Alright i had my Q6600 at 3.6 ghz 1.4v stable, prime 95 ran for 8 hours without a problem. I noticed however as long as i have my CPU over clocked even a little games like crysis see huge performance drops minutes after playing the game. Also when i cold boot my pc it freezes when loading windows and i have to restart. I know its the cpu because ive tried keeping my ram overclocked and lowering my cpu to stock and the problem goes away. Does anyone know why this happens? Even at 3.0 ghz i have the same problem. Bad CPU? Help.

well, isn't that queer! don't know what your problem could be. troubleshooting leads to the processor but it's stable in prime? Try running Orthos or something else to to stress test. have you tried all the different torture tests in prime95 and did you enable round off checking?

Download Coretemp, keep an eye on your temps while running prime95 small fft's. Sounds like a thermal throttle kicking in! Check your bios and disable any thermal protection options! B.T.W if your running stock cooling, installing something big and full of copper might help!

Check this out for more on safe running temps: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/foru [...] ture-guide

Erm if its thermal throttling you may not want to disable that it may be doing it for a reason lol.

Good point Hatman...

How about disabling the Speedstep? It's labeled as the EIST or something in the bios.

shouldve added more in the original, cpu never gets past 58c in coretemp smallftts, ive tested blend on prime95. Ive run sisoft sandra etc. Heres the thing when i play games like crysis it will play fine and then all of a sudden performance will drop to like 5-10fps and just stay there. Only after playing for like 10 minutes though.