I am overclocking my q6600 to 3.6ghz on the new 780i board, and i have set the vcore to 1.568, however i still can not get it stable. any ideas on what i might need to do. i have raised the northbridge to 1.6v, and my memory is set to 1066 at 2.2v with 5-5-5-18 timings. also my temps are 40 idle and gets up to 52 under load.

What kind of instability are we talking about? Yes, these voltages are pretty high (RAM is OK).

You can always lower the multiplier to 8 and see if it's the board or CPU causing it. If it's the CPU you need more vCore.

More vCore = Russian roulette every time you turn your PC on.

....ok.


OP: What's the VID on your chip? 1.568 does seem high to get 3.6 stable.

Maybe a different BIOS version would help?

1.56 vcore does sound awfully high.... At 3.2ghz, my q6600 is stable with vcore @ 1.35 with a 0.01 CPU offset. like cnumartyr said, try messing with the multiplier. I'm unfamiliar with the board and not an expert on OCing but if you have a CPU VTT setting you may need to raise that to open up the FSB a little (check out this http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdo [...] =3129&p=13 for the scaling theory behind FSB and VTT). The exact amounts probably aren't universal but I'm sure the scaling is similar.

As far as I know your chipset voltages aren't going to affect your OC too much, even for 3.6ghz... trial and error might be your only hope.

Aslo, what kind of ram are you using? try underclocking it or running it at stock speeds and see if that is holding you back. I generally try to find my highest CPU stability before playing with the Memory and besides, you probably won't notice the difference between 1066 and 800, but many have told me that's just my opinion

good luck!

i cant underclock the ram. if i run it at looser timings it will return my cpu to stock speeds when i boot back up

I think it's the ram.

Use the blend setting of Prime95 and see. If it fails, that could be most of your problems.