Got a Q6600 today. How's it looking?

[just Scott]

Are these temps OK? Using a ACF7P. Lots of failed Prime tests at 3GHz, but it seems to be stable now. Got the Vcore set to 1.4125v in the BIOS. Is that a decent voltage for a Q6600 at 3GHz, or is my chip not a great overclocker?

My motherboard is a Gigabyte S3 P965, which isn't very good at overclocking, but it should be OK at 333 FSB I'd imagine. Got the FSB voltage at +0.1v and the GMCH voltage at +0.1v too. RAM timings are 5-5-5-18, and it is 4 sticks of 1GB PC6400. Pretty sure one set is GeIL and the other OcUK brand.

I was hoping to get more out of the chip before hitting 1.4v. Is this normal or have I gone wrong with my settings somewhere? Any suggested settings for a Q6600 and my mobo would be awesome.

edit: damn, core #4 just failed Prime after 22 mins.

edit2: put the vore to 1.425 in the BIOS. Gonna see how it does in Prime now.

 

[Guest2]

Check out what the core voltage drops to when the cpu is at full load. I have mine on about 1.58 bios and it drops to 1.48 under full load.

What cooling have you got?

The vid (1.3250v) is the same as my old one that was prime stable at 3.2ghz. This should be do-able with yours

Stick it on 400 x 8, which will keep your RAM at default speeds. Put bios voltage on 1.55 and run prime, with cpuz open. If it drops to 1.3 or 1.4 when loaded then increase it to 1.58. It will be fine on load until about 1.5+ then it apparently starts to get dodgy. Up the MCH (northbridge) a bit, PLL a bit and CPU termination. Leave it priming but watch temps with coretemp. If tjmax is set to 100c then you should be ok up to about 80c (more like 70-75)

If it passes a long stint of prime then lower the vcore until it fails, then up it by one

 

[just Scott]

Check out what the core voltage drops to when the cpu is at full load. I have mine on about 1.58 bios and it drops to 1.48 under full load.

What cooling have you got?

The vid (1.3250v) is the same as my old one that was prime stable at 3.2ghz. This should be do-able with yours

Stick it on 400 x 8, which will keep your RAM at default speeds. Put bios voltage on 1.55 and run prime, with cpuz open. If it drops to 1.3 or 1.4 when loaded then increase it to 1.58. It will be fine on load until about 1.5+ then it apparently starts to get dodgy. Up the MCH (northbridge) a bit, PLL a bit and CPU termination. Leave it priming but watch temps with coretemp. If tjmax is set to 100c then you should be ok up to about 80c (more like 70-75)

If it passes a long stint of prime then lower the vcore until it fails, then up it by one

Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro is my cooler. Prime is still going strong with the vcore at 1.425 and CPU-Z says the vcore is 1.328v right now, so quite a lot of vdroop.

I don't really want to increase the FSB needlessly. My motherboard had trouble with 400 FSB with my old CPU (E6320), but I had to use it because of the low 7 multiplier. With the Q6600s multiplier I'd rather keep it at 9 and have a low FSB - should be more stable to have the FSB and RAM speed low right? I'm more concerned about stability than all out speed at the minute.

What's PLL and CPU termination? I haven't seen any settings like that in my BIOS.

Thanks dude.