Overclocking my E6300 w/o Water cooling...

[MaxTheLimit]

The ones that have low voltage are fairly early week revisions, and thus are probably higher binned chips than the one you have. I wouldn't count on your voltages to be as low as that and be functional. Unless you bought your chip right near release.

I wouldn't jump too low on voltages right away, or else you'll be resetting the BIOS and take the time getting your settings the way you had them before. Start a little higher and work you way down.

Remember if you are doing your GPU to increase the fan speed to a reasonably high level. Keep temperatures as low as possible.

 

[motolube]

Different chips overclock differently, it's luck of the draw.

Lucky Bastid... LOL

Also, do you have active cooling on your northbridge? If you don't, I suggest you get a little fan for the northbridge heatsink, those suckers get very hot.

I am not 100% sure about it but I think my Evga Mobo came with one and it is installed, at least, I know I installed the Stock CPU HF and another one when I got the rig, afterwards, I got the Artic cooler.

The ones that have low voltage are fairly early week revisions, and thus are probably higher binned chips than the one you have. I wouldn't count on your voltages to be as low as that and be functional. Unless you bought your chip right near release.

I wouldn't jump too low on voltages right away, or else you'll be resetting the BIOS and take the time getting your settings the way you had them before. Start a little higher and work you way down.

Remember if you are doing your GPU to increase the fan speed to a reasonably high level. Keep temperatures as low as possible.

I did the O/C on the GPU and According to the Riva Tuner guide I'd follow, I schedule 3 different actions of the fan speed but the GPU has not risen more than 55C even when loaded.

I am a little confused though, I did 2 Prime95 test for more than 2 hours without issues or errors but now that I went to play "Frontlines - Fuel of War" I couldn't last for more than 10 to 15 minutes w/o my rig locking on me. I may have to come down from 2.8 to 2.5 to see if I can bring down the temps on the CPU Cores a bit, otherwise, I am toasted... No pun intended .

How can I determine if the Artic cooler fan is working at max at all times and the HS is doing its job?

 

[MaxTheLimit]

the evga 680i board has a pretty decent passive cooler on the northbridge. If you want you can have a fan blow on it, but usually it's not too bad at the level you are at. I'm betting the voltage is on auto for the northbridge?

If you don't lock up while stressing the CPU, but lock up in game it might be the GPU causing you troubles...try backing off the GPU overclock a touch.

You CPU cooler should ramp out the fan speed as the CPU heats up, I wouldn't worry about that. You can force it to 100% permanently but don't worry about it.

 

[motolube]

the evga 680i board has a pretty decent passive cooler on the northbridge. If you want you can have a fan blow on it, but usually it's not too bad at the level you are at. I'm betting the voltage is on auto for the northbridge?

Yes, it has that passive cooler (nice little thing BTW ) and the voltage is set on Auto for pretty much everything except the Ram and CPU Core. the northbridge is the MPC or SPP? should I be setting to a lower or higher number than the one I get from AUTO? if so, would that help lower the CPU core temps?

If you don't lock up while stressing the CPU, but lock up in game it might be the GPU causing you troubles...try backing off the GPU overclock a touch.

You might be right but the GPU temps while that was happening was lower than 50C so I assume it was the CPU going over +63c while loading the different maps etc but, and this is just speculation on my part, I thought that the RAM could also be the problem since I had set it to 1066 but only at 2.15v... am I totally wrong on this?

You CPU cooler should ramp out the fan speed as the CPU heats up, I wouldn't worry about that. You can force it to 100% permanently but don't worry about it.

That's just it, I don't know if it is (I am only assuming it does) and I don't know where to go to check that as I see on the Bios going at about +2000 but I don't know where to set it at Manual 100%, even though I have been to Dynamic Fan controls and everything is set to 100%... is that all I should be doing to it?

I guess my last question would be if O/C'ng the CPU is at all what I want for smooth Gameplay or is it better to be looking at o/cng the GPU and Ram? Back to more reading I guess.

 

[MaxTheLimit]

SPP is the northbridge. That is the voltage you may want to tweak. It won't really effect your CPU core, but rather the temperature of your northbridge passive cooler. If it get's overly hot, you may consider a fan, but with the voltage settings in the bios only going to 1.5V I think, the boards onboard cooler should be and probably is designed to withstand that voltage (so long as your house isn't overly hot and you have good airflow)

With your ram running at 1066 and 2.15V and the 5-5-5-15 timings you should be fine. That's basically your ram at stock...actually you probably won't need that much voltage to run your ram at that setting.

To be sure I would run a couple instances of prime 95 for a while and with core temp open see if the temps get overly warm...under ideal conditions I wouldn't want over 68C. This isn't too near the limit temp of the CPU before it thermal throttles, but if conditions change, or if cooling becomes an issue you have a good buffer.

Games will never run your CPU as hot as a couple instances of P95. So don't be concerned if you get right to 68C as it's a safe temperature for the CPU and you'll never see it under regular conditions.

if you have fan control set to 100% that should be all you need to do.

OC'ing the CPU will help with new games to a noticeable degree especially comparing stock to anything over a 30% overclock. While gaming the most dividend though will be shown through your GPU overclocking....

Just a quick couple of examples I did:

As you can see GPU overclocking may take you from unplayable to smooth enough to play on. CPU will take a lot more for you to see dividends of that measure...GPU results in game give good bang per MHz

These are just quick runs through the benchmark tools of these games, bear in mind.

 

[motolube]

Ahhh, ok... thanks again for the crash course.

I am having a little issue with my mouse but I'll make a new post after I have downloaded the new firmware for it so as not to Highjack my own post here.

I lowered the O/C to 2.5 and have had no issues with this game, if the need be, I'll go higher when any new games come along and I have the need for it, for now, it will stay that way.