timings and lower rate compared to the 5s and 800mhz I had before, I do more rendering and playing in 3D apps then i do game so I'm confused as to which settings will best suit me.
 
well Asus boards tend to be most stable on the 333mhz strap, if your board runs a 400mhz strap you could try that to get 800mhz on the RAM...

best way is to I guess run some quick tests and see what gets you best results I am not sure tbh...

Alternativly you might consider overclocking a little would increase base FSB speed and therefore RAM and CPU speed.. Not sure what CPU u have? but on a stock cooler and Q6600 you can get to 3Ghz easy normally just by upping FSB to 320 :)
 
Q6600, no 400mhz strap for me, 333mhz is max, set the FSB to 320 so RAM showed as DDR2-768, however with 4-4-4-12 2.1v I got a "NTLDR is corrupt" error when trying to boot, booting on timings set to 5-5-5-15 (still 2.1v) was fine and the CPU showed as 2880mhz which is a start I guess. Could it be the board? G35 chipset etc??

edit: I'll push it further when I have proper cooling cos can't be dealing with this stock cooler, it's the loudest thing my system and now I've OCed slightly it's even louder!! Notice you have your fans at 3500 rpm at that overclock, you'll lose your hearing with that racket lol!!
 
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manoz said:
Q6600, no 400mhz strap for me, 333mhz is max, set the FSB to 320 so RAM showed as DDR2-768, however with 4-4-4-12 2.1v I got a "NTLDR is corrupt" error when trying to boot, booting on timings set to 5-5-5-15 (still 2.1v) was fine and the CPU showed as 2880mhz which is a start I guess. Could it be the board? G35 chipset etc??

edit: I'll push it further when I have proper cooling cos can't be dealing with this stock cooler, it's the loudest thing my system and now I've OCed slightly it's even louder!! Notice you have your fans at 3500 rpm at that overclock, you'll lose your hearing with that racket lol!!
Click to expand...

Try with 2 sticks I guess it could be the Northbridge on the board not being up to it?

Well 24/7 i run a 3.825Ghz clock and my fans even @ 100% load (folding at home) run at around 1400RPM which is not to loud at all certainly quiter than the G/Fs 2 year old AMD system that sits next to it
 
w00t!! Thanks for explaining what the transaction booster does!

It was unstable at 3 but is stable now at a value of 2, and it has boosted my read/write/copy scores by about 1gb/sec and reduced my latency by about 13ns!!!

I love my ballistix

cachememgb5.png
 
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Pneumonic said:
Try with 2 sticks I guess it could be the Northbridge on the board not being up to it?

Well 24/7 i run a 3.825Ghz clock and my fans even @ 100% load (folding at home) run at around 1400RPM which is not to loud at all certainly quiter than the G/Fs 2 year old AMD system that sits next to it
Click to expand...

aah that's okay then, I need at least 4gb of RAM so I'll keep them all in there and stick to the timings I have for now, OCing further will come later, thanks for the info, ya been a great help:D
 
this guide is brilliant. doing my first overclock on my Q6600.

decided to jump in at 3Ghz

Vcore 1.3V BIOS
Vcore 1.28V CPUZ
FSB 333
multi 9

VID is 1.312 which I know is high for G0

BIOS is 0503

paced the 15 mins of small ftt

am doing bend at the moment planing to do that till that to midnight, so that will be a good 7hr's

temps look grate 54,55,48,47 and I have only had the PC running for a week so the Arctic Silver 5 still is bedding in a bit, on stock settings its already made a 10C difrent on load temps.

will fiddle with lowering the Vcore over the week but from a look at the Quadcore database 1.28V vcore seams low

edit: not going to push it any more then 3GHz at the moment as I need to RMA my ram as one of my stick is faulty.
 
blend is good for testing overall system stability but to make sure you want to run a good few hours of Small FFTs as well.. this will really stress the CPU and will load it to the max, you will note that your temps will be high on a small FFTs run as well..

But overclock looks good :)

If your feeling brave you might consider looking at the base of your heatsink / the surface of the CPU as you have some variance in coretemps there.. a bit of lapping would probably see 45/46c across the board and give you some more headroom.. :)

Glad you found the guide usefull feel free to post about anything you think needs more explaining etc..
 
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