Trouble getting 3.5Ghz stable on E6600 + Maximus II Formula

I put my system together last week as follows:

E6600
Maximus II Formula
4 x 1GB Corsair XMS2
Swiftec watercooling kit

I tried the standard overclocking options that were built in to the board, from memory it set the system up as follows:

9 x 389Mhz (3.5Ghz)
CPU VCore 1.6
CPU PLL 1.7

I can't really remember the rest of the volts but it ran prime for 12 hours before I stopped it, memory was running at 1:1

it seemed pretty stable however I noticed some wierdness in some applications, for example, photoshop CS3 has major graphical corruption, especially noticable in Camera RAW, also in Race Driver Grid the menus do some wierd flicking to the left and right.

I did some further testing and found that my memory can run way higher than spec, I bumped the volts on the memory to 2.2 V and set the FSB to 315, memory running at 1ghz, and I don't have any problems with Photoshop or grid and I ran prime for 8 hours before stopping it.

So that is where I am at at the moment, I have tried setting everything manually but I thing I will have to do some fiddling the the GPT settings and clock skews to really eek out the max OC from this CPU, but I really have no idea what settings to tweak (and how much to tweak them) and what to leave alone, some help would be appreaciated.

Current stable OC is:
9x315 (2.8Ghz) VCore 1.4, PLL 1.55
Memory @ 1007Mhz 2.2V
VTT 1.3
Temps are around 45C at 100% load.

Thanks

I would try raising your Vcore a little (you can go up to 1.5v safely) and also increase your MCP voltage a bit. Your chip may simply top out before 3.5GHz though.

I've never gotten my E6600 stable above 3.2GHz @ 1.4v with an Abit IP35 Pro.

I can get just past 3.1GHz with no voltage bump on my E6600 on Gigabyte EP35-DS3P system... and on my P965 board a year ago I couldn't get it past 2.8GHz. These E6600 tend to top out (aka STABLE) around 3.0-3.2GHz on most systems. If you want any more speed or better Oc on something, time to get an E8400 and ramp it up to 4GHz.

Agree with Screwballonon 8400. Got 2 e6600 both at 3.2 on an Asus and Gigabyte board and stock HS and fan. They just dont seem to clock as good as my e6400.

Ive got some real wierdness going on here.

I got sick of XP not supporting 4GB of ram and thought I would try server 2k3 so I loaded 2k3 Enterprise R2 SP2

Loaded the latest Cats (8.8) the latest Intel chipset drivers (9.0.0.1009) etc etc and now I can run at 3.5Ghz without any dodgy corruption in Photoshop and GRID seems to be behaving as well.

I'm overclocking a little different though, memory is at 1:1, FSB = 437, CPU multi = 8, CPU Vcore is 1.5v, CPU PLL 1.63V, memory 2.17V but my Dram VTT is only 1.09 and there doesn't seem to be an option in the BIOS to adjust it.

Overall I'm a bit confused, but happy that it is running so far, I'm pretty sure it will be stable because I primed for 12 hours at my last 3.5Ghz over clock, I will Prime it during the week for 24 or so hours before I deem it fully stable though.

Deimos said:

I will Prime it during the week for 24 or so hours before I deem it fully stable though.

Click to expand...

You should use IntelBurnTest instead. It's much more stressful than Prime and takes much less time to sufficiently test.

Zero82z said:

You should use IntelBurnTest instead. It's much more stressful than Prime and takes much less time to sufficiently test.

Click to expand...

It takes 10 mins for a 5 runs to determine stabilty. Once you get a close intermediate range run it at 10 loops for 20 mins to get your ultimate settings. I recommend you use it to find the lowest Vcore as well.to keep the heat down.