Q6600 Quad underclocked?

[Eric the Viking]

I've recently upgraded to one of the new G0 Q6600 Quad core chips. I've attached it to an Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2 and everything booted fine and the installation of XP Pro went without drama.

A few quick benchmarks (3DMark05 (10200)) later and I can see this is going ok, but there's a couple of problems:

1. The BIOS, apon booting reports 2.40GHz - but every program I'm thrown at it (including Windows itself) reports it's running at 2.30GHz (256 * 9). CPUID reports the same FSB and multiplier for all 4 cores. The 'Speed Step' feature in the BIOS is also disabled.

2. Uneven temps of the cores - core 3 reports a much lower temp than core 1, by up to 8 degrees at idle and cores 2 & 3 are identical. I'm running Prime95 (v2.54) in the background and the temp difference remains. (54, 51, 48, 51 degrees C)

Any thoughts?


Cheers,

Eric

[neonlazer]

I believe there are two things in BIOS you need to disable EIST and one other...i forgot what its called. Temps usually differ some since some wb arent completely flat or make sure its evenly screwed in so its not pressing more on one side of cpu than other side.

[trickson]

You may need a BIOS update .

[Eric the Viking]

Thanks for the response :)

I have updated the BIOS although this didn't fix anything. I have looked for any mention of ESIT - or indeed anything in the BIOS - which might have any effect but with no luck.

Well, almost no luck - I found a strange entry in the manual...

"When you adopt Quad Core CPU on this motherboard, FSB frequency may be reduced 5%."

... with no explaination as to how or why.

<shrug>

Answers that question anyway.... ;)

As far as the temps are concerned, I'll try rotating / reseating the HSF and see what happens.


Cheers.

[muddocktor]

BTW Eric The Viking, :welcome: to OC Forums. :)

I wonder why the mobo drops the fsb speed 5%? I've never heard of that before. Can you manually adjust the fsb speed in bios? If so, set it to 266 or 267 fsb and see what happens.

[sp33dball]

My motherboard does this also actually. It's strange when I put my mobo at 405x8 it will drop it to 404x8 (checking bios will show 404). However if I go to 406x8 it remains there. never figured out why, but never really affected anything.

Also my temps have quite a bit of variance. Core 0 runs about 6-8c hotter (idle/load) than the rest, core 1 about 2-4c hotter than core 2-3 which are usually identical (45-39-37-37).

[Eric the Viking]

Thanks for the welcome muddocktor :)

I can manually adjust the FSB (and will) but since this is a new system I'm just trying to find my base lines so I know what's 'normal'. I can only quess that as this Asrock board is a 'budget' sort of thing this is just a feature to ensure that everything works.

And it's worth noting that the difference from this system to my last (4CoreDual-VSTA & P4 3.2GHz) is the MB and CPU - and this is running slower and still kicking the old one into the dust....

Re the temps - I've rotated the HSF 180 degrees and thinking I may have been a bit mean with the AS5 I added a little more, spreading it evenly....

...with absolutely no change what-so-ever. Four worker threads in Prime95 are currently giving it a hard time (temps 57, 54, 50, 54). Well, snice it's a low temp I'm not going to lose to much sleep over it.

Oh, just noticed sp33dball's post - well, it's good to know I'm not alone with the temp variance. :)


Cheers.

[Eric the Viking]

I spoke too soon about overclocking: altering the FSB by 1 MHz, either up or down, results in the computer not booting.

I've investigated and found other people have experienced the same (http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=29&threadid=2063964&FTVAR_STKEYWORDFRM=&STARTPAGE=3&FTVAR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear) and so I've sent the following email to Asrock...

"I recently have purchased an Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2 motherboard and, in conjunction with your supported CPU listing, have purchased an Intel Q6600 G0 Quad Core (Kentsfield) cpu.

However it seems that this motherboard does not support this processor, in contradiction to your supported cpu listing, because it can not run at the speed it is supposed to. There was no indication on the box that this motherboard was incapable of working correctly with this processor... the box even clearly indicates that it DOES support this processor.

My question is therefore when will a Bios update be made available to correct this fault. Should this update not be forthcoming I will have little option but to return this article for replacment snice it does not function as advertised."

I see little hope of having this matter resolved.

I will not be buying Asrock products again.


Cheers.

[muddocktor]

Man, that kind of blows that you can't get the processor running at it's actual rated speed, much less overclocking it any with that Asrock board. I know now not to even look at it for a cheap quad build now, from your sorry experience with it. I've had generally decent experiences with Asrock boards in the past for a cheap board myself.

[Eric the Viking]

I received a response from Asrock tech support which said that the 5% lower clock speed is on their web page....

And, sure enough, it is... now

But when the board was released, when the board was reviewed by a number of tech sites, this problem wasn't covered... but I think Asrock knew about it - the timings for the board to run that Q6600 must be very tight and to get it to run at all, they had to 'dumb down' the board to accept it.

I too have had good experiences with Asrock products in the past but this clearly seems to be a case of a budget MB manufacturer trying to play with the big boys, in terms of features, and exceeding their actual abilities.

I never expected to overclock, all I expected was that the board would work as advertised.

<shrug>

[/builds a bridge and gets over it]