OC Q6700 further

[Steve-O-]

Hey as of right now I have a Q6700 which runs stock at 2.66ghz. I have OC'ed it to 3.33ghz so far but am wondering if I can push it further on Air cooling.

Right now here are my settings:

Asus P5N-D 750i Sli

RAM - Mushkin Blackline DDR2 800 5-5-5-12

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700

VID - 1.25

Multiplier - 10x

FSB - 1330

Vcore - 1.386 (I think, I'm not at home right now so I will edit if needed)

NB - 1.40

Ratio - 3:2

If I overclocked any higher on the FSB it would never get stable. I'm thinking it's because my ram is rated at 800 for my motherboard. I have gotten it to 866 with my ratio atm though.

To my understanding I thought I would be able to get the speeds I have now with lower Vcore but from my experience that isn't happening.

I would rather not push the Vcore up any higher unless needed. Am I am able to get a higher clock speed with this CPU/Mobo combo? Is my ram holding me back? I'm rather new to OC'ing but have done some research and lately have been on a rampage with it.

 

[Steve-O-]

Ok my Vcore is actually 1.368 lol I had the 68 and 8 switched.

Also my idle temps average for all 4 cores is 42.5.

 

[thestepster]

what cooler are you using mate? what are your load temps those are the ones that matter

 

[Steve-O-]

I have a thermaltake Spin-Q atm. On a prime95 I got up to 67 on the 1024 test. (last part)

 

[thestepster]

thats quite high your prob at your temp limit i get less than that with my TRUE @ 3.6ghz with 1.44v u might want to invest in a new cooler if you want to push it further, and im pretty sure the lower numbered prime tests cause more heat, what do you use to measure the temps? i use real temp as its the closest to the temps i get in my bios and also i would recommend using intel burn test mate its really good and i find that it stresses far more or you can use LinX thats practically the same

downlond IBT run a 3 pass at high see what your temps are like if they stay around the same thats good u can be safe that u wont make 2 much heat but if they go higher or stay about the same a better cooler is going to be needed to get a higher overclock as u will need to put more voltage into the chip to get stability

 

[killablade]

Or you could use OCCT wich is imho a very nice application. Measures temps, has 2 options for stressing you cpu, gives you graphs showing the load and temp, etc

 

[Steve-O-]

Oh yes I definitely agree with you on a better cooler. I recently read FrostyTech's top ten 775 coolers and found that mine was not where I thought it would be (IE: close to the bottom).

I am going to be building a new system for a friend and they said they would pay me some to do it so I'm hoping I can get the Tuniq Extreme 120 with the money as it was at the top of the list and beat mine badly even at it's lowest fan settings. :/

So I guess right now I'm just at a cooling disadvantage but my temps are acceptable when gaming so it's not a big deal for me at the moment.

Right now I use CoreTemp for my temps and CPU-Z for all my information. Does RealTemp more accurately show the temps compared to CoreTemp or is there no difference. If there is a difference what if RealTemp shows a lower temp than CoreTemp? Which one should I base my information on? I've been told that the higher temp is 90% of the time the real one.

 

[thestepster]

i use real temp it is lower than coretemp but its closer to my bios temps and thats the most accurate way 2 get them and everest and HWmonitor's temps are all closer to the bios so i would use all these b4 i would use coretemp

yeah ur temps wont get near what u would get with a stability test cause ur pc shouldnt be near to gettin maxxed out gamin so just hold off on the overclock till u get the new cooler then give the chip some hell and see what its capable of

 

[Steve-O-]

Oh I know that gaming doesn't even compare to say, a prime95 test. Oh and you can rest assured once a better cooler is on, I will beating the crap out of it with tests and getting it as far as I can.

 

[thestepster]

yeah i sat and done that for about a day gettin my q6600 to 3.6ghz but i should have my h50 back next week so im going to see if the temps are better with that so i might be able to push it a bit further

 

[Steve-O-]

I'm purchasing a Noctua D-14 next week around Friday. I'll post up here to let everyone know how it does. I considered the H50 but the Noctua beat it in some tests.

 

[Steve-O-]

Ok everyone, today I get all my new hardware in. But first I would like to go over some results I've been doing with my current set-up (I think that's on the first page).

First off with my motherboard I have bad VDrop. So I searched around and found a Pencil Mod for the P5N-D (sorry forgot link). Upon doing this I went from a .082 VDrop to a maximum of 0.031! And as low as 0.016! For everyone that overclocks a lot even this seemingly small number makes a big difference. So after doing this mod what did I do? Spent 5+ hours testing new overclocks out of course.

I'm not sure what kind of voltages the Q6700 is supposed to do but I was impressed last night at some results. First off let me explain my test methodology. I ran an approximate 10+ minute P-95 test. I used Large FFT test. If the test got to Test 4 of the 1024k I called it stable. The reason it was such a short run was because I am a gamer and designer. I hardly ever use 100% of the CPU and if the test doesn't fail before then than in a non-synthetic test like P-95 it's going to be stable. Plus this saves on time. Screenshots will come later as I don't have the images on my laptop.

So my original OC was 3.2ghz at 1.35/36 vcore with the NB at 1.4, SB at 1.5 and I think ram was on auto. Temps were not going below 40c on idle and when doing a P-95 test they got up to 67c.

Last night I decided to go from default and work my way around again. I started with

VCore: 1.25

Other voltages at auto

Stock 2.66ghz CPU speed

Test ran and was perfect with temps a lot lower maxing out at about 55c with the Spin-Q cooler. So then I thought, well with this Pencil Mod maybe I can actually underclock my cpu. My cpu VID btw is 1.25. I heard this is a good VID for this cpu. So proceeded to underclock the cpu. I went as low as 1.20 with all others at auto and it ran perfect with no failing! Nice! Unfortunately I didn't try to go any lower.

Now the good stuff. I decided to keep the vcore at 1.20 and see how high I could overclock from there. I bumped up .1ghz each time. 2.7ghz, no fail. 2.8ghz, no fail. 2.9ghz. NO FAIL! Sweet! But like I said I have no idea what this CPU is capable of but I was impressed. Idle temps naturally didn't change. But really surprised me was the load temps didn't go up either! Bonus!

So what about the next step? When I got to 3.0ghz I had to bump up to about 1.25 which is the stock voltage assuming the VID 1.25 is the stock setting for your cpu. But for some reason with all other voltages set at auto I was failing. So I went back in and set the RAM to 2.01, NB to 1.4 and SB to 1.5. All of these except for the ram were the lowest settings if I remember correctly that I could set on my mobo.

So boot back up with 3.0ghz at 1.25vcore, ran P-95 and boom, passed! Temps are awesome even with this cooler with it not going above 57c on P-95 load. Very good stuff.

Unfortunately after that I ran out of time and wasn't able to get anything very low for 3.1ghz. Even at 1.30 vcore I wasn't able to pass my test. I didn't tweak the NB or SB though so that might have something to do with it. So my final stable clock speeds and voltages last night were:

Pencil Mod on mobo

1200 x 10 for 3.0ghz (FSB x Multiplier / Cores)

VCore: 1.25 (stock according to VID#)

RAM: 2.01

NB: 1.4

SB: 1.5

Hope this was a good run. I haven't really seen anyone do this kind of thorough test on a Q6700. What do you think? Good results or no?

 

[Steve-O-]

New hardware is in. Just took a crap load of pics on my break from work. Will try and get some stuff up tonight, but I must leave some time for gaming lol.

 

[Steve-O-]

Ok fellas, I finally got everything stable and perfect. If you guys have been following my SLi Problems thread you will know I couldn't stop getting BSODs. Well finally I figured it out. My RAM was being OC'ed too far!

So after much tweaking and everything back in order I finally got 3.5ghz on my CPU. It's hard to get anything above this but I will keep trying soon. For now I'm going to enjoy the new found speed! Games are getting at least 20fps more (with a 3.1ghz OC) especially in BFBC2. I just did a 3DMark Vantage with the 3.5 and a slight GPU OC to get 20,434! Whoopie!!!

 

[Steve-O-]

Well I think I reached my limit for this particular CPU. 3.6GHz. At this speed I have to lower the multiplier to x9 instead of x10. If I try to go to 3.7GHz my RAM starts underclocking and I get instability. At this speed my dual channel RAM is perfectly at 400MHz for it's rated speed of 800MHz. Maybe if I got a different mobo that allows me to have higher clocked RAM I would be able to push it higher, probably even to 4.0ghz. I'm not sure. But overall I'm pretty happy with a full GHz OC. But my fingers are itching to try out better RAM to go higher as I still think my SLi set-up is being CPU limited...