I am trying to overclock a q6600 G0 stepping with a 780i motherboard and I am having trouble getting over 3.0ghz. I know heat is not a problem because when I run Prime95 I do not get above 42 and I am running at 25c idle. Here are my settings: CPU core: 3006 MHz FSB: 1336 QDR MHz Memory: 890.667 MHz G.Skill DDR2 SPP PCI-E: 3125 MHz MCP PCI-E: 2500 MHz Gpu: 8800gt GPU core: 685.00 MHz GPU memory: 1000 MHz Voltages: CPU: 1.3V Memory: 2.025V FSB: 1.4V HT(SPP-MCP): 1.2V PCI-E: 1.4V nForce: 1.5V AUX: 1.5V No matter what I do I can not get a stable overclock above 3GHz. I have upped the voltage and tried QDrs between 1334MHz to 1514MHz. When I do set them higher windows vista seems to start then it will restart the computer. I am not sure what the problem is I have set the voltages for everything in the chipset to the higest they will go and still no stability. Any suggestions will help. Also I have the memory unlinked and running at 4-4-4-12-2T and when I was overclocking I loosened the timmings to 5-5-5-15-2T. I disabed CE1 and Speed Stepping. PLEASE SOMEONE HELP ME!!!!!
Hi, Can you give a bit more detail regarding the components in the system? Fair enough you have a 780i motherboard, but what manufacturer? model number? revision? What RAM do you have? Corsair XMS2? OCZ Reaper? Kingston HyperX? Geil Ultra? Crucial Ballistix? What speed rating are they? Remeber for over 3Ghz you really need RAM rated at DDR800+. What other items do you have in your system? H/D, PSU? Remember if you are driving the Q6600 at high speed / voltage, you will inevitably be drawing more power from the PSU (in some reviews I have seen the power rating of the system jump up by 134 watts!!). Once you have given us this information we can look more finely at what the issue may / may not be. To get the Q6600 to 3Ghz you should start off setting the FSB to 333Mhz and vCore to 1.3v. I have also heard its difficult to overclock 680i & 780i chipset boards to decent speeds using the Quad's, however CPU's like the E6400 can be overclocked to 3.6Ghz! I know that boards using the P35 / i975X, x38 chipsets tend to be the better boards to use. Let us know how you get on. *** EDIT *** Sorry!! didn't read your signature. Just seen your setup. Looks like it should be able to handle it. Just a quick question, what are you model numbers on the PSU and RAM? Also what BIOS version do you have for your motherboard? Cheers
Try to run your memory with 1:1 divider, in this case, set the memory clock to 668mhz, if you are running on 1336FSB.
I got a stable overclock by reseting everything to its default in the bios. Then I set the QDR to 1512 and the vcore was at auto already. Then I set my gskill ram to 2.2v and mad the ratio 3:2. And I got the stable overclock. I want to take the cpu further but I suspect it is the ram that is holding me back. Here is the ram I have: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231098 Any suggestions?
1600fsb ram at stock (timings and volts) and slowly increase your cpu and nb volts till its stable. edit you can play with dividers and find the sweet spot once you have your cpu solid around the speed you want.
You could get a higher overclock by using PC8500 Crucial Ballistix, but of course, that's not mandatory. See which memory multipliers you have in your BIOS, you ideally need to keep G-Skill RAM below about 840mhz at that speed.
