Asus P5K-E Wifi/AP questions/overclocking

I have a Asus P5K-e Wifi/AP edition and I was wondering if I could run SLI/Crossfire on it and if it would be worth it, such as 2 older 7800s in SLI or a pair of x1650s in Crossfire. I also wanted to know if anybody has settings for a stable overclock on a Q6600.

 

I wouldnt crossfire on that board, 1 slot runs at 16x and the other at 4x - which will bottleneck performance. Just spend some extra money (if you really need an upgrade to play newer games) and get a 3870/3850.

What do you want to achieve with the Q6600? What clocks do you want? Are you running stock cooling? Is it a B3 or a G0 stepping quad?

 

For my video card, I currently am running, if you didnt see in my sig, a 6800 GT OEM edition with clocks of 350x900. For the Q6600, I am running now at stock with this fan:
http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-234-1.htm
It is a G0 Stepping. I would like to achieve 4GHz+ but I doubt I can do that with my CPU fan so whatever's stable I guess. I do video editing which takes about 80% out of my CPU Constantly (but gets done oh so fast!) so I wouldn't like it to fail in the middle of one of those.

 

Woah! 4ghz!!! Easy man! Especially with a air cooler - I cant see above 3.6Ghz!

I bench mine at 4ghz with water - and temps are about 60C load so I can only imagine what an air cooler's temps would be!

What are your current temps at stock? To monitor them use SpeedFan...

As for CF, I would go to a 3870/3850 - I need to know your budget.

 

My temps after getting off of Halo 2 are:


As for the graphics card, I might just go with a 8600 or 8800 with their dropping prices, I'm not that heavy of a gamer and my 6800 is doing me well right now. 6800 FTW! lol.

 

Those temps look ok, so you could go ahead and overclock. What do you want to get to? 4Ghz is out of the question, but I imagine 3.6 should be doable.

I recommended a new graphics card thinking you were into playing games, but now that I see you dont a 6800 will be fine - I actually had one but then upgraded to a x1950xt as the 6800 wasn't that great in BF2.

 

I actually ordered a x1650 pro which was for my computer which I got for $30 which wasn't too great. The 6800 was originally in my dads comptuer (ironic) which I then swapped for the x1650 pro. As for the overclock, do you know what settings I should do to achieve this? I have DDR2 800MHz RAM (4GB) if thats needed.

 

Go into the BIOS, and for a 3.6Ghz overclock, change the FSB (which would originally be 266) to 400, reboot, and download CPUZ to check your clocks.

The clocks may be lower when you're not doing anything in Windows that requires the CPU.

If you want the clocks to stay @ 3.6 every time, disable "C1E Support" in the BIOS.

 

What about the RAM? Originally my speed is 800MHz but doesn't changing the FSB of the CPU change the FSB of the RAM too?

 

As you increase the CPU FSB, the ram speed will go up automatically by itself. It will reach insane numbers, like 1200Mhz (you can see in the BIOS, the ram speed will increase while you increase the CPU FSB) so you hav to select that and bring it back to 800Mhz. You may also have to change your timings, if they're 4-4-4-12 then you may have to go to 5-5-5-15. If they're already at 5-5-5-15 then you're all set.

 

Ok, I got it up to 3.61 GHz and RAM speed as 801 MHz according to the BIOS. My RAM speeds aren't that great though, they're at 5-5-5-18 since the RAM was originally bought for a Dell System. Now what program should I use to test the stability of my CPU and RAM? I need a CPU stress test utility that stresses out all of the 4 cores.

 

You can use orthos, or you can run 3dmark06 a couple of times (the 2 CPU tests only) - thats what I do.

 

do you know what the latest version of orthos is?

 

I just found out that Orthos only stresses 2 cores, so go with Prime95.

http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm

 

Well so far...

 

Looks good so far!

 

Problem...
FATAL ERROR: Resulting sum was 3841346911600640, expected 31263823949590.22
Hardware failure detected, consult stress.txt file.
Torture Test ran 0 minutes - 1 errors, 0 warnings.
Execution halted.

Funny part here is that my CPU was at about 30% usage and PF was at 1.7GB so my computer wasn't under a load. The computer didn't freeze or anything either.

 

Bad things happened...
I got another version of Prime95, Prime95 v25.3. I ran it and it failed within 5-10 seconds with the error above. Temps didn't go past 40C though. After that I let the software go, didn't do anything and my CPU was at about 5-10% usage. I took a screenshot of what happened and tried to upload it to photobucket and the computer shutdown automatically. 10 seconds later it turned back on. Now it keeps rebooting at the Loading XP screen.

 

Can you get back into the BIOS and reverse the changes?

 

Yea, I reversed changes and it booted fine. Why did it fail at 3.6 GHz but low temps? Do I need to increase the voltage?