Pad Mod Success - XPS 720 Q6600 @ 3.0

maliclipse

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 19, 2007
Messages
101
I've had my XPS720 for a while now and have been pretty happy with it. For whatever reason I wanted a little more out of it. And Fry's had Q6600s with the G0 stepping for 170$ and I couldn't resist because I read about people pad-modding their CPUs to change the factory 1066mhz fsb to 1333. I figured for 170$ plus the fact I could recover half that on ebay for my E6700 it would be a worth while overlock.

Sure enough it took less than 5 minutes to cut a 3 by 3 millimeter piece of electrical tape to block one of the pins in the socket and the chip went in. I ran a few benchmarks and the results were impressive. No heat problems with the stock heat sink either, at idle the chip hums along at 30 degrees. For the folks that want specifics, I used 8.5mil black electrical tape to cut the square to block the pad from the pin in the socket and Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste after cleaning the factory heat sink. Getting that tiny pice of tape to cover the right pin took 4 of the 5 minutes it took to put this all together. I used a sewing needle to adjust it. Here are some pics:

xps720q6600at3ghz1qc7.jpg


xps720q6600at3ghz2tx5.jpg


My last cpu overclock was a dual slot 1 system with 300mhz celerons running at 450mhz.
 
Congrats, its always that extra bit more fun when you overclock an oem board that wasn't meant for it. I bought a $200 compaq from best buy last summer with an intel 945 chipset for my parents. Some of the guys in the anandtech forum figured out it was an ecs oem board so after force flashing the bios back to ECS, dropping in 2gigs of 50$ ddr2 667 and bumping the fsb up I had the cedarmill celeron rock stable at 4ghz on stock vcore. Somehow this seemed more satisfying than working with the DFI boards I run in my own machines!

Anyway, I thought the mod for LGA775 chips involved using conductive ink to trace two pins (BSEL mod?), is this just another way to do that?
 
So does this work on other mobo/cpu combos? I have an intel DG965WH and if I put a quad in my current system I'd probably put my current e6300 in there but would like to raise the speed a bit.

Any pics of the mod itself? Nice work though.
 
Nice! :)

I wouldn't have used electrical tape. Your standard grade electrical tape has a tendency to break down into a sticky gooey mess when exposed to high temperatures.

You'd have done better to paint the pin with nail polish or something.
 
In response to the tape melting, I hope that doesn't happen, if it does I'll raid the wifes tacklebox. So far I've been running Prime95 v25.6 on all four cores just fine thsi afternoon. With the stock heatsink/fan assembly in the XPS720 (not the water one) temps have been stable at ~58 degrees.

prime95tempsjx7.jpg


Here is the reference picture I used for the mod:

original.jpg
 
How about overclocking Dell PCs using some software, like SoftFSB? Any success stories?

I have a T3400, but don't feel like taking out the CPU.
 
Excellent. I'm getting a new machine at work, and as usual they have the craptacular intel boards that have a locked bios. I'll have to do this when i get it :)
 
I tried this mod on an x3220 xeon and it didn't work....oh well.
Gigabyte P35-DS3L, However I have noticed that I can run a little faster a little more stable? weird:confused:
I now run 3.82 stable on air, that's up from 3.6:D
 
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