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Hex core Westmere.

Hmm, hmm and thrice hmm. So today I have to be quiet. My lady had a rough night and is still sleeping.. Any way, I looked into overclocking the Dell board. Of course, I hit the obligatory brick wall but... There is a but.

Old Andy here likes to learn. So I spent the morning reading up on how a clock generator works. It's done by a PLL which is managed by an ICS chip. So I found two overclocking apps that can work if the PLL is correct. First up was Clockgen, the other is called SetFSB.

Then I did some more reading and more studying and it appears the PLL can be found on a chip on the motherboard. It's located nearby a crystal on the board. I looked up a pic of my board.. Basically the red arrow points to the crystal, and sure enough next to it is my ICS. On the ICS is the PLL..



So I got out my torch and read off the PLL.. 932S421BGLF. And what did I find? Firstly you can see the datasheet for the chip in the background.. Then you will see me with SetFSB open and what do you know? we actually have a match :O



So what does this mean? well hopefully due to SetFSB matching my PLL I may (note may, not tried it yet but will shortly) be able to control my FSB meaning an overclock..

I would say I'm about 5% confident right now but of course I will report back with my findings :)
 
If that is the case it should work. One of the two sliders will raise the FSB which which overclock the CPU and RAM but should leave the PCI-E and PCI alone.

I've gotten fairly high overclocks with low power CPUs as they have plenty of frequency overhead. I got about 1.6GHz from my 1.3GHz laptop CPU, which is almost a 25% bump. However, you may have to fiddle around with a program like memset which can change the SPD timings on your RAM to increase stability when it is clocked. I have never used it however, and I'm not 100% certain but some of those tools can brick the RAM which will force you to stick it into a motherboard where you can over-ride the SPD to set it back. I've never had a problem with setFSB by itself however.

EDIT: You can check this out too - http://www.tweakers.fr/cputweaker.html

It may also be the case that you can force the chip to run at the highest turbo setting across all 6 cores, but I wouldn't know much about how to go about that.
 
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Yeah I was on the top slider man :)

I'm definitely on the right PLL. I've read the chip itself.. I did not set Ultra on though.

I'm currently waiting on a hard drive to come in. When it does I'll install Win 8 (running XP atm) and give it another go :)
 
I believe it is the right PLL, but sometimes choosing a different one can just work. You probably do need the ultra setting checked as well.
 
Oo I forgot about this :D

May as well update. I never did get the CPU to overclock. I was a bit bummed, but when I played games on it I found it to be very snappy and more than good enough.



That's my Westmere rig there. I wrapped it up and gave it to my step daughter and her fiancée for combined 21st present. Rig hauls ass man, gotta say. Has no problems playing Watchdogs on the detected settings :)
 
Looks great how much did you spend total mate
Was going to say I had a spare heatsink you could have had
Shame you couldn't overclock it lol but it is a six core so it's probably not needed
 
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