QX6700 Temps

[JayteeBates]

I picked up a QX6700 in a trade recently and am curious as to how my temps are. I previously had a E6300 with a stock intel cooler and ran around mid 30's idle and high 40's/50ish under load. Now I'm running the QX and I noticed that the stock intel cooler was idling in the 50's initally so I got a Zalman CNPS9700 and it idles around 43. That's about 10C cooler at idle but under load it can still hit the mid 60's.

If I overclock it by running the FSB at 300MHZ then it is back in the 50's idle. Is that to be expected or am I way out of the norm?

Pic of my temps via speedfan, realtemp and coretemp

 

[3far4shot]

With my QX6700, i use the stock HSF. On Idle i stay in the low to mid 40's on load it goes to the lower and mid 50's.

But i dont have anything actually uses all four cores, besides Crysis.

 

[Zero82z]

Idle temps don't really mean anything, but mid-60s aren't too bad for a quad under a CNPS9700.

 

[JayteeBates]

When I run it at a 300MHz FSB I hit around 70-73C under load...is that a huge problem?

 

[Zero82z]

That would be a problem. In that case, I strongly recommend you recheck your mounting and thermal paste application.

 

[JayteeBates]

The thermal greese was more like liquid white out that came with the zalman. I put it on the cpu in an even coat and then mounted the zalman. Iti's mounted properly, at least physically. I may have put to much TIM on it but it was hard to gauge with that fluid consistancy.

 

[Zero82z]

Well, you should probably give it another shot. 70-73C is definitely way too hot for the settings you're running at.

 

[JayteeBates]

I guess it's not as bad as I was thinking.

 

[JayteeBates]

Interesting side note, in realtemp I found that the tjmax for cores 1/2 was set to 100 while the setting for cores 3/4 was at 85 during my test resulting in the odd temps shown for cores 3/4 vs 1/2.

 

[JayteeBates]

I am looking for some advise with regard to overclocking my QX6700 given that I haven’t overclocked substantially. To illustrate, the previous two systems I overclocked were my Pentium 200 which I ran at a 75MHz bus for a 225 CPU Clock and the legendary Celeron 300A at 100MHz bus for a 450 CPU Clock. I never really messed with the CPU multipliers as I felt increasing the bus speed provided a better overall system improvement than just upping the CPU speed. 75MHz bus on the Pentium 200 system really made a nice difference. One thing I could really notice immediately was I could run winamp in the background while doing 2-3 other things in the foreground and never have any skipping.

On my current setup I can easily run my QX6700 at a 300MHz FSB (stock being 266) for a 3.0GHz CPU Clock. I only have to increase my memory voltage +0.1V to achieve this simple overclock. It is perfectly stable at those settings. Just to drive home how stable it is, with my previous processor (E6300) I ran it at 300MHz FSB for over a year with no problems. I played everything from CoD2 to CoD4, Doom3, Hitman, WoW, HL2 etc on the E6300 at 300MHz.

However with the unlocked multiplier I was curious if I would be better off leaving the 266 bus alone and then running the multiplier up on the QX? What would you guys suggest if I want to get the most out of games like HL2, Crysis and Stalker?


Link to my CPU-Z of the QX6700 at 300MHz FSB:
http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc.php?id=426263

 

[Zero82z]

It's probably easier to leave the FSB low and raise the multiplier. However, given the erratic nature of overclocking, the best way to get the most out of your CPU is by playing around with different configurations and seeing which one works best.