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

I think they're saying if you want to push the FSB beyond 410 MHz, you'll need to drop the multiplier to 8x to do so. I have no experience with this having only pushed my Q6600 to 9x401 which produced quite a bit of heat.
 
Hi! I'm also OC'in for the first time and I have a strange problem that I could't find an answer :(

My computer:
Gigabyte P35-DS4 (rev 2.0)
Q6600 2,4GHz (G0)
GF8800 GTX 768MB
2x 1GB OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 Platinum Revision 2 (800MHz)

The problem:
When I try to increase/decrease the CPU Host Frequency(MHz) from the BIOS to anything else than the default value 267MHz, the value I inserted is not saved OUTSIDE of the BIOS. For example:
Here are my values in M.I.T:

Robust Graphics Booster = [AUTO]
CPU Clock Ratio = [ 9 X ]
CPU Frequency = [ 2.70GHz (300x9) ]
CPU Host Clock Control = [ Enabled ]
CPU Host Frequency(MHz) = [ 300 ]
PCI Express Frequency(MHz) = [ AUTO ]
C.I.A.2 = [ Disabled ]
Performance Enhance = [ Standard ]
System Memory Multiplier (SDP) = [ AUTO ]
Memory Frequency(MHz) = [ 900 ]
DRAM Timing Selectable (SDP ) = [ AUTO ]
System Voltage Control = [ AUTO ]

After that I save the configuration and the computer restarts. The POST screen says that my Q6600 processor is still workin at 2,4GHz speed (267x9) and so does the CPU-Z. When I next time enter the BIOS it shows my own values as active and if I press F9 (shows for example core speed) it says that it should run at 2.70GHz speed. So the Core Speed wont really change for some reason. If I change the multiplier to 8, then POST and CPU-Z shows' that Core Speed is 2.14GHz. I can also change the Vcore value and I can see the change in CPU-Z but changing the FSB won't do difference in my system :(

I'm using the lates BIOS (F9). I've set the following values in Advanced BIOS Features:
CPU Enhanced Halt (C1E) = [ Disabled ]
CPU Thermal Monitor 2(TM2) = [ Disabled ]
CPU EIST Function = [ Disabled ]

Thanks for Your time!
 
Now the problem is gone. I just opened the case and used a screwdriver to touch the two pins for a few seconds to reset the BIOS. After that I put the default-BIOS settings and booted the computer and it started to matter what I put for the FSB value :)

Now running at 3.0GHz:
FSB = 333 MHz
Multiplier = 9x
DRAM Frequency = 399,7MHz
FSB:RAM = 5:6
Timings: 4-4-4-4-15 2T
Core Voltage = 1,376 V (AUTO-mode)

Is it wise to run with these values?

Idle temperature for the hottest core is 55c. Now the Orthos v0.41.110.18 has run about 10 minutes and the hottest core was at 79c and the coldest at 66c.
 
I replied to your thread over @ guru3d For those too lazy to click the link:

graysky@guru3d said:
@duckster - I don't see anything wrong with your settings... did you minimize your vcore for the 9x333 as described in the guide (since you're in auto mode I don't think you did)?

Your temps are kinda hot. You might also consider lapping the CPU and base of your heatsink and/or upgrading your HS to a larger one (I dunno what you have now).

I would shoot for temps under 71 °C as per Intel's specs. Again, see about minimizing your vcore first if you haven't already done so. Just for your reference, my Q6600 is a B3 stepping and runs stable with a vcore of 1.2625V @ 9x333 which is SIGNIFICANTLY less than 1.376V. That may drop your temps without the need to lap.

Let us know.
Click to expand...
 
EXCELLENT guide, but numerous settings found in the OP's P5B Deluxe are simply not available in my Abit IP35-E, such as C1E, Max CPUID value limit, vanderpool, CPU TM function, Execute DIsable Bit, PECI, and SpeedStep.

I could be wrong about these settings being absent. Are they located somewhere in the IP35-E bios?

Are these settings crucial to a successful overclock? If not, then I will just skip the part of the guide where you change those settings and head straight for the RAM timings etc.
 
graysky,
Thank you very much for this very informative guide. I built my first gaming rig in October of 07 and I have not tried to overclock it yet even though I built it to do so. I will post my results so anyone with similar specs can see them.

As a note, I am no novice when it comes to working on or repairing computers. However, I am very much a novice when it comes to overclocking and getting into tweaking individual pieces of hardware on a whole. I think that I represent the gaming novices here that are in my situation. I'll givie it a shot.

My Rig specs:

-COOLER MASTER COSMOS 1000 RC-1000-KSN1-GP Black/ Silver Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case - Retail

-COOLER MASTER Real Power Pro RS-850-EMBA ATX12V / EPS12V 850W Power Supply - Retail

-ASUS Striker Extreme LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX The Ultimate Gaming Motherboard - Retail

-2 of CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TWIN2X2048-6400C5DHX

-Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Conroe 3.0GHz LGA 775 Processor Model BX80557E6850 - Retail

-2 of in RAID 0-Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10,000 RPM Serial ATA150 Hard Drive - OEM

-spare drive-Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

-MSI NX8800Ultra-T2D768E-HD-OC GeForce 8800Ultra 768MB 384-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Retail

-Creative 70SB046A00003 7.1 Channels PCI Interface Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Champion Series Sound Card - Retail

-LITE-ON 20X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black SATA Model LH-20A1L-

-ASUS Black SATA DVD-ROM Drive Model DVD-E616A3T - Retail

-SAMSUNG 226BW Black 22" 2 ms (GTG) DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor - Retail

Some accessories:

-not lapped yet-ZALMAN CNPS9500 LED 92mm 2 Ball Cooling Fan with Heatsink - Retail

-Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound - OEM

-TrackIR 4 Pro with TrackClip PRO

-Medusa 5.1 Home edition Head Phones w/mic

-Razer Copperhead Mouse and eXactMat

-Belkin’s Nostromo N52 Gamepad

More notes-
my video card runs hot and after doing a little resarch i realize that i need some more dedicated cooling within my case. I'm thinking about going all liquid...what do you think?

Also, I will be updting my vid cards and going SLI.
I will also be going Quad core (Intel), I was just waiting for some prices to drop after AMD released their Phenom...

Thanks again
 
Fire488 said:
My video card runs hot and after doing a little resarch i realize that i need some more dedicated cooling within my case. I'm thinking about going all liquid...what do you think?
Click to expand...

Try using riva tuner to jack up your idle fan speed. My 8800GTS (G92) stock is set to 29 % of max. I upped it to 40 % which isn't any louder to me and the idle speed dropped by about 10 °C.
 
Thank you graysky and stand by for my overclocking information...
will post shortly...
 
Again many thanks to graysky for putting together this guide. Very easy to follow. I used it to successfully overclock my E6850 to 3.6 (9X400). I just had a quick question. Under the setting for PCI clock synchronization Mode, I set it to 33.33mhz as suggested in the guide. My question is whether is this an absolute value that should be used in general or whether this is related in some way to FSB values (i.e. since graysky was using a FSB value of 333 he set his PCI sync clock to 33.33. In this later case since my FSB is at 400 should I set my PCI syn clock to say 40mhz?) Thanks a lot in advance for your help.
 
Is 36C idle / 57C load OK for E6750? Running @ 3.33 (417x8) 1.312V and 4GB(2x2GB) DDR2 @ 500.5 5-5-5-15 2.1V

Stable for 2 weeks since I built it, just not sure about temps. My old Pentium D 935 ran bellow 40.
 
graysky said:
I replied to your thread over @ guru3d For those too lazy to click the link:
Click to expand...

Thank you graysky and everybody else for the advices! I dropped the Vcore to 1,2000V and now Orthos has run 30 minutes. Temperatures for the hottest and coolest core are 63 °C and 56 °C. I tried to go under the 1,2000V for the VCore but Orthos crashed after few minutes so I had to put it back...

CPU-fan RPM is now ~2600 and I think that the maximum rate is ~3700. I have installed Easy Tune 5 and set there that if Core temperature is over 45 °C the fan should operate at 100% speed but obviously it doesn't work correctly now. But I'm not intending to waste time for that :p
 
As can be seen, I did not get my PC to run very stable at higher settings and often crashed while playing games like ArmA and CoD4. I lowered my settings to where they are now and it seems to be somewhat stable.

The stock memory timings are: 5 5 5 18. Set to 4 4 4 12 w/2.1v set.
The ram is listed as 800mhz but shows as 400Mhz in CPUz...Does anyone know why?

VCore voltage: 1.152v on CPUz (yet in my bios I have it set to a higher value: 1.245

Temps:
Processor is at 44c
Ambient and other temps are at 48c
Vid card: 77c (8800Ultra)

Is there any way to get it clocked up more based on my hardware and capabilities of motherboard listed above?

Any help would be great.

Again, Thanks



CPU-Z 1.42 report file

Processor(s)

Number of processors 1
Number of cores 2 per processor
Number of threads 2 (max 2) per processor
Name Intel Core 2 Duo E6850
Code Name Conroe
Specification Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E6850 @ 3.00GHz
Package Socket 775 LGA
Family/Model/Stepping 6.F.B
Extended Family/Model 6.F
Core Stepping G0
Technology 65 nm
Core Speed 3262.8 MHz
Multiplier x Bus speed 9.0 x 362.5 MHz
Rated Bus speed 1450.1 MHz
Stock frequency 3000 MHz
Instruction sets MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, EM64T
L1 Data cache (per processor) 2 x 32 KBytes, 8-way set associative, 64-byte line size
L1 Instruction cache (per processor) 2 x 32 KBytes, 8-way set associative, 64-byte line size
L2 cache (per processor) 4096 KBytes, 16-way set associative, 64-byte line size

Chipset & Memory

Northbridge NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI SPP rev. A2
Southbridge NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI MCP rev. A2
Graphic Interface PCI-Express
PCI-E Link Width x16
PCI-E Max Link Width x16
Memory Type DDR2
Memory Size 4096 MBytes
Memory Frequency 398.8 MHz (10:11)
CAS# Latency (tCL) 4.0 clocks
RAS# to CAS# (tRCD) 4 clocks
RAS# Precharge (tRP) 4 clocks
Cycle Time (tRAS) 12 clocks
Bank Cycle Time (tRC) 22 clocks
Command Rate (CR) 2T

System

System Manufacturer System manufacturer
System Name System Product Name
System S/N System Serial Number
Mainboard Vendor ASUSTeK Computer INC.
Mainboard Model StrikerExtreme
BIOS Vendor Phoenix Technologies, LTD
BIOS Version ASUS StrikerExtreme ACPI BIOS Revision 1305
BIOS Date 08/22/2007

Memory SPD

Module 1 DDR2, PC2-6400 (400 MHz), 1024 MBytes, Corsair
Module 2 DDR2, PC2-6400 (400 MHz), 1024 MBytes, Corsair
Module 3 DDR2, PC2-6400 (400 MHz), 1024 MBytes, Corsair
Module 4 DDR2, PC2-6400 (400 MHz), 1024 MBytes, Corsair

Software

Windows Version Microsoft Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (Build 2600)
DirectX Version 9.0c
 
Johnny78 said:
Again many thanks to graysky for putting together this guide. Very easy to follow. I used it to successfully overclock my E6850 to 3.6 (9X400). I just had a quick question. Under the setting for PCI clock synchronization Mode, I set it to 33.33mhz as suggested in the guide. My question is whether is this an absolute value that should be used in general or whether this is related in some way to FSB values (i.e. since graysky was using a FSB value of 333 he set his PCI sync clock to 33.33. In this later case since my FSB is at 400 should I set my PCI syn clock to say 40mhz?) Thanks a lot in advance for your help.
Click to expand...

First off, congrads on the 3.6 GHz. No... leave it set to 33.33 MHz for any FSB you're using. The PCI bus and cards you plug in aren't designed to be pushed higher... I actually roasted an old video PCI video board this way.
 
Fire488 said:
As can be seen, I did not get my PC to run very stable at higher settings and often crashed while playing games like ArmA and CoD4. I lowered my settings to where they are now and it seems to be somewhat stable.

The stock memory timings are: 5 5 5 18. Set to 4 4 4 12 w/2.1v set.
The ram is listed as 800mhz but shows as 400Mhz in CPUz...Does anyone know why?

VCore voltage: 1.152v on CPUz (yet in my bios I have it set to a higher value:
1.245
Click to expand...

First, make sure your machine is prime95 stable as described in the guide. Your RAM is DDR2 so you double the 400 MHz CPU-Z is showing you to get 800. Your CPU voltage moves around likely due to some options you set in the BIOS for power savings. Again, is the machine prime95 stable 9x363 @ 1.152V? That voltage seems too low for that o/c.
 
I originally did set the voltage higher, but I got nervous. I ran Prime95 everytime and never had an issue no matter what setting I used. The problems seem to appear when I run a graphics intensive game.
when i tried to bump up the FSB to 1600Mhz., the computer would not boot. I was able to boot at 1500mhz., but i would crash in game. All of this was tried at higher Vcore voltage settings. 1450Mhz seems to work.
Question: When the FSB is increased does it also raise the PCI E speed?
I'm wondering if my graphics card could not handle it.
I will try to increase the VCore voltage and see what happens.
With all of this hardware, I should be able to get much better results than I am getting.
Thanks again.
 
@fire - you should check that your PCI-e frequency is locked @ 100 MHz. Do not allow it to increase with your FSB. Most good boards will offer this option, although different manufactures name it uniquely. Search for it in your BIOS. Beyond that, I don't understand why a graphically intense game would crash as a function of the FSB *assuming that FSB setting is 6+h stable to prime95.
 
graysky,
These pics are what my settings look like now. I have looked at all of my mobo's (ASUS Striker Extreme) tweaker/overclock settings. Most of them are a little beyond my scope of knowledge so i left them set to auto.

The Vcore setting on my mobo is set to 1.250v, but as you can see on CPUz it appears a lot lower. I guess I can try to raise it to the max my processor (E6850 Core 2)will accept and see what happens, but that makes me nervous.

I run the Prime95 program, but it does not run multiple windows as yours does and as a result only loads my processor to about 55%. I will read more on it.

Everytime I let the program run for hours and it has run with no faults or hang-ups.
The only way that I can raise my FSB is to increase the Mhz.
I tried to raise it to 1600mhz, but the rig would not boot up. I dropped the Mhz 25 each time till it would boot up. 1550 is where it seems to be able to boot at. I wonder if I should lower my RAM settings to their stock numbers to see if the processor will handle a little more?
The system is stable at this time, but I really feel that I should be able to get more out of it. Do you agree?.

This is the manual for the mobo:
https://h20435.www2.hp.com/pdfs/e2898_striker_extreme.pdf

The other components are listed on page 9 of this post.

I am not a free-loader and I know you have aready taken up too much of your valuable time trying to help me, but am a little lost here and just trying to learn.I really do appreciate your help.


348791550Mhz.jpg


32699core.jpg
 
Fire488 said:
graysky,
These pics are what my settings look like now. I have looked at all of my mobo's (ASUS Striker Extreme) tweaker/overclock settings. Most of them are a little beyond my scope of knowledge so i left them set to auto.
Click to expand...

A setting of auto can lead to problems down the road. Particularly if you have your pci-e frequency set to auto as this setting may increase it proportionally with your FSB which is something you do NOT want. It should be set to 100 MHz; the standard PCI bus should be set to 33 MHz.

Fire488 said:
The Vcore setting on my mobo is set to 1.250v, but as you can see on CPUz it appears a lot lower. I guess I can try to raise it to the max my processor (E6850 Core 2)will accept and see what happens, but that makes me nervous.
Click to expand...

There is no need to raise it as the moment. The CPU-Z reported vcore is lower which is normal (vdroop).

Fire488 said:
I run the Prime95 program, but it does not run multiple windows as yours does and as a result only loads my processor to about 55%. I will read more on it.
Click to expand...

HERE IS THE PROBLEM! You're using prime95 version 24.x but you need to be using Prime95 version 25.x. Try it to stress out ALL of your cores. Version 24 only uses a single thread and thus only does one core.

It is IMPERATIVE that you enable error checking within Prime95; if you don’t you won’t be notified of errors! Do so simply by going to the “Advanced” menu and enabling “Round off Checking."

royl8.gif


My guess is that you'll need to up the vcore, but try it stress testing @ the current value and work up from there if you need to. Again, follow the steps in my guide for minimizing the vcore. I'd shoot for 6+ h of prime95 stable. Also, keep an eye on your temps using coretemp which is leaner and meaner than speedfan in my opinion. Remember that as you increase vcore, your temps increase dramatically.

If your temps are too high, re-read the 'temperature managment' section of my guide for some advice on decreasing operating temps.
 
Thank you again graysky. I am running the new version as I type. I did raise the VCore last nigt because I kept crashing while in game (system would re-boot out of nowhere).
vCore= 1.275v temp= 71c (too hot?)
I will report the results and re-read your post on how to cool things down. Thanks again.

Note- The link that you gave me for P95 points to a forum post and the link to download on that post is not working anymore. i just googled it and got the correct version.
 
Before I get too much more involved, I will post images of my BIOS setting for refference purposes. I can't seem to remember them when I am asked a question.
I gogled some of the settings to see what they do and found very little info on them:
LDT frequency (mine is set to 5x)
PCIe spread Spectrum (Mine disabled)
MCP PCIe Spread Spectrum (disabled)
SATA Spread Spectrum (disabled)
CPU spread pectrum is greyed out.
LDT spread pectrum is also greyed out.
The settings were set that way by default so i left them there.
here is my BIOS images with current settings in place:(no particular order)

ComputerBiosPics005.jpg

ComputerBiosPics007.jpg

ComputerBiosPics008.jpg

ComputerBiosPics002.jpg

ComputerBiosPics006.jpg
ComputerBiosPics004.jpg[/IMG]
ComputerBiosPics006.jpg

ComputerBiosPics003.jpg

ComputerBiosPics010.jpg

ComputerBiosPics014.jpg

ComputerBiosPics011.jpg

ComputerBiosPics012.jpg

ComputerBiosPics017.jpg

ComputerBiosPics015.jpg

ComputerBiosPics013.jpg

ComputerBiosPics003.jpg

ComputerBiosPics020.jpg

P95update.jpg
 
One side note as to my high temps. I cleaned the case screens (and there was very lttle apparent lint and dst on the screen) and as soon as I removed the screens the temp fell fast from 90c to 65c under 100% load. Oh well I guess I learned that even though it looks clean it may not be. That should help a little bit to stabilize things. More later.
 
I have added another fan (high flow 120mm) to the case chassis and temps are now down an additional 10c. So of course I had to see if the cooler temps would yield additional performance gains. well, it did, I am now running @ 3.6 Ghz. FSB is set to 1600Mhz. I know there is still more tweaking that I can do to even push it boyond that, but I will wait untill I hear from you. Thaks graysky
 
I dunno what to say about some of those BIOS screenshots except that they differ from my P5B-Deluxe. If a BIOS upgrade won't allow you to access lower vcores, you can further reduce your operating temps by lapping both the IHS on the chip as well as the base of your HS. See the guide for links. Beyond that, I dunno what else to say :)
 
I'm planning on getting a gigabyte X38 DS4 in a few months. This board has no option for pci clock setting for 33.33 mhz when overclocking. Is it safe to assume that its always locked at 33.33 mhz no matter what FSB setting I use?
 
graysky said:
I dunno what to say about some of those BIOS screenshots except that they differ from my P5B-Deluxe. If a BIOS upgrade won't allow you to access lower vcores, you can further reduce your operating temps by lapping both the IHS on the chip as well as the base of your HS. See the guide for links. Beyond that, I dunno what else to say :)
Click to expand...

I can access a whole host of lower vcore's so I can lower them in time.
I actually was planning to do the lapping/polishing next. I have much experience in that department. have never done it to a peocessor or heat sink, but I have used similar techniques in other areas. the idea is that if you remove the imperfections and make the mating areas more true then heat transfer (conduction) will happen at a much faster rate due to a larger area being covered.
I have heard of other techniques to furher improve upon this.if you create maching grooves two surfaces and allow them to interlock then you have in effect created an even larger surface area to transfer heat. Thermal dynamics are one of my specialties.
Keep in mind, these surfaces must be exact mirror images of one another for this to work and comlex lathes must be used to do it.
Thank you for all of your help, I am starting to get what is going on now. Heat sure does play a major part in OC'ing...
 
Fire488 said:
I originally did set the voltage higher, but I got nervous. I ran Prime95 everytime and never had an issue no matter what setting I used. The problems seem to appear when I run a graphics intensive game.
when i tried to bump up the FSB to 1600Mhz., the computer would not boot. I was able to boot at 1500mhz., but i would crash in game. All of this was tried at higher Vcore voltage settings. 1450Mhz seems to work.
Question: When the FSB is increased does it also raise the PCI E speed?
I'm wondering if my graphics card could not handle it.
I will try to increase the VCore voltage and see what happens.
With all of this hardware, I should be able to get much better results than I am getting.
Thanks again.
Click to expand...


Hi Fire488. I just thought I would give you some points of reference since we have somewhat similar set-ups. I'm also using a E6850 with an Asus board, a Zalman CPU cooler and an Ultra video card.

Anyway, for whatever it's worth when I started OC'ing I was shooting for a 3.6 overclock (9X400 FSB) but even when I set my vcore to 1.5, I still got errors on Prime95 after a few minutes. That's when I noticed that the vdroop on my board was horrible. Although set at 1.5 vcore, while using Prime95 (load state) CPU-Z showed that my vcroe dropped all the way to 1.37. (really, really bad). Anyway, after noticing that, I went out and bought a 2b pencil (a few bucks at Staples) and did the simple pencil mod for my specific board. Man did that make a whole world of difference. After this simple procedure, I set my vcore in my bios to 1.4375 and upon loading Prime95, my voltage only drops to 1.416. Huge difference obviously. Best of all, after 8 hours of Prime95 my system didn't report any errors. During the stress testing the highest my CPU temperature got was 58 degrees (per core temp) so I was pretty happy with that. I could probably drop the vcore even more and stay stable but so far I haven't had the time to play with it.


Anyway, I hope that at least gives you a point of reference. Like you, I'll probably be upgrading to a quad core chip in the next couple months. In the meantime I've just ordered a Thermalright Ultra 120 extreme Cpu cooler. I saw a good deal on it that I couldn't pass up. I figured I'll use this cooler when I eventually get my quad core. I hear these coolers are supposedly the best air coolers.

FWIW, my GPU temps are very very good. At full load my ultra hovers around 59 degrees. (at overclock settings 675/1710/2340), But then again I am using the Zalman VF1000 GPU heatsink on it. It makes a world of difference.
 
Thank you for that info Johnny. I will post some info tomorrow while in work. See you then...
 
Ok, some results:
I have my Vcore set to 1.375v and it reads 1.280v on CPU-Z (no load)
Once the system is under load, it drops to 1.264 and stays there steadily.
I have use the techniques described using the #2B pencil and I guess I saw some improvement on the voltage, but nothing remarkable for my system. I will try it one more time to see if the voltage increases to what it is set to in the BIOS.
FSB= 400Mhz x 9 = 1600Mhz
Ram= 4-4-4-12, rest is set to auto.
The system is running very stable (Prime95 overnight, 10 hours) although it is running a little too warm for my liking. It stays at about 66c under full load. At idle it stays at about 48c most of the time.
I am reading about water cooling and will go that route as soon as I figure out which kit to get. Maybe I will buy individual components and customize it to my specific case and hardware.
It may not seem like I have done very much so far( I didn’t), but the testing time is killer and eats up hours. Boy, what we will go through for a fast, stabile rig.

I’m 43 years old and my 12 year old son kicks my butt on an older Dell.
All this gaming horsepower and I still suck, I only wish that I could overclock my own reflexes the same way as I am my rig...LOL

I’ll post more info and result as I delve into this deeper...
 
@fire - before you go down the liquid cooling road, did you lap both the IHS and base of your HS? Also, you might wanna consider retiring the zalman for an Ultra-120 Extreme. Liquid cooling can be effective but is also expensive and must be done right (leaks). You might wanna simply back-off on your o/c to a level that gives you temps you're happy with as well... after all, if you aren't using the machine for 24/7 video encoding or the like, why push it to 3.6 GHz? Just food for thought.
 
Thanks for the heads-up on that graysky. I will order that HS and see what happens. I am also replacing all of my case fans (5) with larger ones (120mm, 40CFM to 90CFM). The other thing that concerns me is the NB temps and the 680i chip temps. They feel very hot and there is no way to monitor them from my mobo. The other main source of heat adding to the overall ambient case temp is the GPU (8800Ultra) as it runs at 78c at idle and 85c and up under load. I will get a dedicated fan for that too.
Except for the heat issues, it is running very smooth and fast. Can't wait till I quad core it soon...
 
Fire488 said:
Ok, some results:
I have my Vcore set to 1.375v and it reads 1.280v on CPU-Z (no load)
Once the system is under load, it drops to 1.264 and stays there steadily.
I have use the techniques described using the #2B pencil and I guess I saw some improvement on the voltage, but nothing remarkable for my system. I will try it one more time to see if the voltage increases to what it is set to in the BIOS.
...
Click to expand...


I guess I probably don't have to tell you that a vdroop over .1v (your drop is at .111 from your bios setting to vcore at load) is a pretty substantial drop. I don't in any way want to make you sound careless but are you certain that you are shading the correct transistor with your pencil mod? The only reason I ask is because a lot of these Asus boards differ with regard to which is the correct transistor to shade. For instance I just have the P5K vanilla board and the transistor for the pencil mod is in a very different location compared to the deluxe board. See example.

My board Asus P5K vanilla

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showpost.php?p=2359837&postcount=37

versus Asus P5B deluxe

http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=441407


Two very differnt locations obviously. I tried to do a quick search for any pics of the Striker Extreme pencil mod but I didn't have any luck. I just seems like you're still getting a serious vdroop after the mod. Most people I've talked to only get about a .02 vcore drop after a successful pencil mod. I'm just saying because if you fix your drop better, then obviously you could back off your bios vcore and that in turn would help your temps.


Yeah, but either way your cooling sounds suspect. I'm using a Zalman 9700 (which is a step up I believe from the 9500 you're using) and my temps are much better than yours even though I'm using a much higher vore in my bios. But you're probably right, all that heat coming off your Ultra probably is raising the ambient temps and thus adding to the problem. Before I added my GPU heatsink I seem to recall that my ultra felt like a space heater. :p
 
@ Johnny,
I am not taking your comments about my system as me being "careless". I'm not at all. Now "clueless" might be a better word to describe me and my experience with these kind of mods.
Seriously though, I have checked and re-checked graysky's post and the image example that he gives and it's general location resembles an area on my mobo. Under close inspection, the area and the resistors match exactly. so I am about 99% sure that I have the right one. I do notice a raise in my voltage when I initially do the mod, but it soon goes right back down.
I can post a picture of the section on the mobo that I used.
I will keep on trying.
The heat issues... I know that my machine is hot and I have my work cut out for me, but I will figure it out.

Anyway, Thanks for the insight.
 
graysky said:
CoreTemp is a great app to read the core temperature of your multi-core processor. I’d recommend that you download the public beta (version 0.95.4) which addresses the old “coretemp crashes my system” bugs. It has been very stable for me.
Click to expand...

FYI: CoreTemp Link Displays:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1198647 /CoreTemp/ Core Temp has moved to a new domain and server.
Please fix your links or let whoever referred you know that the link needs updated.
The developer is currently working on replacing the link
in the "About" feature of Core Temp to his domain.
Core Temp is available at http://www.alcpu.com/
The CoreTemp website is now hosted by Atabyte Hosting Please consider using their service yourself.
This site will self destruct when this server goes offline.
Thank you.
Click to expand...
 
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