overclocking a q6600

now that intel have slashed their prices, has anyone had a chance to grab the q6600 (being now its at a reasonable price) and overclock it?

i am planning to buy one for my new build next month... i am very interested to know how far it can clock using a high end HSF cooling solution... something like the thermalright xp120+ etc

anyone tried it yet?

does this mean i can expect to clock as far as a e6600?

id expect it to be a little less as there is twice the transistor count, and twice the load to the regulators so, but nothing huge, id say within 30%

While waiting for an RMA on an X6800, I picked up the Q6600. This processor is rock steady and will overclock easily to 315MHZ. Above 330MHZ, I have experienced random lockups and BSODs. On balance, I would give the thumbs up to the X6800 because of its incredible overclocking ability, until games take full advantage of the quad core's capabilities. After that, it's the QX6700 and beyond.

ASUS Striker Extreme MOBO (Revision 1.04)
2 BFG 8800GTX GPU
Corsair Dominator 8888 (2x1GB) at 4-4-4-12 2T
2 Raptor 150Gig in RAID 0

At 315MHz, CPU temperatures for the Q6600 at idle stay below 27C and under full load below 35C. Of course, I use multiple fans and water cooling.

My case is a modified Lian Li V2100 with three top 12cm fans, a front 12 cm fan (as part of a hard drive cage for the Raptors, which I moved from the bottom of the case) and a rear 12cm fan. I use water cooling for the CPU (a Swiftech Apogee GT waterblock) and GPUs (a DangerDen full coverage water blocks for the BFG 8800GTXs), along with a triple 12cm fan Black Ice radiator (which I have mounted sideways in the bottom of the case). Power is supplied by a PC P&C 1KW-SR PSU. And, yes, the Striker MOBO uses a 680i chipset, which, contrary to many disgruntled users, is a terrific MOBO (and I have the first revision), if you keep all drivers up to date and install the latest BIOS upgrades. In fact, I find that most stability problems stem from the GPU drivers. Nvidia has yet to hit the sweet spot with the 8800s.

Further to my comments on the CPU, I found that the X6800 would consistency turn in benchmarks of 15500 or higher (3DMark06) with a mild overclock of 3.6GHz; the Q6600 at most produces 14100 at 315MHz. I can see the difference while playing Doom3 or HalfLife2.

Whats the point? You wont be using any programs or playing any games that will utilize the processor at stock speed for quite some time, why would you want to OC it?

Two titles I've been playing this year, Supreme Commander and FSX. I'm sure there are more but there are two titles that will eat up all the processor cycles you throw at them.

315mhz?

I forgot about this thread. I've been running my q6600 @ 9x333 for days and it's totally stable @ stock voltage. Cooling is an ultra-120 extreme. You can see my load temps here.

I also ran it @ 9x366 and 9x400 and it's stable at both, although I didn't stress test it @ 9x400 due to pretty high temps under load.

I lapped both the cpu and the hs which did a great job lowering the temps by an average over the 4 cores of about 7C. The AS5 is beginning to break in because the average temps continue to drop (currently down an additional 1 C averaged over the 4 cores) after about 18 h of load post finishing the IHS lapping w/ 1000 grit paper. I'll give a while to stabilize, then update the threads.

I made several threads throughout the lapping process, they contain pics and temp data if you're interested:

Ultra-120 Extreme lapping
Q6600 lapping part 1
Q6600 lapping part 2