First try on Q8200

[Makhaira]

Ok, I'm just dipping my toe into the pool since I'm getting my hands on a Q9550 tomorrow, and haven't really seriously meddled around in OC'ing before. I know the Q8200 is a poor clocker, but I thought I'd have a play on stock volts to see what I could do tonight, before aiming at 3.4/3.6Gig with the Q9550 tomorrow.

Naturally, some questions have appeared...

Q8200 is stock 2.33Ghz, with a 7.0 multiplier. Generally it's a rubbish clocker. I've upped my FSB to 370, locked my PCI-E at 100, and left NB/SB/Vcore at stock (I'm actually undervolting the CPU in Windows, it's down at 1.1v and appears happy - makes me suspect that my cheap and nasty P5QPL-VM EPU board is the source of my 370 wall, rather than the CPU).

So my Q8200 is sat at 2.6Gig now, and seems happy, although I haven't Primed it yet.

RAM was another story though...

I've got some Corsair TWINX 8500C2, and I've managed to get the following out of it:

1110Mhz at 6-5-5-18-44
or 888Mhz at 5-5-5-18-36

Now, at what point does speed become more important than timings? In other words, without launching into a series of benchmarks, which would be the better RAM config to have? Or is that not possible to tell without benching?

All comments/musing/wise words of advice appreciated.

Cheers.

 

[WingZero30]

Ok, I'm just dipping my toe into the pool since I'm getting my hands on a Q9550 tomorrow, and haven't really seriously meddled around in OC'ing before. I know the Q8200 is a poor clocker, but I thought I'd have a play on stock volts to see what I could do tonight, before aiming at 3.4/3.6Gig with the Q9550 tomorrow.

Naturally, some questions have appeared...

Q8200 is stock 2.33Ghz, with a 7.0 multiplier. Generally it's a rubbish clocker. I've upped my FSB to 370, locked my PCI-E at 100, and left NB/SB/Vcore at stock (I'm actually undervolting the CPU in Windows, it's down at 1.1v and appears happy - makes me suspect that my cheap and nasty P5QPL-VM EPU board is the source of my 370 wall, rather than the CPU).

So my Q8200 is sat at 2.6Gig now, and seems happy, although I haven't Primed it yet.

RAM was another story though...

I've got some Corsair TWINX 8500C2, and I've managed to get the following out of it:

1110Mhz at 6-5-5-18-44
or 888Mhz at 5-5-5-18-36

Now, at what point does speed become more important than timings? In other words, without launching into a series of benchmarks, which would be the better RAM config to have? Or is that not possible to tell without benching?

All comments/musing/wise words of advice appreciated.

Cheers.

Ram speed only becomes important when cpu fsb is greater or equal to ram stock speed. So ram speed needs to match fsb otherwise cpu will be faster and ram will be slower. Which means that ram will struggle to keep up with cpu in providing and receiving data.

However in your case:

Q8200 FSB = 370MHz
Ram speed = 444MHZ (DDR2 888MHz)
Ram speed = 555MHz (DDR2 1110MHz)

So in both cases ram speed is faster than FSB so ram is quicker than cpu in sending and receiving data. So I would go with DDR2 888MHz as latencies are tighter. There was a discussion of ram speed vs ram latencies but I think tighter ram latencies proved to be more efficient but I could be wrong.

If your cpu fsb could reach 500MHz (lol) then DDR2 1110MHz becomes important .

 

[Makhaira]

In all the trawling I've done of the net that is the most succinct explanation I've seen, thanks for that. I might even try dropping the RAM speed a bit further to tighten up the timings then.