HOWTO: Overclock C2D Quads and C2D Duals - A Guide v1.0

snipes23 said:
well running 3.060ghz at 1.2875 stable, tried 3.4 and it didn't get past windows loading screen. Guessing I have to increase vcore. I tried 3.150 and got an error within 5 minutes, so now down to 3.060ghz. I have memory set to auto, and 1:1 ratio. I might put timings back to 5-5-5-15, run prime95 to see if its stable, then try 4-4-4-12? Is this correct? use prime95 to test memory also? thanks, Mike.

I ran prime 95 overnight, no errors, temps stayed under 55, 45, 55, 45. Now that I've run my new water cooling setup, temps are slightly decreasing. Ran prime 95 for 3 hrs today at 3.060 and highest temps were 52, 43, 52, 43. Using core temp 0.95.4.

I would like to get my memory situated, then start to work on my 8800. I'm debating if I should buy a new monitor, or just be happy with 1280x768 on my 26" lcd and buy a XFX 8800 Ultra?

My main goal is to hit 3.6 - 4.0 on this water setup.


Thanks, Mike
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I would consider buying a new display. I presume that your 8800GTS is a 320MB? If it is less than 3 months old, I would quickly use the steup program from EVGA to buy the 8800GTX.
 
I've been trying to overclock my e4300, but I can only get to 2.92 ghz before it becomes unstable. In fact, it is even lower @ 2.83 ghz on my new gigabyte board. Is it possible to just have a crappy C2D that sucks at OC'ing? Please say yes so I can just throw this thing away. :(
 
q6600 needs quite a bit of a voltage bump to get into the upper overclocks which also generate a lot of heat you need to contend with. anything below <1.3 is more or less the min required to run at stock, I would say most of intel's chips this generation would be similar in the vcore requirements.
 
graysky said:
You can try 4-4-4-12 or 4-4-4-10 without changing anything else and see if it boots. If it does, try the prime95 blend test for 6-8 hours. If no errors, you're probably good.

When you say drop your volts, are you talking about your RAM volts or CPU volts? Also, what are you load temps @ 1.37 v?
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I was speaking in terms of the cpu volts... And my load temps while running prime are 48-52deg... Idle temps 26-30...

 
Hey guys. Can someone help me out here. I have had a Gigabyte DS2R motherboard with an E6600 chip and also PC8500 DDR2 1000 ram and am having a hard time overclocking a little. I have searched on the forum for months and still not sure if I have my settings right. Here's my question:

What settings should I have in my bios? I have the F4a BIOS which apparently supports 1:1 ratio. Now, i'm not exactly sure how to set that. Right now i'm showing a 2:3 ratio with the f4a bios...in CPU-z. My FSB setting is currently 333. I have my ram timings at 5-5-5-15 as they should be...although I have also sucessfully booted with 4-4-4-12 timings. I can get computer to post with FSB setting at least to 355...haven't tried higher. Temp wise, i'm showing about 46-48 on both CPU cores. Multi at 9, system bus is at 1332.
Sorry if this has been asked, but how do I correctly set the 1:1 ratio with my setup? I want a little overclock, but also want to keep the temps down if possible.
 
Mansize_tissue said:
If you bump the memory frequency up to 1333Mhz, it won't be running in a 1:1 ratio with the CPU's FSB frequency.. more like 1:2. In your situation, i'd change your CPU multiplier to 10x to give you an overall core clock frequency of 3.33Ghz. What is your CPU voltage set at? If it still on auto, set it to 1.4v for now.
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I am having a hard time following this CPU FSB Frequency Ratio of 1:2 or 1:1.
What exactly does upping the ratio do to the FSB and why are some people changing it?

Thanks
 
Concept1 said:
I am having a hard time following this CPU FSB Frequency Ratio of 1:2 or 1:1.
What exactly does upping the ratio do to the FSB and why are some people changing it?

Thanks
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The ratio doesn't affect the FSB... it affects the RAM's core rate. It's nothing more than a multiplier. If you memory can take it, try running it faster than 1:1 and see how it helps/hurts your applications/games, etc.
 
musicstudio said:
Anyone? Now I know some of you know how to do this
:D
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I dunno about that specific board, but on my P5B, the mem speed settings are right next to the CPU speed settings. It's a pulldown (popup) menu that doesn't specifically show fractions/multiplier ratios, but does list the various speeds I can select for DRAM frequency. This option was originally hidden until I disabled another item called "AI tuning" so also keep your eye out for something similar for your board.
 
Just a note about applying thermal paste.

When I build a system I use a credit card to apply the thermal paste in a nice even layer making sure to cover the entire mating surface of the processor. That little skinny line of thermal paste in the earlier picture looks like a bad idea IMO. I think a little too much is better than too little. My opinion, but I have built enough machines to know what works for me.

I run my Q6600 G0 at 9x333 and 1.2 volts, and using a Scythe Infinity cooler I get about 32C with all cores at 100% load. When I read about folks with temps up at 65 and 70C I just wonder if they have enough thermal paste on there.

[email protected] if you have questions or comments or a Daphne Blue stratocaster for sale...
 
About the creditcard method: I believe that works well for single core chips, but if you read the docs from AS's website, that method is discouraged. The single line method is preferred. I have tried it both ways and had much better temps using it.
 
I am running my G0 quad at 9x377 and its pretty stable. Before I really prime it for hours I wanted to ask you guys if the volts I am having to run this at are doing any harm:

@ idle CPU-Z reads: 1.416v vcore | 39, 39, 36, 36 via core temp
@ load CPU-Z reads: 1.355v | 68, 68, 63, 63 via core temp (Prime95 blend)

Temps are a bit high but from what I've read keeping it below 71C is OK. Tweaking this rig is a blast: pulled 278fps on CS:S Stress, all high at 16 x 12, but I hate breaking things.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated. :)
 
Okay guys, I updated the guide (now version v1.3). A paragraph detailing what's new is in there.

Enjoy!
 
@opie - vcore is approaching what I would term "high"... is that number minimized? What board do you have and have you considered pencil modding it for vdroop? Finally, what cooling are you using and did you lap it and your IHS? Have a look at the temperature management section of the guide for links.
 
Just wanted to give a huge thanks to graysky for putting together this awesome guide.

I had been toying with the idea of OC'ing my E6400 since I got it back in March, but having never done any OCing before, so was pretty hesitant. Well, I finally decided to give it a try (I have the same P5B-del mobo which helps), and successfully got up to 2.6 on the first try. Not much, but pretty exciting for me. Running Prime95 now.. so far so good.

Thanks again graysky! You are the man.
 
okayplayer said:
Just wanted to give a huge thanks to graysky for putting together this awesome guide.

I had been toying with the idea of OC'ing my E6400 since I got it back in March, but having never done any OCing before, so was pretty hesitant. Well, I finally decided to give it a try (I have the same P5B-del mobo which helps), and successfully got up to 2.6 on the first try. Not much, but pretty exciting for me. Running Prime95 now.. so far so good.

Thanks again graysky! You are the man.
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Glad you got some mileage out if it dude; depending on the quality of the silicon in your chip and your cooling setup, you might be able to hit 3.0 or 3.2 GHz with it... 8x375 for example. Consider lapping it and the base of the HS if temps are the limiting factor. Also consider the pencil mod which works wonderfully on this board.

Be sure you keep up updated with your success/failure :)
 
Actually I have a quick question if you don't mind... How come Speedfan reports cores at 22-24C, and Coretemp at 37-39? Which one do I trust? I know you mentioned in your guide that Speedfan misreports the temps on quad-cores by about 15C, but this is only a dual core.

Does anything else look out of wack? I just dropped the CPU V-Core from 1.38 to 1.26 and have booted successfully but I'm hesitant to fire up Prime95 again since I don't know which temperatures are accurate.

edit: lapping kinda scares me, but I'll certainly look into it and the pencil mod as well. Thanks!

 
okayplayer said:
Actually I have a quick question if you don't mind... How come Speedfan reports cores at 22-24C, and Coretemp at 37-39? Which one do I trust? I know you mentioned in your guide that Speedfan misreports the temps on quad-cores by about 15C, but this is only a dual core.

Does anything else look out of wack? I just dropped the CPU V-Core from 1.38 to 1.26 and have booted successfully but I'm hesitant to fire up Prime95 again since I don't know which temperatures are accurate.

edit: lapping kinda scares me, but I'll certainly look into it and the pencil mod as well. Thanks!
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OK... first off lapping is no more dangerous than the pencil mod; make no mistake: if you're not careful doing either, you can harm your hardware.

Secondly, go ahead and download SpeedFan 4.34 beta 34... you have to register to get to the beta area but it's free. Please report back what it uses for your temps. As you pointed out, this simply an issue of + or - 15 °C. You can also google around looking for what the tj constant for your processor is but the beta route is most likely the quickest as I know Alferdo has updated much of the CPU detection code in his beta.

http://www.almico.com/sfbetaprogram.php

Please report back.
 
Err, weird.. 4.34 beta 34 does not show the core temps at all. I looked around a little in 'configure' but couldn't find anything helpful. When I try to run the older version of speedfan, the core temps are no longer displayed there either.
 
graysky said:
@opie - vcore is approaching what I would term "high"... is that number minimized? What board do you have and have you considered pencil modding it for vdroop? Finally, what cooling are you using and did you lap it and your IHS? Have a look at the temperature management section of the guide for links.
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Thanks for the response, graysky. It's a Blitz Formula. I've been searching high and low for pencil mod instructions for this board but have only found a cap replacement mod that I am not interested in doing. Do you have any suggestions?

I am definitely considering lapping...but I forgot to add that it was nearly 90 F in my house yesterday when I took those readings. Weird for November, but it's California, what can you do?
 
Thanks for this guide... I had not done any OC'ing since the original AMD Athlons, so I was out of date on knowledge. using this I have gotten my Q6600 on an ASUS Maximus Formula SE with a Thermaltake V1 and OCZ Reaper DDR2-1150 at 3.26Ghz on all cores stable, and my temps are still pretty low... I Am going to explor some slight voltage upticks to see if I can get higher. That's already a 10% overclock from a Q6850 and >30% over stock!
 
I tried to follow this guide to overclock my 6300 on a asus P5B-V, but cant even boot at 275 fsb, any ideas what I have forgotten? I manually set the PCIe and PCI frequencies, decreased memory frequency, and set voltages to auto :( or is the onboard video maybe breaking something?
 
Prime95 gave me an error on one thread after approximately 21 minutes.

8 x 375 = 3.0 ghz
4-4-4-12
DDR2 @ 750
Vcore 1.275 (Bios), 1.240 (CPU-Z)
Load temps: 66C

So...time to up the vcore. :(
I would really like to be stable at 3.0 ghz but I don't want things to run any hotter.
Aside from lapping and the pencil mod, is there anything people can recommend to lower temps? I'm considering (re?)applying some AS5. My system was put together by NCIX and I have no idea if they put this stuff on or not.
Also going to reverse my top fan from intake to exhaust but I doubt this will have much of an effect.

I haven't really messed with the mem voltage or advanced timings, I'm assuming these would not be big factors temperature wise.

Specs:
P5B Deluxe
E6400 w/ AC7 Pro
2x1 GB Mushkin HP PC2-6400 (800)
Silverstone Strider ST75F
P180B with Yate Loons

Any suggestions are more than welcome :)
 
okayplayer said:
I haven't really messed with the mem voltage or advanced timings, I'm assuming these would not be big factors temperature wise.
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Don't be too sure about that...double check your Auto settings because from my limited experience with Asus Intel chipset boards, when you overclock, Auto voltage settings are usually higher than you need...sometimes dangerously high.

On my Maximus Formula SE, I had to manually set my VDIMM, NB, SB, and CPU PLL because they were all VERY over-volted on Auto mode.

It wanted to run my 2.0v DDR2 at 2.2v, and when it was doing that, I couldn't Prime95 my Q6600 B3 higher than 3.0ghz no matter how much voltage I threw at the CPU, and even worse the system would randomly reboot and put me back in BIOS setup, usually under moderate load. I lowered it to 1.8v in the BIOS settings, which gave me a 2.0v actual, and my Prime95 and random reboot problems went away.

Using the Auto settings in BIOS, my CPU PLL was running at 1.7v...lowered that down to 1.5v and my average idle and load temps on all 4 cores dropped 2-4 degrees, and the MB sensor monitoring the PLL showed a 10, count 'em, 10 degree drop.

NB voltage was reading 1.667v, I reduced the settings in BIOS to 1.30v, and NB temps dropped 4-5 degrees by doing that. X38 Northbridge chips seem to run hotter than Hell, but now it's a nicer part of Hell. No effect on overclock or core temps as far as I could see, but hey, less power usage and heat is always a good thing.

SB voltage was set at 1.2, I reduced it down to the recommended 1.05v...2c drop in SB temps, once again no change in overclocking/core temps.
 
graysky said:
Can your RAM handle it? Does it give you a beep code?
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If you mean me, no beep code, just powers on, does nothing, powers off.
I have pc800 ram that should run with 4-4-4 timings and I had set that to pc667 with 6-6-6 before overclocking, with those settings it should let me increase FSB at least until ram frequency is back up to 800.
 
Awesome guide, just read it.

One thing I'm not clear about is the FSB, I'd appreciate if anybody can clear this up for me. :p

So, both the motherboard and CPU have an FSB right? And when overclocking are we only changing the CPU's or both? Does changing one automaticlly alter the other?

My motherboard is a Gigabyte P35-DS4 Rev 2.0 and it supports up to 1333 FSB. I suppose that's the official number and it can be overclocked further? I have a Q6600, can I change its FSB to more than 333?

Also what do you guys think about software overclocking apps? Gigabyte has Easy Tune 5 which I'm thinking about using.
 
fantanode said:
So, both the motherboard and CPU have an FSB right? And when overclocking are we only changing the CPU's or both? Does changing one automaticlly alter the other?
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They both have FSBs, you can choose to OC both, or just lock the mem to find a stable CPU FSB and then OC the mem. You can choose a linked mode that goes from 1/1 to whatever you like ( 5/8 2/3 etc)

fantanode said:
My motherboard is a Gigabyte P35-DS4 Rev 2.0 and it supports up to 1333 FSB. I suppose that's the official number and it can be overclocked further? I have a Q6600, can I change its FSB to more than 333?
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That is correct. That chipset (P35) is a really good ocer mb.
 
This is a great guide and has helped me out quite a bit, I've not over clocked a whole lot but when I did it was quite some time ago on Athlons.

Got my E6750 at 3.2GHz just fine, I think this is a good place to leave it. I may try to bring it up a bit more later, though I don't see why it's plenty fast and if I over clock anymore will only create more heat. Not that heat is an issue right now at 3.2.

Anyway the only thing I don't understand, or am afraid to mess with is the System Voltage Control settings on my GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3R, right now I've got it set to "Auto".

The options are:

DDR2 Overvoltage Control

PCI-E OverVoltage Control

FSB OverVoltage Control

(G)MCH OverVoltage Control

CPU Voltage Control (Vcore)

I want to set System Voltage Control to manual so I can adjust the Vcore, however it enables all the other settings that I listed above, and sets them all to "Default". I don't feel comfortable leaving these OverVoltage settings at default instead of auto because I have no idea what to set them to, with auto it does it for me. Also in flashing red text it says something like "** System Voltages not optomized!! **"

Now that I've overclocked to where I want (3.2) I want to try to lower the Vcore till it's still stable, on BIOS options of auto speedfan reports my Vcore at 1.39-1.41. This seems kinda high to me, I would think that I could lower it some before it becomes unstable. However I really don't even know where to start.

the E6750 is rated at 0.85 - 1.5 from the intel site. In the BIOS it shows my "Normal CPU Vcore" as 1.35 however I don't think that's what I'm running at, it just shows the normal operating voltage of my CPU.

I even tried leaving the OverVoltage settings at default and set Vcore to 1.35 and even 1.30, there was no change in Vcore in speedfan from before (1.39-1.41). maybe I just need to go lower? At 1.2 the system restarted twice before boot screen and reset the Vcore setting, so I think that that is too low.

Any help on this is appreciated!
 
I just want to make sure I am safe. Is 61-62 on cores under full load (under prime) with a Q6600 g0 @ 3ghz safe well within its safe range? I want to make sure this chip lasts me a while.
 
thnx
hope there will be a topic like this for the new 45nm one's
 
@cyper - if you can't boot due to low vcore then yeah, it's too low. Wish I could help you w/ the GB board settings, but I have no experience using that board. I would also suggest you use CPU-Z to get your vcore readings. I dunno if I'd trust speedfan or not.

Basically, you have to hold all but one of those variables constant for your testing. It's too bad the board unlocks all of them at once without telling you what values it selected for each one in auto mode.
 
@ihaveworms - I'm assuming you've minimized the vcore, right? In any case, 62 °C is within the Intel specs for the G0 so I think you're fine w/ those temps.... if they bother you, I'd recommend upgrading your HS/fan and lapping it and the IHS on the CPU. My q6600 maxes out around 62 °C depending on room temp running 9x333 @ 1.2625 V for your reference and it and the u-120 ex are both lapped.
 
lordsegan said:
Great guide thanks!

Could we get a little info on NB and chipset/bus voltages?
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I'm not too sure what else to say :) Basic principal is that you wanna run with the lowest numbers you can and still have a stable system. It unfortunately requires a bit of experimentation to get a stable system... leave them on auto until you're good on the vcore, from there, tweak them one-at-a-time starting from their lowest settings until you're stable. NB and ICH are the most important ones in my experience.
 
graysky said:
@ihaveworms - I'm assuming you've minimized the vcore, right? In any case, 62 °C is within the Intel specs for the G0 so I think you're fine w/ those temps.... if they bother you, I'd recommend upgrading your HS/fan and lapping it and the IHS on the CPU. My q6600 maxes out around 62 °C depending on room temp running 9x333 @ 1.2625 V for your reference and it and the u-120 ex are both lapped.
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Yeah I minmized the vcore and anything under 1.34v was unstable for some reason :\. I heard on the EVGA forums that people were able to get lower voltages and stay stable by reapplying cermique (however you spell it) to the mosfets near the CPU. So I am going try that during thanksgiving break and see if I can manage to get any lower voltage. Seems like my vcore needs to be pretty high to be stable compared to everyone else :(

By the way, I have a thermalright ultra 120 extreme, but I have had to mount it in a really awkward position due to it hitting the case wall if mounted the "correct way". I can take a picture of it when I get home. So I would not be suprised if that also doesn't help my temps, but that doesn't really justify needing the voltage to get stable I would think.
 
Thanks graysky.

I was able to set the Vcore to 1.25v (Or somewhere around there, I forgot exactly what. With vdroop it's at 1.25v) with an overclock of 3.2GHz. I'll be staying at 3.2GHz since that is plenty for me, i'll try to lower the Vcore even more later to see if I can, though I doubt it.

I was able to set all the other OverVoltages to auto/default without any problems booting so they'll prolly be okay.

Temps are around 25-30c idle and 48c load. I ran Orthos for 30 mins I don't have enough time to try for any longer, but I think it's fine. I also played Crysis for multiple hours no problem.

One more thing, my memory voltage is at 1.79v as reported by speedfan when it's rated for 2.1v, is this okay? I can't really type in an exact voltage in my BIOS it only has DDR2 OverVoltage option to give + amounts of volts.

Thanks again.
 
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