First Time OC - Need Some Help (E6600)

[korthos]

Apologise for another thread on the E6600, mine's a bit more noobish. I sifted through Graysky's thread and the other stickied OC thread but they're both incredibly long and I didnt find a BLUF anywhere. Attention span of a goldfish didnt help matters any trying to keep up with what I assumed was a simple OC.

Anyway, here's my system specs real quick:

OCZ Reaper HPC (2x2GB) PC-6400 / DDR800
Xigmatek HSF s1283
Enermax Liberty 620W PSU
XFX GeForce 9800GTX+ BE
ASUS P5N-E SLI Mainboard
Core 2Duo E6600 Conroe

The case runs cool to the touch, and the airflow right now is still icy cold. I've got a 120MM intake in front, a 120 exhaust on the xigmatek (bottlenecking a 80mm about 2 inches as a cause exhaust heh), a 80mm top exhaust, and a 120mm side exhaust sucking out the video heat. Airflow is superb, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Anyways, I have NO idea how to overclock this thing past 3.2 if thats reachable with acceptable temps. I tried everything stock settings and can not get my ram to adhere to it's 4-4-4-15 timing. According to CPU-Z, everything stock (and having set timings in bios, so I thought), my memory is clocking at 5-5-5-31(tRAS), with a fsbRAM ratio of 2:3, DRAM freq @ 400mhz.

I've tried to set the CPU fsb to 333.. to hit 3ghz even, but to no avail, stability goes through the floor and the system either hags shortly after a boot or flat out crashes with all voltages set to auto. I set ram timings to auto and had the same issue. strangely, my fsb requests to be set as a number between 533 and (I think) 1500, might be higher I'd need to check again. So I have to multiply the 333 by 4 for the proper amount which puts my memory at 999mhz i think.

Unfortunately, this is all utter greek to me. I'm trying to push the CPU to a stable 3.2 or higher, the ram and vid card im not trying to OC. Although a 9800GTX+ BE doesnt need to be severely OC'd either I dont think, it's handled every game I threw at it (so far) in high settings at 1680x1050.

If anyone can give me a few 'dummies' pointers at what I might be doing wrong, or how I can better OC this cpu to break 3.2+ stable it'd be appreciated. Unfortunately I'm really lost on the OC side of the house

 

[korthos]

K. I managed to get it up to 3.295 ghz at 366x9 (well, it figures as 1464 for some reason in bios), and I manually set the ram to 732mhz down from 800mhz.

I set the original voltage for the cpu to 1.40 and left the ram voltage at auto. Booted up no problem, life was good. Opened up a game, got about a minute in and the system seized. Probably should have ran prime95 first. Went back and upped the cpu voltage to 1.45 (incremental, I know, i figure I could always back it down), and set the ram voltage to 2.1, the manufacturers default. brought the timing down to 5-5-5-18 (it auto picks up the 5-5-5, I manually added 18, it was 31ish).

Rebooted, tried the game, and about a minute in, the system just reset itself instead of seizing. Restarted and tried out prime95 on a blended test and it seized/froze nearly immediately on the first test. Ran Prime for 10-15min on Small FFTs (max fpu stress, L2 Cache, little ram test) and it went smooth for the short test. When I ran the sam test for In-Place Large FFTs (heat, power, Ram), it seized nearly instatly.

Since it keeps seizing whenever a ram test is done, and WoW both freeze the system within minutes Im going to assume the CPU clock is stable, but the ram is jacked up somewhere I just don't know where to make the changes. Here's my cpuz and hwmon spit-outs:

HWMON
CPU
RAM
RAM Slots