Help with Q6600 + P5K WS overclock.

[mark_t50]

Hi,

So after playing ARMA 2 I decided to buy a new GPU (285GTX on its way) but thought I might try my hand at overclocking the CPU. My system is:

Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 "Energy Efficient SLACR 95W Edition" 2.40GHz (1066FSB)
Asus P5K WS Intel P35 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 PC2-8500C5 1066MHz Dual Channel Kit (BL2KIT12864AA1065)
BFG GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express)

Plus all the other usual bits and pieces: 2 x 500gb Sata Drives, 2 x 74gb WD Sata Raptors, XFi Fatal1ty, 2 x DVD Writer2. OS wise I have XP Pro + Vista x64 dual boot, the drives are not configured in ant RAID, just stand alone drives.

Sorry for all that info, just thought it best to include everything.

Right, so while I wait for my new GPU I found a guide online lastnight and figured I'd try to overclock, this involved going into my BIOS and setting the overclock mode to manual, I followed the guide but mostly I was setting the FSB from 266 to 333 (also tried 300), setting the memory timmings to 5-5-5-15 (found this on the web after searching the code on the memory: BL2KIT12864AA1065) and then enabling or disabling certain sections of the BIOS.

The problem was that changing the settings from stock just resulted in my system booting up but with strange corruption on the desktop, the mouse felt laggy, it was slow to draw icons etc. The strange thing is that when I ran CPU-Z it did show my CPU running at increased speads such as 3.0Ghz. I wonder if overclocking is maybe doing something to the GPU ?

I'm guessing the first problem is that I'm maybe a bit silly just diving in and changing stuff when I have no idea if it's right, but I feel like I might be quite close to cracking this overclocking thing. Anyone got any idea's on what the problems could be that cause the desktop corruption and lag ? I'd love to get this thing working at more than 2.4 so any help most gratefully received

 

[StevenRaith]

No idea what's causing the actual problem, but if you aren't sure what you are changing, troubleshoot it; set everything back to default, then change one thing at a time.

Start with setting the FSB to 333 - that will give you a much more noticeable performance boost than fiddling with the RAM timings.
If that's Ok, then move onto the next step, and see if that runs OK.

Keep doing this till you come across the problem. That last step you changed - be it the first or the last in the guide - would have been the cause of it.

'enabling or disabling certain sections of the BIOS' - can you be more specific?

Also, if you just want a simple speed boost. remember KISS - Keep It Simple, Stupid. No point fiddling with memory timings, PCI-E frequencies and Vdroop stuff unless you are seriously pushing the overclock to the limits of the systems cooling and power capabilities. If you just want up to 3.0ghz, the Q6600 and a decent board will do that with just a FSB change in 99% of instances.

Except mine, I have 8gb of RAM and it doesn't seem to like running four sticks at 3.6Ghz [and it was a bit hit and miss on that with 4Gb too]. I'm too lazy to fiddle with northbridge voltages and such though, and 2.4 is good enough for me at the moment, system runs nice and cool, very quiet....etc etc.