Q6600 & DDR3 - First OC Advice

[m0b]

Hello Everyone,

Thanks in advance for taking time to read this. I bought some new kit recently with the intention of overclocking it. My friend has a very similar system and has overclocked his Q6600 to 3.2Ghz on air with no issues at all. He started telling me to do this and do that, but it wasn't very stable and I couldn't figure out why. I've decided to start from scratch and to get an understanding of things as I go along. I followed the guide on this board and some other guides aswell but still couldn't manage to get it stable at 3.2Ghz

Firstly, my spec:

CPU: Intel Q6600 2.4Ghz G0 Revision
Mobo: Asus Maxiumus Extreme
Memory: 2 x 1Gb OCZ PC3-14400 (1800Mhz) DDR3
HSF: Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme + Scythe S-Flex 1600RPM
PSU: Zalman Heatpipe Cooled 600W
HDD: 2 x SATA2 Wester Digital Caviar 750Gb
GPU: 8800 GTS 512Mb

The first thing I did was run memtest86+ over night. My memory had no errors. I then uninstalled the Asus AI Suite as I want to OC manually.

I was increasing the FSB in increments of 10 and it seemed fine. Eventually the settings I reached were:

FSB Frequency: 355
Multiplier: 9x
All voltages were left on auto. I read that this should overestimate the voltage needed, so I should do that for my first OC then work down.

I checked coretemp and they were at the mid 40s when idle. They went up to the mid 50s when running Prime95 for 10 minutes.

I then decided to run 3dMark06's CPU test. Boom. Blue screen. While I was playing a game it went boom a couple of times too and when I left Everest doing a stress test it also went boom.

I had a look about and read that it could be my memory voltage so I increased that to 1.94V (my memory is rated at 1.95V). Still unstable, even though the temperatures are fine.

I'm going to be honest, I don't really know what I'm doing. I've read about the FSB and multipliers and I've read about memory and timings and voltages but I'm just not sure where to start and how to isolate problems. All my temperatures seemed well within their limits and the voltages sufficient. What else could be causing instablity?

Also, how can I get the most out of my memory? From what I've read I'm guessing I'd need an FSB of 450 to reach 1800Mhz, and using a 5:6 divider. Is this correct? Should I even bother trying to do this?

Anyway, any help would be appreciated. I've reset it to defaults for now and it is running fine, no damage has been done it would seem. I do really want to OC, however. Given my spec, where would you start? Also, could it be some nefarious option in the BIOS that could be causing me problems?

Thanks!

m0b

PS If you need any additional info, just let me know!

 

[p e r p l e x]

Just start out by saying your system looks very nice I would never think my overclock is stable after 10 minutes of testing, try a hour at least. My bet is you can hit (333.0 x 9) 3.0 Ghz with the stock voltage. Try that and post your results.

 

[devsain]

You can hit 3.6 easily with i believe 1.35v , but you can definitly hit 3.0ghz on stock volts

 

[Kai_Force]

From overclocking my machine, leaving the FSB voltage on auto and/or south bridges or northbridges, i was very unstable, so appointing them a permanent voltage in the Bios fixed this problem. Possibly you could try appointing all your items a manual voltage? Good luck dude.

 

[m0b]

Hi guys - thanks for your posts.

I've changed some things around and have reached a stable point.

I've set the FSB to 400 and using a multiplier of 8x. This allows me to reach 3.2Ghz and have my memory running at 1600Mhz. I ran Everest System Stability test for 2 hours and the highest temp I reached was 70 on one core and the others around 68. I'm think there is room to go a little higher too, but I'm ok for now. I'd really like to get my memory up to 1800Mhz, but that means an FSB of 450 and I'm not sure if my machine is cool enough for that.

Oh, yes, I set manual voltages - 1.4 on the vcore and 2.0 on the vdimm. Seems stable.

Will run Prime95 tonight while I sleep just to make sure

Thanks!