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***The Official Yorkfield Q9300/Q9450/Q9550 Overclocking Thread ***

Sem said:
you sure its not just current motherboards holding this chip back

maybe bios updates will solve the issue
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Possibly - I'm not "sure" of anything tbh. All I do know is that the Q9xxx chips seem to be very poor clockers.

Personally, I think Intel have yield problems. These processors were delayed to start with and now it seems they've got clocking problems whilst the QX chips seem much better. It looks to me like only a small percentage are hitting the higher frequencies at sensible voltages and these are being creamed off for QX duties, leaving the Q9xxx range with what's left.

If this is the case then the performance of the Q9xxx chips will improve as Intel's 45nm process matures but the question is will that happen soon enough when Nehalem is little over half a year away now.
 
Speaking as someone that was stuck at ~335mhz on P965 when the Q6600's first appeared, I'm going to wait til P45 before passing judgement on these chips.

The fact they need high NB volts to get high FSB points towards the motherboards possibly being the limiting factor.
 
Looking good so far

3800qv5.jpg
 
Q9450

I know it's a conservative clock, but getting the QX9770 speed of 3.2 GHz by plopping the FSB up to 1600 MHz and leaving everything else absolutely stock made me happy. 3200 / 1600 / 400 are pleasingly round numbers so I'm not interested in trying any higher :o
 
wush said:
I know it's a conservative clock, but getting the QX9770 speed of 3.2 GHz by plopping the FSB up to 1600 MHz and leaving everything else absolutely stock made me happy. 3200 / 1600 / 400 are pleasingly round numbers so I'm not interested in trying any higher :o
Click to expand...

is that running stable? i ordered my q9450 before i read the forums, and by the looks of it its not turning out to be a popular processor. :( i have never OC'd before and this seems to be a pretty simple and safe starting point. so you simple upped the FSB to 1600 to get it to 3.2 from the stock speed of 2.66? sorry im very new to this. :rolleyes:
 
[KH]Shadow;11629758 said:
I ordered my q9450 before I read the forums, and by the looks of it its not turning out to be a popular processor. :(
Click to expand...

It's very early days yet. In terms of benchmarks, clock for clock, the bigger cache on the Q9450 will outperform a Q6600 in most areas, but the real question is on overclocking. Not enough users have enough CPUs in the right motherboards (X48, P45) to know for certain one way or the other. The Q6700 is so cheap now that anything else looks very pricey indeed.
 
It's still early days for the Q9450. Stocks are only starting to come through in half-decent numbers (the retail version only appeared in the UK this week), and prices are starting to settle down to near their expected levels.

As for their overclocking, the x8 multiplier is making them a lot more difficult to get stable at high speeds when compared to the Q6600. They're needing lots of chipset voltage to get near their current ~3.8ghz limit. But that may have as much to do with the current motherboards than the actual chips.

But clock-for-clock the Q9450's are faster, run cooler and use less power than the Q6600s. You made a good choice.
 
[KH]Shadow;11629758 said:
is that running stable? i ordered my q9450 before i read the forums, and by the looks of it its not turning out to be a popular processor. :( i have never OC'd before and this seems to be a pretty simple and safe starting point. so you simple upped the FSB to 1600 to get it to 3.2 from the stock speed of 2.66? sorry im very new to this. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
Yup - tested and stable.

333 FSB * 8 multiplier = 2666 MHz (Stock)
400 FSB * 8 multiplier = 3200 MHz (Overclocked)

With the RAM set to match the given FSB speed.

FSB speeds might be written as the base number, or that number mutliplied by four (e.g. stock is 333/1333 and overclocked is 400/1600)
 
what settings do the RAM need to be adjusted to out of interest? as i said i've never OC'd before and this seems like a basic starting point, as you haven't adjusted the VCore settings have you? :S sorry for my noob-ish-ness. :)
 
Yeah - no voltage adjustments. Just the clock speed of the RAM being raised from 333 Mhz to 400 MHz, in line with the FSB.

(This speed might be called DDR2-800, because the actual speed will be 400*2, similar to the actual FSB being 400*4)

9450ocpa6.png
 
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You can unlink the memory with that board and run it at pretty much exactly its rated speed (1333mhz in your case, tho it'll likely do a bit more).
 
I've got: Q9300 LGA775 'Yorkfield' 2.50GHz 6MB-cache (1333FSB) With an Asus P5N-T Deluxe motherboard.

Machine is heavily used for gaming, Is it worth trying to overclock the processor, if so what should I be aiming for?

Cheers.
 
The chips FSB will probably top out at 470-480mhz, so 3.5ghz should be possible with the right memory and cooling.

It should be fairly easy to get it upto 3.3ghz anyway.
 
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