QX6700 and p5n32-e-sli overclocking help

[addinator]

I was curious if anyone has any experience with this chip and/or motherboard and could maybe shed some light on my current overclocking conundrum. Right now I am running it at the specs in my sig, and I do not have any issues with it whatsoever. The only issue is Crysis will lock up sometimes, but thats its own problem. Anyways, It seems that there is an FSB wall at 333mhz. I am unable to push it anywhere around (quad-pumped) 1333 with any stability. I have pushed the chip up to 1.41 vcore and have raised the northbridge up to 1.4 as well but nothing has been able to get me any bit of stability. The ram is not overclocked simply to eliminate variables but these sticks I have are monsters when I was overclocking them. If anyone has any ideas or experiences it would be greatly appreciated.

On a side note, is the QX6700 really an unlocked processor? I don't think it is as I can't change the multiplier upwards, but I had read a few places that it was. Any ideas?

Thanks so much!

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: addinator
I was curious if anyone has any experience with this chip and/or motherboard and could maybe shed some light on my current overclocking conundrum.

I have a bit of experience with the QX6700. Had mine since Nov'06.

The first and most important question I can ask you though is what stepping is your QX6700? Is it a B3 or a G0? (my expectation is that you have a B3, just as I do)

Use CPU-Z to identify your stepping and report it back in this thread if you don't mind.

Originally posted by: addinator
Right now I am running it at the specs in my sig, and I do not have any issues with it whatsoever. The only issue is Crysis will lock up sometimes, but thats its own problem. Anyways, It seems that there is an FSB wall at 333mhz. I am unable to push it anywhere around (quad-pumped) 1333 with any stability. I have pushed the chip up to 1.41 vcore and have raised the northbridge up to 1.4 as well but nothing has been able to get me any bit of stability.

Sig specs for: addinator
QX6700 @ 3120 (1.34vcore, 25c to 39c-load) Watercooled

Aigo can likely help best regarding watercooled aspects of your system, I've had my QX6700 under both vaporphase cooling (vapoLS) and aircooling (Tuniq120).

One thing you can do to help yourself in overclocking, provided you don't mind nulling your warranty, is lapping your IHS and waterblock. I lapped my vapoLS evap head and my QX's IHS and it really helped stabilize my overclocks with slightly reduced Vcore's.

The lockup situation could very well be a subtle overclock instability of your system. Don't under-play these things. I use to think my system was stable except for a minor system reboot every 2 months or so. I took the FSB down a notch (from 333 to 300) and upped the multi to compensate so I had the same CPU clock and subsequently didn't experience a stability-initiated reboot for >12months.

Here's the deal with B3's and QX6700's (in my experience)...they HATE when you monkey around with the FSB on those Nvidia chipsets. I had my QX6700 on two i680 boards (EVGA and Striker Extreme) and both systems ultimately had to be ran at stock FSB (267MHz) with the overclocking done solely thru raising the multiplier if I wanted to be rock stable with my apps of interest.

Migrating to the Asus P5E WS Pro with the x38 chipset eliminated a lot of my FSB issues, I could clock the FSB all the way up to 400MHz on my QX6700.

Originally posted by: addinator
On a side note, is the QX6700 really an unlocked processor? I don't think it is as I can't change the multiplier upwards, but I had read a few places that it was. Any ideas?

Yes it absolutely is an unlocked processor. I've had mine in 4 boards with three different chipsets (i680, P35, X38) and the multi has always been unlocked. I've had it as high as a 15x multiplier (4GHz, 15x267, on vapoLS) without issue for months.

If your multiplier does not allow you to change it then maybe you have just the Q6700 and not the QX6700.