After reading these boards for the past couple days I started screwing around with overclocking my Q6600 last night. Before I get into anything, my system breakdown is as follows:
-Q6600 G0 w/ AS5 paste & Thermaltake Big Typhoon CPU cooler
-2-2GB (4GB total) of Geil DDR2-800 @ 2T 5-5-5-15 Value Series w/ Thermaltake Aluminum heatsinks
-Asus P5K
-EVGA 8800GTS OC 320MB w/ Thermaltake GPU cooler
-Enermax Noisetaker 600W PSU
-Win XP SP2 32bit
All of this sits in a Coolermaster COSMOS case, so all things considering, I feel cooling is adequate...
The first thing I learned with my limited overclocking experience is that my memory will not operate at a higher frequency than stock. I believe the recommended voltage is between 1.8V-2.2V for this memory, so even feeding them 2.2V I still cannot POST at anything higher than 400MHz. The stock timings are 5-5-5-15. Changing this to 5-5-5-12 works fine, and I was able to run Orthos for 20 minutes without any errors ( I'll run a longer test once I figure out what i'm doing ). But changing them to 4-4-4-12 will not allow me to POST. Again, no matter how much voltage I feed them. I guess this is due to the fact that they are value sticks? Or maybe i'm doing something wrong, or could it even be due to the amount of ram that I have? There's also the issue with a 32bit OS not supporting more than 3-4gb (in my case, 3.25gb). For the record, I don't mind leaving it at 400Mhz @ 5-5-5-12. I just think it's odd that I can't get it to OC beyond changing 15 to 12 (I apologize for not knowing the proper vocabulary when talking timings - i'm still new!). My goal is to reach a stable OC with my FSB and RAM operating 1:1.
Before I started screwing around with my memory, I adjusted most of my BIOS settings found in the 'Sticky' C2Q OC thread on this forum. Then I started to play with my CPU freq, memory freq/timings and all associated voltages. I couldn't for the life of my find a stable OC and I don't know why.
I eventually set all my settings back to default and changed only a few items that resulted in a semi-stable OC. The settings I changed are as follows:
C1E - disabled
Speedstep - disabled
(I disabled the above two so that CPU-z would reflect accurate frequencies)
CPU Multi - 8x
CPU Freq - 400Mhz
RAM Freq - 400Mhz
RAM Timings fixed to 2T 5-5-5-12
PCIe - 100Mhz
Everything else I kept to auto. Including all voltages. I don't know if this is good or bad. I understand that you always want your hardware to operate at the lowest voltage possible, and setting it to auto may provide more voltage than needed. Is this true? Is it bad to leave the voltages on auto?
With the configuration above I can run a small orthos test with no errors. This is fine, but for some reason orthos is detecting my CPU to be operating at 266Mhz with a multi of 13.5x (3.6Ghz). Not only that, but my device manager also detects 3.6, as well as Intels TAT program. The only program that seems to be detecting the correct frequencies is CPU-Z.
Why is this happening? My CPU voltage is very high too for a OC that should be only 3.2Ghz. I've been hearing stories that the G0 version of this processor can operate at stock voltage up to this speed (or close). Could this be conflicting with my memory some how? Causing them to not being able to OC at all? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
-Q6600 G0 w/ AS5 paste & Thermaltake Big Typhoon CPU cooler
-2-2GB (4GB total) of Geil DDR2-800 @ 2T 5-5-5-15 Value Series w/ Thermaltake Aluminum heatsinks
-Asus P5K
-EVGA 8800GTS OC 320MB w/ Thermaltake GPU cooler
-Enermax Noisetaker 600W PSU
-Win XP SP2 32bit
All of this sits in a Coolermaster COSMOS case, so all things considering, I feel cooling is adequate...
The first thing I learned with my limited overclocking experience is that my memory will not operate at a higher frequency than stock. I believe the recommended voltage is between 1.8V-2.2V for this memory, so even feeding them 2.2V I still cannot POST at anything higher than 400MHz. The stock timings are 5-5-5-15. Changing this to 5-5-5-12 works fine, and I was able to run Orthos for 20 minutes without any errors ( I'll run a longer test once I figure out what i'm doing ). But changing them to 4-4-4-12 will not allow me to POST. Again, no matter how much voltage I feed them. I guess this is due to the fact that they are value sticks? Or maybe i'm doing something wrong, or could it even be due to the amount of ram that I have? There's also the issue with a 32bit OS not supporting more than 3-4gb (in my case, 3.25gb). For the record, I don't mind leaving it at 400Mhz @ 5-5-5-12. I just think it's odd that I can't get it to OC beyond changing 15 to 12 (I apologize for not knowing the proper vocabulary when talking timings - i'm still new!). My goal is to reach a stable OC with my FSB and RAM operating 1:1.
Before I started screwing around with my memory, I adjusted most of my BIOS settings found in the 'Sticky' C2Q OC thread on this forum. Then I started to play with my CPU freq, memory freq/timings and all associated voltages. I couldn't for the life of my find a stable OC and I don't know why.
I eventually set all my settings back to default and changed only a few items that resulted in a semi-stable OC. The settings I changed are as follows:
C1E - disabled
Speedstep - disabled
(I disabled the above two so that CPU-z would reflect accurate frequencies)
CPU Multi - 8x
CPU Freq - 400Mhz
RAM Freq - 400Mhz
RAM Timings fixed to 2T 5-5-5-12
PCIe - 100Mhz
Everything else I kept to auto. Including all voltages. I don't know if this is good or bad. I understand that you always want your hardware to operate at the lowest voltage possible, and setting it to auto may provide more voltage than needed. Is this true? Is it bad to leave the voltages on auto?
With the configuration above I can run a small orthos test with no errors. This is fine, but for some reason orthos is detecting my CPU to be operating at 266Mhz with a multi of 13.5x (3.6Ghz). Not only that, but my device manager also detects 3.6, as well as Intels TAT program. The only program that seems to be detecting the correct frequencies is CPU-Z.
Why is this happening? My CPU voltage is very high too for a OC that should be only 3.2Ghz. I've been hearing stories that the G0 version of this processor can operate at stock voltage up to this speed (or close). Could this be conflicting with my memory some how? Causing them to not being able to OC at all? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!