A lil help Clocking my Q9550

[SinisterRellik]

Ive been working at getting my comp stable for a while now. Thanks to a number of ppl in these forums and a ton of patience on my part, im getting close to my goal.
Heres whats going on.
For now im just trying to get my q9550 stable at 3.2 ghz. Id be happy with that but perhaps when things start getting closer to perfect, ill consider going higher.
Im using a evga 790i ultra sli mobo and 4 gigs of ocz reaper ddr3 1333mhz pc3 10666. The problem i think im having now, is finding the right voltages.
Ive got the sb and nb volts running pretty good i think. But im not sure what voltage the cpu should be running at 3.2ghz. Ive tried a number of voltages between 1.2 and 1.3v. I havent gone higher then 1.3. Now i know that some ppl aiming for 4ghz will run the cpu at 1.4v but i dont think im that brave lol(or have enough money if i mess up and fry something) Ive used prime and OCCT. even though my comp seems more sluggish then it should be occt says all is well after its 2 hour run. I havent wanted to chance running prime all night just in case it starts running too hot, so i havent ran prime for long. Usually ill set things up and run occt for 2 hrs, watch a movie and occasionally check up on the temps with hwmonitor.
If someone is familair with this cpu in this board, please lemme know about what range of voltage i should be running the cpu at to get it perfect at 3.2-3.3 ghz.
Ive got the multiplier maxed at 8.5 ,because i havent really had any lockups up at all, just the occasional inability to make it past post screen, then i go into bios and adjust it a bit and starts up fine. No BSOD or anything during my time trying to oc it.
Im using the newest p07 bios for the board btw.
im really close to gettin this sukka running good, so please anyone with experience with the q9550 and/or the 790i ultra, please let me know what your opinions are. Thanks guys, you've all be very helpful.

 

[SinisterRellik]

Oh yeah, forgot to mention. Regretfully i have the c1 stepping version of the 9550, not the E0, they came out right after i bought mine....

 

[SinisterRellik]

Well, good news and bad.
Ive been burning the midnight oil and i actually got my comp running amazingly stable and smooth at 3.3ghz! woot!
However, only when i leave the advanced memory timings to auto.....
Since im running 6gigs of this 1333reaper, i cant get them to run at the factory 6-6-6-20 timings. but i never have been able to.. But once i bumped them up to 7-7-7-20-2t, everything started working great with the cpu at [email protected]. Ha, turns out that i had the cpu clocked to low for the voltages and such. Soon and i upped the cpu from 3.187 to 3.302, BAM everything was loading fast as lightning and has so far been stable while i leave the rams advanced timings at auto but lock the standard timings to the aforementioned.
So uh....anyone got an idea of good anvanced timing ranges? lol Ive been messing with em for a while now, but to no avail.

 

[Kris]

Wish I could help but I have no experience with nvidia boards or ddr3. I know it took me some time to get stable with my Q9550. Once I did she screams! Good luck!

 

[Kazappin]

Leave the timings as they are. tighter timings only really help with benchmark scores, real-life apps don't see too much of a boost.

 

[vixro]

Yea, the q9550 should be able to hit 3.5 or 3.6 without too much trouble or even a voltage increase. i think something is just whack with the ram settings.

 

[Lukee]

if you have more than 2 sticks of RAM in your machine, they won't run at their factory settings. I had that problem with Gskill and here is their reply.
---------------------------------------------------
Dear customer

We recommend to run only 2 sticks of DDR3 memory on any X48, X38, P45 and P35 motherboard. there is issue with 4 sticks DDR3 run together with high speed.

We tests many motherboards includes Asus, Gigabyte, DFi, and others. Looks like all of them have this issue. we suggest you only run 2 sticks

Thank you

GSKILL SUPPORT

-----------------------------------------------

I have the same MB and tried running 8 GB of Kingston HyperX 1600 MHz memory and it would just crash if I tried to clock them higher than 1066 or 1333(can't remember which one)

I would just put your memory on auto and OC the chip as far as you can. That way you'll take the mem out of the equation.

After you have a nice OC on your CPU, then you can work on playing with the memory.

 

[SinisterRellik]

Ok well heres the update and im having new problems now.
I seem to be experiencing random lockups. Usually when playing a game.
The computer will lockup randomly and when i restart, and windows loads, it loses the time and date for some reason. The board is brand new and i checked the battery, its fine.
Ive been running the system at 3.4ghz for a few days now with no trouble, and honestly i know this might sound crazy, but ive actually had the board running more stable with the 6 gigs of ram in it then with just the 2 sticks of 4gb. For some reason i cant get just the 2 sticks to run exactly at factory timings. But when i put the 2 other 1gig sticks in, up the nb voltage and the ram voltage to 1.8v. , set the timings to around 7-7-7-20-2t. the computer runs much better.
Im wondering if the random lockups have beeen due to trying to run the cpu fsb at [email protected] for a while. A number of ppl in these forums and ocz told me that with 1333 ram i might start to have trouble if i try to go over 3.2ghz.
I had it running really stable at 3.2, and wery good at 3.3 as well. I dropped it back down to 3.329 for a while and im gonna see if the lockups stop.
I may just have to invest into some 1600 or 1800 mhz ram eventually if i wanna get this thing going good. Ive seemed to have nutting but trouble with this memory since the start.
Ive always stood by ocz ,and usually their ram has done me well.
i just upgraded my ram in my other rig running the new 750i ftw mobo, [email protected] ,and the newly designed ocz ddr2 800 reapers that came out this november, and i have to say that ram solved all my computers probs. Oc has never gone smoother for me then when i stuck that mem in there.

Ive spoken with ocz and gotten alot of advice from here too, on what to do with this memory,because i really think that all my troubles are comming from them... If anyone is interested. Ill copy down all my bios settings for cpu,memory and voltages and u could look them over and perhaps get an idea on what i might be overlooking.
Please if anyones got any ideas. let me know.