Hi guys,
First post at anandtech forum!
Firstly thanks greatly to graysky for the guide. I would never have dared overclock without a easy to follow guide like that.
Anyway I have;
Q6600 G0
Asus P5E (X38)
2x2Gb OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 (800Mhz) ram
OCZ vendetta cpu cooler
Cooler Master Cosmos1000 case
Ati 3780X2 (vents heat out of the case)
So I did my first ever overclock. I basically followed grayskys case study and did 3Ghz (9x333), with ram at 667 (1:1). Initially I was very pleased with myself, system was stable. However I was using "auto" for vCore and some of the cores were @68-69C at load (prime95 small FFT test). So I next went to reduce vCore. This is where I'm a bit concerned. The lowest I can get it and run reasonably stable (over 4hrs prime95) is vCore at
1.34V in bios.
That gave me;
vCore CPU-Z 1.31 idle, 1.272 load (Speedfan gives same values)
idle CPU 35, cores 36-38
load CPU 63, cores 63-67
Well, that seems safe anyway, but reading grayskys figures (vCore 1.2625) for the same overclock, and reading other peoples vCores mine seems a bit dissappointing. Below 1.34v I get errors in prime95. At 1.30v I run prime95 and my system locks up straight away

.
At vCore 1.31 I get an error in 1 minute and so on.
I realise every chip is different and there are lots of variables between systems, but should I be doing better than this. I guess my temps are still fairly safe?
I wondered if the voltage of the ram was an issue. In bios it says "auto" so that's not helpful. I set it to 2.00v manually (ram rated at 2.1v) to see if it helped but no joy (in terms of running the vCore lower). Timings are set 5-5-5-15 (ram rated to 4-4-4-15) Also I guess my MB has quite a big vDrop/vDroop. Does that have anything to do with it?
I've seen guys talk of "unlucky Q6600 G0's". Any suggestions/thoughts?
Sorry for the long noob post.