e6600 overclock/cooling results

[z00b]

I'll add this to another thread as necessary, but I wanted to express some more enthusiasm for Zalman's CNPS9700 LED cooler and the e6600. What an overclocking champ. I've been doing this for years, was a proud owner of the celeron300@450, which was my previous best overclock.

Asus Striker Extreme
Intel core 2 duo e6600
2GB 4-4-4-15 OCZ pc6400 (800mhz)

With stock cooling this chip did fine at 400x8, 1.475v. It was good enough at stock voltage but more stable at 1.475v. 1.5v got a little hot. Easily above 60C with stock cooling, sometimes more with Supreme Commander. Idle was somewhere around 40C. This seemed to be getting worse with time, so I went for the Zalman, as folks seemed to have great luck with it. Plus it's pretty as all heck.

Wow - what a difference. The CPU now runs idle at around 25C. Ambient case temps are also 25C or so (it's pretty cool in the Bay Area, CA right now). Talk about some nice cooling. These results are easily the best air cooling I've seen, and pretty much on par with my water cooled system from around 2001 (and a whole lot easier to put together).

Overclocked the e6600 to 400x9, with little increase in temps. Under load it now hits 40C, and idle remains 25C or so. Interestingly the MB case temp ends up stabilizing at around 30C when idle, due to drive and exhaust heating. It's pretty amusing to see the CPU running cooler than the ambient.

This system runs Call of Duty 4 perfectly, and does great with Supreme Commander. Nothing I've thrown at it yet slows it down.



The 8800GTX is still stock cooled, with a little overclock. I'm going to try out Zalman's VF900 on that soon, but honestly it does great with everything out there so I'm being lazy. I'll add those results if I get around to it.

 

[skillyho]

Firstly, welcome to Anandtech!

Those results sound almost too good to be true...but then again that's only in game temps (if I interpreted your post correctly). I'm running a e6600 @ 3.4 on 1.38VCore in a 68F room and my load temps with Orthos are around 58-60C after a 20 minute run. I know my cooler isn't as good as yours, but when I had a Freezer Pro I still was around 54C Full Load with identical specs. Are you using Speedfan, motherboard software, Intel TAT or CoreTemp to monitor your loads? What do you get with an extended Orthos load? Games typically don't push CPU temps near as high as Orthos or IntelTAT.

I'm jealous of your GTX BTW!

 

[n7]

Originally posted by: z00b
It's pretty amusing to see the CPU running cooler than the ambient.

LOL.

You realize that's not actually possible right?

Your temps are obviously not being reported correctly, as idle will always be a few degrees warmer than ambient in the best case scenario.

Sounds to me like if you add 15C to those we'd have the more accurate ones of around 40C idle/55C load.


Anyway, welcome to the forums

 

[kb2114]

I'm getting very similar temps to those with my E6600 and Tuniq Tower. I've always wondered if they're accurate or if I need to add 15*. Either way, they're nothing to be concerned with. And by the way, the VF900 won't work with an 8800gtx, you'll have to get the new VF1000 for that.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Well, have fun. The E6600 was the CPU I used to cut my teeth on my Striker board. I felt uncomfortable with the voltage set above 1.4625V, but I wasn't that familiar with the temperature profile of the E6600 at that time. I'd seen several posts with people timid about exceeding 1.44V. I've forgotten for sure what the retail-box maximum for the E6600 is, but I thought it was 1.40V. 1.47V would only be 5% in excess of that maximum, so I'd only speculate that your worst concern would be heat. IF the spec maximum is more like 1.38 or 1.35, that hardly makes a difference, either.

TAT won't work with the OP's Striker (680i) board. The only sure way to monitor temperatures accurately involves a combination of CoreTemp and nVidia Monitor, or Everest Ultimate by itself. If you use Everest, the program's own activity will bias the Core #0 temperature upward by about 5C degrees. I'd say that CoreTemp values in the 60's Celsius are "safe" -- you choose your over-clock setting and decide a comfortable climate for your CPU and its load temperature.

In case it's not understood, nVidia Monitor reports the TCase temperature of the processor, and CoreTemp reports individual core temperatures based on "TJunction." For the C2Ds and E6600, TCase should be about 15C less than the core temperatures, and the processor is made to throttle back at around Tcase of 62C.