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Squeaking a bit more performance out of a Core 2 Quad Q6600

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evilspoons

Senior member
I have a Q6600 CPU on an Asus Striker Extreme mainboard (nVidia 680i chipset). Not sure of the CPU stepping right now, I'm at work, but I'll check when I get home. I have 4 GB of DDR2 RAM that is rated slightly faster than it is actually running. My GTX 285 seems to be much faster than the CPU and as a result my games suffer.

I've heard the Q6600 has some overclocking headroom so I was hoping to narrow the gap a little until I upgrade my system (likely not until next year). However, I do run Seti@Home and other distributed computing applications so I don't want to run the risk of causing invalid results - I don't want to do anything too extreme here.

I had actually originally planned on overclocking the chip from the day I bought it (some time in late 2007) but the mainboard was flaky as all hell until a BIOS update came out in late 2008 that really smoothed things out for me.

Are there any good guides for overclocking this processor (or those similar to it)? The last overclocking I did was on my Celeron 433. I understand the basic concepts of a CPU and transistors (I'm an electrical engineer), but I really have no idea which way to go first in terms of biggest performance gains without losing stability.

EDIT: Aww jeeze, after writing all that up I just saw the sticky "HOWTO: Overclock C2Q (Quads) and C2D (Duals) - A Guide v1.7". Sigh.

Feel free to offer tips though 🙂 Thanks!
 
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if you have a decent board, you should be able to set teh fsb to 333 without changing anything else and tada free oc.
 
680i is not a very good overclocker, but make sure you have the latest bios and just set the fsb to 333 like mentioned above and you should be good to go. You may have to add a little voltage for the cpu (mine needed it). The stock cooler will probably not be good enough- mine was OK up to about 2.8GHz and after that it really needed a better HSF.
 
spdfreak said:
680i is not a very good overclocker, but make sure you have the latest bios and just set the fsb to 333 like mentioned above and you should be good to go. You may have to add a little voltage for the cpu (mine needed it). The stock cooler will probably not be good enough- mine was OK up to about 2.8GHz and after that it really needed a better HSF.
Click to expand...

Fortunately I've had a giant-ass cooler since day one. I can't remember what it's called, but it has a 120 mm fan inside it and it barely fits inside my case. I think I'm good on that front 🙂

I'm going to give this a shot in the next few days - probably today if I remember to!
 
Unfortunately, I was not able to just plug in the new bus speed and go.

I disabled auto memory/FSB management, and unlinked memory to FSB ratio. I typed '1333' in for the FSB (it was 1066 before) and rebooted (3.0 GHz). Windows threw a BSOD within about a second of the Windows 7 loading screen showing up.

I then turned off all the usual Speedstep/C1E/etc things and switched the VCore from Auto to 1.30, and set my memory voltage to 2.2 V (auto puts it at 2.05 and it's rated up to 2.3 V). No dice. I stepped the VCore up a few times to 1.375 and still never managed to get Windows to do anything other than BSOD.

I also tried lowering the multiplier to 8x, resulting in a 2.66 GHz clock speed. Still crashes.

I guess the B3 stepping unit that I have along with my 680i mainboard just aren't cut out for overclocking. I'm a bit pissed I paid like $300 for this mainboard back in 2007 now.
 
Did you get the latest bios? The MB should have no problem running at 333. I would leave all the memory and fsb stuff on auto or default. When you set it to 333 it will automatically set the memory divider to the right setting. Try running it at 2.8 (that is what my 6600 and 650i board are running) and do the arithmetic to get your memory in spec. Mine would run at 3.0 but it got very hot.
 
If your board can't handle the increased fsb drop the cpu multiplier, set the fsb to 333, and up your north bridge voltage a little at a time.

evilspoons said:
I guess the B3 stepping unit that I have along with my 680i mainboard just aren't cut out for overclocking.
Click to expand...
The B3's just weren't very good overclockers. If you had a G0 I'm sure you'd be good to go at 3.0ghz minimum
 
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Hi,

Not to step on evilspoons thread, but I was doing the samething with my Q6600 rig. On stock I get 2.8 @ 61c full load and recently purchased a MASSCOOL 8W553B1M3 hoping temps would go down...nope, temps went up. When I tried to put stock back in the darn plastic broke so I using this for now. Can anyone recommend a cooler that will get me at 3ghz without the noise and keep heat under 60c on full load?. Thanks, -JC

evilspoons, try yours at 2.8 (312, Mem@800).
 
680i boards do not oc quads very well, so I hear. You may need to up NB voltage, as well as vcore. I am not sure all the boards have NB voltage control though. Keep in mind most 680i memory controllers are very finicky and can even be called weak. Even my 780i ftw had a bit of issue with that, NB voltage upping required.

Anyways, I have my Q6600 in my 780i ftw (evga) at 3.2, under a xigmatek dark knight with a high airflow scythe fan.

Settings: vcore is about 1.375 V, vdroop off. 4 GB of gskill pi ddr2 1100, running at 948 MHz 5-4-4-12 @ 1.9 V I believe.

NB voltage upped a bit, as with FSB.

My q6600 is a G0 VID 1.25 btw, which is a pretty good, some later G0's and the B3's have much higher, like over 1.3. Some had as low as 1.2.
 
evilspoons said:
Unfortunately, I was not able to just plug in the new bus speed and go.

I disabled auto memory/FSB management, and unlinked memory to FSB ratio. I typed '1333' in for the FSB (it was 1066 before) and rebooted (3.0 GHz). Windows threw a BSOD within about a second of the Windows 7 loading screen showing up.

I then turned off all the usual Speedstep/C1E/etc things and switched the VCore from Auto to 1.30, and set my memory voltage to 2.2 V (auto puts it at 2.05 and it's rated up to 2.3 V). No dice. I stepped the VCore up a few times to 1.375 and still never managed to get Windows to do anything other than BSOD.

I also tried lowering the multiplier to 8x, resulting in a 2.66 GHz clock speed. Still crashes.

I guess the B3 stepping unit that I have along with my 680i mainboard just aren't cut out for overclocking. I'm a bit pissed I paid like $300 for this mainboard back in 2007 now.
Click to expand...
First, reduce the speed of the RAM to 800Mhz 5-5-5-15. Set Vcore to 1.4 and 1333FSB. Go into "Advanced Chipset Features" and do the following:

CPU Spread Spectrum - disabled
HT Spread Spectrum - disabled
PCIe Spread Spectrum SPP - disabled
PCIe Spread Spectrum MCP - disabled
Sata Spread Spectrum - disabled

Save and reboot.

If things are okay, no BSOD and stuff with prime95, reduce vCore until things are not okay. Go back and forth until you got it Running under prime95 for 2 hours without errors or bsod, then go back to bios and give it an extra .02v and crank RAM speed back up. Note that there are still relationship between FSB on CPU and RAM eventhough is it unlinked. You really can't unlink them, use a ratio on it, unlink means to use a ratio that fit best. Run prime95 again overnight (since you do sat@home), and then run memtest overnight the next day.
 
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