Overclocking help needed => P5B + E6600

[newb1]

Hi, thanks for taking time in looking at this topic!!

I originally had a MSI Neo-F v2 P965 motherboard, running a Q6600 G0 @ Stock, i then eventually tried upping the fsb, got the cpu to about 2.5Ghz stable before i was facing an unpresidented amount of BSoD's!! I upped the vCore to 1.35v and managed to obtain 2.6Ghz, everythin seem'd okay!! So i continued, upped to 2.65Ghz and the motherboard went. (RMA wanted 2 months), so i bought myself a ASUS P5B P965-E motherboard!! With that board, i could overclock my Q6600 to 2.6Ghz stable.. again BSoD, so i thought.. hmm.. maybe its my CPU thats 'faulty'.. So i invested and bought a Q6700 after selling my Q6600 on ebay, managed to hit 2.8Ghz, same problem if i went further.. My temps were around mid 60's, so i bought a Ultra-120 extreme, problem.... in the middle of cleaning my CPU to replace the hsf, my niece was around and kinda dropped my Q6700 on a wooden floor.. and it never worked again.

Im now down to a brand new E6600 (which im happy with), a Asus P5B P965-E motherboard, and cant get higher than 2.5Ghz!!! My vCore is 1.5v under the bios, temps are 40/50 (idle/load respectively) using AS5 thermal compound.. Ive reverted back to stock specs as imo 0.1Ghz isn't really worth pushing the CPU to 1.5v..

System specs -

CPU - Intel Core2Duo E6600 @ 2.4Ghz (Stock) - Ultra-120 Extreme
Motherboard - Asus P5B P965-E
RAM - 8.00GB RAM (4 x 2GB Corsair DDR2-667Mhz) - With CoolMaster copper heatsinks (2.15v)
PSU - Corsair TX-750w Power Supply
GPU - Inno3d nVidia GeForce 8800GT 512mb OC (Was using a 9800GTX but i dont see any difference between the two).
HDD - 2 x 500GB Seagate SATA2

Would really appreciate some feedback as this has been bothering me for a while!! Maybe i just suck at overclocking

Thanks very much =)

 

[Billb2]

Overclocking with 8 gigs in near impossible. Why do you need all that memory?

2x2 gigs should be enough for most anything, even then you'll have to slow the memory speed and loosten the timings.

A tome on overclocking ain't gonna happen here. Read about it. The Asus website's forums on that MOBO would be a good place to start.

 

[newb1]

Just out of question, how come you cant overclock 8gb? even if i upgrade to lyk.. 1066 ram or something?? Hmm... I do need the ram for my designing and stuff, but i want to OC it for my gaming (as its kinda my gaming pc as well), and for my video converting!! Ive tried lowering the ram to 533Mhz and then overclocking it from there, e.g. underclocking it to give it headroom for a nice CPU overclock when i up the FSB, but that doesnt work either, i cant get higher than 2.5Ghz on this... Its really pathetic!! Any reasons why that would happen?? I mean.. If i lower the fsb-ram ratio thing, shouldnt that give me more headroom???

Btw, love your system <3

Thanks for the fast reply =)

 

[Absolution75]

Drop your ram divider so that your ram is running significantly slower than your FSB (2:1 works well for that). I've never heard of any specific problems with a lot of ram providing you changed your divider.

 

[newb1]

I did try that, but still no use.. (With reference to billb2's post) he says that a high amount of ram could be hindering my overclocking??

**Confused** ... Sorry im not too good with this!!

Thanks for the help so far =)

 

[BlueAcolyte]

It means that your memory controller (Your northbridge) is choking under the strain of managing 4 sticks of dense RAM. It is much easier to overclock with 2 sticks of RAM, although right now I am running with 3 alright.

 

[Qbah]

Why did you buy a P965 mobo? No idea how they handle Core 2 OCing. Both mobos had the same chipset, so perhaps that's the culprit? You should've gotten a P35 or P45 after the old one died imo

No idea what else could cause the OCing to be so ineffective (the RAM idea was good too ).