Is overclocking worth it?

[cje]

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.

 

[cje]

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.

 

[cje]

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.

 

[cje]

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?

 

[cje]

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.

 

[cje]

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.

 

[cje]

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.

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?

 

[cje]

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?