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Q6600 Oc'ing problems

B

BIGJ

Gawd
Joined
Dec 19, 2006
Messages
856
Hey [H], I am having some problems getting my Q6600 to properly OC. First off the goods...

MOBO: MSI P45 Platinum
HS: Enzotech Ultra-X
RAM: G. Skill DDR 2 (2x2GB)
GPU: 8800GTX
PSU: Corsair 750TX

Well I believe that covers all that important componants, so here is my problem... I turn on my system and all is well, so I go to OC it and it also works very well. I can get it running perfectly stable at 3.6GHz on air at 1.44V. Not to bad eh? So I play crysis and mess around and the core temp never reaches above 50c. So all is well and when done I turn off my computer. Upon returning I press the power switch on the computer and guess what? NOTHING, no post, nothing, After fiddling around with turning it on and off, and finally getting to the bios, I put it back down to stock, it loads, I mess around for a few minutes, and then proceed to OC it again, This happens every time, and as you may have guessed, it gets very annoying, So any help would be much appriciated!
 
Hmm what do you mean when you say "perfectly stable." Do you mean stable as in prime95/orthos for a few hours or do you mean stable as in you see no problems when you boot to desktop?

The reason why I ask this is because I noticed this as well kind of when I was ocing. I oced to 3.6ghz but had to input 1.5v in the BIOS for it to be stable on prime95 for 10 hours (on ABIT motherboard software and CPU-Z it reports the actual voltage at 1.41-1.44v). However, a few times I was able to boot at 1.38 and 1.4 which surprised me (however it wasnt prime95 stable, a core would fail in a few seconds/minutes). Well the reason why this may be relevant to your situation is that when I would turn it off and attempt to turn it on later on well it wouldn't POST or do anything for that matter. Well this puzzled me for awhile and then I wondered if that maybe one of the reasons why it isn't able to boot anymore after the oc is that the cpu needs a certain amount of voltage to essentially "warm up" and that any voltage less than what is required is not enough to heat the comp. The reason why you were able to boot after you changed the settings in BIOS is because the cpu was already warmed up enough so that it could boot at a lower voltage. However when the cpu isnt given that extra "warm up" there is insufficient voltage for it to turn on.

Anyway iono if my situation mirrors yours or not. I solved it by simply lowering my oc to 3.0 (didnt need the extra speed) and when I did need it I just set voltage higher.

Also it might be more informative if you told us a little about your voltage (is that voltage the one you imputed into your BIOS or the one given in CPU-Z/your motherboard software). Also what is your cooling situation? I mean what heatsink are you using/what is ambient temp of room.

Edit* Oh man I'm sorry I didnt noticed that you stated your heatsink, my apologies.
 
I am not sure of the temp of my room, but all of the numbers that you see are the bios numbers, I know that something like CPU-Z would be preferable but I cannot seem to find it, although I do have to admit that I have not tried very hard (20mins on google...) if some one could give me a link to that and any other program like it that may help solve my problem, that would be great! I will try to up the volts and see if that works.

Oh yea, and by stable I mean that I can play a few hours of crysis while downloading patches for another game while having a few web browsers open....


thanks a ton for the imput!
 
Solution: More like what known said....but your CPU doesn't have enough power for it to feed it and give it the absolute stableness to work the comp during load and idle periods at any such hours you leave the computer on. Its like comparaing to a person who wakes up in the morning and doesn't eat breakfast and goes to his usual work moving heavy loads and furniture removals...guess wat? Without the energy from food he is going to break down. Such as your q6600 not having a stable run at that oc when it doesn't have enough energy...(voltage).

If I were in your case....I would lower my overclock down to 3GHZ or 3.2GHZ max....coz those things tend to run very unstable at 3.2GHZ + unless you give it extra and higher power inputs which results into more heat production and areas such as your NB and mosfets running at boiling points. Esp...when you mobo is a MSI one....their tend to not oc and run stable as well as those you hear of Gigabyte and Asus ones!
 
If you want to keep that speed at 3.6GHZ be sure not to increase your voltage up to 1.475v
Anything well beyond that can damage your board......if that still doesn't work....lower your RAM timings and add some Northbridge voltage as well....<this can seriously give some side affects and if not done properly...take out your motherboard!
 
Oh man, sorry about that earlier, cpuz is also known as CPUID not sure why but I guess it is, here is a link to the CPU-Z/CPUID page, just look to the left to find the download link.

Here is a link to prime95. I forgot exactly why prime95 was developed but its a program that people use to stress all their cpu cores to 100%.After you dl the program, go to "Small FFTs" and then check your task manager to see if your cores are being tested to 100%. Now monitor your comp for the first 10 minutes, its when the first errors occur. When an error comes, it will be visible, one of the four green bars will turn red and say "error." I cannot properly describe what it looks like but you will know an error has occurred when it has. Anyway the error means that your core is unstable due to possibly not enough voltage, temperature issues, too high of an oc, etc.

If an error occurs it means you should either stop and lower your oc or increase the voltage. Honestly i agree with Matthew on this one... Lowering your oc to 3ghz or 3.2ghz will not hamper performance that much, personally, the extra stability may offset the noticeable (atleast to me) difference anyway. Once you start ocing higher, you have to start to worry about your motherboard temperatures (mosfets, North Bridge, South Bridge) in addition to your cpu temperatures. I'm unfamiliar with your motherboard but very few if any motherboard is immune to the toll that high voltage takes on it after awhile.

However I must note that being prime95 stable doesn't mean that your cpu is unusable I mean very few programs (even a combination) pushes a quad to 100% but I mean you may encounter problems... not too sure what they are but will try to find out.
 
Your help is very appreciated! But I am still having the same problems, I ran prime for 10 mins with no errors or anything, and upon trying to turn off and on my computer, it once again failed to post?? Something is off here that I am still missing...
 
When you "go to OC" it, are you doing it through the bios or some sort of msi software within windows? To me, I'm reading as if its being done through software.
 
It is in the bios... I after turning it on without an oc, I mess around for a few mins, then go and do a partial OC (something like 3.0GHz) and *restart* the computer, (if I do not restart, it will fail to post after my OC) Then I mess around on the partial OC for a few mins, and go all the way (something like 2.4GHz @ 1.4v) then I can run prime 95 for ten mins with no errors or anything, and then as soon as I turn off the computer and try to turn it back on, it will not post...
 
I would suggest priming it for a longer amount of time, say 4 hours or so. Personally I do at least 8 hours. Secondly, you need to keep in mind that 1.4v vcore in the bios does not necessarily mean 1.4v vcore in windows, and definitely wont be 1.4v from idle to load. So you need to compensate for that by overshooting a little. CPU-Z should be able to tell you what your vcore is in all those situations. I would try a little more vcore, though I don't think you would have adequate cooling. You should also try raising your chipset and ram's voltage.
 
Pharoahe808 said:
I would suggest priming it for a longer amount of time, say 4 hours or so. Personally I do at least 8 hours. Secondly, you need to keep in mind that 1.4v vcore in the bios does not necessarily mean 1.4v vcore in windows, and definitely wont be 1.4v from idle to load. So you need to compensate for that by overshooting a little. CPU-Z should be able to tell you what your vcore is in all those situations. I would try a little more vcore, though I don't think you would have adequate cooling. You should also try raising your chipset and ram's voltage.
Click to expand...

My goal is to not screw anything up, do you have suggestions on how much voltage to raise my chipset and ram? (oh and my ram is not being read correctly, it is showing up as pc2 6400, as opposed to the pc2 8000) (this is a very common problem with my MOBO, something that kyle ran into when reviewing the board)...but I have it set to 1:1 ratio, so that should not matter correct?
 
Pharoahe808 said:
I would suggest priming it for a longer amount of time, say 4 hours or so. Personally I do at least 8 hours. Secondly, you need to keep in mind that 1.4v vcore in the bios does not necessarily mean 1.4v vcore in windows, and definitely wont be 1.4v from idle to load. So you need to compensate for that by overshooting a little. CPU-Z should be able to tell you what your vcore is in all those situations. I would try a little more vcore, though I don't think you would have adequate cooling. You should also try raising your chipset and ram's voltage.
Click to expand...

Oh yea, and the cooling is great, under all of this (the prime 95 testing) it has not gone over 50c, so cooling is not a problem. (I know that the HS is not the most popular, but if you do some quick research you will find that it preforms very well, comparable to the TRUE)
 
Pharoahe808 said:
Oh no, my mistake! For some reason, I thought it was under stock intel cooling:(
Click to expand...

lol, no biggie, but I am still faced with this problem, it seems to be a perfectly stable OC and I am running prime right now for a few hours to make sure, but I just want to get the stupid thing to start under the OC....is that too much to as for?? I have to be missing something....(it doesn't help that this is my first ever build, and thus first ever OC...)
 
Well I mean prime95 for a few hours more and tell us how it goes, its odd, I mean if your not getting an error for a few hours already then you should be able to boot at your voltage. Hmm I have to ask, are you checking, "small fft" when picking the test?

If so then try other things like setting ram to 5-5-5-15 and raising ram voltage, possibly a little (maybe .1) higher. Also, try inputting a BIOS voltage of 1.46 or 1.48 and then restarting and leaving the comp off for a few hours. Then try to boot at night. If you are able to boot it might give evidence to the fact that you need a higher voltage. If it doesnt, try 1.5 and repeat. If it still doesn't then voltage may not be the cause and you might have to look at others factors such as your board. Is your board bios up to date? If not check your board's website and trying flashing to a higher version. You may also want to up the voltage of the NB up a tick or two.
 
BIGJ said:
My goal is to not screw anything up, do you have suggestions on how much voltage to raise my chipset and ram? (oh and my ram is not being read correctly, it is showing up as pc2 6400, as opposed to the pc2 8000) (this is a very common problem with my MOBO, something that kyle ran into when reviewing the board)...but I have it set to 1:1 ratio, so that should not matter correct?
Click to expand...

What exactly do you mean by pc2 6400 and pc2 8000? Is your ram 800mhz? If so then 400 (your fsb) x 2 (ddr2) = 800 which is your rated RAM. However, sometimes at high OC raising your ram to its rated mhz also means raising the voltage (although I have ram 1000mhz, I am unable to run that higher when ocing 3.6 even when I up the voltage. I must note this is nothing but a guess, a pretty far out one even I must say however your situation is odd to say the least.
 
Oh yea, and by stable I mean that I can play a few hours of crysis while downloading patches for another game while having a few web browsers open....
Click to expand...

thats not a good way to test stability on an overclocked cpu !!!

I would suggest priming it for a longer amount of time, say 4 hours or so
Click to expand...

thats wrong....to make sure his overclock is stable....at least he has to run prime95 for 24 hrs.....

theres a sticky thread on HOWTO: Overclock C2Q (Quads) and C2D (Duals) on this section of the [H] forum.

it says :
The goal of stress testing is two fold:
1) To arrive at a stress test stable system (>24 hours with no prime95 errors).
2) To minimize your vcores and thus minimize heat product both on your CPU but also on your NB/SB and other MB components.

Prime95 will run and every now and then it will check the values it’s calculating using your processor to its internal standards since its torture testing using known values. Assuming you enable error checking, you’ll be notified if your values differ indicating an instability. This is why it is IMPERATIVE that you enable error checking within Prime95; again, if you don’t enable it, you WILL NOT be notified of errors!

Do so simply by going to the “Advanced” menu and enabling “Round off Checking.” If the system isn’t stable, it will report an error and stop stressing the core that gave the error.
Click to expand...

i overclocked my q6600 g0 stepping to 3.0 ghz and im using a thermaltake v1 HSF ( i know you want 3.6 ghz but at least you can have an idea of the voltages im using and the temperatures im having ) and heres a screenshot, mine was stable for 26hrs while running prime95 small ftt's torture test with round-off checking enabled, all 4 cores working at a 100%....i hope it helps....let us know what happened with your results : )

2002651476762267862_rs.jpg
 
AHH, ok, I ran it for 5 hours last night without a single error, but I will try 24, it is still ok to use the computer while running prime correct? It ran last night for 5 hours at 2.4GHz @ 2.44v (kinda high I know, but heat was not an issue) with no errors, so I will run 24 with it, the problem I am facing though is that although it is stable for 5 hours on prime, it will not boot after turning it off.... A stable OC is what I am looking for, but it does not help if after I OC the core it will not turn on, and I have to start from scratch again....oh yea and the difference here is that I can play crysis @ 2.6GHz all day on ultra high settings and it is amazing, and without an OC I can only get medium settings, so a good OC is a must, but being able to start my computer afterwards is also a must....the info has been really helpful so far, but even if I have a perfectly stable OC it is useless if the computer will not post after.....
 
BIGJ said:
AHH, ok, I ran it for 5 hours last night without a single error, but I will try 24, it is still ok to use the computer while running prime correct? It ran last night for 5 hours at 2.4GHz @ 2.44v (kinda high I know, but heat was not an issue) with no errors, so I will run 24 with it, the problem I am facing though is that although it is stable for 5 hours on prime, it will not boot after turning it off.... A stable OC is what I am looking for, but it does not help if after I OC the core it will not turn on, and I have to start from scratch again....oh yea and the difference here is that I can play crysis @ 2.6GHz all day on ultra high settings and it is amazing, and without an OC I can only get medium settings, so a good OC is a must, but being able to start my computer afterwards is also a must....the info has been really helpful so far, but even if I have a perfectly stable OC it is useless if the computer will not post after.....
Click to expand...


I'm assuming you meant 1.44v not 2.44v? 2.44 is going to cause a nuclear meltdown!:D
 
If your BIOS isn't the latest, update it. That may do away with the "inability to restart" problem you're running in to.
 
Also, 2.4ghz is the stock speed of a Q6600. So maybe you meant 3.4ghz for priming and 3.6ghz for Crysis? Definitely make sure you have the latest bios, since your board is fairly new
 
LOL, there are so many typos in my last post, I am in a storm right now, but will fix them later, yes I meant 3.6, lol, and changing the bios is a great idea! I thought it was such a new board that they would not have a new patch out, but they do indeed! I will try that (probably tomorrow, b/c I cannot get the page to load for me right now....) and let you guys know how it goes, thanks again for all the help!
 
With any stability test...always test and stress test your computer for 24 hrs. Minimum at least 16 hrs!

Also what brand is your RAM? And you mentioned it it was a 8000, not 6400 ddr2..are you cross mixing different RAM coz thats what that problem sounds like or a fault or not inserted into the Dimm slot properly.

Next up...is did you just increase everything up to 3.6GHZ at once...or you did you increase it a bit by bit? Best is to oc by increasing in small increments...then stress testing for 30mins - 1hr using a tool such as OCCT Perestroika ed. Then going into the BIOS and increasing it in small increments but speed to a higher GHZ. When you do this...you'll eventually get to a point where it just won't work no more and a restart may result in losing all your already oc! This is when you start tweaking the RAM settings and maybe a bit of voltage ratings!
Lower your RAM to low settings when it reaches to an appropriate RAM/Clock Ratio 1:1 is best when you got 1066mhz FSB for a Q6600 and put it with a 533mhz DDR2 RAM (1066 divide by 4 = 266mhz > 266mhz real rated FSB speed > RAM 533mhz divided by 2 = 266mhz so its CPU 266mhz:RAM 266mhz = 1:1 ratio. Otherwise research for 3:5, 10:5, 4:7 and etc ratios! It can be confusing).

Once your RAM settings are lowered to low latencies (timings), try overclocking more and see if it works, it should give a bit more headroom, then stress test for 8hrs using OCCT Pere...and Prime95 or Orthos simultaneously. If you get 1-2 minor errors its no problem....but if you get more or the program quits and shutdown....boot into the BIOS again and tweak more your RAM and or lower your oc a bit for stability.

Next up increase power. Increasing voltage for your cpu has the biggest effect of any oc. As speed increases, more power is needed, as more power is needed, more heat is produced, which leads to better and much efficient cooling required!

I will not go further into voltage oc coz I am no expert and if you do something wrong....then I get in trouble!
 
Just out of curiosity, what are you using to monitor your core temps. If it's Realtemp or Coretemp you are probably fine. Never use the software they include with the motherboard because it monitors the temperature of the CPU socket not the individual cores. The Ultra-X is nowhere near as good as the TRUE. I know this because at one point I was going to buy the Ultra-X so I looked into it quite a bit. I hope that you can get it working properly. I just bought my TRUE a couple days ago and I'm running stable at 3.2. I doubt it's fully prime stable, but I still have some tweaking to do.
 
Matthew Kane said:
With any stability test...always test and stress test your computer for 24 hrs. Minimum at least 16 hrs!

Also what brand is your RAM? And you mentioned it it was a 8000, not 6400 ddr2..are you cross mixing different RAM coz thats what that problem sounds like or a fault or not inserted into the Dimm slot properly.

Next up...is did you just increase everything up to 3.6GHZ at once...or you did you increase it a bit by bit? Best is to oc by increasing in small increments...then stress testing for 30mins - 1hr using a tool such as OCCT Perestroika ed. Then going into the BIOS and increasing it in small increments but speed to a higher GHZ. When you do this...you'll eventually get to a point where it just won't work no more and a restart may result in losing all your already oc! This is when you start tweaking the RAM settings and maybe a bit of voltage ratings!
Lower your RAM to low settings when it reaches to an appropriate RAM/Clock Ratio 1:1 is best when you got 1066mhz FSB for a Q6600 and put it with a 533mhz DDR2 RAM (1066 divide by 4 = 266mhz > 266mhz real rated FSB speed > RAM 533mhz divided by 2 = 266mhz so its CPU 266mhz:RAM 266mhz = 1:1 ratio. Otherwise research for 3:5, 10:5, 4:7 and etc ratios! It can be confusing).

Once your RAM settings are lowered to low latencies (timings), try overclocking more and see if it works, it should give a bit more headroom, then stress test for 8hrs using OCCT Pere...and Prime95 or Orthos simultaneously. If you get 1-2 minor errors its no problem....but if you get more or the program quits and shutdown....boot into the BIOS again and tweak more your RAM and or lower your oc a bit for stability.

Next up increase power. Increasing voltage for your cpu has the biggest effect of any oc. As speed increases, more power is needed, as more power is needed, more heat is produced, which leads to better and much efficient cooling required!

I will not go further into voltage oc coz I am no expert and if you do something wrong....then I get in trouble!
Click to expand...

I have G. Skill ddr2 8000, they are two 2 gb sticks of RAM, in order to get my OC it start it up, and then take it up slowly as suggested, then I get a stable prime oc (16 hours just fine) and when I go to turn it off it will not restart, I understand the concept of adding V for more power for a better OC, but when I accomplish an OC stable, I turn off my computer and it will not turn on, the MOBO gives me 4 red lights (cpu) and they after a few times of playing around with the power switch, it will start up and give me the error and say I need to change the bios, oh yea, and my ram is at 1:1, so it needs no OC seeing as how it isn't running at full potential BUT could it use more V?? (may be a stupid question, but I am getting desperate), oh yea, and I tried downloading the new bios, and no go, it didn't help....I am starting to lose faith,
 
flak-spammer said:
Just out of curiosity, what are you using to monitor your core temps. If it's Realtemp or Coretemp you are probably fine. Never use the software they include with the motherboard because it monitors the temperature of the CPU socket not the individual cores. The Ultra-X is nowhere near as good as the TRUE. I know this because at one point I was going to buy the Ultra-X so I looked into it quite a bit. I hope that you can get it working properly. I just bought my TRUE a couple days ago and I'm running stable at 3.2. I doubt it's fully prime stable, but I still have some tweaking to do.
Click to expand...

No where near as good?? :rolleyes: maybe not as good, but it hits within the ballpark (I keep the fan on high at all times b/c it makes almost no noise)....

http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=2082&page=5
 
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