Q9450 shooting for 4ghz, on air, possible?

[imported_AllenL]

I have the good fortune of my Q9450 being cherry-picked from a tray 100 OEM cpus. My buddy, who works at a computer store, doesn?t have the time to overclock each cpu individually, what he did was picking the coolest running Q9450 out of 100, which I believe should be darn good.

Anyways, my aim is to overclock Q9450 over 4ghz. Since the chip is multiplier-locked at x8, it would required ram and fsb running at least 2000mhz. To facilitate the likelihood of achieving this goal, I plan on buying the following parts: eVGA nForce 790i Ultra 3way-SLI, OCZ 4GB PC3-16000 (2000mhz) Platinum DDR3 Kit (2 x 2GB). How good a chance do I stand?

Tips and suggestions appreciated.

 

[aigomorla]

Originally posted by: AllenL
I have the good fortune of my Q9450 being cherry-picked from a tray 100 OEM cpus. My buddy, who works at a computer store, doesn?t have the time to overclock each cpu individually, what he did was picking the coolest running Q9450 out of 100, which I believe should be darn good.

Anyways, my aim is to overclock Q9450 over 4ghz. Since the chip is multiplier-locked at x8, it would required ram and fsb running at least 2000mhz. To facilitate the likelihood of achieving this goal, I plan on buying the following parts: eVGA nForce 790i Ultra 3way-SLI, OCZ 4GB PC3-16000 (2000mhz) Platinum DDR3 Kit (2 x 2GB). How good a chance do I stand?

Tips and suggestions appreciated.

define your lvl of stable, and the answer to your question is maybe. Meaning, gaming stable, possibly, since only 2 cores load up at most, with a third.

Encoding stable, no way.

This is assuming you get a decient 4.0ghz clocking chip, which is more like a lucky 4.0 capable chip. :T

 

[imported_AllenL]

I define stability as "running prime95 on each core for over 24hr without any error".

I can't say I'm not a bit dissappointed by your feedback, as I was under the impression the single greatest obstacle preventing most q9450 from achieving 4ghz+ is most MOBOs and RAMs are incapable of going over 500mhz.

Thanx.

 

[n7]

500 MHz FSB 24/7 stable with a quad?

That'd be extremely unlikely.

And then there's the fact that 4 GHz is very hard to hit as well...unless you're running some insane cooling & vcore.

I'd say you might want to either aim for something more reasonable, or at least find a chip with a 9x multi...

RAM isn't an issue.

 

[myocardia]

Welcome to anandtech, Allen. Noone has gotten a Q9450 stable at anything over 470 Mhz FSB, with most topping out somewhere between 425 & 450. A few have gotten theirs benchmark stable at higher frequencies, but none have gotten the kind of 24/7 stability you're looking for. That pretty much requires a QX9650, for 4 Ghz.

 

[runawayprisoner]

Originally posted by: myocardia
Welcome to anandtech, Allen. Noone has gotten a Q9450 stable at anything over 470 Mhz FSB, with most topping out somewhere between 425 & 450. A few have gotten theirs benchmark stable at higher frequencies, but none have gotten the kind of 24/7 stability you're looking for. That pretty much requires a QX9650, for 4 Ghz.

I actually have had my Q9450 at 4GHz stable in OCCT, but it's a horror story in terms of voltage, and I don't dare post the results now even after I have sold the chip.

Anyway, to get to 500MHz stable, I think you are better off with an ASUS P5E-VM HDMI board rather than any other.

But be advised: if the chip itself can't reach 475MHz stable at less than 1.36v on vCore, then don't bother. 500MHz requires more than .1v from there.

P.S.: Tip of the iceberg:
http://i235.photobucket.com/al...C/3DMark06CPUScore.jpg

1.488v JUST barely stable enough for benching.

 

[imported_AllenL]

After further research, perhaps overclocking q9450 to over 4ghz on air is not in the cards. Will oem E8400 fare better? I can still cherry-pick the coolest E8400 out of a tray or two. Would 4ghz be attainable in this case?

TIA.

 

[runawayprisoner]

E8400 is reasonable. You can aim for 4GHz any time you want.

 

[myocardia]

Yeah, 4 Ghz is easily attainable with alot of E8400's. Not all of them will do 4Ghz, but the majority seem to make it. BTW, don't have your friend go by the processors' temps, have him go by the ones with the lowest VID.

 

[imported_AllenL]

Pardon my ignorance, but what is VID and how is it measured?

TIA.

 

[myocardia]

VID is the minimum required Vcore for Intel chips. It's different for each processor, even ones made the same day, from the same plant, of the same type (E8400 or Q6600, etc). The majority of really high overclocks are achieved with low VID chips, since if it requires less Vcore to run @ 3.0 Ghz, it should overclock higher with the same Vcore, or just as high with less Vcore.

edit: CoreTemp will tell you the VID.