The Official OC (OverClocking) Thread!

Yes quite impressive there Sophy!! Makes me lust for a Q9650 even more. lol.

Been busy this week and haven't had the time to do any posting let alone OC'ing. Hope to see more of you guys in the days to come.

...gm

 

The Vcore WILL kill the CPU if you go over the limit, and that limit does seem to be 1.36V. Based on their scores you're looking at a maz of 4.35Ghz or so on that voltage, and the most demanding stress tests they ran are 3dmark. I could run 3dmark at a speed that wasn't stable for gaming / windows usage, hence my score of 19,020 at 3.51Ghz, my highest overclock that passes intelburntest is 3.24Ghz, a significantly lower score than 3.51 - who says their 4.5Ghz overclock was stable for 4 hours of Call of Duty 4? The reason why I am impressed with Soph's Q9650 benches is primarily because he's included an 8-pass IntelBurntest, therefore I am very confident he has his chip stable. Whether the voltage he's using is cosher or not, I'm not sure.

That Q9650 may be more than triple the price of the E8400, but it does genuinely seem to be two of the 8400s stacked together in every sense of the word. I'm pretty certain you'd easily get an E6600 higher than the recent Q6600s like I have. In the face of this, if you have the money, a dual core is a complete farse now! Then again, if you don't have £380 to spend on a CPU, you still have to weigh up the pros and cons. As a gamer, a quad core has big benefits. As a video encoder, a quad core can have big benefits. As a regular winrar user, assuming your HDD is fast enough, a quad core can have benefits. I'm not one to interrupt plans, but are you absolutely sure you don't want to try overclocking a Q9450 instead for the same price, spam?

 

Soph,

very very impressive. I got the C1 stepping instead of E0 for my Q9450. I'm still quite content at 3.55ghz @ 1.34 vcore for everyday use. this is where I intend on staying for a long bit while the rest of ya'all go off and leave me in the dust. I've got more pc than I really need now. my prioritys have changed a bit. good luck with your OC ventures.

 

My current Vcore setting is at 3.2 something Vcore but I could go as high as 1.3625 and still be within spec. also remember when I overclock I always start with a higher vcore than I estimate is needed and then back things down after I find my desired sweet spot so the current Vcore setting might actually be a little higher than is needed. I rarely shut down at night and when I checked this morning my idle temps were at a happy 26C which means that the thermal paste is starting to set. I am quite happy right where everything is and I suspect that my memory will give up before the processor does. I did increase the memory voltage to 2.14V because I'm running a wider FSB than I did with my E8400. I am going to run some serious stress testing over the weekend. After that I'm going to compress a 28 gigabyte 3 hour and 7 minute movie. The last time I did that it used virtually 100% of processor resources for 16 hours without a break. I should see that time drop considerable at 4 GHz and 4 cores.

 

2.14 is bad? lol I've run my memory at 2.16V since new...

 

Whoa, I think my profile is working?

Soph, GREAT OC there!

Sam, I always ran my Crucial Ballistix Tracers at 2.2v, but for the last three computers(my own, not customers) I would leave the memory at stock speeds because of the 9x multi so I would just use 1.8v.

 

it won't surprise you to learn that 2.16V is what it chose on auto, so even now I'm on manual, I stuck to it, I'm pretty sure it's +0.3V in the BIOS.

 

The real trick to getting overclocking the 45nm processor is as we all know getting and EO stepping. If you are purchasing the E8600 and Q9650 they all started with EO stepping. The Q9550 (Q9450 not is not worth buying)can be purchased with both C1 and EO stepping so the only way that one can be certain of getting one with EO stepping is check it out in a brick and mortar store. To insure that you get EO stepping look at the back of the Heat spreader to insure that you have the right processor and then look for this ID "SLB8V."

If I could have been certain that I was getting an EO stepping Q9550 then I would have gone with it instead of the Q9650. Unfortunately the market is choked with C1 stepping Q9550 processors and few people are reporting having obtained one with EO stepping so I went with the Q9650 which is guaranteed to be EO.

 

That is true, but the Q9450s can't be that bad, surely? My friend has one upped to 3.36 on stock voltage, and importantly, they're half the price of the 9650s...

 

it all depends on the memorys rated voltage. some memorys rated voltage is as low as 1.8v while others is as high as 2.2v. the most I would ever overvolt the memoy is 25% max. 10% overvolt doesn't concern me at all.

 

You talking about Morty? lol. I think his is at 3.5something. Of course he'll chime in now but that's impressive to me with a C1 stepping Q9450. Of course when the Q9000 series Quads come down in price I'll get the Q9650 if permission is granted and kick the crap out of MOrty!! hehehe. ;p

NOT really but I'm VERY impressed with it so far.

....gm

 

The rated voltage of my RAM (CM2X1024-6400C4) is 1.9V.
Gm: Only 3.5? wow, point taken then. It has occurred to me, if the 9650 is only overvolted by 80mV to get to 4Ghz, couldn't it potentially run that speed fine on air too? After all, the TDP of my CPU is the same as the 9450 stock, and it's overvolted by a considerable 150mV, cooled more than adequately on my TRUA @ 1000rpm.

 

the Q9450 is the same price as the Q9550, so that alone makes it worthless


im still going with the dual core, but will switch next year to i7, so ill be fine until next year.

and if ifeel i need a quad, then i can always sell my e8600 and get a q9550.

 

Very strange, after the US dollar rebound, new CPUs are coming in by the old exchange rate, yet the older ones have gone up... Glad I bought my CPU/GPU when I did...

 

That's exactly why i said that they are worthless. Who is going to be so cheap that they will buy a Q9450 to save $5 to $10? If there was a $100 difference then that would be another matter. A Q9450 with EO stepping would probably be able to hit 3.7 GHz maybe better but for $10 or as they are now, the exact same price it is a pointless and foolish purchase. Mort bought before things began to change so he did the best that he could at the time.

 

Yeah, I hadn't considered the recent price hikes in the UK, the Q9550 is considerably more than the Q9450 was but now the Q9450 has gone up they're the same...

 

stupid amercian dollar rate exchange

i blame america for this "credit crunch", or if we hadnt owed america trillions of dollars, we'd be fine

 

Without wishing to sound internationally rude, I think the americans have had more than a significant impact on the cause of the credit crunch, due to overborrowing...
Anyway, that's politics.
The Pound/dollar exchange rate now is only what it used to be a few years back, so it's not really worth blowing a gasket over. Back in 2001 when we went on holiday to the US, the exchange rate was only 1.6. If that happened now there'd probably be uproar... lol

 

No offense taken because it's true. It's not just borrowing but rather this whole subprime mortgage fiasco along with the cost of war that is at the root of this problem.

The Q9450's are going to have to drop regardless of original cost if newegg and other online retailers are going to clear stock or they will wind up sitting on them.

 

Agreed on that, it's plainly obvious they won't sell them at their current price.