E6420, can't get stable past 350 FSB. Help?

I bought from Newegg (of coruse! )

lovegunphoenix said:

I bought from Newegg (of coruse! )

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Lucky you. I ordered from NewEgg on 4/30 and got a dreaded L644, which is pretty pathetic for overclocking.

I ordered on 4/23 and got a damn L644 too. ****es me off because I was about to order a watercooling setup to get a lot more out of this chip, but now I'm stuck with a bad proc.

How well is yours clocking blackbird? I've been seeing mixed results from the L644G's, but overall they have been worse off than the rest of the batches.

sremick said:

Lucky you. I ordered from NewEgg on 4/30 and got a dreaded L644, which is pretty pathetic for overclocking.

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your e6600 is at 3.3ghz right? i don't see how a 900mhz oc is pathetic. from my experience overclocking, 900mhz is a damn nice OC, but that's just me.

hUMANbEATbOX said:

your e6600 is at 3.3ghz right? i don't see how a 900mhz oc is pathetic. from my experience overclocking, 900mhz is a damn nice OC, but that's just me.

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I don't have an E6600, I have an E6420. And I'm basing my comments not on the relative OC from stock, but how I compare to 95+% of the other people with E6420s who OC them. For almost all E6420 owners with batches other than L644, they hit 3.2GHz easily with stock (or less) Vcore, and often 3.4GHz and higher without much work. It was based on this that I spent extra money designing a system around the E6420, so I'm a bit upset about my really horrible luck.

ok, so you have gotten 1.2ghz out of it for basically the cost of a nice heatsink. i don't see what you have to complain about.

not all cpus OC the same. i guarantee you, people post more about their successes than they do about their failures. so for every post you see here with someone running 3.4ghz on 1.4v, you can bet that there are lots of people who can't even hit 3ghz and don't post about it (most likely caused by inexperience with oc'ing, not a bad cpu).

i mean think about it. you paid maybe $180 for a cpu that clocks to 3.3ghz, and spanks a x6800 and those still go for about $950. what are you complaining about again?

*edit* and i was just wondering, did you try anything i suggested in post #9, or even read it?

Heh, well except that pretty much no one gets to choose their batch when ordering their CPU. This means that all those on this forum (and others) with E6420s are an accurate sampling of the likelihood of getting the dreaded L644 batch, as well as a sampling of overall success OCing that batch vs. other batches.

And according to that, most people do not get the L644, and almost everyone who does misses out on 20% extra-performance that everyone else gets with the "good" batches. Considering what some people do on here for 1-5% performance gains (watercooling, phase-change, etc)... 20% is a huge deal. So if you were one of the unlucky 5% or so who miss out on 20% of your potential overclocking ability... wouldn't you be bummed?

Considering the name of these forums, I would think it a little ironic for someone like yourself to be taking the stance of "every 1MHz of OC is a gift, take what you get and shut up" heh. I would suggest instead that we start at the baseline that we're all overclocking enthusiasts and statistics do matter and are legit reasons for disappointment.

you lack perspective IMO.

back when we were OC'ing p2's and p3's, every mhz WAS a gift. i remember the hell i went through trying to get my 733mhz p3 to 1ghz, and do you think i ever made it? nope, stuck right around 975mhz.

i'm not telling you to "take what you get and shut up", but honestly, that is pretty close to the stance i would take with someone who talks about RMA'ing a cpu that is in perfect working order, just because they are afraid that their e-penis doesn't measure up with the rest of the folks on this forum.

also, i think your math is WAY off. 3.3ghz + 20% = 3960mhz. if you think that is truly what a "good" e6420 can do with air cooling, i've got some realestate in antarctica i'd like to sell you.

btw see my edit on my last post...

This is getting dangerously close to ungentlemanly, and I don't want to go there. Suffice it to say that I'm questionably-stable at 3GHz right now, not 3.3. 3.6MHz is not hit by everyone but is far from uncommon... a lot of times it's not the CPU itself holding people back from 3.6MHz but other things like heat/RAM/etc, all things I made sure to address. 3GHz is 83% of 3.6GHz, and I rounded down because I'm not 100% how stable I am at the moment.

I OCed back in the day when every MHz counted too but proportionally things have grown. I mean, seriously: if 95% of your friends won $1000 but you only won $800, wouldn't you be bummed?

Incidentally... NewEgg has an RMA reason titled "Dissatisfied". I'm not using that, but my point is that vendors recognize that there are legit reasons to send something back other than "Defective".

As for the things you suggested... of course I read it. But I'm nowhere near 450 FSB at the moment. I'm tinkering around 380. As far as dropping the multiplier from the stock 8 to 7... I've done the thing people are always told to do and read read read and one thing I'm reading a lot these days is about the new knowledge of how the NB frequency is calculated based upon stock multiplier and used multiplier, and how dropping the multiplier is really bad for the NB. So no, I haven't tried that.

If it makes you feel any better, my L646g523 e6420 doesn't really like anything over 3.2. I can go higher but I really have to pour on the voltage.
I'm close to a 50% overclock, so I really can't complain.

well, i really didn't want to come off as rude, i was simply trying to be blunt.

lowering your multi will not harm your NB. there are many many people here who run with a lower multi. there have been claims by very knowledgeable and respected people that lowering the multi raises your NB clocks, but AFAIK, those very same people have retracted their claims. if you have a link detailing how it is bad for the nb, i would be interested to read it.

i would try what i have suggested. you see, when ocing, you want as few variables as possible. you want to lower the multi so that you are sure your cpu clocks don't hamper your FSB ocing. once you have established what your mobo can do, then jump back on the 8 multi and see if you can get to those fsb (or at least higher than 380).

*edit* XS is down right now, and that is where most of Tony's posts are detailing the NB phenomena with respect to lowering the multi, and its effects on the mobos strap setting. so i can't post straight from the horses mouth, but here is a pretty good thread that has most of his info in it (from what i can tell from a quick skim). you might wanna dig thru it if you are uneasy about lowering your multi: http://www.overclock.net/intel-moth...clocking-redefined-interesting-p965-975x.html

I'm oced to 2.8 right now with pc probe saying that Im using 1.38v under load. But the vcore in bios is set to 1.425v i believe. My previous attempts to get to 3ghz have failed, but I plan on trying again.

**edit** oh and my multi is at 7 with 400fsb, ram running 1:1 at ddr-800.

Well I had to try it.
Dropped the multi to 7 and jacked the fsb up to 450. Not good. My puter turned on and no screen, no post beep. So after reseting cmos and setting up my bios again, I'm going to leave well enough alone.
At least I know it won't go there.

^^what vcore are you running to get 3.2?

blackbird007 said:

^^what vcore are you running to get 3.2?

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Bios=1.4125
Cpuz Idle=1.392
Cpuz Load running Orthos=1.360

Peepaw said:

Well I had to try it.
Dropped the multi to 7 and jacked the fsb up to 450. Not good. My puter turned on and no screen, no post beep. So after reseting cmos and setting up my bios again, I'm going to leave well enough alone.
At least I know it won't go there.

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for you to run 450fsb, your ram has to run at 450mhz as well, or ddr2-900 speeds. what voltage and timings are you using here?

also, you will probably need slightly higher than stock voltages for the fsb, nb and southbridge. what settings did you try? i would start at 7*400 and try to go up from there. the mobo should have no problems at all doing 500fsb. if you know that the cpu can do 3.2ghz, then all it takes is some time and testing to get 7*450.

also, you shouldn't have to clear your cmos very often. on many occasions i have no posts, and i can get back into the bios by turning off the psu for a few secs, then back on and powering on the computer, repeating if necessary.

HBB I tried everything to get into the bios, to no avail.
The only thing I changed was the multi and fsb. I figured I was jumping ahead a bit fast but I thought it would at least post. I kind of figured 450 wouldn't be a problem as my ram is rated at 500.
I left all voltages at where I run them at 3.2.
Fsb term volts 1.3
NB vcore 1.45
SB vcore 1.5

hmm those volts look like they should do the trick. you could try bumping them all 1 notch and still be safe.

the ram might be rated for ddr2-1000, but at what volts? if you have this on auto it might be causing problems. also, set the ram speed from auto to the first choice (if you haven't already). finally, what timings do you have set? are they still on auto? if so, set them manually to the timings on the ram package or heatspreaders. they may just be too tight @ ddr2-900.

You might have a point here. I left the voltage at 1.9.
That might have done it if I turned up the voltage a bit.
I run the timings on spd. I tried loosening them up the other night trying to go higher on the clocks without going higher on the vcore. It didn't help.