Q9650 ... The best $60 I've ever spent? Overclocking advice appreciated!

Hey everybody, just picked one of these (Q9650s) off eBay. $60 is about what they go for if you find a deal!

What a sweet CPU!! I've got it in my P5KE with 8 GB of DDR2 800 and I'm lovin it!! Seems to OC better than my E8400 did even!

Running everything on "AUTO" and doing 9X 455 for an easy 4 GHz. I'm impressed!! Did this on the stock cooler, But then I said "Lets do BETTER" so I dug up some WC gear. A pump from a powermac G5, an Apogee GTX and an old single pass heater core I had. Slapped the heatercore on the outlet vent of my window AC

Can someone recommend OC settings for this board? A voltage for the chip? How much further could I realistically go?

4 GHz with everything stock is pretty darn impressive. Good cinebench score too, 410 I believe.



Those are FULL LOAD temps!

You'll not go much further.
Bclk much over 500 give or take is pretty tough on a quad, or should I say mobo with a quad installed.
On air, maybe 4200.
On water, maybe 4500 pending how good the board is.

Nice work.

Yeah... I figured over 500 is pushing it. BUT, she's doing 1 GHz over stock clocks with all stock settings. Or does AUTO allow the BIOS to up the vcore???

4.5 GHz would be perfect More would be... amazing...

And it's chilled water. 30C idle, 35C full 4 core load

Auto ups the vcore ben.

I've never been a fan / user of "AUTO"... So whatevea! haha

I'm guessing it increases it very conservatively, right? I wouldn't think that it would be doing anything substantial just for liability reasons?

It's likely giving you a voltage increase on some level. The stock CPU voltage is probably somewhere between 1.2v-1.325v.

Difficult to say exactly without checking though.

I've in the past seen an increase from stock 1.25v to 1.4v while overclocked, with the voltage set to auto. So, it can increase the voltage automatically by quite a bit if the level of attempted overclock is high enough.

CPUz reports 1.36, which is probably correct. I can live with that number. I'm thinking 1.4 would be the MAX? I'm on semi-chilled water... and I'd like to push this thing

For benching or 24/7? For benching on chilled water, I'd go 1.5V. I did it on air and then some. 45nm was pretty tough.

That said, I'd isolate memory and clocks and see where your fsb ends. Then start pushing up once you know. Need cpuz screenshots of memory and SPD tab.

See the overclocking sticky.

24/7, literally. This is my only PC that never shuts down. And the issue with the "chilled" water is when the AC's compressor kicks off the radaitor isn't getting ice cold. BUT, the room stays below 70. And most of the time the AC is "cooling". Either way the CPU is staying cool for the most part. But I want "safe" voltages.

And yah, I have my memory multiplier or whatever you'd call it at the lowest setting, and I think its still OC'd by 100 / 130 MHz or so.

Your memory is underclocked from those images.

I'd just check on fsb and see where you can go. 1.45v is good for 24/7.

I believe that CoreTemp will read/show the VID (stock) reading for your particular sample Q9650...