Questions after a novice's first E6600 overclock

[Jimmy the Greek]

At the start of the weekend, I upped my FSB to 333 and increased the CPU voltage to 1.35, and my Conroe has run at a stable 3GHz since. It idles at 32/29, and reached 48/46 after a couple of hours of Orthos.

Even though it seems to be working well, I still have a couple of questions:

1) Even though I set the CPU voltage to 1.35, the BIOS and CPU-Z report it between 1.296 and 1.304. Which is more likely to be accurate? If the latter, does this mean that I have more headroom and can reach 3GHz at a lower voltage?

2) While I modified the CPU and memory voltages, I left the others (FSB, nForce, etc) as "Auto". Are these more or less irrelevant, or can auto voltages be a concern on an overclocked system? At the moment, nVidia MonitorView reports them as:

FSB: 1.4V
HT (SPP-MCP): 1.2V
PCI-E: 1.4V
nForce: 1.5V
AUX: 1.5V

Are these voltages reasonable? (FWIW, FSB and PCI-E are accompanied by red icons, while the others have green.)

 

[TheQuestor]

At the start of the weekend, I upped my FSB to 333 and increased the CPU voltage to 1.35, and my Conroe has run at a stable 3GHz since. It idles at 32/29, and reached 48/46 after a couple of hours of Orthos.

So far I have no problems taking the E6600 to 3.4Ghz, And I leave ALL voltages alone!
1st make sure you lock your PCIex slot at 100mhz and PCI at 33.33Mhz this takes it easier on the various subsystems. Depending on cooling and ram, I have been able to take my FSB to 400 with memory @ 1000mhz and it runs rock solid, except that it kicks my primary PCIex slot to 1x. I have no idea why it does this and it makes for some horrible gaming lol.

Since I water cool I don't know how it would act on a hsf but I never get above 120F on CPU under load and 100 idle [or less]

You should EASILY be able to take that CPU to 3.2 with air cooling. You may have to set you ram down a notch [ie 533 instead of 667 or what ever] but other than that, you should not have to mess with the voltages at all.

 

[Jimmy the Greek]

So far I have no problems taking the E6600 to 3.4Ghz, And I leave ALL voltages alone!
1st make sure you lock your PCIex slot at 100mhz and PCI at 33.33Mhz this takes it easier on the various subsystems. Depending on cooling and ram, I have been able to take my FSB to 400 with memory @ 1000mhz and it runs rock solid, except that it kicks my primary PCIex slot to 1x. I have no idea why it does this and it makes for some horrible gaming lol.

Since I water cool I don't know how it would act on a hsf but I never get above 120F on CPU under load and 100 idle [or less]

You should EASILY be able to take that CPU to 3.2 with air cooling. You may have to set you ram down a notch [ie 533 instead of 667 or what ever] but other than that, you should not have to mess with the voltages at all.

I guess I didn't have to increase the voltage. I made the change at the same time that I increased the FSB, and haven't bothered to scale it down yet. I take it that you're using auto voltage for the CPU?

Right now, I'm running my memory unlinked at 1000MHz. Is that going to hinder my performance, stability, or both vis-a-vis a more synced system?

 

[TheQuestor]

I guess I didn't have to increase the voltage. I made the change at the same time that I increased the FSB, and haven't bothered to scale it down yet. I take it that you're using auto voltage for the CPU?

Yes I left the bios setting to "auto" which CPU-Z reports as 1.448v

Right now, I'm running my memory unlinked at 1000MHz. Is that going to hinder my performance, stability, or both vis-a-vis a more synced system?

Unlinked? as in async mode? ugh. Thats a huge hit.

 

[Jimmy the Greek]

Unlinked? as in async mode? ugh. Thats a huge hit.

So 3.2GHz (457x7) would be significantly better with 457MHz RAM than 500? Are we talking real-world differences, or small percentages in SuperPi?

 

[owkia]

except that it kicks my primary PCIex slot to 1x. I have no idea why it does this and it makes for some horrible gaming lol.

Try bumping your PCIe slot up to 105 Mhz and see if it stays at 16x.

 

[Jimmy the Greek]

I haven't found conclusive evidence that linked memory helps, so I've left it at 1000 for now.

I increased the FSB to 356MHz (x9 = 3.2GHz) and decreased the voltage to 1.325. The temps are exactly the same as 3GHz (and 2.4, for that matter), but the voltage is now reported as 1.28v. Is the BIOS CPU voltage the actual voltage that will be applied, or the maximum allowable amount?

One weird thing is that when I made the initial 2.4->3.0GHz increase, my system shut down (i.e. powered off) after I saved out of the BIOS, and powered back on by itself. After the move to 3.2, it restarted as it normally would. Is this unusual?