Help out with tweaking my overclock....Q6600

[norcalwelder]

Hey guys, first time on here and I need a little help....I just built my first system, and I've been overclocking a bit. First off, heres my specs. I have a Asus P5Q pro mobo with a Q6600 G0. So far, i've overclocked the cpu up to 3.25Ghz, with my FSB being 360. My ram (F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ) is currently at 865Mhz @1.8V (I locked the voltage in). The temps (using real temp 2.70) are 58C being the highest, (Crysis, Mercs 2, and Stalker Clear Sky-these are the games I play most, and after hours of playing, the highest they ever get the cpu to is 58C). It idles about 28-33ish. (my cpuv is 1.42850 i'm pretty sure...I will check when I reboot next) I'm also using a EVGA GTX 260.

So, using all that, I had my RAM speed at 903, and I got the blue screen of death, so I lowered it to 865, where its at now. So my question is this, I would like to get the most out of my system, but not put a lot of heat and wear and tear on it at the same time. What should I be doing differantly? It seems to be pretty stable right now, but I haven't stress tested it with prime95 yet. (just downloaded, will do later I'm thinking) I have a Scythe ninja mini as my CPU cooler as well. I would really like to get the most out of my system, so please give me some help.

 

[norcalwelder]

So am I to assume that no one knows anything about this stuff here then?

 

[babybudha]

No, we know alot about it. In fact that CPU is the most overclocked and documented quad of the past 2 years.

If you are too lazy to look up the thousands of documented pages on it, we can't help you.

I love how someone who has never contributed a squat of help/info/incite to the forum expects to just come in and have everyone help them.

 

[norcalwelder]

lol wow...someone's got sand in their vagina huh? Dude all I needed was someone to say, just check the older posted and or a link. no need to be rude about it. I actually spent 4 hours pursuing the forums last night. Annndddd further more, how can I help or contribute to this forum if i'm still learning? I thought forums like these were "nice" people helping out other people gain knowledge? Guess not...
Happy new year!

 

[jsc]

Although I do not agree with the tone of babybudha's post, I do agree with the content. About the only more irritating topic is "medium speed quad core or fast dual core?". I just reached "nimble knuckle" status and probably more than a hundred of my posts dealt specifically with the Q6600.

But OK ...

Reasonable vcore, reasonable speed, reasonable temps.

But why are you running your memory so fast instead of a 1:1 ratio of 720 MHz? I think that you will get better performance (not much better, but a little better) by tightening the memory timings.

What kind of RAM? Some need higher voltage for stability (OCZ, for example) if overclocked.

Overclocking since 1978 - TRS80 Z80 from 1.77 MHz to 2.01 MHz

 

[norcalwelder]

my ram is PC2-6400....that means its 800mhz. I did some studying, and found out that i'm running wayyyy to hot, so I dropped my corev down to 1.35 and that made a huge differance in my temps. Been playing mercs 2 as my stress test for the last 10 hours off and on, and it's stable. I'm gonna keep dropping it till I find my sweet spot, and then start working the FSB up, and try and hit like 3.4 with good temps. Any recommendations on this?

Ok so now the RAM...I'm using G. Skill. When you say tighening the memory timings, what do you mean? And dude, if you don't want to take the time to type this stuff out, just say it to me and I wont be bugging you guys ok?

 

[norcalwelder]

Ok I just ran Prime95 and heres the deal. First, I saw a few people on other forums with Q6600's @3.4Ghz 1.3625cpuv. With these settings, they were reporting rock solid stability. So, I figured, well I'll give it a try...so I upped my corev to 1.3625 from 1.35 and set the fsb to 370 (3.33Ghz). When I ran prime95, within seconds I got a error on my #3core, and then after a minute, I got the BSOD. Also, I got the same error and everything when I tryed to run it @ 3.25Ghz with 1.35cpuv. Any ideas?
this is the error message that it gave me:
[Sun Dec 28 23:28:03 2008]
FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4
Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file.

this is the error message from the first attempt @ 3.25Ghz:
[Sun Dec 28 23:03:49 2008]
FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4
Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file.
Compare your results to other computers at http://www.mersenne.org/report_benchmarks
Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz
CPU speed: 3239.59 MHz, 4 cores
CPU features: RDTSC, CMOV, Prefetch, MMX, SSE, SSE2
L1 cache size: 32 KB
L2 cache size: 4 MB
L1 cache line size: 64 bytes
L2 cache line size: 64 bytes
TLBS: 256
Prime95 64-bit version 25.8, RdtscTiming=1
Best time for 768K FFT length: 13.046 ms.
Best time for 896K FFT length: 15.690 ms.
Best time for 1024K FFT length: 18.000 ms.
Best time for 1280K FFT length: 22.108 ms.
Best time for 1536K FFT length: 27.146 ms.
Best time for 1792K FFT length: 32.428 ms.
Best time for 2048K FFT length: 35.914 ms.
Best time for 2560K FFT length: 47.129 ms.
Best time for 3072K FFT length: 57.975 ms.
Best time for 3584K FFT length: 69.339 ms.
Best time for 4096K FFT length: 77.333 ms.
FATAL ERROR: Rounding was 0.5, expected less than 0.4
Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file.