Monday, October 29, 2007

Overclocking the Q6600 on a P5N32-E SLI

So at friday my Q6600 (Core 2 Quad 2.4GHz with G0 stepping) and the ASUS P5N32-E SLI arrived and I was, of course, eager to try it out. Well, my system is water-cooled, so it's quite a hassle to change the mobo, of all parts.

Initial problems


First thing I noticed after installing the new stuff was that the PS/2 keyboard did not work. HOLY SHIT, it's a freaking PS/2 keyboard and it does not work with that motherboard! I was (and still am) very shocked about that. It's like building a car with the steering wheel not working. Just not as dangerous.

So I hooked up my USB-keyboard (which is not very comfortable, since it's a compact keyboard) and used that for the day. I installed XP and afterwards windows and, except some small networking quirk in XP, everything worked pretty darn well so far. Nice Vista drivers, even 64bit. It wasn't all that easy the first time I installed Vista on my older P5WD2-E Premium, since it hadn't that great Vista support (how could it if it was build before Vista being around, anyways).


Here we go


After a little bit of initial gaming on stock-clockspeeds I decided to test it's overclocking capabilities. Now here's some more information on my system, first:
It's watercooled and it's pretty well cool I'd say, since both CPU and GPU-temps are okay. The only temperature I'm worried about is the motherboard's: The BIOS says it's 46°C hot, which I think is just too much. I installed a big fan later and it dropped to under 40°C. I have watercooled 2GB (2x1GB) OCZ-RAM with 5-5-5-15 timings, DDR2-800. Then there's the XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB which is clocked to 513MHz core stock, I run it at 700MHz for games and it doesn't even break a sweat with under 52°C. So I went for 3.0GHz for a start, and it worked nicely.

Overclocking


I simply changed the FSB to 333 (1333MHz quad-pumped). Windows boots, benchmarks run, everything's fine. Whenever I try to go just one MHz above 333, the system won't boot up. It won't even finish it's POST. I think that's somehow ridiculous, I should definitely be able to do more with that CPU, it's a G0-stepping, after all. Updating the BIOS just did not do good. After I've updated it to Revision 1205, I couldn't even get it to boot nicely with the 3,0GHz. The speeker beeped like crazy every second time I booted the PC and I reverted my BIOS back to to the second-oldest version, which is 1103. I might add that with the 1205, the PS/2 keyboard worked. It won't with the 1103 I'm currently running. Additionally, the newest BIOS gave crazy voltages to my CPU. It went to 1.38V, although the CPU is spec'ed to a max of 1.37V, iirc. With the older BIOS-revisions, the vcore was much lower.

My current computer-setup

After upgrading my box this weekend, it currently comes down to this:

CPU Core 2 Quad Q6600 watercooled, clocked at 3.0 GHz
Graphics GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB watercooled, XFX, clocked at 700/2200MHz
Mainboard nForce 680i SLI P5N32-E SLI
RAM 2GB DDR2-800 watercooled, OCZ