680i + E6600 woes

[Finkus]

Hey everyone, I'm hoping someone can help me with a querie I have about bus speeds and multipliers.

I just assembled my new system of C2D E6600, EVGA 680i, XTX 8800GTX and Corsair Dominator 800MHz 4-4-4-12 2GB. It was a fresh assembly with a new hard drive, Win XP Home SP2 and the new chipset and GPU drivers from nVidia that came out on the 8th.

Everything has been great and I was really impressed with running all my games at 2560x1600 and all the eye candy (very impressed with the image quality on the 8800!!) and then I tried 3DMark06 and got about 8600, with a CPU score of only 1640, which just seemed... wrong.

I thought everything was running fine at stock speeds (I'm not even going to think about overclocking until I have a better grasp of how everything works. I just want to know if everything is running as it should be at stock speeds for the moment).

nVidia' Monitor was telling me:
CPU Core: 2400 MHz
FSB: 1371 (QDR) MHz
Memory 1028.792 MHz
and the only things I changed in the BIOS were to switch on the EPP memory option and leave it at CPUx0.

The low CPU score in 3Dmark was making me thing something was wrong with a setting somewhere so I checked the bios again and it shows FSB as 1066 and the multiplier as x7 with the CPU clock at 1866. However in Windows the nvidia monitor still insists the FSB and CPU are running faster. The new mobo supports 1333 FSB so I assumed it was running a faster FSB and x7 multiplier to get my E6600 up to the stock clock.

However I ran CPU-Z and it's showing me completely different information.
Core Speed 1866 MHz
Multiplier x7
Bus Speed 266 MHz
Rated FSB 1066 Mhz

The numbers in the nvidia monitor and CPU-Z are all moving about slightly as I watch them so I don't know which one to believe is showing me the real-time status of my system. The low 3DMark CPU score and the x7 multiplier for an E6600 are making me think that my CPU is running too slowly.

Can anyone comment on this, preferably people who have experience with the 680i chipset? I don't want to put my multiplier up to x9 if the new chipset is running a faster FSB and everything is ok. Like I said, I'm not wanting to overclock, I just want to know if my system is underclocked. Thanks.

 

[Finkus]

Ok quick update. I did go into the bios and change the multiplier to x9 after all and now in Windows the nVidia monitor and CPU-Z are both saying the same thing.

CPU Core 2400
Multiplier x9
Bus Speed 266 MHz
Rated FSB 1066 MHz
Memory 800 MHz

and my 3DMark06 scores shot up to 9941 and the CPU score to 2071, which is what I would have expected in the first place.

So I guess the two morals are that the nVidia monitor lies and that the 680i chipset will default an E6600 to x7 multiplier in the bios. If you are a noob like me and buying a new system based on this wave of hype, please check your bios and make sure your CPU multiplier is running your CPU at the listed stock speed. Mine was running like an E6300 out of the box. So much for "novice friendly" motherboards. The last time I built a system was years ago and even then the motherboard knew what multiplier to use for that processor. If I hadn't had run 3DMark I would have been blissfully gaming away with a processor that came hugely underclocked by default!

 

[orion23]

So you have all that "overclockable" hardware and yet dare to run stock speeds?


Try changing the FSB to 330-350 (2.95 - 3.15ghz) and see how your E6600 responds.

Most E6600's will work @ those speeds without any voltage modifications!

 

[Finkus]

Well I was actually asking for help, not looking for a comment on my [H]ardness

The reason I'm wary of overclocking anything is because my "almost two thousand quid" PC that I put together, instantly shut down about 2 seconds after I first powered it up, with a loud pop and a puff of smoke.

The Silverstone Zeus 850W PSU died (spectacularly) straight away. I thought it had fried the whole lot and was about to throw myself infront of some traffic when I swapped out the PSU for my old PC's Seasonic S12 600W and found that nothing had been damaged.

So now everything is running just fine but I'm not messing with voltages for a while. The Silverstone is being RMA'd and I'm never buying another one. It scared the life out of me.

I'll pick up a side case fan and a decent CPU heatsink/fan in the next few weeks and think about overclocking things... maybe. I'm already getting 30-60fps at 2560x1600 in every game I have with all the settings on.