I'm not beginner when it comes to over clocking, I've had a Barton 2500+ running at 2.2Ghz (essentially an AthlonXP 3200+) I currently have my Opteron 165 at 2.8Ghz (making in an FX-62) My last venture was an Intel E4400 running nicely at 2.93 Ghz, making it an "Extreme Edition". Well, I had some money and the Q6600 has been teasing me for weeks. I decided to jump and get one, because a)my Nvidia motherboard wouldn't support the upcoming Penryn Core cpus, and B)cuz I heard that if you get the G0 Stepping its an easy overclocker, and well I found quite the opposite. Where my E4400 ran at 2.93Ghz with a very limited Voltage bump, the Q6600(which is a G0 stepping BTW) has turned into a nightmare at 3Ghz. I had it running 4 instances of Prime95 for 8 hours and no crash, stable as heck. But when I fire up Crysis I had polygons flying everywhere. And when I play Unreal Tournament 3 it sometimes crashes. And at boot it occasionally crashes to a black screen with a bunch of white text with nonsense, or starts going into windows and crashes and restarts. This makes absolutely no sense to me. Prime95(and Orthos and SP2004) haven't steered me wrong yet, why would they now? Just for giggles I ran A 4 hour loop of 3DMark06(the cpu test in that is CrAzY) and no crash, stable as heck. The Q6600 doesn't even get that hot. I got an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 and temps at load rarely hit 57c. Right now I have it at 1.45 volts at 3.0Ghz and it seems stable enough. I just don't like it at that high of voltage. Also another strange anomaly are white dots. I see white dots on the Icon for selecting suit powers in Crysis, I don't remember them their with my E4400, and when I swapped out my 8800GTS with my 7600GS they were still their. Also, I lowered the settings on the CPU to default and the white dots stayed their. Uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers 4 times and white dots stay. Reinstalled the game and, guess what? The white dots are still there!!!!!
Any help would be greatly appriciated!
Any help would be greatly appriciated!