Is my Q6600 really poor?

[OzZie]

Hi,

Last week i purchased a new Q6600 along with an Asus P5Q-Pro and 4GB of Kinston PC8500, with a sunbeam CPU cooler. The rest of the system is a 4870 1GB, 1xSATA 500GB and 1xIDE DVD-RW, powered by a Hiper Mod TypeR 580W (which is a replacement for my old Hiper that blew up. It is about 5 months old) I'm having issues however that may or may not be related to the PSU that i hope you can help with..

At the moment i have managed to get it prime stable at 3.0Ghz, but in the BIOS i am pumping 1.39v through it, and any lower and it fails. Now i have a crappy VID of 1.325, but surely 0.75v extra just to get to 3Ghz is a bit extreme?

I backed my memory off to 5-5-5-18 800Mhz 1.8v as per the manufacturers directions and kept it under this for the duration of the overclock, but prime will still fail at any CPU voltage lower than 1.39v (next increment along is 1.4v). The Northbride voltage is at 1.28v, and again, any lower than this and it will fail, but i have no idea of what kind of voltages this can take, so i'm not going over 1.3v for the NB and 1.4v for the CPU. This would sound reasonable for more than 3.0Ghz wouldn't it?

What else can i look at adjusting?

Many thanks.

 

[DrSteve]

I have a Q6600 with the same VID and it needed extra voltage to get to 3.0. Finally managed to get stable at 3.6 but from memory I needed to set vcore to just over 1.6v to get that to work. Also needed at add a fair bit of extra voltage elsewhere. Not sure of the exact values as I'm not near that pc at the minute.

 

[Vir]

I wouldn't want a Q6600 to run at 1.6v for a long time. Higher chance it'll die?

 

[Meridian]

Leave everything else, but drop the multiplier one notch. How is it now? If it works perfectly then yes, it's the CPU - you'll need all the volts. If you still have problems, the fault lies elsewhere. Next try dropping the RAM divider and see if that fixes it. If you still have issues, then the NB is next suspect.


M