Looking to upgrade a 3.5 year old machine

[ch33zw1z]

Nobody mentioned it yet, but a future upgrade to an SSD would further prolong the life of this box.

 

[stinkoman247]

I got the parts installed and running on my rig (q6600G0 and sapphire 6870). My computers gotten a new lease on life! So much faster! I managed to get the cpu to 3.00ghz vary easily at a vcore of 1.32500v according to the bios. Doesn't that voltage seem rather high? That's what my Bios sets as the default voltage for the stock speed (2.4ghz). I tried 1.27500v but that insta-crashed on prime 95, even though I've seen a lot of 3.00ghz oc's done at voltage. Anyway, at my current oc it ran prime95 for 10 hours perfectly, and the hottest the cpu got was a mere 57c.

Any tips on getting it faster than that?

 

[Hubb1e]

Whoa, that's a lot of voltage. I'd be very careful with voltage or you can kill your new chip. My Q6600 hit 3ghz on stock voltage which was around 1.3V ish. At 3ghz it played games very well and I could have OCed higher but I didn't want to mess with it too much.

 

[stinkoman247]

oops, I meant 1.2750 volts. Still, anything that could make the cpu any faster? Or anything to make that voltage lower? I kind of have the same position of not wanting to mess with the machine to get it super fast. I'd have to ether have my ram be slower or faster than normal, or make the fsb bat-shit insane fast (and possibly lower the multiplier to 8, assuming the fsb is at 400mhz, inorder to get 3.2ghz) and deal with all of the difficulties such as using really high voltages on the NB, etc, and excessive heat. I really want to keep my ram running at 800 megahertz.

 

[mfenn]

1:1 FSBRAM is the way to go for a Core 2 IMHO. Put the FSB to 400 and the multi to 7 or 8 depending on what you can get stable.

 

[ch33zw1z]

1.325 volts is good and below the 1.5v cap for the Q6600. I wouldn't push it past what you have unless your unhappy.

I liked to run my RAM as fast as it could go(44412 @ 800mhz, 2.0v), and just bump my FSB. my mobo would choose the fsb:dram divider.

My main rig is still a Q9550, stock @ 333Mhz fsb, ram at 400Mhz

 

[stinkoman247]

Iv'e got my CPU stable at 3.2 gigahertz with a multiplier of 8 at 1.4 volts, and my FSB-RAM ratio is 1:1. I'm going to continue lowering my voltage until it will go no lower. The CPU is getting up to 69 Celsius in the small-FFTs prime 95 test.


If I could give kudos on this site I would be right now :thumbsup:

 

[Blain]

Nobody mentioned it yet, but a future upgrade to an SSD would further prolong the life of this box.

Because stinkoman247 mentioned a budget about $200.
After a CPU/GPU upgrade, SSD $$ is hard to find.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Because stinkoman247 mentioned a budget about $200.
After a CPU/GPU upgrade, SSD $$ is hard to find.

indeed, my wording of "future" was key there proc/vga now, ssd later for a little extra out of the platform.

 

[hoorah]

I am currently dragging behind on an ATI 4850, which is faster than your 4830. The cards I was looking at (6850,6870) are supposed to be at least a 100% improvement over my card now (memory bandwidth) It was difficult to find a side-by-side comparison of these two cards as the 3dMark version changed around that era.

So, I'd say that an upgrade from a 4830 to 6870 will be significant, even on an older CPU.

Also, I would have said to buy the GPU first and see if its good enough of an upgrade for the games you play, possibly postponing your CPU upgrade until you could get a q9xxx for the same money, or just put the money towards a new rig if the GPU alone will get you that far. I'm a cheapskate though.

 

[stinkoman247]

Even if I didn't need the CPU upgrade, i'm having a lot of fun overclocking it

 

[sm625]

Seems like you got the best possible upgrade you could for $200, from a short term perspective. However, had you upgraded the cpu/mobo/ram to a microcenter i5-2500k+mobo combo for $200 or so, you would be better off in the sense that you'd at least have a video card upgrade path and most games would still be playable with that 512MB card. Not to mention everything else would utter fly. Core just feels slow compared to an i5.

At some point in the future you could have sold the old cpu/mobo/ram for $60 and that would have gotten you within $100 of a 7870

 

[stinkoman247]

I didn't want to get that platform due to Intel's likely end of support for it with haswell coming out not to long from now, and I NEEDED a GPU upgrade.

 

[mfenn]

Iv'e got my CPU stable at 3.2 gigahertz with a multiplier of 8 at 1.4 volts, and my FSB-RAM ratio is 1:1. I'm going to continue lowering my voltage until it will go no lower. The CPU is getting up to 69 Celsius in the small-FFTs prime 95 test.


If I could give kudos on this site I would be right now :thumbsup:

:thumbsup: You're on the right track. 69C is already out of the danger zone. Just keep dropping those volts until its unstable, then back off a bit.

 

[stinkoman247]

Dang, the 3rd core always stops working first if it is not stable. So apparently, it is not stable at 1.4 volts; the 3rd core went out after 20 minutes.

Edit: At 1.4025 volts or something like that the 3rd core failed after 1 hour and 20 minutes.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Dang, the 3rd core always stops working first if it is not stable. So apparently, it is not stable at 1.4 volts; the 3rd core went out after 20 minutes.

Edit: At 1.4025 volts or something like that the 3rd core failed after 1 hour and 20 minutes.

use CPU-Z to record the voltage inside of windows. s775 machines have "vdroop" to account for as well.

 

[stinkoman247]

The voltage indicated in CPU-Z is always a lot lower than the bios voltages. Perhaps there is a voltage mod for my motherboard (Gigabyte GA-EP43-UD3L)?

EDIT: Also, I have problems with sleep mode now. I haven't investigated the issue or tried to fix it yet.

 

[mfenn]

The voltage indicated in CPU-Z is always a lot lower than the bios voltages. Perhaps there is a voltage mod for my motherboard (Gigabyte GA-EP43-UD3L)?

You're seiing vDroop in action. That's completely normal on a Core 2 board, as load line calibration (LLC) wasn't as effective back then. Just keep track of the offset so that you can take that into account when you set voltages in the BIOS.

EDIT: Also, I have problems with sleep mode now. I haven't investigated the issue or tried to fix it yet.

Sadly, it problems waking and resuming from sleep are extremely common when messing with voltages. It has to do with the voltage level the processor expects when it transitions into and out of sleep mode.