Help a noob overclock his Q6600

cyborg

cyborg

cyborg

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So what do I start stepping up, im a complete noob at increasing volts and playing with RAM settings.

Motherboard is a P5Q Pro, and RAM is 4 GB G-Skill 6400.

Thanks in advance.

*EDIT* I change my multiplier to 8, and my FSB to 400 and im getting 3.6ghz according to windows, should it not be 3.2?
 
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Well the guides are non specific, so i thought i'd post a screenshot of my bios in particular. 3.2Ghz proved to be unstable, i can get 3.00Ghz with 8 X 375 without changing any volts. I tried uping the volts alone for more than 3.2Ghz (9 x 400) but it kept crashing after the welcome screen.
 
use cpuz that will show what you are running at, you may have to up the northbridge a touch as you are running 4gb ram. cpuz will also show what your ram is set at.
 
Well apparently its crashing now, i wont see why untill later. ARG. Its an artic cooler 7, with whatever paste is standard on them. It might be my case airflow i suppose. When i went to 3.2Ghz though my blue screen mentioned memory, i think it was pushed too far. Do i throttle my memory down a little to get a higher clock?
 
1. Set you mem timings correctly set the ram volts to rated and not default 1.8v (should be around 2.1v).
2. Set you voltage to 1.45 in bios for the cpu
3. Set the fsb strap so that is 400fsb so the mem is on a 1.1 ratio (nice and loose for pushing it).
4. Set the load line calibration to enabled
5. Set the spread spectrum to disabled
6. Make sure all the Ai (boards default ocing program) is disabled.

leave the northbridge and south bridge voltage alone for now (we will play with them later)

set the chip to 8 x 400 and see if it posts ( it should most will at these settings)

Post back the results when you get outta work (hope your working hard :P )
 
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Well the system doesn't start at all with the above settings, starts up with no display, after i turn it off and on it restarts itself and says overclocking failed. :( i seem to be the only person unable to overclock a Q6600
 
if your p5q pro is anything like the p5q deluxe dont use auto voltage or the lowest manual voltage for the chipset and if your ram is rated at 2.1v set it to 2.02v ive found thanks to members of this forum that the asus boards tend to overvolt quite a bit on auto or lowest manual setting:)
 
cyborg said:
33y0rk0.jpg


2ag93m1.jpg


So what do I start stepping up, im a complete noob at increasing volts and playing with RAM settings.

Motherboard is a P5Q Pro, and RAM is 4 GB G-Skill 6400.

Thanks in advance.

*EDIT* I change my multiplier to 8, and my FSB to 400 and im getting 3.6ghz according to windows, should it not be 3.2?
Click to expand...
aye 8x400=3.2 just not read in windows properly. for 3.6 you can use the 9x multiplier (9x400fsb) this will let your ram run at its rated speed of 800mhz.
 
The artic cooler is not the best cooler, but in *** same breath its not the worst either.

I have a Q6600 and in the DS3 ( Oh, now Im using the DS4, so I will go to basics firstly )

I got the DS4 only the other day, so I ran it at stock for a couple of hours, gave it a fresh install, went for Vista64 as I want to play with DX10 for a bit before going to a real os ( XP64 ) again.

Anyway, I went into the BIOS, set the volts to 1.4 ( Might be more than necessary, but I ran it there on the DS3 just fine ) and the Multi, I left alone, its at 9 and the FSB set to 333 ( gives 3Ghz of course ) and thats a nice round figure and ran it for a day and it was fine.

Me personally have never really taken prime too literally... too many people will **** you off if its not prime stable, and yonks ago when I started out in clocking, I had a 100% perfectly stable system, hitting 3Ghz with an XP17, it ran absolutely everything I wanted it to and it never crashed once, but it had issues about 8 hours into prime testing, and just because of that, I had people tellign me that its not stable??? WTF? - in the end I got fed up and told them to go... Well, I better not Id get banned.

Anyway, it ran great for a day, and I upped it to 400 x 9 and the volts are 1.4v and again, its stable enough. I have not had any issues yet, and its been about 4 days now. Im folding on all 4 cores, and I am able to run 4 copies of ConvertXtoDVD v2 as well as burn 3 DVDs ( 2 speed ) and play UnReal Tournament III all at the same time and I have not had any issues at all, so as far as I am concerned... its stable.

Sure, I think that the NB could do with a notch as could the RAM, but I wont do that unless I had a cause to.

You say that your PC is unstable at 375, so check the RAM volts first, but also you say that the CPU is at stock too, so my first thought would be the CPU volts needing a small nudge in the upwards direction first... 1.4v is more than enough so, try 1.35 or 1.375 ( Some boards allow really fine tuning of the volts but I feel that to be a little bit of a waste of time to be honest, so just go in.25v steps and you will be fine.

And CPU-Z has been mentioned more than once so its good advise and a great tool to use.

Your Temps and Volts can also be read with SpeedFan too!
 
3. Set the fsb strap so that is 400fsb so the mem is on a 1.1 ratio (nice and loose for pushing it).

Can someone explain this please? is this when you set the memory to say, 800mhz, independently from the FSB, and how do you do that on a DS4?

I'm an overclocking n00b, I tried to set the FSB to 333, for a 3Ghz, and the memory frequency went up to 1000Mhz!

:o:o:o

please help!
 
the gigabyte boards have a memory divider.. i.e. 2, 2.5, 3 etc... yours is currently at 3 (3*333 = 1000mhz ish... if you set it to 2.5 (might even be a 2.4 option) then you would get 833mhz or 800mhz (at 2.4).

Edit... just noticed you have an asus board lol.. ok... as tyranus says you need to set the FSB to Northbridge Strap.. although based on the P5K motherboards this should give you some idea of what the stuff in the BIOS does
 
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Yeah, as you rightly pointed out, it had a 2.4 option, which took it to 800mhz.

Temps where not pleasing however, I need to improve air flow and get the PC sitting up on the desktop where it can breath, idles of near 50 degrees...not good...thats at 3 Gig with 1.4 V!

I really should have tried it at stock volts though...

No idea why temps are that high tbh.

EDIT: Current idle temps at stock between the cores, between 36-40 degrees. *sigh*
 
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