Q9550 overclocking

Greebo said:
Funnily enough 443 was the max stable fsb I could get my x38 board. 1 fsb greater and prime would fall over. I played around with voltages on everything and even silly voltages before I discovered that with a quad 443 was the max FSB I was ever going to get on my motherboard and then bought the p45 board.
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Funnily enough that seems to be the case for my P45 board as well. It's currently sitting at 441fsb 3748.5Mhz stable but getting that extra 50mhz/6fsb has been impossible. Not even with silly volt through nb/vtt (1.4V+).

To be fair the board you had the Giga P45 UD3P is known to achieve the highest fsb with a 45nm quad and that's why you had such success. With the ASUS P5Qs however it seems to be hit and miss.
 
Back again to report on the war story.

Anyway i upped the cpu volts 1 notch in the BIOS so it was reading 1.2600 ( if i recall). CPUZ show this as 1.240v

Ran 2xOrthos through the night and the same core (core1) failed after 7hrs and 31mins.
Should i aim to increase the voltage yet again or is that fine for a stability test?

temperatures as follows:
- Load -
Core1: 55°C
Core2: 52°C
Core3: 50°C
Core4: 51°C

Oh also i should have a H50 arrive today. will i see any improvement on my load temps?
 
Those temps are fine (not sure what cooler your using at the mo (had a quick scan through the thread but couldnt see)

Up the vcore a bit more.
 
I really should learn how to overclock my Q9550, can anyone give me a starting point with the plethora of BIOS options?

I'm running a Rampage II Formula with 4GB Corsair Dominator PC8500 and have a Corsair H50 sat on the chip with two fans on the rad pushing in from the front.

I'd love about 3.6GHz but would like to run 1:1 if I can. I didn't realise people were clocking so high, I should be able to breeze to at last 3.6 no?
 
From a quick google, your board is better than mine so you should have no troubles with the OC. Also your ram is faster than mine.
I'm still a newbie to OC but the options i've tweaked are FSB and CPU voltage.
But if i was you I would try bumping to 400FSB 1st (3.4Ghz) and work with the voltage at stock.
 
on my Asus P5K Deluxe (practically the same motherboard) I hit a FSB wall of around 450mhz resulting in a overclock just over 3.8ghz. Any higher and it becomes ultra unstable and I struggle to get it into windows. I Think at most ive been able to boot to the bios at 4ghz, but fails to go beyond the main bios screen.

Could never get much higher than 3.6ghz on my E6600, 4.3ghz on a E8600 as well, I wallways seem to get the poor ish CPU's/MB's this is under custom water as well :(
 
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buzzlightweight said:
What are your volts on the north bridge?
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I left the NB volts on auto. I'm gonna do another run tonight with the volts set to 1.275 in the BIOS. hope that sorts it out. else i have to start tweeking other settings that i'm not familiar with!

Also I'm not currently looking to go past 450FSB. i'll be pleased with the 9550 @ 3.8ghz.
 
update:

I upped the cpu volts to 1.275 in the BIOS and left other volts on auto.

Ran 2xOrthos and results were STABLE for 9hrs. woohoo.
Surprisingly my temps havent changed that much

- Load -
Core1: 55°C
Core2: 52°C
Core3: 51°C
Core4: 51°C

very please with the overclock so far. Q9550 @ 3.8ghz with 1.275v on a P35 mobo.
Shall i now see if i hit an FSB wall past 450? Hitting 470*8.5 would be sweet though hehe. Think it's worth pushing that little bit extra?

I shall keep you all updated on my OC adventure :D
 
Oh will be attempting to add a h50 today with 2 x Akasa Viper fans in Push/Pull config.
Hopefully i see an improvements in my temps (which admittedly aren't bad) else i'm gonna sell it on.
 
Congrats on the successful overclock. I would suspect your temps might be worse with h50 as they are very, very good as they are.

Oh and the easy way of finind your max fsb is drop your cpu multi down and your memory to the lowest speed and very slack timings. This way it will take the cpu and memory out of the equation otherwise you won't know whether your new overclock is unstable because the cpu/memory is set too high or whether it's your fsb.

Once you have found your maximum fsb then you can set about trying to get the cpu running somewhere near that FSB on it's proper multi.
 
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I'm half expecting that too :(
but doesn't harm trying i guess. I only bought it to try and even out the temperatures on each core.

BTW i was comparing benchmarks at different overclocks and wondered if anyone could answer my query.

FFXIV benchmark:

Test 1
CPU @ 3.6Ghz
Ram @ 1021Mhz (5:6 ratio)
Score 5301

Test 2
CPU @ 3.8Ghz
Ram @ 900Mhz (1:1 ratio)
Score 5283

Is the lower score due to the ram running slower? If so, do you think my next realistic step should be to overclock the ram more rather than push to overclock the cpu?

also good advise on the max FSB Greebo
 
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I always do ram last. Find the max fsb first then find the max cpu core speed at a voltage/temp I can live with 24/7.

Then I look at what choices I have for my memory. As you have discovered, it may well be a slightly lower core/fsb speed which then enables your memory to run faster gives you better overall performance.
 
I have 8GB GSkill DDR2 1GHz matched with my Q9550 and it is currently at 3.82GHz and what I had to do after much tweaking is up the CPU PLL and VTT a bit more so I am now at 1.4vtt and 1.69pll (1.7 on other boards). vcore is at 1.35 but I think I can drop this although drrop with LLC when idle is 1.31v (VID is 1.275).

RAM voltage is at 2.1 (rated volts for my RAM @ 1GHz but I'm running 1:1 - i.e., 900MHz)

So my CPU went from:
cpu_before.PNG


To:
cpu_after.PNG


I think 4GHz would be stable too with 1.35v although I'm going to run 3.82 a few more days and game a bit too before trying it.

Previous to upping vtt and pll only 3.4GHz was 24/7 stable.
 
I have an eo Q9550, runs stable 4GHz @ 1.35v from cpuz. Any idea if i can get it to run any higher.

Also, whats good voltages for things like vtt, pll? fsb? etc etc.

Running a Maximus formula 2 (P45).

Temps are ok for me, been awhile but think on max load in prime was around 65.
 
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