First time overclock

Squink · 7 Apr 2008 at 14:37

I had a quick punt at overclocking my Q6600 G0 (with Tuniq Tower on a Gigabyte DS3R mobo with 4x1Gb OCZ RAM) this lunchtime, following the guide in the sticky for the board in the motherboards forum.

I wasn't quite sure what I was doing, so left the multiplier at 9x and moved the frequency from 333 to 366 (thinking this was a modest change). It appears this was a fairly significant bump from 2.4Ghz to 3.29Ghz. I played around with it for 40 mins or so (played a game, haven't run any testing tools yet) and nothing untoward happened except that my minimum frames had gone up.

If I wanted to settle on 3.2Ghz, what would be the 'standard' combination of multiplier and frequency (if such a thing exists)? Would it be wise for someone like me who doesn't have a clue to try for 3.4 or 3.6Ghz?

InkZ · 7 Apr 2008 at 16:21

try 356*9.

shadowake · 7 Apr 2008 at 16:38

As long as you only up it 5 or 10 MHz a time you should be OK, if it crashes just lower it in the BIOS again and no harm done.

The begginers guide is very handy. Keeping an eye on your temps is the main thing if you do go higher. 3.2-3.4 is about the most you'll get from a Q6600 on air with safe temps. You may find you need to up your voltage slightly from default to get it stable.

Squink · 8 Apr 2008 at 09:58

I decided I'd be happy with 3.2Ghz so set it to 8x400 at 1.45v. The temps went into the low 60s and Prime produced an error after 25 mins. I changed to 9x333 and lowered the volts to 1.4 (iirc). Temps are now topping out at 57C and it was Prime stable for 8 hours when I left for work this morning. Not exactly cutting edge but I'll probably keep the processor for 3 years, so I don't want to push it. Unfortunately when I attached the Tuniq tower I was a bit distracted and used some generic thermal paste which came in a similar-looking tube to the AS5 I had meant to use. I can't really be bothered to clean off the old stuff and reseat it all.

Still, I have no complaints at an easy 25% overclock (it will certainly do more in the right hands), especially since my previous CPU (a 3400+ Clawhammer) wouldn't overclock at all.