What is Wrong With My Q6600?

[imported_Airjarhead]

Hey guys,
I got a Q6600 from Fry's on BF and replaced my E4300. Since I really don't have a lot of time to mess with it, I just figured I'd go for a modest overclock of 3GHz. However, I can't get it to to through more than an hour of Prime 95 for more than an hour without one of the cores failing. Also, I find it a little weird that the temp difference between the 1st core and the 4th core is 6-7 degrees C. This is what I've tried:

-I tried going to 400x8 and Vcore of 1.35 and it wouldn't boot!
-I tried 350x9 and got blue screens before an hour was up.
-Stock volts at 333x9 (Mem at 1:1) and core 0 failed just before an hour, the rest went 6 hours without error (I had left it over night).
-I upped the Vcore to 1.3125 and core 2 failed after an hour.
-I upped the volts to 1.35 and core 1 failed at 40 mins.

I'm using Everest for Temps (because of the coretemp issue with Vista x64), and none of the cores go over 60 degrees.

I've run memtest all night a few times at different settings and have never had any errors.

What do you think it is?

Thanks,

E4300 @ 3.0GHz to Q6600 @?
CoolerMaster Hyper TX
ASUS P5W DH Deluxe
4x1GB GEIL Ultra DDR2 667 Cas3
EVGA 8800GT Superclocked
Samsung 20" WS LCD 205BW
Maxtor 250GB SATA II 16MB Cache
Seagate 320GB SATA II 16MB Cache
Lite-On 20x SATA DVD Burner
Pioneer 111D DVD Burner
Sunbeam NUUO 550W
Thermaltake 250W GPU PSU
Windows Vista Ultimate x64

 

[imported_Airjarhead]

All the Prime failures where rounding errors. The blue screen during the Prime test was a pagefile access error (because I set Prime to run at 3200MB in custom).

 

[imported_Airjarhead]

I needed to reply to subscribe to this thread.

 

[n7]

Are you certain your RAM isn't acting up?

I'd suggest loosening it way up to 5-5-5 to take it out of the equation for sure.

What about bumping motherboard voltages: NB/FSB, etc?

If you can back down the OC a bit below 3 GHz & it's stable, you know you need more of something, whether it's vcore, vNB, or etc.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

The P5W DH -- I think it has an i975 chipset -- was released several months before the Kentsfield quad-cores.

Have you been to the ASUS support web-site to see how many BIOS updates have occurred after the one you got with the motherboard?

On my ASUS STriker board with nVidia 680i chipset, there was a plethora of BIOS updates which "improved over-clocking for new CPU releases" during spring and summer of this year. They will have to update the BIOS again to make the board Yorkfield compatible, and they will probably tweak it to improve the way it runs the Wolfdale Penryn.

Beyond that, set up a Notepad file "log" of your over-clock settings, start with stock memory timings, find the monitored VCORE voltage in BIOS voltage monitor that arises from setting the VCORE to "Auto," and start from there.

The other advice you've been given here is both wise and useful, also.