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Requesting help with overclock

W

wasteomind

Gawd
Joined
Aug 13, 2004
Messages
522
Hey guys.

I will forewarn you, this first post I'm making is a rather large rant, but attempts to provide all information I could think of to help you guys get an idea of what my setup is, and what can be changed. Some rather large screenshots/images are included as well.

First of all, thanks to anyone who can help out. I've been trying off and on for a year now to try to push to 3.6ghz or as close as possible on my E6600.

I've come close but haven't been able to break that last 0.02-0.03ghz that I need. Currently I am 100% stable (24+hours of orthos small ffts and 100 loops of all 3dmark06 tests) at 3.375ghz. I will include proof of this momentarily, as some of the information perhaps might be relevant to a solution.

I realize my processor might not be able to hit 3.6ghz after then end of all this trial. With this in mind, my second and alternative objective, would be to attempt to keep my current overclock speeds, but try to do so with lower core temps, perhaps by changing some bios settings/voltages.

I will outline my current stability, then I will post my bios settings and additional information that might be helpful. Note: I am using the lasted bios provided by evga. This can be seen on screen shots below.

However, first I will give the details of my computers components and case setup.

Here are the specs we are working with:
Thermaltake Armor Series VA8000BWS Black Aluminum / Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case
EVGA 122-CK-NF68-AR LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor L632A374 Stepping 6, revision B2
ZALMAN 9700 LED 110mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler
G.SKILL 4GB (4 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Professional Series
Logitec Z5500 Speaker System
2x Western Digital Raptor 150GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150
SAMSUNG Black 18X IDE DVD Burner With LightScribe Technology
eVGA GeForce 8800GTX 768MB 384-bit GDDR3
OCZ GameXStream 700W Power Supply

Here is the inside of my case. As you can see I have tried my best to keep things clean and airflow unrestricted.

Cooling fans as follows:

2 x 120mm fans intake from front of the case
1x 110mm fan pulling air from intake fans and exhausting to rear case fan
1 x 120mm fan exhaust just behind processor pulling air away from cpu fan
1 x 80mm fan exhaust air from harddrive and psu area near top of case.
1 x 80mm fan exhaust air at the top of the case
1 x 80mm dual slot exhaust fan pulling air from the 8800gtxs rear slots and exhausting it out the back of the case

All fans set to 100% duty.



My processor as stated is an e6600. As can be seen in the picture it is an L632A374 Stepping 6, revision B2 build.



Here are the additional details of my pc's current setup using CPU-Z. You will notice here that there is a red box around one of the image crops. This highlighted section is when the processor it under load. Speed step is enabled and as I mentioned before, the pc has been 100% stable with it on.




Here is a screen shot of temps during idle, 100% stable:


And here is a screen shot of temps during load 100% stable:


Orthos 24hour stability test:


Using these settings I have been able to game for hours on end, and complete 100 loops of all 3dmark06 tests back to back (took about 16-18 hours) Here is a screen shot after the tests:


Also you might have noticed my video card is slightly overclocked as well. Its tempature I have no seen rise above 68c during any load I can throw at it (3dmark, atitool, furmark ect ect).

So as you can see the temperatures aren't too bad. This setup was running at 52 degrees idle and 72c at load for the past year and has shown no ill effects from it. This past week I have lapped the ihs of the e6600 and the bottom of my zalman 9700 cooler, and this has resulted in the temps you see in the pics above (42c idle 62c max load).


So now on to the problem now that that is out of the way.

I seem to have hit a wall at the above stability. I can post and load to windows using 3.6ghz (9x400) @ 1.45-1.52 volts, but orthos will immediately fail. No matter how much vcore I throw at it, it doesn't seem to want to be stable. Which leads me to believe it is going to take something more than just vcore to achieve stability if possible.

I'm not really sure how to go about this, and thus ask for assistance.

I will provide screen shots of my bios here so that you can easily see my current settings. NOTE the first screen shows I am using the latest bios provided by evga.



I have in the past tried disabling speed step and loosening memory timings to try to get 3.6 stable. I'm not opposed to trying again, but will wait to see if it is suggested.

Also, does anyone see any settings non-over clocking or over clocking related in the bios that are inefficient or just plain dumb? Any thoughts or suggestions in those areas would be nice too.

I thank you again for any assistance offered, and look forward to any help.
 
I've had the nforce SPP (which I assume is the south bridge?) up to 1.5v, and also the FSB to 1.5v as well.

As I recall, neither seemed to help much.
 
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