Is overclocking worth it?

cje

cje

cje

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I've got a bad clocking Q6600. 1.3VID. It needs around 1.58 to 1.6 to stay stable at 3.5Ghz. I've got a Striker II Extreme motherboard.

I was thinking, it can run very happy at 3Ghz with around 1.36v, but needs a big voltage jump to be stable at 3.2ghz. I was thinking of running it at 1600 with a multiplier of 8. Giving me 3.2ghz. I've only done some short testing and its been stable in prime95 for an hour. But it needs 1.48 volts. I can clock my ram up to 1556 at stock timings. I'm sure I can hit 1600 with a bit looser timings though.

Temps are at max around 65 using Intel burn.

For a test I ran Far Cry 2 benchmark with 3.6 ghz cpu, and I only gained 1fps average over 3ghz cpu.

3Dmark06 gave me over 1000 point increase. But day to day and gaming, is it worth it to push that little bit more out of my ram and cpu? Or just be happy with 3ghz as my gpu's are holding me back?

Cheers for any help in advance. :D
 
My e8500 will do 4GHz with just over 1.3v vcore. idle 28-34, gaming upto about 52 and orthos just touches 60-61 now and again before dropping back to about 55. For 4.2GHz I have to use almost 1.4v vcore. At this speed, in gaming i have seen it get to 63 and orthos 67 which is where i stop it. I never had any stability problems at 4.2GHz but i just prefered to stick to 4.0 GHz
 
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my e8400 feels a lot quicker at 3.6 than at 3, and runs folding at home perhaps 30% faster
Id probably choose 1.36 at 3ghz over 1.48 for 3.2. Definitely the cpu at fault? 4 sticks can need a fair bit or northbridge voltage
 
Well, I think it's cpu's fault because with a lower multiplier it can run up to 1700 fsb. But once I crank up the multi's it goes all bsod.

I have got it entirely stable at 1556 both ram and fsb. But it needed 1.6 vcore with Loadline Calibration ENABLED. If that was disabled, well, it would have needed even more.

Also, I don't know if my motherboard is quite right. If I get a BSOD on boot, the motherboard will refuse to "see" any hard drives then. I'd have to power down, swap hard drives into other unused ports. And then it will boot OK.
 
you only see a small increase in farcry 2 because your graphics card it limiting you. I see over a 20fps increase with my 6600 at 3.6 over the stock 2.4 on my gtx 280.
 
Yeah, I've got 2 9800 GTX+. So as far as gaming is concerned, I'd have to be looking for a gpu upgrade. But that would b pointless, as I know my cpu won't go further. Ah well, need to save for an i7 system then.
 
I gave it 1.52. Am I right in thinking that if 1600 fsb is stable with x7 multi, then it should be stable with x9 multi with only vcore need to be adjusted?

Or would NB need to be tweaked when raising NB as well?
 
I tried going for a minimum voltage stable at 6x471 then increasing multiplier with vcore to try to hold it, not a success. 1.52 mch seems quite high, even for 4 ram sticks. Perhaps you're right, and you've just got a gash quad :(

Ive had a glace at your motherboard, is the northbridge under water? Resale value on the q6600 probably negligible, but the boards 300 quid new on here. Shame to waste that.

Run the q6600 at mad voltage for 4 months or so and just let it die then replace with q9*50 series?
 
I've had a dozen of so Q6600's over the last year and they generally needed 1.5V and more to do 3.6GHz stable. If you can dump the heat then there is no real issue with stability or longevity.
 
This quad of mine isnt to greedy voltage wise at 3.6ghz (1.400), needed a jump to 1.50625 to hit 3.8ghz, but it runs pretty cool even under 100% load.
 
Damn, this happened again. Now, every time my OC fails, I have to re image my hard drive over again. It isn't a hard drive issue. My Striker II Extreme is corrupting my hard drives!!!! Anyone know what is causing this? It didn't use to happen, only recently.

I've got 1104 BIOS, I just can't see what's causing it. I don't know, but I've got an old dvd rom drive connected to the IDE port. But that was always there. Can't see why this issue happens more often now, I haven't added anything.

EDIT - I've decided I'm gonna stay at 3ghz and be happy. I've wasted a lot of time trying to get it stable at higher speeds, but it seems that there are a number of factors holding me back:
-Something wrong with the motherboard corrupting my boot hard drive.
-No watercooled NB block.
-Useless Q6600. Requiring way too much voltage to be safe under air.
-No more heart left in me. I just want to crawl into a corner and die. :D:D
 
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Btw thought i would say it might be worth updating ur firmware on ur mb or at least flashing it. Its probably just a bad CPU but u never know i would check to see if that makes a difference (doubt it will but its worth the try).
 
yeah, but my mobo is corrupting ym hard drives at the moment. I can't see why though, I'm not doing anything different than I did before. I've got 1104 BIOS and everything.
 
If the motherboard is corrupting data I'd be inclined to drop the overclock, no point working things out ridiculously fast if the results are scrambled shortly afterwards.

Is dodgy ram more likely to be corrupting data?
 
Are you using the NVidia RAID controller? They are notorious for corrupting HDD and the whole 790i chipset is not exactly well regarded for overclocking compared to the equivalent Intel chipset.
 
WJA96 said:
Are you using the NVidia RAID controller? They are notorious for corrupting HDD and the whole 790i chipset is not exactly well regarded for overclocking compared to the equivalent Intel chipset.
Click to expand...

Come to think of it, when looking back at my settings i see that nvidia RAID was set to IDE, and not disabled altogether. Could this be an issue?
 
Is overclocking worth it he asks! on OVERCLOCKERS uk

Hell yes it is! you can buy the budget end cpu and OC and have the performance of the thousand pound cpu u dreamed of!
 
Yes, but i was asking if it was worth it, only to see a 1fps increase in my games. Seems like 3ghz is the "sweet" spot for me. I cannot be bother trying to lower vcore now as my motherboard likes corrupting my OS boot HDD.

What I'm essentially asking is, what benefits I'd see running my RAM and FSB at 1600 mhz as opposed to 1333 mhz?Bearing in mind that I can only see 1 fps difference in games. Would day to day tasks be quicker on the whole?
 
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