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Another Q6600 OC help thread.

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criccio

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Heres the deal. When I got my Q6600 a year ago, all I did was bump the FSB up to 333 for 3GHz (stock voltage in BIOS) and that has been working great up until now. It was never really Prime stable, but it NEVER crashed/locked up or blue screened for a whole year unless I tried to run Prime so I wasn't concerned.

Last night I decided to dust off the BIOS (which I haven't opened in a year) and go for 3.2GHz. I dropped the multi down to 8x and upped the FSB up to 400. I also upped the voltage in the BIOS to 1.450v. Made sure the RAM (DDR2-800) was running at 1:1 (stock) and it booted into Windows perfectly fine.

Prime95 ran for about an hour before the system locked up. Not a BSOD, just I lost all input (mouse, keyboard, etc) and I had to reboot. I wasn't completely upset as that got farther then my 3GHz OC got with Prime95 so I tried to do a real-world test that my 3GHz could do perfectly fine. I set x264 to encode a Blu-ray.

That failed after about an hour aswell.

I can deal with it failing stress tests, but I can't deal with it failing real-world stuff.

What am I missing?

As it sits now with the voltage set at 1.450 in the BIOS:

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You don't need 1.450v to get to 3.2Ghz.... Why did you just jack the voltage way up without testing on lower voltages first?

For the higher FSB, you will want to raise the NB voltage 1-2 steps and possibly the SB voltage 1-2 steps as well.
 
I was going to lower it if it was stable, I know it shouldn't need to be up that high. I'll try the NB, thanks. What about the RAM voltage?
 
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Heh, I've been dialing in my Q6600 OC lately as well, though my rig is barely a couple months old (just haven't had the time to figure out the optimal OC yet). You probably don't need to set RAM volt at 2.1 or w/e G.Skill specifies, but you probably don't wanna leave it at default under the BIOS either if you've tightened the timings down. You could set it to 2.0 initially and after you've made sure everything runs stable try something like 1.8 or 1.9 w/Memtest first.

You'll also wanna take a look at the VTT, might need to step that one up a notch or two as well if you're going with a 400MHz FSB. Lowering the FSB to 356 and OC'ing the RAM slightly is always anoption as well, it'd still give you a 3.2GHz OC but it'll put less stress on the mobo and more stress on the RAM (with a divider it'll end up at something like 427MHz, or DDR2-855). Good luck!
 
Well its been almost 2 hours now in Prime95. I upped the NB and RAM both by .1v. I wasn't sure in the BIOS what the SB voltage control was, it wasn't clearly marked like the NB and RAM.

Impluse, back when I was running at 3GHz, my RAM (stock volts) was automatically running at DDR2-1000 speeds. I dropped it back down to stock (DDR2-800) speeds to do this.
 
If you're just shooting for FSB speeds between 333 and 400 you probably don't need to touch the SB voltage, not before bumping VTT voltage anyway imo. If your RAM was running semi-stable at DDR2-1000 then it surely can handle something in between that and DDR2-800 (if you opt to use a lower FSB w/a divider), was it set at the same voltage then as it is now? 'Cuz if that's the case then I'd guess it wouldn't be the problem right now, it'd be the NB or VTT.
 
Ok, gonna sound newbish, but what is the VTT? (haven't done this in awhile)
 
Probably called something like FSB voltage in the BIOS ('least on mine it is, IIRC). Regulates data lines between the CPU and NB/MCH.
 
O ok, yea its just labeled as FSB Voltage. Its options are +.1v, +.2v and +.3v. I have it and the DRAM voltage set to +.1v and its been Prime95 small FFT stable for over two hours now. I'm happy with that for the time being.

CPU voltage is set to 1.400v in the BIOS, think I should bother trying to lower it? Or just stick with what works? Temps haven't broken 54c.
 
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Screw it. 3 hours of Prime 95 was fine, rebooted and it locked up watching a Youtube video...

Back to my sudo-stable 3GHz.
 
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