Pentium E5200 OC - stable in gaming up to 3.7ghz, fails Prime above 3.3ghz

[meatfestival]

Does this seem right to anyone? Currently trying to overclock a Pentium Dual Core E5200. Runs at 2.5ghz stock, I've heard reports of people getting it up to 3.6ghz on stock voltage alone.

I managed to get it stable in games (i.e playing for several hours with no problems) at 3.7ghz with a small boost to 1.35 vcore (stock vcore is about 1.15 I think). But then when I started properly testing for stability, it would fail Prime stress testing until I dropped it all the way back to 3.3ghz.

I can't increase the vcore any higher because I'm using the stock cooler and temps are getting very high as it is.

Any other settings I should be looking at? I'm not overclocking the RAM, spread spectrum and speedstep are off, northbridge volts are on auto, FSB is not set too high (I'm well below the apparent 340-350 limit)

Should mention it's on an MSI Neo P31 motherboard, not exactly a high end board but I've read reviews with fairly successful overclocking results.

 

[BillParrish]

Run prime at 3.3 and after about 5 minutes put your finger on the northbridge/MCH heatsink. Can you hold it on the heatsink and do a slow count to 10 or do you smell you finger cooking ?

The Memory Controller Hub/Northbridge gets OCed just like the cpu and needs attention to cooling for high OCing.

Your board is a multimedia board with good OCing features in the bios but the cooling solutions are not sufficient for a high OC (as you already know).

Get an inexpensive tower heatsink/fan (cm212 coolermaster , think that is the number is a well regarded inexpensive cooler) and glue a fan with silicone RTV adhesive availabe at any hardware store to the MCH/Northbridge, blowing down.

I would also be worried about the mosfets around the cpu area and would want to make sure I had a fan positioned (any way you can, bailing wire, bubble gum, rubber bands) to blow air directly into that area if you do replace the downwards blowing stock heatsink which washes that area with "blow by" air with one of the tower type heatsinks. On the other hand it is an inexpensive board. Just depends on how long you are planning to want to use/keep it.

 

[meatfestival]

So you reckon it's defo a heat issue? You're probably right, everything does get pretty toasty. It's a relative's PC I built 18 months ago. I was given it back for a service, it was in a pretty sorry state, both in windows (infested with spyware) and inside the case (dust clogging everything).

In the end I decided just to keep it at 3.3ghz and hand the PC back, at the end of the day it's still running better than it ever did. I also enabled speedstep and smart fan control to keep the heat and power consumption down, seems to be working very well.