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CPU upgrade for Asus Rampage Formula?

JoHubb

JoHubb

JoHubb

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Joined
23 Dec 2008
Posts
71
Location
UK
I would be grateful for advice on my 3 year old system.

I run a Q9650 in this mobo mainly for flight simulation (FS9 in XP) with advanced hardware (throttle quadrant, rudder pedals, triple monitors). I also have many software addons. Graphics card for the main monitor is Nvidia 260GTX overclocked 216 core 896MB. I run the other monitors off a GTS250 with 500MB. I have 4GB DDR2 RAM of which 3GB is accessible.

Performance is pretty good but I would like to improve it! Is there any point upgrading the Q9650 on this mobo, and if so to what (socket 775)?

Thanks.

John
 
If you haven't clocked it then do so for a nice performance boost. Don't upgrade the cpu as there is nothing on the 775 apart from the extreme or xeons cpu's thats better than yours. Either wait for amd's new chip or go sandy bridge.
 
If it were me i'd wait till the bulldozer chips are out then get whatever's the best out of the bulldozers or an i5 2500k. Nobody knows what the BD performance will be yet but unless you can use more than 4 cores the i5 will probably be best.
 
Q9650 is about as good as it gets as far as S775 is concerned. It seems a nice easy chip to overclock though, so you may want to squeeze another 800Mhz to 1Ghz out of it before you think about upgrading.
But if you do decide you want to move to a newer socket now is a pretty good time to sell Q9650s (although the other S775 stuff won't get you much) as they are going on FleaBay for £150+. As marms said, wait for Dozer to arrive and then make a choice then although how he knows the i5 will be better core for core I don't know. All the most recent feeback seems to be surprisingly positive as far as Dozer is concerned.

If it's any help, I'm running my Q9650 @ 4Ghz and it's fine for all my gaming needs atm, but I'm keeping an eye on the upcoming Bulldozer Sandybridge fight. Big one for me is to see how BF3 is handled by my chip, that'll make my mind up whether to upgrade or wait another generation.
 
Thanks to all you guys! I've no experience of overclocking.

The mobo has a utility called Asus AI Suite which has a setting for extra performance. I've never dared use this. It also has an advanced setting page which allows CPU Freq to be changed (currently 333.00), and also CPU Ratio (currently 9.0), DRAM voltage (currently on Auto) and DRAM Freq (currently on Auto).

At idle, the CPU temp is 19C, and voltage 1.208V

John
 
if you leave every thing on auto but for CPU Vocore and try

CPU Vcore: 1.30V
CPU Freq: 420
And select ram freq for the lowest,

Then run OCCT and mointer temps and if it fails up the VCore in 2 Increments upto around 1.35V. Then if still not stable lower CPU Freq by 20-30MHz at a time till stable. Then start going up again.
 
Good advice jamesfreddie.
EDIT: I would think CPU Freq @ 423 and Vcore (CPU voltage) of 1.3 will be good (This will give you 3.8Ghz on the chip)
Keep RAM Freq as close to or under your standard RAM speed.

Fire it up and use Hwmonitor to keep an eye on the CPU temps while you test it. You are fine as long as the temps stay low 60's.
If your machine crashes while you are testing it, don't panic! You probably just need to increase the Vcore (CPU voltage) by 0.02 and try again. Keep going until you reach stability, although I think you'll be fine at suggested settings.

Just remember that your machine will shut down before you can damage it.
Enjoy.
 
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Thanks jamesfreddie,

I've discovered a Beginners Guide to O/C on another board here. I will avoid the Asus AI utility and use the BIOS to adjust settings. I will check each iteration with OCCT. I will not be trying to max out the processor - I do not want to have to replace it - pricey little chap the Q9650 even after nearly 4 years.

Just one thing, what temperature should I take as upper limit allowing a reasonable safety margin? I realise that all chips are not the same of course.
 
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During OCCT Load i would not like to see above 72*C But i would leave it running until about 78*C. But occt will be about 20*C over the temps in gameplay.
I have a Q9450 and i run it @ 3.4GHz with 1.232V.

Also make sure you disable speedstep and all the other energy saving things. and also enable load line cal. (LLC)
 
My CPU temps reach 70 in testing but only 60 in gaming with even BFBC2. I'm pretty cool with that.

Glad you are going to use the bios. Like I said, aim for 423/1.3v and work from there.

TBH jamesfreddie, he shouldn.t need to touch LLC etc. It should just fly up to 3.8 on a whim.
 
Well if he enables LLC And disables the other stuff he should get a continuous voltage and it should not move. So he will only be pumping the voltage he needs through his chip.
 
But TBH he should just be able to stick it at 423/1.3v with no messing whatsoever, it's guaranteed E0 stepping unlike a Q9450 and a quality Asus board too.
 
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Hmm....

The Asus BIOS Menu has controls under 'Extreme Tweaker' for manual overclocking. With this I can alter the CPU voltage to 1.3V but it is not obvious how to alter the CPU frequency.
Under the 'Extreme Tweaker' menu there is an 'AI Overclock Tuner' menu which gives an option 'CPU level Up'. This apparently optimises the processor at a 'higher level' but the details are not specified.

FSB freq is 333 by default and DRAM settings for frequency, command rate and skew are all set to AUTO. I do not see any control for disabling load line cal (LLC).

What to do now? Thanks again to all posters.

John
 
The first thing is to set ai overclock tuner to manual. Then go down to FSB Frequency and change to 420 to start. Then go down to DRAM Freq. And set it to the lowest which should be DDR2-840Mhz. Then scroll down the page to CPU Voltage and set it to 1.30V. Now try OCCT. If it is unstable up voltage. (see my previous post) Then once it is stable write down the settings and then up the FSB Freq by 20Mhz at a time upto around 460 then OCCT again. Watch your temps!! :D:D:D:D:D:D
 
Thanks, jamesfreddie :)

Not having used OCCT before I am now running a 30 min test on my non-overclocked CPU. Does OCCT produce a 'result' or analysis at the end, or how will I know if my system is stable when I ramp up the CPU voltage etc?

I suppose I must run HWMonitor at the same time to keep an eye on temperatures. EDIT: no I don't need to - I see the four core temperatures now.

John
 
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Success! No errors after 1 h OCCT. I am running 430/1.3V and getting CPU frequency of 3.9 GHz. Temperatures 55-60C cores 1,3,4 and 48 in core 2 (XP 32 bit)

Should I leave the DDR2 RAM freq at 840MHz?

John
 
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