O/c'ing my Q6600/analysis of temps

cool i am very interested in your oc results as i am getting a nearly identical setup very soon - btw what speed is your sflex fan

I'm interested in seeing how this goes, please keep us updated.

Here is a summary of the 3 FSB numbers I ran:

[code:1:57ee279783]9x266 = 2.4 GHz

Speedfan: 39-45C (coolest core and hottest)
TAT: 60 and 57.

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9x300 = 2.7 GHz = stable

Speedfan: 44-53 (coolest and hottest)
TAT: 68 and 65

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9x333 = 3.0 GHz = stable
Speedfan: 46-56 (coolest and hottest)
TAT: 71 and 67[/code:1:57ee279783]

Also, everything is stock except the FSB (speedstep is enabled, C1E is enabled, CPU and mem voltages are stock).

70ºc wont hurt. around 65ºc should be the ideal maximum to run 24/7. If you can get it lower, better.

Forget TAT and Orthos temps when stressing. You won't get near those temps during games nor movie encodings

Disable speedstep, ce1 and spread spectrum. What is your default ram voltage? And Command Rate?

Just because the voltage may throttle back to a level where at idle the system could be unstable when OCing.

I'm having mixed results with it actually. I have been up at 4-4-4-12 @ 9x333 for about 12 h then for no reason it rebooted. I'm @ 4-4-4-13 @ 9x333 now testing. It's certainly not a heat issue.

Yeah, 9x333 @ 4-4-4-12 is perfectly stable. Coretemp was crashing my machine. I have since switched to TAT and haven't experienced a problem. I suspect I can push it beyond 9x333 since my hottest core is <65 C but I don't care really. 3.0 GHz x 4 cores is pretty darn fast

By the way, I didn't change anything in the BIOS beyond the FSB and the mem timing, voltages are all stock values as are all the stuff "they" recommend you disable like C1E, speedstep, etc.

Nice... WC w/a push on the voltage should get some nice numbers. Peace

What's your ambient temperature?

I am interested in getting the Q6600, but I have heard that they can get pretty hot. That's a little worrying for me, as I live in a place where it gets very hot in summer.

I edited the first post in this series, but decided to write it here too just to update the community:

Since I wrote this post about 1-1/2 weeks ago, I have lapped my ultra-120 x as well as lapped my Q6600. The decrease in temps have been amazing for about 5 hours of careful lapping, and $20 worth of sandpaper. The most recent temp data can be found the q6600 lapping post. I will say that after a few days of load/idle, the temps have dropped even more as the AS5 breaks in. Also, I discovered I don't need to run with a 1.310 vcore to keep the 9x333 stable. It's been stable now for >5 h on 2x orthos with a vcore of 1.3250 in the BIOS which is, according to CPU-Z and speedfan, 1.232 under load, and 1.260 @ idle.

I'll run the same x264 encode I did in the threads above with the new vcore tomorrow and post the results in a new thread.

Dunno about the max temp. I've had it up to 9x400 and it rebooted after about 50 minutes. I was ignorant about vcore when I did this and left it to auto. I also wasn't logging the vcore. I'm happy running 9x333 and having load temps under 45C -- that's really fast enough for me

Manually set my vcore 1.3250 in bios and temps have dropped by an average of 3.5 C (7 %) across all 4 cores. It's stable as judged by 2x orthos for > 5h doing small FFTs. If I drop it to 1.3000 in the BIOS, one of the orthos gives a math error after 40 min or so. I can obviously go back and select the intermediate voltage (1.3125) but this is fine for me.

You mentioned that 400 didn't POST, but 401 did. What are you using to determine that these work well? In other words, why 9x300 and not 9x333?

Also, which P965 board do you have?

I don't remember where I read about the holes, but as an example the post said 401 works and 400 doesn't. I had been trying to get 400 from the third day I had the CPU and tried every combination of volatge settings, bios options, memory ratios, timings, even memory brands. No matter what I tried couldn't even get 400 to post. It seemed to good to be true (too easy). I set to 401 and boom first try!

It's my understanding that the "holes" are board issues not CPU as newer boards and bios updates have fixed some of these issues. While initially the 680i was supposed to be "THE" chipset for overclocking the P965 has had time to learn and revise both the boards and bios and has proven to be very OCable.

I have the Gigabyte DS3 actually as of tomorrow I will have 3 of them and for a no frills board I don't think you can beat the quality and price. I personally would like to see firewire on it...I mean come on it's 07 but the ove machine I wanted it on I had an old at the time $30 1394 card laying around so I just popped it in.

I set my CPU voltage to 1.45 and from day one and haven't touched it since. Actually I kicked it up for a couple of tries at 400 but since it didn't I've only run at 1.45.

I have patriot PC2-8500 RAM and it's rated at 2.3V but it runs fine @ 2.2 and I've had it up to 2.4 running @ 1200MHz but I'm in So Cal and it's been getting into the 90's the last few days so I knocked "down" to 1003MHz @ 2.3 probably would be fine @ 2.2 also. I run the BUS @ +1 for 340 and over. My NB has been getting warm so I temporarily (and in a sloppy way rigged an 80mm fan to the back side of the graphics card to get good airflow across the passive stock cooler. The position is actually great because it doesn't disturb the airflow from the front mounted 120mm to the 120mm rear exhuast fan. It works kind of like a "repeater" with boosting properties on the push pull setup. Until I can get my hands on a Thermalright 120 Extreme, I'm making due with a Zalmann 9500 which thermally limiting the CPU.

If you want the ultimate stress test run this:
StressCPU version 2 http://www.gromacs.org/component/o [...] Itemid,26/

EDIT: I forgot to get into temps.... I've had a long day To Be Continued....
little preview - These things can handle high temps!

...and last thing for the night a new Q6600 will be out in July with new stepping and TJunction rated 11C higher than the current model and probably with a nice price cut... Even so I have another one coming tomorrow